The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  She’s gazing at the tombstone of Carolino Warrior, her grandfather. Nearby stands the tombstone of John Shields, the grandfather of the Dimery brothers.

  “But it’s a thing to be proud of,” Mrs. Dimery says. “I just didn’t know that then.”

  Louis Dimery moved away from Brackettville for 30 years and lost contact with his history, too, until he returned in 1972. “Then Miss Charles and Willie, they started talking to me about it,” he says.

  “Miss Charles” is Miss Charles Wilson, who taught all the Black Seminole children of the Dimerys’ generation in a one-room schoolhouse. “Willie” is William Warrior, Lily Mae Dimery’s cousin, who works for a trucking company and serves as a reserve deputy sheriff in Del Rio.

  “When I was little, I didn’t know nothing about the Seminoles,” says Carol Dimery. “But Miss Charles, when we was in school, she would tell us stories about them, and we would say, ‘Well, tell us more.’ But it just went in one ear and out the next. Now that time is going by, she’s telling us more, and we’re remembering it this time.”

  When the Brackettville schools were desegregated in 1960, the Seminole Indian Scout Association—a group that Miss Wilson and Mr. Warrior and the Dimerys helped organize—bought their old school building and grounds. “We wanted to keep it for ourselves, because our parents worked so hard to get it for us,” Miss Wilson says. Big photographs of Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts hang on the wall near her old school bell.

  Now Black Seminoles return to the school from all over the United States and Mexico twice a year to celebrate their history. “We have a celebration on Juneteenth [June 19],” Miss Wilson says, “but that’s to honor those Negroes who were slaves. We were not slaves. And since we started our organization and are trying to get our people back, we have what we call ‘Seminole Days’ the third weekend in September. We dance. We sing the old songs. We wear our long Seminole dresses and our turbans. I tell you, we have a good time. On Sunday, we go to the cemetery and have a service in memory of the scouts.”

  She sighs. “I think the Seminole culture is dying, though, even in Mexico. There are very few of the original Seminoles left down there, because of intermarrying with the Mexicans. That’s why the older ones like me are trying to pass something on to the kids.”

  But much has been lost, she says, because the Black Seminoles always have been reluctant to talk about their lives and history.

  “I didn’t hear much about the scouts after we left the camp,” she says. “The older people just didn’t open up. It was their upbringing, I guess. Maybe it’s the Indian in them. But after I retired from teaching, I became interested in our history. I give talks here and there. And Willie’s getting to the place where he’ll open up.”

  Willie Warrior is 64 years old. He wears the Western hat and boots befitting a lawman on the Rio Grande. When he was in grade school, Miss Wilson was his teacher, and in 1945 he was one of the first two black students to graduate from the 12th grade in Brackettville.

  Mr. Warrior is the grandson of Carolino Warrior and the nephew of Curley Jefferson, the last of the scouts to die, and he’s a mine of information. He owns a big briefcase stuffed with photographs and documents, and can spin tales for hours.

  One by one, he pulls the pictures and the papers from the case and tells a story about each: “When John Warrior enlisted in the service, he stammered. When they asked him his name, he couldn’t get it all out. He said, ‘Warr… Warr… Warr…’So they wrote him down as ‘Ward.’ He’s buried next to his father, Tony Warrior.

  “Back in Florida, everybody had just one name. Like ‘July,’” he says. “But it was in Spanish. It was ‘Julio.’ And my great-grandfather was ‘Guerrero,’ which means ‘Warrior.’ ‘Guillermo Guerrero’ is my name in Spanish. John Horse’s name was ‘Juan Caballo.’

  “You take a black kid or an Anglo kid and raise him in Mexico, he’s going to be a Mexican,” he says. “You raise him as an Indian, he’s going to be an Indian. It’s where you’re raised, and who you’re raised with. Down here on the border, everything bleeds into one.”

  He pauses for a drink of whiskey. He says he wishes more people would listen. “We try to teach the young ones,” he says, “but they don’t want to learn. We try to make them understand, but they don’t care.

