Come Juneteenth (21 page)

Surely this dragging on of slavery hurt a lot of people. I wanted to show how it hurt a precious few, to make my readers care about them.

I wanted to care about them.

Then, early in 2005, the story started to assume shadows against a vast landscape. And I knew right off that it was not a happy landscape. I heard whisperings of my characters, but I did not know yet who they were. I heard angry voices, and I did know that these people had strong convictions, high ideals, traditions to live up to, traditions that might kill them if they didn't watch out. I knew they lived big, like everyone in Texas. I also knew they loved big and hated big. And that included each other. One minute they'd be laughing together, and the next they'd be shooting each other with words as deadly as the guns they were so expert in using.

The story was starting to haunt me.

Basically it would be the story of two girls, one white and one near white, the latter taken in by the family Holcomb as a baby, treated like a princess, while under Texas law still a slave.

The portrait was coming into my sights, huge with its skies and its stars, its flat endless prairie, and its high mountain regions studded with peaks of lime shell and chalky rocks.

I knew I had to bring it to a personalized snapshot, black and white, with all the shadows and gray areas. Only then could I build my story.

For that is how all my historical novels begin. With characters. With their story. Never mind about the history.
Oh, it's there, all right. It's up to me to fit my characters in to this landmark happening. Let it affect the characters' everyday lives. Let them lead me through it.

But wait. It still can't be a story until these characters invite me in.

Some take forever to do this, going about their business and ignoring me.

The characters in this book, it turned out, were there, waiting for me. "Where have you been? We've been waiting five years."

They had the gates of the ranch open, as well as the heavy front door of the house. Did I want a nice cup of coffee? Some of Luli's sugar cookies? Even Gabe and Granville's hound dogs greeted me.

"I'm Luli," a lively, pretty, bursting-with-life teenage girl introduced herself. "And this is Sis Goose."

Sis Goose played her role well. She was older, but shy. Beautiful, but already a woman with secrets.

"And this is my brother Gabe," Luli said, grabbing his elbow with both hands. "My brother Granville is in Mexico. Building empires."

"Mind your manners," Gabe said solemnly. You could see he took responsibility for her, for them all. He took off his planter's hat and smoothed down his brown, sundrenched hair. He was in his midtwenties. Could I do justice to his quiet brand of good looks? Or would mentioning them just demean him? He was so much more than that. A man crowded with obligations, worries, and
a river full of memories he had to swim through every day before breakfast.

"Welcome, ma'am," he said to me. "My ma is upstairs taking a nap. She's getting on now, you know."

A dutiful son to Ma,
I thought. Yes, I must remember that.

"How's your father?" I asked politely. I knew his father was dying; after all, I'd put him in that upstairs bedroom and given him that stroke.

He turned his planter's hat around in his hands. "Middling well, thanks for asking. Luli, stop jumping around like a possum on a stick."

The girl quieted down. Thirteen, I'd made her thirteen. Impossible age, just to give him trouble. But she minded him. He saw to it. I also saw the fondness in his eyes when he looked at her. As for Sis Goose, there was something else in his eyes when they looked in her direction.
Whoa there, Gabriel,
I thought.
Careful. A person could be as blind as a skunk in daylight and see what you feel for her when your eyes linger there.

It's come to the point where they are part of me. They generously share their hopes and dreams and fears. I especially know Gabe's fears because he had a laundry list of them, even after he'd fought Kickapoo Indians in the war and come home, his wounds healing better than the guilt he carried.

"I'm afraid of everything," he admitted to his young sister, and he-who-had-fought-Indians sacrificed his
macho image to help she-who-was-frightened. Especially, he admitted, sitting down to eat with polite people in polite houses.

"Even ours?" she asked.

And there it is. "Especially ours," says he who has known the cost of the Southern honor his pa schooled them all in. And the heartbreak of living in a house in which everyone is lying to one another one minute and calling each other honey the next. That makes fighting Kickapoo Indians honest at least.

But then, too soon, the story was finished and it was time to leave these people.

Ma gave me a large stone jar of their precious coffee, like the nuns in San Felipe gave Luli, and a thick meat sandwich. "You'll need something to comfort you out there," she said.

How did she know? I didn't ask. Just supposed that her world and mine were different only in the trappings.

But I found the heavy front door locked. And I knew that, even if I could sneak out a window, I would find the gates of the ranch locked against me, too. Somebody didn't want me to leave.

Truth to tell, I didn't want to leave, either. I liked it here.

I stood in the hall, clutching my coffee and sandwich. "I have other books to write," I told them.

"Who locked the door?" Gabe demanded.

Turned out it was Luli. Who else? Sis Goose was long
since gone. Anyway, ghosts can't do such things, can they? Another question: If Sis Goose was long since gone, why was Luli still running around, thirteen years old? Oh, I have to get out of here.

"Do I have to worry about this, too?" Gabe acted irritated, but I knew him well enough to know he liked his role in the family. He must, because other than some gray at the temples he hadn't aged, either. And where was Sits in the Sun, the little Indian boy he brought home? Oh yes, Gabe, do take charge.

"Open the door, Luli," he said. He said it roughly and she cried. Later he'd make it up to her somehow. It was the way of them. They'd fight like brother and sister. She'd sass him. She knew just how far she could go. And he knew how far he should go, and the fragile distance between destroying her and making her strong.

