Texas

by James A. Michener

  People outside Texas, especially those in less-favored states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, had begun to look upon Dallas and Houston as places where the figures could only go up. Now they are learning with the rest of us that they can also come down. Houston, Midland, Abilene, El Paso, Laredo and the so-called Golden Triangle are disaster areas, and in certain hard-struck industries unemployment reaches past fifty percent.

  Friends in the know advise me that Ransom Rusk, heavily involved in all the fields which have been hit, has suffered staggering losses. I have verified the following: his commanding position in TexTek, loss $125,000,000; sharp drop in the value of his oil holdings, loss $85,000,000; bankruptcy of his mud company and idleness of his nineteen drilling rigs, loss $35,000,000 now, with more to come later; his position in Braniff Airlines, loss $45,000,000; Houston real estate reversal due to peso, loss $14,000,000. Collapse of the Midland Bank, loss maybe $21,000,000. Total Rusk loss in one calendar year: $325,000,000 minimum.

  How did Rusk react to these losses, which were much greater than the visitor had estimated? He sat in his new office, surveyed the Dallas skyline with its multitude of soaring new construction, and said only to himself: Now is when I dig in. I have more work to do than ever before. His shoulders did not slump, nor did he try to avoid inquisitors who wanted to ferret out the effect of these stupendous reversals. Instead, he showed his icy smile, stuck out his lower jaw, and predicted: ‘Every item in Texas will revive. The Mexican peso will stabilize. Oil will come back. We’ll see the rigs operating again. Braniff will fly, we’ll see to that. TexTek has a dozen new inventions ready to astound the market. And the Dallas Cowboys will win the Super Bowl.’

  ‘Then you’re not pessimistic?’

  ‘I don’t know that word.’

  • • •

  When the bad years ended and his accountants showed him the final figures on his losses, he laughed and asked: ‘How many of your friends can say they lost nearly half a billion dollars in one year?’ and they said: ‘Not many.’

  But even his aplomb was shaken by a series of those family tragedies which so often enmeshed the very rich in Texas. His famous father, Fat Floyd, had produced two daughters, Bertha and Linda, born almost a full generation before Ransom. Each had had four children, so that Ransom had eight nieces and nephews for whose fiscal welfare he was responsible.

  Just as his father had seen ownership of his first well split into minute fragments, so Ransom and the courts supervised the various allocations of ownership of the Rusk Estate. Insofar as the offspring of Bertha and Linda were concerned, the pattern was this:

  To take only the case of the two fourth-generation children, Victoria and Charles, if one multiplied out the percentages, one found that Victoria owned 0.002750 of the Rusk Estate and Charles 0.000917. Since the Estate, which participated only in the oil portion of Ransom’s total holding, was now worth some $700,000,000, this meant that Victoria’s share, at an early age, was worth $1,925,000 and Charles’, $641,900. And since Ransom’s adroit handling of the oil reserves produced a yearly income of about sixteen percent on investments, young Victoria received some $308,000 each year, and Charles $102,700. Various young Texans had comparable holdings.

  But these two, and their six siblings, were not enjoying their money these days, because their parents had become involved in shattering tragedies. Mae, of the third generation, had married a worthless young man who had angled for her shamefully, caught her, and then found himself unable to maintain pace with her lively interest in Texas life. He had escaped his deficiency by committing suicide.

  Victor, Mae’s cousin and a most likable fellow, had fared little better. His wife, a beautiful girl but lacking in both character and will, had taken to the bottle early and with great vigor, deteriorating so totally that she had to be placed in an institution. It was one of the finest drying-out establishments in Texas, but it had an inadequate fire-alarm system, and when an inebriated gentleman on the ground floor fell asleep while smoking a cigarette, the entire wing burst into flame, and only the heroic efforts of two Mexican caretakers saved Mrs. Rusk. She was horribly burned, but did survive; however, any chance of escaping her addiction to alcohol vanished, and both she and her family could look ahead only to her lifelong hospitalization.

