Above is an 1833 map of Coahuila and what we now know as Texas—the pink area on the gulf was the land reserved for Austin’s colony. This land belonged to Mexico at the time, not the United States or Texas.
Above is a photo I took of a map of Austin’s Colony through glass when I visited Washington-on-the Brazos in 2013. The most obvious squiggly line coming up from the lower right is the Brazos River near which most of the plantations settled. You can also see how many rivers and streams cover the area, nothing like the dry plans most people think of when they consider West Texas. In many ways, East Texas is more like Louisiana, with moss-covered live oaks, rolling hills, mosquitoes and, at the time, even an alligator or three.
After Mexico’s revolution from Spain in 1822, Stephen Austin went to Mexico City and received a grant affirmed by the new government.
The first colonists had actually arrived in December 1821 on New Years Creek and stated it was a “never failing rock bottom creek that lies in a gentle valley with wood and water readily available.”
Most of the three hundred settled along the west side of the Brazos River. Each family engaged in farming was to receive one labor (about 177 acres) and each ranching family one sitio (about 4,428 acres). Each family’s sitio was to have a frontage on the river equal to about one-fourth of its length. Most of the labors were arrange in three groups around San Felipe de Austin, which form the nucleus of the colony.
Many were farmers and many had substantial means before they arrived.
My main character’s papa, Paien Villere (At What Cost, Silence?), arrived on his tract, or sitio, from Virginia with his overseer, his wife Isabella, and his few slaves in July 1824.
In 1830 a Mexican decree temporarily stops colonization in Texas, California and other territories.
Mexico also tried to prohibit slaves, but influential settler Austin reasoned that the success of his colonies needed slave labor and the economics it produced to lure more whites to the area, and he used his relationships to get an exemption from the law in the Austin Colony.
In 1832 Paien’s first son Lucien is born and Isabella dies in childbirth. The slave Rosanne Hayes take over the house and raises Lucien.
In 1833 Austin returns to Mexico City to present a petition for separate statehood, but was kept in prisons for most of two years. The petition was denied.
Once upon an era two mice were put in the most wonderful cage either could imagine.
The cage was so vast they could hardly see past all the various plants and toys to the metal bars at the far end. There were tiny fruits growing on the plants, balls to play with, a ferris wheel to run around on when tearing from one end of the cage wasn’t enough, and even a maze to learn for extra treats. They were both smart mice with great imaginations and learned the maze fast.
Photo by Anne Bunner from Flickr
The trickiest play was the button push for water. It poured out into a little stream when you pressed your paw on the right one. That took many whisker twitches to figure out. But they got it.
Someone they called god came every other day to clean up after them, which was best of all. God put them here, didn’t he?
They built a nest in the best place beneath their favorite fruit tree near the water stream (there were so many fine places) and birthed six little mice. Oh, joy, six more mice running around and playing. It wasn’t long before six little mice became thirty mice and even more fun was had. Except when those mice turned into thirty mice and god came and not only cleaned, but removed some of the mice. They were missed, at first, but more mice were born to replace them.
Time passed, and one day god did not arrive to clean their mess.
Two darks later, and he didn’t arrive. Four darks later and their shit piled up, creating an interest to flies and other small critters the mice did not care for. There were no treats from the maze, either, no matter how often one ran it.
Also, it was getting a bit crowded in paradise.
One young mouse named Seed said, “Maybe we should do something.”
The shit piled up and more mice were born, and many of them were hungry.
Seed tried. “Remember who did best in the maze?” she said. “What will happen if we don’t clean up this mess ourselves?”
But they did nothing.
One mouse named Wiley, bigger than the others, got his friends and stood guard over the water button. “Bring me your females or you get no water, clean space, or places to play.”
Soon mice were fighting over whose females went for water and who got the cleaner spaces. Dead mice as well as mouse shit lay everywhere, and paradise began to stink and attract ever more undesirable creatures.
By now Seed had little mice of her own and friends who were trying to clean up spaces by tossing shit and dead mice out of their cage, but they couldn’t keep up as so many other mice were shitting and killing others to get clean space, water, and food.
Their plants no longer provided and hungry mice killed one another for food.
They were so crowded and filthy many became ill and spread disease. Those who were once healthy became weak. Flies dove everywhere, feasting.
By now Seed was a great grandmother, and watched her grandchildren and great grandchildren fade with disease before her eyes, the once beautiful plants shrivel among the stinking piles of shit.
Those early years were filled with anxiety, were often depressing, and peppered with moments of joy. Dad’s greed and anger left me with a lack of self-confidence, but filled me with determination and toughness that enabled me to face life’s problems I might not have had otherwise. Sometime in my teens I decided that when I lay on my deathbed I did not want to regret the way I had lived. I wanted to live an adventurous life, no matter the risks. I wanted to experience what I read about in books. That dream was a major part of what enabled me to get past what I faced later.
He never knew, no one did, how strong that dream was. Years later, days after I graduated from Kent State University, refused a local teaching job, and prepared to leave for Colorado, Dad said to my friend Mary, “I didn’t think she’d really do it.”
It was in the summer when I couldn’t take Dad’s sexual abuse any longer, when that black bubble growing inside burst the first time.
