Silver Dollars
My first blog post is a short sketch about early generations in my family’s story, which begins first in 1830’s central Texas. This first generation to leave any records came overland, in 1834, from Tennessee as part of the Robertson Colony, with a land grant secured from the Mexican government. This land grant, located smack in Comanche territory, may have been considered by the Mexicans to be of little value. Settling this land, although many today would call it stealing, was long and hard, and gave to this generation a heroic status. Their stories peppered many a family reunion. But what follows are not hair-raising tales of throwing bear grease over the transom to thwart invading Comanches, but a rumination on one life shaped by the confluence of time, place, and family history.
Some generations didn’t always live up to the first one. Particularly one rascal of a guy seems to have had more influence than he deserved, a man I grew up hearing about from my grandmother Roxie Sloan Marks—her father Dougle Sloan. Roxie Sloan was born in 1889, one of nine children, so Dougle would likely have been born in mid-nineteeth century. He is central for me, because Roxie blamed him for wasting the so-called family fortune earned by her grandfather, John Burnet Reed.
John came to Texas, in 1834, as a young single man with his brothers and father Michael, when the family was issued their league of land. I grew up hearing about John Burnet Reed’s building a log house on a small lake, subsequently named Reed’s lake, of his starting the area school and cotton gin, of his later building a larger house (with velvet curtains!), and of sacks of gold buried on the land. This house could hardly have been a plantation, given the nature of the land, and I can find no evidence that the Reeds ever enslaved people. But my grandmother’s nostalgia had a “Gone with the Wind” feel, complete with the velvet curtains.
This golden age contrasts starkly with the poverty of Roxie’s adulthood. She would have been 40 when the Great Depression hit the country in 1929, plummeting market prices of their cotton and produce. Her husband, Silas Marks, took a job in a grocery store in the little town of Rogers, but couldn’t have earned much to support their five children. When he died of cancer in 1937, Roxie was destitute, and ten years later moved in with her daughter and my mother, Vivian Marks Dodd, her husband Wilburn, my sister and me.
The loss of Roxie’s family fortune must have begun with the Civil War and its aftermath. Perhaps less devastated than other Southern states after the war, Texas, nonetheless, endured many hard-scrabble decades and began to turn around only after the Great Depression. Even by 1889, times were still hard for Roxie’s family. Her opportunities must have been limited, and talents undeveloped. Was she musical like her youngest son, J.W., or athletic like my mother? Did ancestral memories of the founders’ glory haunt her world of hardship and poverty? Is this the source of the bitterness I detected and tried to understand?
Her children, however, like others in the so-called Greatest Generation, were young enough to avoid being crippled by early poverty and to seize the opportunities of the post-World War II years, but rather, to use it as an incentive, as something to struggle against. Like those Anglo settlers of Texas in 1834, my parents were young enough and in a time and place of opportunity enough, to prosper. Roxie Sloan Marks, with her memories of velvet curtains and sacks of gold, was too old, too crippled, and too bitter. Here is her story, “Silver Dollars.”
Every day Dougle Sloan put on a freshly ironed white linen suit, mounted his white horse, left the family farm, and rode the three miles into town. He cut a fine figure with his straight back and proud bearing. Before he left the house, he filled his pockets with silver dollars and, once in town, proceeded to the saloon where he met his friends. During the course of the afternoon, he bought drinks and dispensed these silver dollars as the mood struck him, as if he were the patron’ of the county. By dark, he appeared at the homestead gate again, still erect after downing enough drinks to fell a lesser—or less stubborn—man. He wanted his supper. His daughter Roxie and her siblings either scowled or ignored him as he lurched through the door. Once again, Papa had wasted the family money and done nothing to help run the farm.
