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. 

Trees and I go back a long way, millions of years, in fact, to a shared root in the evolution of life.   We went our separate ways, but as long as I can remember, I have still felt our connection.  A memory formed at five years old involved a broad-canopied mesquite tree that stood in the center of the otherwise empty back yard of my family’s raw, just-built starter house on the edge of San Antonio.  The mesquite was not a particularly satisfactory tree; it didn’t match the spreading oaks in my picture books, and its leaves were sparse and quirky- looking, but it was mine.  It provided the only shade until the trees my father planted gained some height. 

On Sunday mornings, I would wake with the light to a quiet house, with my depression-era parents still asleep.  They would have worked hard all week:  two jobs and college classes for my father, a full-time job, cooking, and sewing our clothes for my mother.  Sunday provided their only day to sleep late.   In bed, I would listen for sound, and eventually get bored and restless.  So I would unlatch the window screen in my bedroom, ease out, and drop a few feet onto the damp grass.  There waiting was the mesquite, with its circle of morning shade. Perhaps with a doll or book in hand, I played or read under the mesquite, content in my own green space and my own self.  The house would rouse after a while, and I would take my doll and book inside.  I couldn’t have put words to the feeling then, but memory suspects that those Sunday mornings provided a buffer from the struggles and tensions in the house.

In my twenties, in 1966, my husband James and I moved into our own raw, new house on the edges of Houston.  There were no trees waiting in the back yard, not even a mesquite, because this was not mesquite country.  But it was tree country, and the first things I planted in the yard were pines and willows, fast-growing and visible from almost every window.  The pines grew tall and straight and whistled when the wind blew, and the willows soon bent to the grass.  I did not know what lay ahead or what role these trees would play.

Times were prosperous in the 1960’s, so James and I were luckier than our parents.  We did not have to strive as hard as my parents had done for a house and promise of comfort.  With college degrees and jobs, we began living out the American dream.  But eventually a nice house and furniture couldn’t assuage the loneliness of a failing marriage.  For a while, my working on a master’s degree helped mask the truth of the relationship, but when James balked at my going on for a Ph.D., I had no more escape.  Two years later, the marriage ended.   In the divorce settlement I kept the house and the newer of the two cars, but making those payments would be difficult on $300 a month child-support and $360 a month graduate-student teaching stipend.  And James insisted on writing into the divorce contract that he would get the house if I missed three months’ payments, and he let me know that he would sue for custody of our four-year-old daughter Karen given half a chance of winning.  The pressure was on.  Survival required more than a quiet Sunday morning under a circle of green.

Every morning and evening, I looked out the bedroom window at the pines and willow I had planted five years before.  I loved those trees.  But on one afternoon that I still remember in all its anguish, I looked out the window and knew in my gut that these trees were not going to help me, any more than the rest of the universe was going to.  It was as if existential angst, perhaps shaped by reading Camus and Sartre and the rest of that cheery crew, combined to form the knot in my stomach.  An illness, mine or Karen’s, a car break-down, or a hundred other possible events could mean catastrophe, at least to my knotted stomach.  I was on my own. 

 Yes, I had loving parents, but I had broken with the family religion, creating a chasm of grief in them, and had fought to hold boundaries as a new mother.  While I knew they would help if needed, I had to make it on my own.  And friends—well, graduate school was too much about competition to lean on them for help.  Survival was up to me.   

So I turned to effort—my parents’, now my, most reliable way of coping.  I taught extra classes in the summer, tutored, took my lunch to school, enrolled in a free car repair class, learning how to change my own oil and do my own repairs.  Still, there was scarcely five cents left over at the end of the month.  When a neighbor and good friend knocked on the door soliciting civic club memberships at $15 a year (this was 1972, and $15 was real money), I told her I couldn’t afford it.  Uncomprehending, she replied, “Anyone can afford $15.”  “Not me,” I insisted, unashamed.  I knew what I had to do. 

Over the years, I got the Ph.D. and a teaching job, published enough to get tenure and promotions, consulted for a law firm, and eventually sent Karen to a good private college.  Just as I had budgeted money, during these years I budgeted time.  Effort was always the fall-back.  Now, years later, with my husband Thorpe in an old house shaded by big pecans and oaks, I nevertheless planted a new oak in the front and in the back.  Every morning I checked through the bedroom windows to see how the trees were doing.  They grew tall and wide, branching out and reaching up for light.   They were my comfort trees.