  “There were Some Seminoles who were never slaves, you know. My father traced back our family history, and he could not find a generation of Warriors who had ever been slaves. …”

  Willie Warrior opens up, deep into the night, telling the stories.

  February 1992

  JOHN

  One of the few people I envy is John Graves. He has lived two of my best fantasies - taking a long canoe trip on a river alone, and finding a quiet, beautiful place away from everybody and living there. He also wrote Goodbye to a River, which I think is the best Texas book of this century. John hates interviews and hemmed and hawed when I asked him. He lately had turned down quite a few people who wanted to write about him, he said. If he let me, somebody might get mad. Let him think about it and call him back in a few days, he said. When I did, he said, “Come on out. I’ll talk to you.”

  ON A FALL AFTERNOON 35 YEARS AGO, JOHN GRAVES SHOVED A CANOE containing a shotgun, a couple of fishing rods, some camping gear and a dachshund puppy into the Brazos River, then climbed aboard and began paddling south. The day was raw and windy, one of those gray, cut-to-the-bone spells that North Texas can get in November, not the crisp, golden day that he had hoped for the beginning of his journey.

  He planned to float from Possum Kingdom Dam, where he had put in, to a spot near Glen Rose, not far above Lake Whitney. As the crow flies, the distance between the two points is only about 60 miles, but as the river flows, twisting like a snake on a hot rock, it’s close to 175.

  From childhood John had fished and hunted along the Brazos and listened to the stories of what had happened along its banks in the days when the Comanches, who called themselves “The People,” held this part of Texas in terror. This stream, which the Spaniards had named “The Arms of God,” had become a part of him.

  Although he didn’t know it yet, he was about to become a part of the river, too. In years to come, when people would think of the river, they would think of John, and when they would think of John, they would think of the Brazos. For this journey was different from the other times that he had spent on the river.

  The government had plans to build five new dams between Possum Kingdom and Whitney, turning the part of the Brazos where John was into a string of lakes. So his journey, he thought, would be his last along this beautiful and familiar stretch before it was drowned in its own waters. It would be a farewell journey. He would see the river one last time and say goodbye to it.

  John, who was 37 that year, had been away from the Brazos for a long time, living in foreign places. He only recently had returned to Texas, and was revisiting old haunts, trying to regain the familiarness of the things that had gone into the making of him. That was most of the reason for the journey. He hadn’t yet thought that he would write a book.

  “I had a little scribble notebook,” he says. “I would sit down in the evening and write up the day. I was thinking at the time that it would make a good magazine article, and my agent had gotten a commitment and some money from Sports Illustrated.”

  When the three-week-long journey was finished and the article written, Sports Illustrated rejected it. “It wasn’t sporty enough for them,” John says. Holiday magazine published it instead. By the time he had finished writing it, John saw that he had put much more into his notebook than the mere facts of his trip. “I became aware,” he says, “that I had the material to make a book.”

  He wrote it and named it Goodbye to a River. “In a way, I was trying to explain Texas to myself by writing it,” he says. “I was redefining home things. And I liked it. But my experience at that point was only a failed novel or two. I didn’t have any great euphoria about its prospects.”

  It did better t
han John expected. The critics received it warmly. It was nominated for the National Book Award. And although it lost to William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, one of the most popular nonfiction works of the 1960s, John’s publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, has kept its hardcover edition of Goodbye to a River in print for 32 years now, and Gulf Publishing’s paperback edition remains one of the most popular items on the bookstores’ Texana shelves.

  For many of its readers, Goodbye to a River defines Texas, as writing it redefined John’s “home things” for him after his absence. It says more eloquently and truly than any other single piece of writing what Texas was and is and is becoming. It reveals—by describing the bitter toil and the bloody conflict and the unforgiving land in which it was created—the Texan soul, without adornment. There isn’t a speck of chauvinistic hokum or romantic baloney in his book.

