Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  Parks hired black Marlinites as extras. Joyce Strickland walked down the street with a bundle of clothes balanced on her head. Elijah Polk’s role involved walking a mule named Josephine laden with pots and pans. Lead Belly was played by Roger Mosley, a character actor who gained fame playing the helicopter pilot on the television show Magnum, P.I. Parks hired one of Texas’s most famous authors, John Henry Faulk, to play Governor Pat Neff, the man who pardoned Lead Belly because his music was so beautiful. The film company spent $38,000 in Marlin.19 As soon as the filming ended, Wood Street turned the jukeboxes back on, and the bars and restaurants resumed business.20

  Jewell and O.T.’s relationship was faltering, and they spent more and more time apart. O.T. started taking Loreane to Terry’s football games, but he always made sure to take another friend along to ride in the backseat with her. Terry saw through the ruse and knew there was something going on between his dad and Loreane, who was just four years older than he was. Jewell moved out of the house on the Hill in 1972 and took all of the children except Terry with her to Waco.21

  O.T. stopped hiding his relationship, and Loreane met his four children and liked them. Loreane was enchanted by O.T.’s life on the Hill and discovered how important the community was to her boyfriend. O.T. would take Loreane fishing, cutting across Uncle John Tomlinson’s land and waving at him as he sat on his porch. Loreane told me O.T. reminded her of her father, hardworking and generous. In early 1972, Loreane discovered she was pregnant with O.T.’s child, and O.T. asked her to marry him. On February 2, 1972, they drove to the justice of the peace in Lott. Loreane described those early years in her book, LT & Me:

  It was difficult for O.T. to be away from his beloved Hill. If he could have, he would have spent all his time there. It was where he felt the most at ease and free to be himself. Every time we left that place after a visit, O.T.’s whole demeanor took on a slightly sad look.

  O.T. and I had a good marriage. We were in love and laughed a lot. Even in my happiest moments, though, I knew O.T. had another love: Tomlinson Hill.22

  That summer, Loreane gave birth to their first child, a daughter named Londria. Londria and her cousins called the Hill “our town” because it bore their name. She told me about Julie, now short, stout, and gray-haired, with a dimple on her cheek. Everyone called her “Big Mama Julie.”

  My earliest memories are [about] going over to Big Mama Julie’s house and the tea cakes, and spending time with her in the kitchen and going up under—I think it was an oak tree—and playing around out there. And playing on the well with all my cousins and stuff. We knew once it got dark, we were supposed to be home. She’[d] have drawn our bath and everything and had our food like hot, you know, after we got out of the bath. And she would read to us.

  The sand, it was just like sand I’ve never seen.… We would sit there for hours and play in that sand. Besides the cooking, and Big Mama Julie taking care of me while my parents were away at work, that was the most memorable thing … that sand.

  And there just always [had] been a lot of food, a lot of family around. We were kids laughing and running up and down the street. And the houses, you could go to anybody’s house. They didn’t care. They [could] be sitting in there watching TV and we’[d] just walk in and go to the refrigerator. And we [were] like, “Hey, we’re thirsty. We’re on this part of the Hill.”23

  When both O.T. and Loreane worked, they dropped Londria with Julie to spend the day and Julie would fix her meals. Londria said her grandmother doted on her, encouraging her to be a good girl, get good grades, and stay away from “hardheaded boys.”

  O.T. raised hogs and cows, and Julie planted a half-acre vegetable garden, where anyone on the Hill could pick what they needed: corn, tomatoes, peas, sweet potatoes, and many other things. As the community began to shrink, Loreane said the preacher started coming only every other week, but the whole community would still come together in the little nineteenth-century Gravel Hill chapel. Relatives who had moved away would make a special trip to Tomlinson Hill on those Sundays.24

  In the evenings, Julie would shell peas and watch one of her favorite television shows, M*A*S*H. She almost never left the Hill, and rarely left her house and yard, except to visit her relatives or walk to the neighborhood store. If she needed something from town, Julie usually asked someone to pick it up for her.25

  Londria said she rarely saw whites in her neighborhood, but a white family did run a store down the road; it looked like an aluminum barn. Julie always wanted an older cousin to walk with Londria and the nine-year-old twins, because she felt it was too far to go alone, but that didn’t keep them from sneaking down the gravel road:

  She was looking for us and I swear I heard her at that store calling my name. And I was like, “We’re in trouble.”

  So we go running down the road, and I’ll never forget it. It was this white man in this pickup truck; it was a blue pickup. And he stopped and he said, “What y’all niggers doing down here?”

  The biggest [twin], she picked up this bottle and she threw it [and hit] his truck. And he went to get out and we stood there. She said some ugly words to that man.

  And I remember thinking, I’m gonna tell my daddy, my daddy going to shoot you.

  I was thinking that in my mind. But I said something kind of like “Let’s go.” And we took out running again. Big Mama knew that we were somewhere that we didn’t have any business.

  She was outside on the porch and we went in the house and stuff, and she said, “I told y’all not to go down there to that store.”

