Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory

Author's Note

Author's Note A home truth is a key fact, one uncomfortable to acknowledge, and the account I offer in this book of memory represents my attempt to state home truths, to face them, and to reveal as much about them as I am able. Put another way, what I attempt is to declare the impoverishment of truth and to claim the nourishment of lies. Growing up in the state ofTexas taught me the need, use, and an ofthe lie. This book is an examination ofmy learning to lie while coming up in East Texas and on the GulfCoast, my reasons for having to deny the truths about myself, my family, and our situation in that place and time, and how my recasting and reinterpretation of fact led inevitably to my becoming a writer of fiction. I was born into a family with deep roots in the piney woods of East Texas on my father's side and in the solid Midwest on my mother's. My father was a working man in the petro-chemical industry in the Golden Triangle ofTexas, so-called, tllltil he lost his job at the end of World War II and moved us into his home country, the logged-out, farmed-out woods of East Texas, the remnants of culture of the settlers from the Old South who came into Texas after the Civil War. I found myself as a child transported from the Gulf Coast into an exquisitely demarcated social structure dependent upon a sertled view of the world and my family's place in it. I sought refuge in lxxlks, my imagination, and a refusal to accept what the conditions of my existence in Texas told me was right, true, and just. The themes working through the first halfor so ofthis lxxlk relate to the food we ate, the water we drank, the church we artended, and the God we prayed to for deliverance. "The eyes ofTexas," school children stillieam to sing in the Lone Star State, "are upon you, and you cannot get away." Much of my story is an acCOtlllt ofartempting to escape in whatever ways I could imagine. My book circles around the implications, the use, the benefit, and the satisfaction of spinning lies in spite of the truth. The times in which I grew up were rife with change, redefinition of relationships sexual, racial, political, and cultural, and my memoir reflects my resp:mses to all that. It was a time of prevarication, new views of old realities, and the personal necessiry to adapt. There were lies of need and lies ofconvenience, and my memoir takes that into accotlllt. A cowboy song we fourth-grade students were taught to sing in a dying East Texas town states the best core home truth of my lxxlk of memory. I'm going to leave Old Texas now, • They've got no use For the longhorn cow. They've plowed and fenced My cattle range And the people there Are all so strange. ...