  In this dual impasse, the cousins Victor and Mae started seeing each other, at first out of mutual commiseration and eventually because of a deep and passionate love, despite the fact that they were cousins. When Victor felt that it would be shameful to divorce his stricken wife, he and Mae loaded the latter’s Mercedes-Benz with cans of gasoline, roared down a Fort Worth freeway at ninety miles an hour, and plunged head-on into a concrete abutment.

  Ransom was left to answer the inquiries of the media and to care for his nieces and nephews, and the pitiful experiences resulting from these two obligations deepened his understanding. Summoning the children, he told them: ‘You’ve all known what was happening. You understand better than anyone else. So what’s to do? Pull up your socks. Grit your teeth. And take an oath: “It’s not going to happen to me.” ’ And as he spoke he visualized those intrepid Rusks who had preceded them, and he began to see his ancestors in a kindlier light. His mother had been dowdy, but she had kept the family together when her husband was striving to locate an oil well, and Emma Larkin may have had no nose or ears, but he now realized that she’d had incredible fortitude. ‘Never forget,’ he continued, ‘that your great-grandmother Emma suffered far worse tragedies than you’ll ever be required to face.’ And now he wanted to exorcise the guilt he felt for the ugly manner in which he had once dismissed his parents: ‘Don’t forget that your ancestor, the one they called Fat Floyd, was willing to gamble his last penny on the oil well that got our family started. He had courage, and so must you.’ As he watched the effect of his words upon these young people, he thought: This generation isn’t going to be defeated. But then he realized that something more fundamental than fighting spirit was required to build a satisfactory life, so with much embarrassment he stood before them and said softly: ‘I love you very much. I will be here to help no matter what happens. Let’s stick together.’

  Back in his new office, after the accountants had his family’s affairs straightened out, he said: ‘Well, we can be sure of one thing—1984 has to be better.’ And then his old fire returned: ‘Reagan’ll be reelected, best President we’ve had in more than sixty years, but a mite long in the tooth. We’ll eliminate more of those communists in the Senate. And we’ll see oil bounce back. Maybe even Braniff will fly again.’ On the phone to Houston he said cheerfully: ‘Good and bad, I’d rather be working in Texas than anywhere else in the world.’ Then, supremely confident that he would recover his lost dollars within two years, he flew to Kenya for a safari with his friends.

  If Ransom Rusk was finding new challenges in North Dallas, a small, sparkling, dark-eyed young woman of twenty-five named Enriqueta Múzquiz was having an even more exciting adventure in South Dallas.

  Dallas consisted of three separate cities, really, and it was possible to live in any one and scarcely be aware of the other two. There was downtown Dallas, the historic city on the Trinity River which had boasted two log cabins in 1844 and not much more by 1860. An unpublished diary tells what happened in that year:

  On Sunday, 8 July 1860, the citizens of this town awoke to find every store and rooming house ablaze. When the terrible conflagration was finally brought under control a jury of 52 leading citizens was impaneled and upon their finding that the fire must surely have been part of a slave plot, three Negroes were promptly hanged.

  Despite its slow start, downtown Dallas had prospered, and now contained the business heart of a metropolis with more than a million inhabitants and of a metropolitan area with more than three million.

  North Dallas, where Rusk had his new office, was a golden ghetto of palatial homes, resplendent new skyscrapers, luxurious shopping centers and a way of life that was, said one critic, ‘both appealing and
appalling.’ It was appealing because it provided what its inhabitants wanted; it was appalling because of its brazen flaunting of wealth. But the true secret of North Dallas was that it was a world to itself; residents could live there quite happily and rarely bother about venturing into the clutter of Central Dallas. Boasted the average North Dallas housewife: ‘I go into that maelstrom only when there’s a meeting of the Art Museum board.’

  And almost no one from North Dallas ever crossed the Trinity River to enter South Dallas, where blacks and Hispanics lived, and rarely did anyone from Central Dallas go there. It was a city to itself, impoverished, poorly cared for, and constantly embattled with its wealthier neighbors to the north. Those residents of Northern states who had imbibed from television and newspapers the illusion that Texas, and Dallas in particular, was populated only by millionaires received a shock if they ventured into South Dallas.