  Londria didn’t tell her grandmother about the white man, but she told her dad. He was angry that Londria had disobeyed Julie, but he was also angry at the white man. He told her, “You know, racism is here. You know, everybody don’t like black children.” That was the first time that Londria remembered anyone saying that to her:

  “I think I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed because I was somewhere where I wasn’t supposed to be, first of all. And then I heard something that made me feel dirty,” she said.26

  When Londria told me this story, her mother was sitting next to her and hearing it for the first time. Loreane looked down and shook her head. The story visibly saddened her:

  That’s something that I can attest to. It’s kind of like an embarrassment, even though you’re not the one that’s acting like that. You’re kind of embarrassed and you feel not only threatened, but you feel like you’ve done something wrong.

  A lot of times, when we look around, we think that we’ve come so far, and we have. Then somebody would come along and steal that peace that you had, that things are changing, and we’re making a difference.27

  Loreane took a job at the HEB grocery store in Marlin and asked O.T. to move to town to be closer to work, Londria’s nursery school, and her family. O.T. agreed, but he missed the Hill. When the two argued over money or he felt a need to get away, he drove out to his little house. He’d hunt for rabbit with the shotgun he carried in his car, skin the animal, and take it to his mother to cook.28

  Family was the most important thing in O.T.’s life, and he wanted to protect the people he loved. He often visited his children, who were living in Waco with Jewell. But sometimes his parenting skills didn’t measure up. O.T. found it difficult to discipline his children, leaving that responsibility to their mothers.29 O.T. particularly doted on Londria, who was a daddy’s girl. He took her fishing and hunting and taught her how to drive when she was twelve.30

  O.T. warned all of his children against becoming attached to the animals he raised. Nevertheless, Londria wanted a pig of her own, so he tied a shoestring around its neck, and she fed the little piglet until it grew into a huge hog. One day, she noticed her pig was missing, and at dinner that night, as Londria put a piece of pork in her mouth, O.T. told her she was eating her pet pig. She said it took a while before she ate ham or bacon again.31

  One day, Londria complained to her father about a boy at school shoving her. O.T. went straight to t
he principal’s office to demand that the teachers stop the bully. But a few days later, Londria found O.T. playing dominoes with his friend Pookie and told him that the boy was still pushing her. They decided to teach her how to fight.

  They got to talking about it and Uncle Pookie was like, “O.T., keep teaching her the upper cut.” And “Hit him where it hurt[s].”

  I was like, “Okay?” But my dad was really serious about teaching me how to fight.

  He was teaching, “You keep them up, and you jab and you keep your arms straight.” I might have been, what, seven, eight. But I would do it. And he would tell me, “Hit me harder. That’s a sissy touching.”

  I was like, “I’m a girl!”

  I went to school over the next few months and that bully boy, he pushed me down again. We were in the cafeteria. My lunch tray went one way and I went the other. I was on the cafeteria floor; everybody was laughing. And I just jumped up—and I remember it—I just popped him and popped him right in his mouth. His mouth was bleeding; he was crying.

  I was like, “Oh my God, are you okay?” I started crying.

  We went to the office and they called Mom.… She was not happy with me or Daddy.32

  The shock didn’t last long. Her father had taught her well. Londria told me she came to rely on her fists more than she should have, spending a lot of time in the principal’s office.

  O.T. had also taught Flesphia, whom everyone called “Fifi,” how to fight, and she was getting in trouble in Waco. Sometimes she’d run away, and O.T. and Terry would go searching for her.33 Waco was a much larger city than Marlin, with 100,000 people, some tough parts of town, and a no-nonsense police department.

  A Marlin court fined Terry in February 1975 for possessing a small amount of marijuana.34 Terry’s brother Ron was convicted and fined for carrying a small amount of marijuana there in 1978.35 Five years later, Waco police arrested Terry’s brother Charles for larceny and fined him. But that wasn’t the end of Charles’s trouble. Waco Police arrested him in 1985 for burglary and the court sentenced him to five years in prison, though he was paroled after just one year.36

  These kinds of arrests were not uncommon in African-American neighborhoods, where police aggressively charged blacks for minor offenses and prosecutors sought maximum sentences. President Richard Nixon had declared a “war on drugs” in 1971, and African-Americans found themselves the primary targets in an era when school integration spurred African-American dropout rates, and the loss of manufacturing jobs drove up black unemployment. Minor drug convictions also disqualified blacks from getting higher-paying jobs that could get them out of poverty.37 For the first time in five generations of freedom, black Tomlinsons faced a standard of living lower than that of their parents.

  LASTING CHANGE

  Marlin’s population reached 9,839 in 1976, and the city’s budget was $1.2 million. Cattle provided most of the county’s income, followed by the VA hospital, the regional hospital, and nursing homes. In a bid to diversify, the city recruited a carpet mill, a turkey-processing plant, and a business-forms printer for a new industrial park south of the city.38 The older generation passed the baton to a younger generation, and no two people personified that better than Brady and Larry Pamplin.

