The Man Who Walked Backward

by Ben Montgomery

  But amid the big run-up, the prices crashed. Then the rains disappeared and a hard, years-long drought set in.

  They all but ignored the coming hard times in Texas. “As a matter of fact, in America, we dont know what hard times are,” a 1930 Star-Telegram editorial said. The daily newspapers in Fort Worth pointed to increased construction, railroad traffic, oil production, and cattle and poultry sales as stabilizing influences.

  But something else began to happen.

  When the land was covered with grass, the prairie winds could blow strong all day and all night and you wouldn’t know unless you stood outside and felt the rush of breeze, strong and steady. But now, with the grass gone and the tilled earth exposed over so many acres, the wind began to lift the dirt. The black storms were coming.

  They were small at first. On March 7, 1930, the Mt. Pleasant Daily Times, twenty miles east of Plano, noted an unusual occurrence with a short front-page story, headlined DUST STORM THURSDAY: “A dust storm blowing from the west visited this section Thursday. The dust was largely high in the air and caused no inconvenience except to dim the sun considerably. The atmosphere was much colder Friday, following the blow.”

  No cause for concern.

  Two months later, a Simmons College student noticed that the dark sky outside seemed to be moving. Scared as she was, she felt a sense of peace that she was studying the Bible inside while hell seemed to be coming outside. “Dean says it isn’t right to trust the lord too far, though,” she wrote in her journal.

  A few days later a savage storm hit Coleman, fifty-two miles southeast of Plennie Wingo’s house in Abilene, and the paper called it “the worst wind and dust storm Coleman has had in more than a decade.” A gust of thirty miles per hour could lift dirt. Anything higher made a monster, and this storm was both strong wind and microbursts of tornadoes, or “roof-busters,” as they were called. The “smiles that spread over the faces of the people after the big Sunday rain were converted into frowns,” reported the Coleman Democrat-Voice. “Every hour brings additional reports of damage done in various parts of the county and an accurate estimate of the storm’s toll cannot be made.”

  The following month, on June 26, 1930, the Sweetwater Daily Reporter, forty miles west of Abilene, reported that yet another odd dust storm had dumped additional sand in Sweetwater homes the previous evening. Temperatures had broken records every day that week, no rain in sight, with the Wednesday high at 102 degrees. Also breaking records was the water consumption to keep the crops growing through the heat wave. Farmers had sucked 1,533,700 gallons of water from the Watts Well and Lake Trammell in a single day.

  The news by then had taken a decidedly dour turn. The same front page that reported the dust storm in Sweetwater shared news that Brownwood State Bank, eighty miles southeast, had failed and would never again open, and that the US House had confirmed Hoover’s veto of the bill that would have provided relief to the thousands of unemployed war veterans massing in Washington, DC, refusing to leave, building haphazard shanties on government grass that would come to be called Hoovervilles.

  The largest storm came in September 1930, when a strong wind from the west lifted earth from Kansas and pushed it into Oklahoma and Texas, a massive black cloud rolling across the land, carrying dirt and static electricity and scratching skin like steel wool. No one knew exactly what to make of it. Many called the government offices to ask what was happening, ignorant that the bullheaded rape of the land in which they were engaged had anything to do with the dirt clouds blowing in the air.

  Some knew, though.

  “Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized,” said Hugh Bennett, who had studied the earth, when the dust had started to blow and the government kept pitching the soil to entrepreneurial farmers as the one resource that could not be exhausted. Bennett called it a symptom of “our stupendous ignorance.”

  In February 1931, with drought gripping the Plains and crops shriveling in the fields, the government finally stepped in to help. President Hoover, who’d become so despised that Texans had dubbed armadillos “Hoover hogs,” approved a bill that would add $20 million to a $45-million drought loan relief package for farmers.

  The blood had long since disappeared from the Muncey-Jamison massacre site near Highway 5 and Rowlett Creek when Plennie Wingo backpedaled through Plano in April 1931, walking along the eastern edge of what had once been a bountiful grasslands, home to some 470 native species. The new century’s promise had vanished. The crops and livestock that had replaced the Indians and buffalo over the course of a few short decades had become a curse to the six million farmers who now called Texas home, and the landscape looked completely different from the way it had appeared even five years before.

  What Plennie saw instead were scorched fields and weary people. They seemed to wear tension on their sagging shoulders like overalls. Their farms had seen better days. The wind was carrying the earth. They bore the posture of the doomed.

  As Plennie made his way through Plano, he sold postcards to anyone who would stop, and business was pretty good. It was too early to turn in for the night, so he pushed on. About two miles north of town, the skies broke open. Glorious rain fell, the last for a while. He wished his cane were an umbrella. He was soon sopping wet, but with no options for shelter, kept walking until he saw a lit farmhouse on Route 2 appear in his tiny mirrors. He backed onto the porch. A man answered the door and Plennie did his best to explain the circumstances.

  “Sure, come on in,” the man said.

