My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (5 page)

More important, there is little exploration left to do in the Permian Basin. Most of the entrepreneurial gamble is gone: All you can do these days is work on how to draw every last drop of oil out of the ground. Some scientists speculate that in the next half century or so the Permian Basin will actually run out of oil and gas. The phrase “economic diversification”—probably unheard of in town twenty years ago—was on the front page of the
Midland Reporter-Telegram
nearly every day I was in Texas. Midland may not become one of those forgotten towns that popped up on the cap rock, never took hold, and then simply vanished, as if a high dry wind had blown it away, but these days the city is trying to market itself as a retirement haven and a convention site, just in case.

IT’S NOT HARD
to imagine that in Midland you are seeing the end of something. The pump jacks dipping up and down in the distance look prehistoric, and the hot wind bangs on the empty windows of the now defunct Midlander Athletic Club and the long-gone Rockin’ Rodeo. You even sense it in the Petroleum Club, an exclusive organization that caters to local oil executives. It must have been a great place to make an entrance in the days when oil was big and Big Oil was invincible: The club has an enormous open staircase, and when you walk up to the dining room, you feel as if you are rising to the top of the world. The day I visited, though, the club was a little vacant; the empty stairway seemed to stretch forever, and half the dining room had been sectioned off and filled with artificial palm trees. It was my last day in Midland: I was having lunch with John Paul Pitts, the oil-and-gas editor at the
Reporter-Telegram,
and he seemed to know everyone in the room. This one had been worth millions, and that one worth billions, and that one was the founder or the president of this or that oil concern. But the dining room was subdued, and many of the fellow diners who walked by were ancient, skinny men wearing string ties.

The Petroleum Club has always been for the money people in the oil business, and the money people have almost always been white. Early on, even the oil-field workers were white, but after 1986, many of them left Midland or left the industry, and in the last fifteen years or so, a majority of the people digging and servicing and repairing the rigs have been Hispanic. The population of Midland has changed as well: Now only sixty-five percent of the residents are white, and nearly all the rest are Hispanic. There are very few Hispanics at the upper reaches of the oil industry—and few Hispanic geologists or engineers—and none were in evidence in the quiet dining room at the Petroleum Club. Pitts said that he expects the next generation of Hispanics in the business to end up in the offices downtown, rather than out on the oil patch; and some Midlanders believe that in twenty years the city may be mostly Hispanic. The question is how much longer there will be oil for them to tap.

George W. Bush has said that he would like to be buried in Midland. This will not necessarily be easy to do. When you first see it, the soil here looks loose and crumbly, and you’d think digging a hole in it would be as easy as sticking a knife in a cake. But nothing in Midland, not even burial, is as simple as it first seems. The tender soil conceals a calcium deposit called caliche that is as thick and hard as bone, and it takes a tempered-steel drill bit to break through.

Beautiful Girls

The Holiday Inn in Prattville, Alabama, is on a grassy rise beside a wide gray highway across from a Waffle House and a McDonald’s and several different places to buy gas. One Sunday this spring, the hotel lobby was especially crowded. Some of the people had come straight from church for Sunday lunch: mild-faced women in pastel dresses and men in gray suits and dull blue ties; boys in white shirts and oxfords and girls in Sunday school dresses and black Mary Janes. The rest of the people had come for the Universal/Southern Charm International Children’s Beauty Pageant being held at the hotel. They were wearing stonewashed jeans or leisure outfits, and they were carrying babies or pushing strollers or rushing around leading little girls by the hand, and with a spare finger some of them were balancing hangers that held tiny dresses with ballooning skirts covered by dry cleaners’ plastic bags. A few of the littlest babies were fussing. Mothers hurried through the lobby and bumped their strollers into other mothers’ strollers. A miniature dress of green chiffon slid off its hanger and settled onto the carpet with a sigh, and as soon as the woman holding the empty hanger noticed it she yelled, “Nobody move! Don’t step on that dress!” Then a few three-year-olds started horsing around and squealing, and a cosmetic case slipped out of someone’s hand, and, when it landed, out shot a dozen cylinder-shaped things—hair curlers, hairbrushes, lipstick tubes, eyeliner brushes—that rolled in every direction across the floor. A few fathers were sent back to the parking lot to retrieve the shoes or hat or Wet Ones or entry forms that had been left in the car by accident. One mother had spread her baby out on the lobby sofa and was changing her into a lavender Western outfit. In the ladies’ room, small dresses and hats were hanging from every ledge they could hang from, and white anklet socks and white shoes and pairs of children’s size 2 rhinestone-studded cowboy boots were scattered on the floor, and there was the tangy metallic smell of hot curling irons in the air. In the middle of the room, four women were adjusting the bows in their daughters’ hair and smoothing blusher on their cheeks. Across from them, three other women were lined up elbow to elbow. Each one held a Great Lash mascara wand poised like a conductor’s baton, and each was facing a lovely little girl in a glittering pageant dress sitting quietly in a sink.