  Neither is it parochial or provincial, for it also is about The World and Nature and Life in the way that great literature everywhere illumines these things—by incarnating them in such small, specific creatures as a man and a dog floating down a river.

  The journey wasn’t particularly dramatic or exciting. Neither men nor beasts nor the elements ever threatened John’s safety. He made and broke camp. He caught fish and shot ducks and squirrels and cooked and ate them. He wrote in his notebook and read the books he had brought with him. He had brief, uneventful encounters with other people, but most of the time he was alone.

  “We don’t know much about solitude these days, nor do we want to,” he would write in his book. “A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness, and that to seek it is perversion. Maybe so. Man is a colonial creature and owes most of his good fortune to his ability to stand his fellows’ feet on his corns and the musk of their armpits in his nostrils. Company comforts him; those around him share his dreams and bear the slings and arrows with him….

  “But there have always been some of the others, the willful loners. And out alone for a time yourself, you have some illusion of knowing why they are as they are. You hear the big inhuman pulse they listen for, by themselves, and you know their shy nausea around men and the relief of escape. Or you think you do….”

  We all yearn for escape and aloneness sometimes, and floating down a river, living off the land and listening to the water and the birds, seems a beautiful thing to do with solitude. Especially when the river is John Graves’ Brazos, which in his book isn’t just a string of water, but a history as long as the river itself, full of such stone-hard characters as Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, Cynthia Ann and Quanah Parker, Bose Ikard, Martha Sherman, Big Foot Wallace and all the blood-loving Comanches and flinty Anglo-Celts who strove against each other.

  It was of these and their world—gone now, but not so long gone—that John was thinking while he paddled. “No end, no end to the stories…” he would write. His thoughts were the long and deep thoughts of one who is alone but not lonely. And a reason so many love his book is that we imagine that if we were drifting down the Brazos in a canoe, John’s thoughts are the thoughts we would have.

  Goodbye to a River often is called a classic. When this is done in John’s presence, he smiles, pleased that you think so, then says: “We won’t know that for a hundred years.”

  “In the simpler times I knew when growing up in Fort Worth, even we town youngsters had some almost unpeopled pieces of countryside, in the Trinity West Fork bottomlands and elsewhere, that were ours in exchange for a bit of legwork and a degree of sang froid toward the question of trespass,” John has written in Self-Portrait, with Birds, an autobiographical essay. “Later on there were Depression country jobs in summer for a dollar a day and keep—wheat harvest, fence-building and so on—and I can’t remember a time when wild live things weren’t a part of consciousness and when knowing something about them didn’t matter.”

  John’s father ran a men’s clothing store in Fort Worth, but had grown up in Cuero, in South Texas, wonderful quail country. John grew up hunting with his father and his uncles. The Trinity bottom, his urban wilderness, was just across the Rivercrest Golf Course from the Graves home on Fort Worth’s west side.

  After high school, he went to Houston and got a degree in English from Rice. When he graduated, in 1942, the country was six months into World War II. John joined the Marines, became an officer, and, in 1944, shipped out for the Pacific. “I didn’t last very long,” he says. “I was just starting to think I was about halfway competent when I got bashed by a hand grenade.”

  He was discharged with a captaincy and a Purple Heart in 1946, went to Columbia University for a master’s degree, and, in 1948, became an English instructor at the University of Texas in Austin. In charge of five freshman sections of 30 students each, most of whom didn’t care a flip about the language or its literature, John was disillusioned quickly by the academic life. “The main thing I remember is the ungraded themes,” he says, “stuck in coat pockets and piled on my mantelpiece. And every time I would look at them, I would feel guilty.”

  Tortured also by the failure of a brief marriage, and “a powerful but stalled compulsion to write undying prose, and a yen to shake the dust of old Texas from my shoes and roam the world, … I fled for solace when I could to the pleasures of forest and stream,” he wrote in Self-Portiait. Two years later, he quit his job and embarked on what he calls “an unreasonably protracted, pigheaded, impecunious, lone-wolf writing apprenticeship lasting for several years and conducted, in the main, more or less on the move and far from my native region.