  The Robbinses were farmers, and one of their two sons, whom they called Little Bill, was shy at first but soon warmed up when Plennie started telling stories. The boy leaned in close to his mother.

  “What kind of man is he?” Little Bill asked.

  Before long the boy was friendly. He wanted Plennie to autograph a postcard so he could show his friends. When Plennie handed him a signed card, Little Bill’s face lit up like he had a million dollars. Plennie promised to write Little Bill when he got to Europe. He made a note that night in his journal, a reminder, such was his confidence. He had not really thought about it until then, but he wondered now how far it really was around the world.

  6.

  Round, Spinning

  On December 30, 1930, a noisy crowd of scientists packed a hall in Cleveland, Ohio. The members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science had gathered for their eighty-seventh annual convention, along with some folks from Sigma Xi, a research honor society. The crowd quieted as Dr. C. E. K. Mees, director of research for the Eastman Kodak Co., took the stage. Mees projected a photograph on a large screen, and the scientists weren’t certain what they were looking at. He explained that the picture had been taken recently from an airplane in South America, by Captain A. W. Stevens, a professional aerial photographer, who had pointed his camera in the direction of the mountains he knew were there but could not see. One snap of the camera shutter, at one fiftieth of a second, recorded a panorama of an area larger in size than many states in the country. The scientists could see that the distant horizon line of the pampas bent slightly downward at one end, kind of like a photograph of the curving edge of the moon. Mees traced the barely distinguishable curve with his finger, and pointed out the level pampas stretching ahead for nearly 300 miles, ending in a long range of the Andes Mountains, and behind them, 320 miles from the Stevens airplane, the peak of the volcano Aconcagua.

  Was the earth round? Eratosthenes, the father of geography, had noted 250 years before Christ that on the longest day of summer, the sun cast no shadow at noon at Syene, while at Alexandria, farther north, the shadow gave an angle of seven degrees and fifteen minutes, and that this amounted to about one fiftieth of the 360 degrees in a circle. If the earth was round, that meant the distance between Alexandria and Syene was one fiftieth of the distance around the earth in a north-and-south direction, and that, after one measured the distance be
tween the two places, the circumference of the earth could be calculated at about 24,500 miles—which would prove to be very, very close to the facts. But it was theory.

  Mees told the scientists that the photo was made possible by the development of photographic plates sensitive to rays of light that were invisible to the human eye. Stevens could not see the shape of the mountains on the horizon, but they were there, and the camera saw them, or rather, saw the light behind them.

  The scientists were beholding, Mees said, the very first photographic evidence that the earth was round.

  Two short weeks after the Mees presentation, scientists with the Argentine Astronomical Society gathered beneath the dome inside the congressional palace in Buenos Aires. From the vertex of the dome they had hung a 200-foot cable, and attached to the end of the cable a 56-pound ball of lead. A pin attached to the bottom of the ball touched a layer of sand, which was spread on the floor below, so that the movement of the pendulum was traced in sand by the pin. It was the exact experiment first conducted eighty years before, in 1851, at the Panthéon in Paris by the French scientist Foucault. At that time, the idea of a rotating earth was accepted among intellectuals, but still many had doubts. The revolutionary work of Copernicus in the sixteenth century and many observations made possible by the invention of telescopes had made an unmoving earth improbable, but it wasn’t until Foucault’s experiment that anyone was able to show that the earth spins on its axis. Now, in 1931, the scientists were attempting to re-create the Foucault trial to verify his findings. The scientists held the pendulum stationary using a cotton string, making certain the sphere was absolutely still; then they burned the string. The observers watched as the ball began to move back and forth; the pin cut the sand in a slightly different line with each swing, rather than drawing just one line, as would have happened were the earth not rotating. Foucault was right.

  Thus in two weeks on the front end of 1931, scientists proved beyond a doubt that the great world was not only round, it was spinning.

  * * *

  Upon the crust of the spinning sphere reversed Plennie Lawrence Wingo, in late April 1931, up Highway 6, in the northern portion of the American state of Texas. He noticed how the underfed animals regarded him as he came into view. The cows behind the barbed wire would lift their heads and chew their cuds and watch him reverse past. Chickens scratching and pecking on the dusty roadsides would flap and flutter away in a flurry of feathers when they saw him coming, as though a hawk were swooping down. Once, a mule stopped eating, raised his head, and watched Plennie. The mule stood still as a mouse, but his head followed Plennie as he passed by, staring until his neck was bowed and his ears leaned forward, like he knew something was odd. Plennie was a good ways down the road before the mule broke eye contact, shook his head, and went back to eating.

  Dogs were especially funny. Even the most vicious farm dog would turn tail and run when the backward-walking human lifted his cane. It was as though the canines were surprised the man could see them coming.