I had never been to a beauty pageant before I went to Prattville. For the longest time, the world of children’s beauty pageants was invisible to millions of people like me, who don’t read
Pageant Life
and
Pageant World,
and don’t plan their vacations around the big state finals, and don’t have a little girl who has dozens of trophies and crowns and pageant banners in her room. Probably all of that would have remained invisible if someone hadn’t murdered JonBenet Ramsey. Once the footage of her in pageant clothes and wearing makeup appeared on the TV news, the world of children’s beauty pageants came into sight and a horrible association was made—not just that a beauty pageant girl was murdered, but that the pageants themselves were depraved and had maybe even contributed to the murder in some way. It was as if you’d never heard of the game of football until the O. J. Simpson trial, and then you’d never be able to separate the crime from the game.

But pageants have been taking place all over the country for decades, and in the South, especially, they are as common as barbecue. Pageants are held nearly every Sunday—Sunburst Pageants and Moonbeam Pageants and Miss American Starlet and Glamour Dolls USA Pageants—in meeting rooms at Holiday Inns and Comfort Inns and Best Westerns in places like Florence, Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi, and Jackson, Tennessee. Every Sunday, pageants have been making winners and losers, inspiring and dashing hopes, wasting some people’s money and making some little girls rich. As I left for Alabama, I guessed that I would see some overcompetitive parents and some parents who would insist on winning even if their kids didn’t want to be in a pageant—the same bad things you sometimes see at junior tennis matches and gymnastics meets. I knew that I wasn’t going to enjoy seeing three-year-olds wearing eyeliner and crying when they weren’t named Supreme Queen. But in spite of what most of the stories that followed JonBenet’s murder led me to expect, what I saw in Prattville were not people like the Ramseys, with lots of money and mobility. They were ordinary people: They were dazzled by glamour, and they believed truly and uncynically in beauty and staked their faith on its power to lift you and carry you away. It may be embarrassing or naÏve to believe that being Miss America will lead you somewhere in life, unless it happens to be your life, or your daughter’s life, and the working-class life that has been assigned to you and your baby feels small and flat and plain. There are only so many ways to get out of a place like Prattville. The crown you win on Sunday might be the chance for your beautiful baby to get a start on a different life, so that someday she might get ahead and get away.

Darlene Burgess, who founded the Universal/Southern Charm International Pageant seventeen years ago, told me that ever since JonBenet, people who don’t know anything about pageants are peering into the pageant world and then condemning it because they’re shocked by the makeup and the dressy dresses and the sexy sophistication of some of the girls. There have been magazine stories and television shows about children’s pageants before, but most of them have been for foreign press and TV, so this has really been the first time that the pageant world has been shoved into view. It’s not that anyone has anything to hide; it’s just that they feel scrutinized and criticized by people who haven’t been to a single pageant—people who can’t see how proud mothers are when their daughters win and don’t see how pageant people are practically a family, in which everyone knows one another and watches out for one another.

Darlene got into pageants purely by accident. She grew up on a farm in Arkansas in the fifties; her mother drove a grain truck, and Darlene lived on her own in town starting at the age of fifteen. She didn’t know a thing about pageants and wouldn’t have had the money to compete in them even if she had. When she got married, she and her husband, Jerry, who was a pilot for Oral Roberts University, lived in Tulsa. They started their little girl, Becky, in dancing classes at the age of three. Becky was a natural onstage, and Darlene learned to coax out her best performances by waving a flyswatter at her. After a while, Becky’s dance teacher entered her in a competition that turned out to be part of a children’s pageant. Becky came home that day with a trophy, and Darlene was hooked.

