Celery and Rich People in Rogers, Texas
The little central Texas town of Rogers isn’t much to look at today, but when my mother, Vivian Marks, was born there in 1919 it boasted three banks, six cotton gins, and a weekly newspaper. The year before her birth, more cotton was shipped from Rogers than from any other Texas town. Profiting from this wealth was the bank run by the Baugh family. The bank survived the fire in the 1920’s that destroyed much of downtown, and it survived the Great Depression that began in 1929 when cotton prices plummeted. The bank sat on a prominent corner of Main Street, and the Baugh house, the largest in town, occupied its own prominent position. Like the Baugh buildings, the family stood out. Everyone in town was likely aware of them and of their position in Rogers’ social hierarchy.
I suspect, however, that a hundred years earlier in central Texas, social hierarchies would have been less clearly defined. In the 1830’s each immigrant family, and single men as well, received land grants from the Mexican government. Over decades, however, early landholdings were sub-divided among the successive generations of children, until within a hundred years many farmers had only small farms. When market prices for farm crops plunged during the 1930’s, these farmers, my parents’ families included, struggled to survive. But the bank owned by the Baugh family, prospered. It was as if the development of a more rigid class system, such as what took centuries to develop in Europe, compressed into a hundred years.
Rogers’ class structure was a feature in many of the stories my parents told of their childhoods. One story stands out—the one about my mother, Vivian, and the banker’s daughter, Delite Baugh. One day in school at lunchtime, Delite was eating a stick of celery. Vivian, who ate the vegetables grown on their farm, celery not among them, asked Delite what she was eating. She replied, “Celery, but it’s only for rich people.” At a young age, Delite understood her rank as the banker’s daughter, and if Vivian had not understood her own rank before that conversation, she did then. As an adult, she could laugh at the absurdity of defining class by celery, but she must have felt ashamed that her family could not afford to buy it in the grocery store.
My mother and father, like so many others, escaped Rogers as young adults. Thanks to their hard work, and to the GI Bill, they eventually prospered in the post-World War II economy. But my mother kept attitudes toward class shaped both by childhood poverty and by family stories of more egalitarian times. I was a young child during these years, and in turn, I was shaped by her stories.
I remember many Sunday afternoons when I became aware of my mother’s attitudes toward the class structure of our town of San Antonio and developed my own. While my father studied for his college classes, my mother would give him some quiet space and pile my grandmother, my sister, and me into the car to take a drive. We didn’t drive into the country, as some might have, but around San Antonio looking at houses. We would cruise through our own neighborhood of starter wood-frame, small suburban houses and gradually get closer into town to the older, richer neighborhoods. By fifth grade, I could have drawn a map of San Antonio based on the status of any neighborhood I had been in, and my mother no doubt could have, too. I measured the rank of each house by size, whether the exterior was wood or brick or stone, and its number of stories. Two-story houses made of stone were my ultimate.
By high school in Corpus Christi, where we now lived, I could have ranked each social group: children of the local merchants who lived on Ocean Drive occupied the top, and the rest of us were somewhere down the ladder, with perceived parents’ income as the ladder. So, as my mother’s daughter, I grew up aware. And also like her, I suspect, felt both attracted to and repelled by such distinctions.
In the 1980’s I took a leave from university teaching to set up a writing program for first-year lawyers at a large downtown law firm in Houston. Shortly after I began, one day riding the elevator up to my office, a senior partner and I exchanged greetings. He asked, “So, where are you parking?” When I answered that I ride the bus, since I live close to Main Street, he looked horrified: “You can’t do that! When you are first class, you have to go to first class.” I had violated a norm, acting inappropriately to the status of my employer. Like my mother laughing at Delite and her celery, I could laugh, but I was old enough not to be humiliated, or to change my bus-riding ways. And I could be horrified when a firm newsletter printed a mocking cartoon of a bag lady on the cover. Yet I could also admire the firm’s norms regarding hard and good work and accept happily a salary larger than my university one.
With the passing years, I find the tension still exists: I long for an egalitarian ideal yet love the comfort of a house (yes, brick and two-story) in a close-in neighborhood in Houston. I hate it that the income gap has widened to such extremes but happy that I have enough. I hate it that some people carry debt in the hundreds of thousands for medical care, but grateful that I have Medicare and secondary insurance, as well. Some might give away all their goods or start an orphanage in India. That I cannot or will not do. But I will vote, demonstrate, give food to the homeless, donate to causes that support a more egalitarian world. I will do something, but it will never be everything I could do. I will try to remember that when much is given, much is required, but I will live with the tension that it will never be enough.
In the meantime, stories about rich people eating celery and riding elevators continue to find current permutations in the news. Have you heard the one about the rich parents who bribed college admissions officials and then a few days ago tried to impress their sentencing judge with expensively produced, slick videos touting their civic virtue? If you missed it, don’t worry. There will be more stories where that came from.