The silver dollars Dougle Sloan spent every day belonged, technically, to his wife, Molly, the daughter of John Burnet Reed. In 1834, the Mexican government had granted Reed’s father Michael Reed thousands of acres in central Texas, as part of the Robertson colony. As one of the largest land holders in the area, some years later John Burnet built the cotton gin and school. The local community and the adjacent lake took his name and are still known as Reed’s Lake. Thus, Molly’s father, not her husband, was the true patron’ of the area. When Molly married Dougle Sloan, she was only twelve years old; Dougle perhaps thirty. They built a house on the river, probably paid for with her money, on her share of the family land, and grew cotton and vegetables. Molly gave birth to four daughters and five sons.
When her husband Dougle spent her silver dollars each day at the saloon, how did Molly respond to his alcoholic, spendthrift ways? Did she compare him often to her well-respected father? Did her daughter, my grandmother, soak in her bitterness? The story I heard as a child from my grandmother Roxie Sloan Marks contained only these bare outlines. But there is one picture remaining of Molly and Dougle in our family collection that gives a clue. Molly is sitting in a chair on the porch, with Dougle standing next to her. He stands tall and straight in his white suit, no longer young, but still handsome. Although perhaps eighteen years younger than Dougle, Molly looks old enough to be his mother. Since she married at twelve years old, gave birth to nine children, and saw those silver dollars vanish every day, it is no wonder.
When my grandmother told this story, I was too young to know what questions to ask. But I clearly sensed her bitterness—and she is the one I am most interested in trying to understand. In the one picture remaining of my grandmother Roxie as a young woman, taken of her graduating high school class of around 1906, she stands tall and erect, like her father, and her face bears the same angular lines. She looks beautiful—and proud. But those wasted silver dollars and a lot of bad luck shaped the years that followed.
Perhaps the worst piece of Roxie’s bad luck occurred at age sixteen. When the school class went to Galveston, as the story goes, an insect bit through her black stockings, allowing some chemical from the dye to enter her blood stream. The bite on the inside of her ankle turned into a wound like a rancid rose blossom, which never healed. As a child, I watched her wrap it each night in fresh bandages; I saw her walk haltingly; I saw her wince in pain. Skin grafts never took root, and in her sixties, the leg was amputated.
In 1910, at twenty-one, unusually late at the time in rural central Texas, she married Silas Marks, a small farmer. In time Roxie gave birth to six children. As she lay in bed for a few days after the birth of each child, her leg began to heal; when she got up, the wound once more got worse. Crippled, she managed the house and cooked for farm workers. One more person to feed arrived when her father Dougle moved in after his wife, and Roxie’s mother Molly, died. Most likely, Roxie cooked for and cleaned up her father, along with her other chores. She spoke of her father, in my hearing, only with contempt.
The depression hit Roxie’s family, and most farmers in central Texas, hard. Prices for crops dropped, and husband Silas had to take a job in a grocery store in the small town of Rogers. Perhaps ashamed of her come-down from a prosperous girlhood, or perhaps just exhausted and in pain, Roxie became reclusive. Unusual in central Texas then, she never went to church, and also never went to activities at her children’s school, never visited with neighbors. But she soon was to need those neighbors.
When Silas was in his mid-forties, he developed lymphoma. My mother, then a girl in her teens, told of hearing his screams of pain each day as she walked home from school. He died at age forty-seven, leaving Roxie with two children still at home and with no income. She and the children survived on money sent by her son Clinton, who joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, and from a brother who owned a grocery store in a nearby town. Around this time, there are more pictures of Roxie; only in her mid-forties, she looks like an old woman.
Destitute, in 1947 Roxie moved in with us, when I was five years old. My mother had just given birth to my sister, and my father was about to start college on the GI bill My mother was going to work, and my grandmother could help with us kids. Roxie was never like a stereotypical grandmother to me, baking cookies and reading stories. Rather, she was either distant or gruff. There seemed no way to connect with her. I wondered why. I knew even then, of course, that she must have been in physical pain. But now I suspect she was also in perhaps worse, psychological, pain—the pain from feeling cheated of the possibilities the squandered silver dollars could have brought.