  Brady Pamplin was sixty-nine-years old and terminally ill during the 1976 sheriff’s race. He urged his twenty-eight-year-old son, Larry, to run for the Democratic nomination, and once he won the primary, Brady stepped down. The county commissioners appointed Larry to serve out Brady’s term. But both Pamplins had made enemies, particularly in the Marlin police force. Many of the officers had served under Brady Pamplin as deputies and didn’t like him. Rumors circulated that Brady favored a particular wrecker service in return for kickbacks, and that he tried to intimidate supporters of the man who ran against his son in the primary.39

  Nevertheless, Falls County voters elected Larry, and at first he appeared born for the job. In February 1977, he arrested two men for flying one thousand pounds of marijuana into a rural airstrip, a twenty-year-old Marlinite and a twenty-year-old from Austin.40

  Federal regulators ruled in 1977 that the Marlin Independent School District was one of six districts in the United States that had failed to comply with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Two of the other districts were in Texas, and the rest were in Arkansas. The secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joseph Califano, Jr., threatened to cut off all federal funding, taking away $200,000 from the district’s $2,647,000 budget. HEW said “racially identifiable and racially isolated classes” and “the exclusion of minority students from extracurricular activities,” combined with the illegal “promotion, demotion, assignment and recruitment” of staff and faculty, were the reasons for the ruling.41

  Harry Kenny, the president of Marlin’s school board, insisted that the all-white school board had done all it could for the students, who were 51 percent black, 40 percent white, and 8 percent Hispanic. The faculty included 112 white teachers and 39 blacks, with only one out of seven administrators an African-American. The golf team was the only segregated extracurricular activity, but that was because the private Marlin Country Club, where the team practiced, did not allow African-Americans. Eventually, the district reached a deal with federal authorities.42

  Most Texas schools had found meeting the federal integration standard not that difficult. After busing and court-ordered desegregation, 42 percent of Houston schools and 37 percent of Dallas schools in 1978 remained virtually single-race institutions, and federal officials considered those districts in compliance. However, many white parents considered that level of integration too much, and by the 1980s, blacks and Hispanics were the majority in the Dallas and Houston school districts.43 In 1979, African-Americans served as superintendents at two of Texas’s one thousand school districts.44

  The federally mandated changes to Texas society angered white conservatives, who amplified their calls for greater states’ rights. Civil rights activists, though, believed almost every institution needed to change, particularly with regard to criminal justice. In Dallas, a police force of 2,000 had only 106 blacks in 1980, prompting a federal judge to declare the department guilty of discrimination. The Houston police force was only 8 percent nonwhite when minorities made up 45 percent of the city. In the 1980s, when prospective jurors showed up for a murder trial in Texas, one in three whites made it onto the jury, while only one in twelve African-Americans were selected.45

  Texas Democrats, who had controlled Texas since the end of Reconstruction, reached a tipping point in 1976. Jimmy Carter, whom many Texans considered a leftist, won the party’s nomination for president and prompted conservative Texas Democrats to defect. In 1978, Texans elected the first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Bill Clements. In a move conservatives considered Washington meddling, Carter named Gabrielle McDonald the first African-American federal judge in Texas, based in Houston.46

  The poverty rate for Texas blacks dropped from 55 percent to 28 percent between 1959 and 1980, but it was still more than double the white rate of 12 percent. The percentage of African-Americans who graduated from college reached 9 percent in 1980, an all-time high, compared to 18 percent for whites. But perhaps the most symbolic step came in 1979, when the Texas legislature declared Juneteenth a state holiday.47

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  There was so much I didn’t see because I was white. My privilege allowed me a blindness to the realities that my African-American friends faced every waking minute.

  —Chris Tomlinson

  In the 1970s, the Dallas Independent School District wanted to use voluntary busing to desegregate high schools, so they built a huge new high school in the Pleasant Grove neighborhood called Skyline, advertising it as a “career development center.” The school offered a number of “vocational clusters” that taught real skills so graduates could find jobs straight out of high school. I was obsessed with airplanes and wanted to be a pilot, so when I heard Skyline offered an aeronau
tics cluster that taught aircraft mechanics and private pilot’s ground training, I begged my parents to let me go.

  I got a little rush every time I walked into the aircraft hangar, where teens worked on helicopters that the instructors flew from a helipad next to the athletics field. I wanted to attend the Coast Guard Academy to fly helicopters, though no one mentioned to me that a vocational high school probably wasn’t the best way to get there. Convinced that the closer to aviation I got, the more likely I would make a life of it, I never gave a second thought in 1979 to attending a school where African-Americans made up the majority.

  Dallas businesses felt differently, among them the Dallas Cowboys, American Airlines, and Exxon, and moved to predominately white suburban school districts. When JCPenney relocated from New York, it chose mostly white Plano.1

  Forty Klan members marched through downtown Dallas in 1979 for the first time since the 1920s. More than two thousand counterprotesters showed up to shout them down. The Dallas Morning News reported on the parade, billed as the “March of the Christian Soldiers.” Police shut it down after only twenty minutes and put the Klan members on a bus:

  “Oh my God,” said the unnerved bus driver, 38-year-old Jay Irizarry, as he looked around with bulging eyes and surveyed his passengers. “Nobody told me I’d have to do this. This bus doesn’t even have bulletproof windows. Oh my God.”