Different challenges arose, ones that my old forms of effort could not address.  In 2013, a year a half after I retired from teaching, Karen and wife Betty adopted a two-year-old boy through the foster care system in San Francisco.  Even the excellent social services in California could not change the fact that he came with ADHD and behavioral challenges.  Thorpe and I promised Karen and Betty that we would do what we could to support them, so we went to San Francisco periodically to give them some relief.  At times, we stayed with Henderson as much as a week, while Karen and Betty took a break from demanding careers and caring for Henderson.  Hence, a new form of effort for me, as a grandmother.  It became too easy to feel that my worry and effort could help.  I took on learning about ADHD and shared information, as much as I dared, lest I seem intrusive. This time the boundaries were ones that I, not my mother, might step across in relationship with our daughters.

The night before leaving for a visit to San Francisco, I looked out the bedroom window at the shadowy canopy of the nearest oak, moving gracefully in the wind.   I prayed, or what my pagan soul calls prayer, to my oak trees for help in being open but not intrusive, help in knowing when to be silent.   On the Saturday night before Karen had to leave for a two-week trip to Africa for her work, it was hard to know who was more upset, Karen or Henderson.  After she finally got him to sleep, she came into the living room, where Thorpe and I were sitting.  I looked at her with a sympathetic smile but said nothing, for once.   For an hour she talked about how hard it is to leave and how necessary her job is.   She talked about her love for Henderson and the effort required to care for him.  I saw afresh her strength and wisdom and spiritual grounding.  I saw how she has taken whatever I gave her and gone far beyond it.  I saw that not my effort, but only the continuing love of Henderson’s family, was required.

That night I knew I could let go.  Once in bed, I thanked my oak trees and the spirits of the universe for the gifts of the evening.  As if a voice spoke to me, I heard, “The spirits are not just in the trees, they are in every cell of your body.  You can count on them.  No effort required.”

At my house today, the back yard is full of brown-skinned workers speaking Spanish.  Whether they are illegal or legal, from Mexico, El Salvador, or Honduras, I can’t tell.  But I am grateful for their labor.  Without them, my downstairs toilet would remain stopped-up, and the dishwasher and washing machine would remain unusable because the pipes are blocked by tree roots.  I don’t pay the workers directly, the plumber does, so I don’t yet know if these men are paid fairly or not.  If I inquired, the plumber might tell me the truth, or not.  I would have no way of knowing.  I do know it is hot outside—this is Houston in July—and the men are working hard.  In fact, all up and down my street today, young brown-skinned men are mowing yards, putting on a roof, and doing house repairs.  And brown-skinned women are working inside the houses that sit on those yards and under that roof.  

I never had to earn my living doing such work, and it is a good thing.  I wouldn’t have lasted a day and would have gone to bed hungry.  I grew up here in Texas, never knew hunger or fear for my safety, went to school, and got jobs that paid enough to live comfortably.  And now, I can walk past these workers, get into my car, and go out to lunch with a friend.  Have I earned my privilege?  Maybe a little, through hard work, but much of it arises from history, from the circumstances of birth and from being white.

My lunch companion, Susan Yarbrough, a retired immigration judge, and I talked about personal things for a while, but then the conversation drifted to the seemingly unavoidable politics of the day.   She mentioned that she is occasionally asked to speak to groups about immigration, and she usually opens with the question, “What are borders for?”  Her answer:  that people use borders to protect their ethnicity.  

How does a culture protect its ethnicity in an age of global communication, trade, travel, and climate change?  People are on the move.  How high does the fence have to be to keep them out?   When workers from poor countries help sustain the economies of rich countries, what is the purpose of borders now and how should they function?  Can borders even begin to protect an ethnicity?   Aren’t groups enriched, just as individuals are, by cultural mixing?

Has the United States always respected the borders of other countries?  Not in Iran, with the killing of Prime Minister Mossaddegh, in 1953, in a coup d’etat orchestrated by the C.I.A. and the U.K’s MI6.  Not in the support given for decades to repressive regimes in Central and South America.  When civil wars occur, chaos ensues, and drug lords step into the vacuum, do we Americans recognize our responsibility?  As my lunch friend Susan continued, she hopes that Americans will begin to do so—to acknowledge our collective role in contributing to the border crisis at our southern border.  What does taking responsibility mean?  Not, she would say, just in going to Brownsville or McAllen and handing out food and clean clothes, compassionate as that may be. Maybe humanitarian aid mitigates human suffering just enough so that citizens do not rise up and demand immigration reform.  Does acknowledging the American role in causing the immigration crisis help Americans think about accountability?  Can accountability lead to thinking about workable policy?  If we don’t craft a workable immigration policy, are we willing to give up immigrant labor?  

I don’t know about you, but I am not willing to try to run an electric snake through my sewer line or nail new shingles on my steep roof the next time it leaks.  I need the labor of the young Hispanic men in my back yard.  I don’t know any other people willing to do such labor.  But I know that we should devise a system for such men and women to immigrate or cross back and forth legally,  and to be paid fairly.