  “… All I wanted was to shuck off a few old guilts and inadequacies, and to see and learn and live a bit while engaged in the belated effort to make my work come right.”

  His wanderings took him to New York, New Mexico, Mexico, England and finally Spain, where he settled, more or less, for three years. “When I went to Europe in 1953,” he says, “I thought I would spend six months in England and France and Italy, picking up a little language, seeing everything I was supposed to. But, hell, I bogged down in Spain. I really think it was because it’s like West Texas. I tend to treasure the kind of people that a hard, dry country produces.”

  Living was inexpensive in Spain, and John was selling enough of his writing to get by. He even had a little motorcycle, and was making all the bullfights. “I was writing mostly fiction then,” he says, “most of it for the ‘slick’ magazines of the day—women’s magazines, that sort of thing. I would write a story for the slicks, and then I would write one for myself—some serious thing that I would mail off to one of the little literary magazines. The first short story I had ever written—back when I was at Columbia—had been published by The New Yorker, and I was wasting a lot of time trying to write like I belonged in The New Yorker, which I didn’t. Most of the serious stuff was really bad.”

  He also was contributing semi-regularly to Holiday, a popular magazine devoted mostly to travel and good places to be. And he wrote a novel, which he won’t talk about. “There’s a manuscript stashed down at the Humanities Research Center in Austin with instructions that it can’t be opened until 25 years after I’m dead,” he says.

  “But mostly, I was just living in congenial places. And it was a good life.”

  In 1957, after about four years abroad, he returned to Fort Worth to visit his family. “I didn’t come home because I wanted to,” he says. “I just felt that I ought to. I never thought I was going to stay.”

  Once home, however, his life began to change. His father became ill with cancer. John’s brief visit became an indefinite stay. He took a job teaching creative writing at Texas Christian University, which offered him a sunnier experience of academia than he had had at the University of Texas. “If you get to teach what you know and like and want to teach, it’s fun,” he says. “I had bright kids, and they were all there because they wanted to be, which is a lot different from a freshman class.”

  He met Jane Cole, a young designer for Neiman Marcus, and fell in love. And, in books a
nd the outdoors, he began rediscovering the Texas wildlife and history that had fascinated him in his youth. Eventually he realized he had returned to stay.

  “What it amounted to was a homecoming a re-exploration in adult years of roots and origins, an arrival at new terms with the part of the earth’s surface that was and would remain, regardless of all its flaws, more my own than any other part could ever be,” he would write years later in Self-Portiait, with Birds. “The wandering years, it seemed, had served their purpose. I could now exist where I belonged, chasing echoes, without wondering if there might be better things to chase elsewhere. There weren’t, not for me. I’d gone to a good many elsewheres and was glad I had, but I was back home now.

  “And without much dark pondering having occurred, the work that I wanted to do fell into place and began to speak in my own voice, for better or worse, of these matters and others.”

  That finding of his voice might be dated from one afternoon when he sat down at his typewriter and wrote: “They called him Pajarito. …” It was the beginning of a story about an encounter between Tom Bird, an old frontier cattleman, and a band of Comanches led by an old warrior named Starlight, who came to Mr. Bird’s ranch and asked him to give them a buffalo from a small herd that he kept.

  “The story just sort of wrote itself,” John says. “I stayed up all night and finished it. It’s so wonderful when that happens, and so seldom.”

  The Last Running was published by The Atlantic Monthly, was reprinted in one of the Best American Short Stories collections, and has been issued twice in book form. It’s widely acknowledged as a masterpiece, and may be the best short story yet about the end of the frontier and the meaning of its loss. The Last Running is as hard and tough as the old rancher and his ancient Comanche adversary, completely dry of sentimentality. But its power and the haunting echo of its last sentence—“We had a world, once.”—have made many Texans and at least one Indian cry.