  There were many reasons for the impoverishment of this area. Texas, perhaps the wealthiest of the states, was among the most niggardly in its services for the poor, and in certain criteria like unemployment benefits, it stood at the bottom of the fifty states. It was not good to be a poor person in Texas, and downright miserable to be one in South Dallas.

  But this was where Enriqueta Múzquiz was having her exhilarating experience. Following that February afternoon in 1969 when she leaped aboard the Southern Pacific freight train in El Paso, she spent her first years in Texas in Lubbock, where she had suffered the full force of West Texas discrimination, which in many ways was worse than anything known along the Rio Grande, since the northern region held so few Hispanics and disregarded them with such insolence.

  ‘When I was young,’ she told her fourth-grade pupils, ‘no Hispanic was allowed in the better restaurants, and we were not welcomed in the movie theaters. We were expected to quit school at the eighth grade. Boys could not get haircuts in the regular barbershops. And we were held in contempt.’ When she gave such lectures, which she did repeatedly and to all her classes, she invariably ended with a refrain which summarized the major triumph of her life:

  ‘In 1974 the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a decision called Lau v. Nichols, which you must remember, because it is your Declaration of Independence. It did not deal directly with us but with a Chinese boy named Lau, and it said: “Even if he is Chinese, and even if he cannot speak a word of English, the United States of America must provide him with an education, and since he cannot speak English, this education must be in Chinese.” Don’t you see? The Supreme Court is saying the same to you children. If you cannot speak English, you must be educated in Spanish, and that’s why I’m here.’

  Señorita Múzquiz, as she wanted her students to call her, even though she, along with her father and two brothers, had attained United States citizenship, spoke to her thirty children in Grade Four and her thirty-three in Grade Three only in Spanish, and in this language, which she was supposed to use only temporarily as a bridge to English, she spent about half her time haranguing them about the injustices of American life, with special emphasis on the inequities they suffered in Dallas.

  She did this because she visualized herself as an agency of revenge for all the suffering she and her people had undergone in West Texas, and as she labored to create in her students a burning appreciation of their Spanish heritage and the glories of Mexican culture, she foresaw the day when the Spanish-speaking people along the Rio Grande, south and north, would form a kind of ipso facto republic, half Mexican, half American, in which pesos and dollars would both be used. A common currency and a common outlook on life would prevail, and a common language, Spanish, would be spoken: ‘Of course, it will be an advantage if you have English as a second language—to work in stores and such—but the effective language will be Spanish. And the mode of life will be Mexican, with large families closely bound together and with priests who give their sermons in Spanish.’

  ‘What citizenship will we have?’ her older children sometimes asked, and she said: ‘It really won’t matter, because Mexico will not rule the area, nor will the United States. It will be a union of the two, with free passage across the river.’

  ‘How big will it be?’ the children asked, and on the map of Mexico that she kept in her room—a map in Spanish, so cut across at the top that it included Texas as far north as Lubbock—she used her pointer to indicate a swath which encompassed San Antonio, San Angelo and El Paso on the north, and Monterrey, Saltillo and Chihuahua on the south: ‘The new nation of our dreams already exists. Spanish is spoken up here, and English is understood down there. Trade between the two halves is already flowing and will grow as years pass. Brownsville and Matamoros at the eastern end of the river, who can tell which is which?’

  ‘Will the nation reach all the way to California?’ a child asked one day, and she said: ‘It already does,’ but another child said: ‘Señorita Múzquiz, I grew up in San Angelo and they don’t speak much Spanish there,’ and she said: ‘They will, when enough of us come north and fill the places.’

  Her dream was not an idle one. There were many living along that protracted border who were already effecting the change which she promulgated with her students during the day and with her adult friends at night. Experts, and even those with only a casual interest, could see that the unstoppable flow of Mexican nationals into the United States must inevitably create a new society with new attitudes and, perhaps, new political affiliations.