  When he arrived in Allen, a small railroad town built by Irish and German immigrants, he backed into the general store to say hello and perhaps sell a few postcards. The proprietor saw him coming and grimaced, not knowing Plennie could see him. Plennie straightened his tie, approached a couple of customers, and introduced himself, telling them what he was doing. He was asking if they wanted to see his postcards when the owner shouted.

  “Stop that nonsense and get out of here!” he said.

  The hostility was palpable. It was the first such meanness Plennie encountered, though it would not be the last. He didn’t want to cause trouble, so he backed out of the store and stepped down off the porch, the proprietor trailing behind, or in front, as the case was.

  “See you when I get back from around the world,” Plennie said, smiling, his heels already kicking up dust.

  “Not if I see you first!” the man shot back.

  The rejection was a jolt, but he was on his way. No more than a hundred yards up the road, he saw two or three people dart out of the store, the proprietor with them. They shouted for him to come back. He turned and backed toward them, and when he got close he could see their tiny smiles in his mirrors.

  “You must be the man I read about,” a woman said. She explained to the shopkeeper that this was the guy walking backward around the world. The man began apologizing, grunting about the number of drifters and ne’er-do-wells lately. He was the first one to buy one of Plennie’s postcards.

  7.

  Rubble and Race

  There wasn’t much left of the Negro quarters of Sherman, Texas, in the spring of 1931. Three whole blocks of black businesses and homes had been reduced to heaps of charred rubble, broken brick, and shattered glass. As Plennie walked down Houston Street he noticed that the courthouse, too, was just a gaping and burned husk of a building. It had been glorious when built in 1876, a two-story white stone edifice with long windows, and on top sat a tower that held a clock and a bell. Now, though, it was gutted, its burned contents spilling out of cavities like big black tongues.

  Plennie stuck to the sidewalk. He had plans to scoot right on through to make Denison by nightfall. But a man walked past Plennie, then turned around, stopped, and introduced himself as Mr. McDonald, proprietor of the McDonald Hotel and Dining Room, situated catty-cornered from the used-to-be courthouse on Houston Street. The man handed Plennie a business card with a paragraph of text on its face:

  All My Life

  I have been bawled out, balled up, held up and held down, bull-dozed, black-jacked, walked on, cheated, squeezed and mooched; stuck up for war tax, dog tax and syntax, liberty bonds, baby bonds and matrimony, Red Cross, green cross and double cross, asked to help the society of John the Baptist, G.A.R., Woman’s Relief Corps, men’s relief and stomach relief. I have worked like hell; I have been drunk and have gotten others drunk, lost all I had and part of my furniture; and because I won’t spend or lend all of the little I earn, and go beg, borrow or steal, I have been cussed and discussed, boycotted, talked to and talked about, lied to and lied about, held up, hung up, robbed and damned near ruined, and the only reason I am alive today is because I eat at the…(Over)

  McDonald Dining Room

  115 East Houston St.

  SHERMAN, TEXAS

  “Where You Get Those Home Cooked Meals.”

  Mr. McDonald had read about Plennie in the newspaper, figured he’d be coming through Sherman, and invited him in as a guest. The news of Plennie’s walk was novel and needed in a time of trouble in Sherman, the seat of Grayson County, a black-dirt farming region on the south bank of the Red River with a population of about sixty-five thousand. The State of Texas was preparing to bring its case against J. B. McCasland, a nineteen-year-old who stood accused of setting fire to the courthouse across the street. Prosecutors had readied their witnesses and diligently sorted through the compounding evidence. All that was left was proving to a jury that McCasland was responsible for stepping out of a mob of thousands and hurling a five-gallon canister of gasoline through a courthouse window to set fire to the black man being held inside.

  Sherman had made national news before, like when the worst tornado in Texas history spun through in 1896, killing some seventy people and destroying dozens of homes and businesses, or when Teddy Roosevelt visited the courthouse square in 1905. Neither of those events brought shame on the town, though, not like what had happened eleven months before.

  In early May 1930, a forty-one-year-old black farmhand named George Hughes had gone to the home of his employer, five miles southeast of Sherman, to collect his pay of six dollars. What happened next, according to those in the white community, was awful: Hughes raped his employer’s wife and mutilated her throat and breasts. The story that spread through the black community was that the employer, a rent farmer, didn’t have the money to pay Hughes and prodded his wife to invent the assault. A deputy tracked Hughes down quickly, obtained an alleged confession, then hustled him to the county ja
il, two blocks west of the courthouse, to face what seemed like an open-and-shut case.

  That was May 3. On May 9, George Hughes stood trial, and the wild whites showed up from all directions. Rain had fallen for the past few days and the fields were too wet to work. They came by car and wagon and on foot, and reporters smelled corn liquor on the breath of more than a few. They were described variously as men, men and women, hard-bitten men, a small group of boys in their teens, mostly boys, mostly teens, boys surrounded by quite a sprinkling of young girls, a few mothers cradling babies in their arms, women and children, an orgy of madness, a dangerous disturbance, and, mostly, an angry mob. Some said there were several hundred, some said twenty thousand.