He’d done it again, downstairs because I recall running upstairs and making it as far as Diann’s bed, not my own upper bunk and not being able to stop the tears. More than tears as it all came up, everything I had been holding onto, all of it coming out and he followed up after me. Maybe he kneeled on the floor at the side of the bed or sat on it. I don’t know but he was there and he must have been scared. I recall most clearly him saying, “I wanted you to know what boys do. It was so you would know.”
That was the end of it.
John Paul Klink, my dad
Except for the way he teased my girlfriend Janet and Diann’s new friend, Millie, who was a flirt. And the fear of riding in the car alone with him, the silence, not knowing what to say, what he might say. The way he drove on the next car’s bumper, my not being able to say a thing. Sitting there, stiffly, hands at my side on the chair, holding my breath. Or, how he’d say to Mom, “What is the matter with you, stupid? Can’t you do anything right?”
This is the same man who was chief of the Portage Lakes Volunteer Fire Department for several years.
I must push through a series of plateaus, one risk after the other.
I had to prove myself to myself in order to build up confidence, and that took years, and therapy. But it can be done. I did it.
Looking back, puberty and junior high was the first plateau and one of the worst I faced.
Though it appeared Dad’s sexual predation had ended, nothing else about him had changed, and I felt more guilty than ever, was overweight, and overwhelmed with fear and anger about him and my entire situation. I hated getting “periods” and I hated getting breasts because I was no longer comfortable sleeping on my stomach. Turning into a woman was nothing but trouble. Look what had happened to Mom? Women were prissy and used by men. In tight situations they did nothing but scream and faint and act silly and I would never do that. It was stupid.
What saved me were the stories Mary and I put together where I was always a man.
Now I was old enough to ride my trusty bike six miles to her house on weekends where we would talk our tales for hours. I often stayed overnight and we played our characters into the wee hours of the morning until I could no longer remain awake. I never realized how our altered selves saved Mary as well as me.
Sometimes her Mom or Dad brought her to our house, and in the summer we slept on cots in the backyard with Maverick as guard. I developed a love of lying out under the stars, of the soft air drifting across my face, the sounds of night all around, the smells. If I can make it happen, I would like to die like that, outside, lying under the stars.
That was summer. The rest was the new Erwine Junior High School.
Horrible. I have never been “sick” as much as I was those two years of Junior High School. The first year we wore saddle shoes and wide crinoline skirts. Those skirts came in handy since we had a math teacher who loved paddling girls. The second year we wore straight skirts and warm hose. No such thing as girls wearing jeans or pants in those days.
Poodle skirt, but we wore crinolines underneath (from an ad on the web)
I had a tough time keeping up with my school work because I was bored with most of it.
I would rather read a good book, and I did half the time. Or gab with Mary on the phone, anything to separate from the real world. One semester I received an “F” in a math class. When I saw that report card I knew I was in big trouble. Dad only had to raise his voice once. His attention was enough to terrify me and Diann. The following semester I came home with an “A.” I can focus when I have to. That lesson has remained with me.
Supposedly, that first year in school we were allowed to choose an instrument to play, but only if that particular instrument was still needed by the band.
I wanted to play the flute but the band leader, Mr. Hadgis, had previously chosen his flute players. This was the story of my life in that local district. I, Mary, students like us, were perennially too late. The popular students always got the best book, the instrument they wanted, the tutors they needed. We received what was left. Funny how it happened that way. Ironically, some of those students quit the marching band to be cheerleaders anyway. Mary ended up with saxophone; I ended up with clarinet, Janet learned trumpet.
Poor Maverick—how he’d run when I picked up that cheap, silver clarinet. Squeak, squeak! Determination won the day, though, and I learned to play the thing.
Dad bought a stereo player but not for rock-and-roll. He played Mitch Miller records and classical music. I was weird because I liked classical music. Mary and I played it as emotional background for our imaginations in the basement of her house.
These were also the days of TV westerns. “Gunsmoke” was a family favorite. In the evenings we watched what Dad watched, same on weekend afternoons, which meant football, even if he fell asleep—no touching that channel. During the week there was just enough time to pick up Mom from work and be home by 4:00 and put on our ears for “Mickey Mouse Club.” Fortunately, nothing else was on at that time that Dad wanted to watch.
Right before my high school years we lost the house on Pillar Avenue, as Dad couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments even with Mom’s contribution.
Maybe he shouldn’t have bought the TV, the stereo, the rabbits, the toy trains, who knows what else. All the time he’d spent at Uncle George and Aunt Betty’s working on their house instead of ours—now he had to finish our house so it would sell. Finally. Mom would miss her kitchen. I never said, but I would not miss a thing about that house, except the backyard and woods.
I was thrilled when we rented a house on Dusty’s Road within walking distance of Mary’s house a couple miles away, across West Turkeyfoot Lake Road (619). Our stories became “walking” stories, miles and miles of walking the neighborhoods and down to Rex Lake at the end of Dusty’s Road and back.
A new start.
A new house, closer to Mary. I would begin high school and get into the locally famous Coventry High School Band. I decided to lose those extra pounds I had put on. Everything would be different here. Wouldn’t it?