  Señorita Múzquiz’s early appreciation of this fact was intensified when in the summer of 1982 she enrolled in a special seminar in Los Angeles, and when she returned she carried exciting news to her Texas friends:

  ‘Los Angeles is already the second largest Spanish-speaking city in the world, larger even than Madrid, smaller only than Mexico City. The food, the culture, the manner of thought are totally Mexican, and our newspaper, La Opinión, prints sixty thousand copies a day. More than ten theaters show movies only in Spanish, and the schools are filled with dedicated teachers like me, keeping our beautiful language alive and reminding our children of their Mexican heritage.

  ‘What is happening is simple in process, glorious in effect. We are quietly reclaiming the land which Santa Anna lost through his insane vanity. Vast areas which are rightfully Mexican are coming back to us. No battles … no gunfire … no animosities, simply the inexorable movement of people north. The anglos still control the banks, the newspapers, the courts, but we have the power which always triumphs in the end, the power of people.’

  Proof of her contention came dramatically when Immigration agents raided a big ranch south of Dallas and arrested some twenty illegal immigrants who had evaded the Border Patrol. From Dallas came a general cry of approval, but when officials looked more deeply into the matter, they found that Lorenzo Quimper, owner of the ranch, had arranged for his traveling factotum, Cándido Guzmán, to obtain citizenship, and Cándido, in turn, had imported from his small hometown of Moctezuma six young nephews who, he claimed, had proof of having been born in that hospital in El Paso. So instead of having nearly two dozen wetbacks to deport, the agents had fewer than fifteen, and the affair caused much amusement in Dallas.

  Señorita Múzquiz jumped on this unfortunate affair as a major topic for her two classes to analyze, and with her careful guidance, the young Hispanics learned of the government’s brutality and of the heroism of the Mexicans, legal or otherwise, who had worked their way so far north without having been detected: ‘They are the heroes of our conquest. And like my father, they will stay.’ Studiously she avoided uttering the word revolución, and even when she voiced it silently to herself she always followed it with pacífico; she did not visualize gunfire or rebellion, because there was no need. Everything she desired was attainable through slow but persistent penetration. For the present she did not include Texas cities as far north as Dallas in her looming confederacy: ‘At least not for the remainder of this century. The anglos are too strong. But I can see it happening sometime after 2030.’ When she assur
ed personal friends that it must happen, she called it: ‘The inevitable triumph of the marriage bed. Mexican women have many children. Anglos don’t.’

  In her general activity Señorita Múzquiz conducted herself with strict legality, but without advising her superiors, she operated against the rules as they were intended. The Supreme Court decision Lau v. Nichols, and the subsequent orders which implemented it, known as Lau Relief, had as their purpose the education of very young children in America, whether citizens or not, in their native tongue so that an easier transition into English could be made. Thus, certain large cities throughout the nation—and many with no Spanish-speaking minority at all—were required to teach elementary-school classes in many different tongues, and to accomplish this, they had to find qualified young persons who could teach arithmetic, geography, music and science in Chinese, Portuguese, French, Russian, Polish and some fifty other languages.

  As a consequence, the teaching of Chinese flourished, but that of science and arithmetic did not, for there were few of the hastily enlisted teachers who had the solid competence in their subject areas that Señorita Músquiz had in hers. ‘She’s one of the best teachers in Dallas,’ her supervisor said. ‘Her only fault is that she is slow in getting her pupils to switch over into English.’

  This tardiness was not accidental, for after these new teachers of Spanish had been on the job only a little while, they promoted the theory called maintenance, which meant that even after their pupils had reached a stage at which they could switch over to English, instruction in Spanish continued on the principle that the mastery of a second language was so valuable to the United States that proficiency in that language became a goal in itself.

  Thus, Señorita Múzquiz’s students came to school at age six knowing almost no English, and at seven or eight they were supposed to swing over to the English-speaking classes, but under the new theory of maintenance, they were kept in Spanish right through elementary school, until learning in Spanish, with inadequate mastery of subject matter, became the rule. And in Spanish they learned from certain teachers like the Señorita that they were an oppressed group, discriminated against and obligated to lead the great social changes which would transform their portion of America into a reclaimed Mexican homeland.