Then in the evening, he'd be lounging in the parlor, talking with Ma about the day's doings of the ranch and having after-supper coffee, his laced with rum, and Luli would come in and sit on the floor next to him and rest her head on his knee. Quiet for a while. Sis Goose would be floating all over that room, haunting Gabe and Luli so they'd both be in pain for what they did to her, for the great lie they told her, for the way they kept her in bondage. Now she would keep them in bondage. Forever.

But Luli has more than that to ponder. What about the great truth she didn't tell Gabe?

"I need a powder, I have a headache," Luli would say.
And she'd get up, but not before sneaking a mouthful of Gabe's coffee.

"Get me one, too," he'd say.

I knew this all because I did it to them. And now I was leaving them with it. If I could only get out that front door.

Luli opened it. Smiled at me through her tears. Kissed me. "He needs a woman," she whispered to me. "Granville's promised to help me find him one."

There's a switch. Her conspiring with Granville.

Gabe nodded to me in the hall. "We're beholden to you, ma'am, for telling our story," he said. "You all come again, now."

I left them there. But at what cost? I know they will never leave me be, that I will always think of them, that they will always have some grip on me, that when I am in the middle of some task or reading a book I will hear Gabe's voice saying, "Why did you make her thirteen? Do you know what she did today?" Or, "Pa is never going to forgive me for Sis Goose."

Or from Luli: "My ma died today. You could have stayed around for that."

Yet I am more fond of them than any characters I ever created. Gabe with his haunted memories and his Southern honor that he upholds and demands so of others. That he knows he can't abandon or he will fall to pieces. Luli with her spirit still intact, though she must fight for it every day. Ma with her quick sharp orders and her own
pain near her heart, which only mothers get. And her stern love for her children. And, of course, Sis Goose with her pride and longing to be free.

Thank y'all. I'm beholden.

T
HE LARGER
question my book poses is, how did the Texas ranchers and planters keep the freedom enjoyed by slaves in the East a secret from their own people in bondage?

The "how" is a mystery, except to say that most Texas farms and ranches and plantations were worlds unto themselves, as was Texas itself. Communication from establishment to establishment was likely at a minimum, and the level of information given to slaves kept under a tight rein.

Of course the slaves knew there was a war on. They called it the freedom war. But they did not know the battles, the wins and losses, or the particulars. They sang about it, they prayed about it, they dreamed about freedom, but most never expected it in their lifetime.

As for their white owners, their biggest reason for keeping their slaves ignorant of the freedom enjoyed by their brothers and sisters in the East was the slave labor. After that it was because they feared if their slaves knew of it there would be a slave uprising.

They constantly feared a slave uprising.

During the Civil War, Texas was called "the dark corner of the Confederacy" by many, simply because Texas wanted to be left alone, to govern itself, not to be intruded upon by outsiders, and because there was so much land
yet unexplored, land that went on for miles and miles, land yet occupied only by Indians.

Yet during the war, Texas was the largest producer of cotton in the Confederacy. New England textile manufacturers, running low on cotton, wanted President Lincoln to order an invasion of Texas. But Lincoln ignored them.

Indeed, though there were Federal troops in Texas during the war, there was no wholesale invasion of the state by the Union. Homes and personal properties were not destroyed and occupied as they were back east.

Some Texas army units, like Gabe's, spent all of the war in the state, assigned to defend the frontier against the Indians. Others fought with General Robert E. Lee, and still others went into battle east of the Mississippi.

There was a Federal blockade of the Texas coast in July 1861, which was a death knell for Texas commerce and for Texas cotton merchants. But soon enterprising Texas businessmen and planters (like Luli's brother Granville) discovered a loophole in the blockade by shipping cotton through Bagdad, Mexico.

The incident in the book about coyotes eating the shoes and hats of Gabe and Luli was adapted from an incident in the book
Pioneering in Texas: True Stories of the Early Days
by Winnie Allen, archivist, University of Texas, and Corrie Walker Allen, adjunct professor of education, University of Texas, The Southern Publishing Company, 1935. All the stories in that book were adapted from original sources. Everything else in
Come Juneteenth
is a product of my own imagination.

The name Sis Goose goes back to an animal tale in the style of the Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit stories of Joel Chandler Harris. Collected from the oral tradition and written down by A. W. Eddins, a San Antonio schoolteacher, the tale reads: "En so dey went to cote [court] and when dey got dere, de sheriff, he wus er fox, en de judge, he wus er fox, en all de jurymen, dey wus foxes, too. En dey tried ole Sis Goose, en dey 'victed her en dey 'scuted her, en dey picked her bones."

Reconstruction was the formal name given to the military takeover by Federal troops of Confederate states after the war was over. It lasted, in some states, from 1865 to the 1870s. General Gordon Granger came to Texas to issue the Emancipation Proclamation for Texas slaves on June 19, 1865.

In many cases, Yankees occupied Confederate plantations and ranches like they did in my book, taking over the big house, running the place, and ordering the white folk around. Actually they were there to see that the Southerners properly freed their slaves and were living up to the law of the land. Some simply took advantage of their situation, living high off the hog. Many behaved like gentleman and kept things in line but, unfortunately, too many played their roles to the hilt and made things miserable for the Southerners.

There was no specific time for them to leave. Many did not leave until the midseventies and many left the premises they had occupied in a dreadful state. But the Southerners were lucky if they did not come on strong, shooting the cattle and dogs and horses, burning the barn and houses.

Reconstruction, for many Southerners, was indeed a sad chapter in our history.

Within a short time after the slaves in Texas were freed, there was established a whole spectrum of celebration that became known as Juneteenth to celebrate that 19th of June in 1865 when the Texas slaves finally received their freedom. It is celebrated to this day.

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