Notes
Notes Chapter 1 1. For example, in an interview by Winston Bode, “Miss Porter on Writers and Writing,” first published in the Texas Observer in 1958, now readily available in Conv., 30–38. 2. At this time Porter was in ill health but struggling to resume work on the “Old Order” material. Porter to Josephine Herbst, July 27, 1932. 3. Information about Indian attacks (as well as lynchings) comes from Newton and Newton, Racial and Religious Violence in America. 4. When white settlers did pursue the raiders, usually to get back their stolen horses, they also wanted to get revenge, and sometimes, like the Indians, they took scalps. See, for example, the history of Somervell County (about sixty miles northeast of Brown County) by Nunn, Somervell, 36–37; see also Newton and Newton, Racial and Religious Violence in America. 5. Porter to George Sessions Perry, Feb ru ary 5, 1943. 6. Regional linguists confirm Vliet’s assessment, though with far greater complexity . See, for example, Carver, Ameri can Regional Dialects, 225–32. 7. See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, on “heteroglossia.” 8. Cormac McCarthy also liberally incorporates Spanish into his English- language novels. Neither a native of the borderlands nor a native speaker of Spanish, he began his life in the South and wrote about the South before moving both his residence and his writerly interest to far west ern Texas. He is frequently discussed in terms of border issues and border theory. 9. Aware that facts about her early years were less well- known than the rest, Porter wrote to Joan Givner on April 12, 1978, asking her to come visit so they could talk about it; Givner, private collection. 10. Ameri can history was not of ten taught in school classrooms until about the 214 / Notes to Pages 19–24 mid- nineteenth century. Its frequency as a school subject approximately doubled between 1850 and 1900. It did not become standard classroom fare until the twentieth century. Since Porter’s elementary school years ended in 1901 or 1902 and she had only one year of schooling after that, it is possible that she may never have encountered either Texas or Ameri can history in a school setting. 11. The title “Mother of Texas” was bestowed on Jane Long because it was said that she bore the first white baby in Texas—a reason that overlooks the many non- white babies that preceded hers. Historians now say that she did not bear the first white baby in Texas anyway. My teachers also emphasized that in the absence of her husband and his men, she fired a cannon and killed numerous Indians, as if that were obviously a good thing. To be sure, the deed was done in defense under attack, and it did show her willingness to take an active role usually performed by men. 12. I am drawing here primarily on Foster, Spanish Expeditions into Texas, 1689– 1768, 1–27. 13. Austin’s first colony came to be known as the Old Three Hundred because his initial grant from the Spanish, ratified by Mexico, allowed him to settle three hundred families. Due to a few awards of double grants, the number of families was actually 294. A convenient, compact guide to Texas history published by the Texas Historical Association, The Handbook of Texas, is available online at http://www .tshaonline.org/handbook/online (accessed June 6, 2012). 14. One of the ironies involved in Texas racism toward Mexicans (that is, people of Mexican descent, whether born south of the Rio Grande or north of it) is pointed out by Stewart and De León: even though Mexicans were widely believed by Anglos to be lazy, they were also seen as foreigners (in what had been their own land) who actively pursued “disloyalty and subversion” (Not Room Enough, 87). 15. See Zamora, Orozco, and Rocha, Mexican Americans in Texas History. Crook’s strongly visual accounts of both the Goliad and the San Jacinto massacres in Prom ised Lands is even- handed in its horror and revulsion, but by admitting atrocities on the Texians’ side at all and by refusing to demonize Mexicans it is an intensely re visionist work of fiction. 16. A slave rebellion or rumors of one had occurred as early as 1835. By 1860 slaves represented one- third of the population of central Texas. In Brazos County, the “north ernmost reach” of Austin’s land grant, there were more than a thousand slaves out of a population...
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