Darlene learned about pageants as she went along. One thing she learned was makeup. The dance teacher used some on the girls in their recitals, and Darlene didn’t like it at first, but then she agreed that for pageants Becky needed it. “She was just so pale,” Darlene said to me recently. “I just had to cake her. Otherwise, she would have been invisible onstage. If you have a baby who’s a true blonde, not a browny blonde, and you put her under those lights, it’ll kill her.” Darlene herself is tall and substantial and has fair skin and clay-colored hair. She wears big rimless glasses and warm-up suits. She has an Arkansas accent, rolling and drawly, and a light, chiming laugh that can put you in an instant good mood. She is self-possessed and capable in a way that is slightly intimidating. When she needed a dress for Becky, she sewed one; when she saw that there was no good pageant dress business in the area, she started one; when she discovered that no one manufactured mannequins small enough to use for her clients, she built one; and then, when she decided that the pageants Becky was entering were poorly run, she started her own. “I’d hear talk in dressing rooms,” Darlene told me. “Like ‘If they know you, you win; if they don’t, you don’t.’ And then I was at a pageant and found out that one of the judges was the grandmother of one of the babies, and I thought, I’m going to do my own pageant and do it right.” She picked a date, made up flyers, and rented a room. To break even, she had to attract at least fifty kids. She ended up with a hundred and twenty. After a few years, she was able to expand Southern Charm into North Carolina, Mississippi, New York, and Maryland, and she told me that she might soon be adding Virginia and Florida. In each state, Darlene appoints a director to run preliminary pageants and the state finals, and she herself takes care of the national finals. All beauty pageants are owned privately, and most use state directors, as Darlene does. State directors can make money running a pageant, but unless they own a pageant system they need a full-time job. Recently, Darlene’s Tennessee directors, a married couple, had to resign, because the man, a Baptist minister, had just got his own church and wasn’t free on Sundays anymore.

Stacie Brumit, Southern Charm’s Alabama state director, arrived at the hotel around noon, loaded down with boxes and bags. The mothers in the lobby hurried with their daughters into a line that started in front of Stacie’s registration table and curled down the hall and out the door. Stacie is round faced and round shouldered and has a bleached blond pageboy. She was already heavily into pageants when she signed on to be Darlene’s Alabama director—she had competed herself when she was little, and so far she has entered her two-year-old daughter, Brianna, in thirty pageants, starting when Brianna was five months old. “I see how much being in them is giving Brianna, even at her age,” she said. “I think she’s going to be a great public speaker because of her pageant experience. She’s learning poise. She’s going to end up being . . . being like the president! I mean, he’s not shaky when he’s up there speaking.” Before becoming a pageant director, Stacie worked at Wal-Mart. This was when she was expecting Brianna, and she says that even though directing a pageant is hard work, it’s nothing compared with sitting on a stool out in the cold in front of a Wal-Mart greeting shoppers when you’re six months pregnant and sick as a dog.

The kids in line to be registered ranged from six months old to almost but not quite four, and they were beautiful or cute or plain, and they were wearing white satin dresses covered with matching satin capes trimmed with feathers, and peach dresses with beaded bodices and heart-shaped cutouts in the back, and powder blue dresses with leg-o’-mutton sleeves. The girls who were old enough to have some hair had it swept up, prom style, or left loose and sprayed into curvy shapes, and the bigger girls wore foundation, blusher, eye shadow, and mascara, and the babies wore no makeup except maybe a little pink gloss on their lips. Some of the mothers wore attractive clothes and had their hair blown smooth, but many were too fat or too thin or looked tired and frayed next to their dazzling daughters. While the mothers were waiting to register, the fathers dawdled in the parking lot, having a smoke. The babies napped, and the bigger girls practiced pageant modeling: eye contact with the judges; a wide smile showing one row of teeth; “pretty hands,” which means holding your arms straight and slightly lifted, with your hands bent at the wrist and parallel to the floor; and “pretty feet,” the pose for the beauty lineup, right heel pressed to left instep, toes wide and apart.