Elmer Kelton: Essays and Memories

6 Convergence: Race and Ethnicity in the Work of Elmer Kelton

57 6 Convergence: Race and Ethnicity in the Work of Elmer Kelton Joyce Roach A LINE OF VERSE BY Townsend Miller in This Bitterly Beautiful Land suggests the theme that runs through the novels of Elmer Kelton. Miller calls the region of Kelton’s works, “The bleached bone laid on the huge heart of the continent.” The 1972 book, edited by Al Lowman, the great Texas bibliophile, contains essays, recollections , and descriptions of a land that is indeed bitterly beautiful. Long out of print, the book is a limited edition designed by William Holman, illustrated by Barbara Whitehead, and published by Roger Beacham. Though it does not directly discuss the works of Elmer Kelton, it paints a picture of the land he loved and wrote about. What he calls in his memoir Sandhills Boy, his Heimat, his homeland. The title of Lowman’s book could serve as an epigraph for all the works of Elmer Kelton, for he is concerned with characters, often racially and culturally dissimilar, who make habitable the inhospitable in an impossible climate and a forbidding landscape. Juxtaposing the bitter and beautiful is always present, but so is balancing the two. Most critics maintain, arguably, that the focal point of many of Kelton’s stories is cowboy/ranching life, but add that race, culture , socio-economic status, gender, history, and folklore attached to every group within the arid stretches of the Southwest in general and West Texas in particular validate the story and illustrate his per- Elmer Kelton: Essays and Memories 58 sonal vision. There is collision and cohesion in all these elements; conflict and resolution; difference and likeness; consequences and changes; mixing or separating. In other words, convergence, wherein all notions meet. Nothing means more than location, a coming together of a multitude of Southwestern components in a specific region of the American Southwest, with West Texas as dead center for the novelist . But even dead center covers thousands of square miles and millions of acres, not to mention some 500 years of history, recorded and unrecorded. Both the Southern Plains and the Chihuahuan Desert, two geographic regions, converge too. Both regions are, or were, largely uninhabitable, or at the very least inhospitable and populated with indigenous peoples (Comanches mainly), transplanted inhabitants (Mexicans mainly), invasive conquerors (early Spanish, but later Anglo settlers, mainly), or those passing through (cavalry, traildrivers )—all of whom have notable cultural and racial differences, both intra- as well as inter-group. Th e p l a c e o f c o n v e r g e n c e . . . The place of convergence means everything—shapes, molds, changes, destroys, makes noble and ignoble individuals. Place also impacts ethnicity—the ways (habits, customs, speech, living, thinking , adapting) and means of a racial or cultural group. Geographic determinism comes into play here: how the regions of the earth shape the animal kingdom, mankind included, and contribute to who and what they are and how they behave. J. Frank Dobie used the phrase, “appropriate to time and place,” referring to the behavior of people in Old-Time Texas. In Elmer Kelton and West Texas (1988), Judy Alter writes: The always accurate but fairly casual mention of the land’s characteristics in the early works is replaced in later Joyce Roach 59 works, particularly the major novels, by an almost lyrical understanding of West Texas, its harsh nature and its underappreciated beauty, and of the men who have peopled that land. The rugged harshness and beauty of the West are not just thematic; they are also contributing factors in the development of Kelton’s characters. (127) Kelton acknowledges his part of Texas, harsh as it is, marks, defines , integrates, and anchors real people and therefore his characters with a sense of place, of belonging, becoming a part of. He notes that the Mexican people call such a feeling querencia (Kelton , “What’s Wrong in Being Different?” 9). In a preface to Texian Stompin’ Grounds, a 1941 volume of the Texas Folklore Society, Harry Ransom put it this way: Among the feelings that have moved men powerfully, none has been more universal than love of the earth. Consciously or unconsciously, silently or in defiant proclamations , men have always identified themselves with their native soil. With their own countryside, with their home rock, they have associated the forces of their lives. Young men, not always in vain, have died for this ideal of the...