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3. Nine Ball, Corner Pocket
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D O N G R A H A M D O N G R A H A M graduated from North Texas State University with a BA and MA and took a doctorate at the University of Texas in Austin where he currently serves as the J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor of American and English Literature. Among his works are Cowboys and Cadillacs: How Hollywood Looks at Texas (1983) and Texas: A Literary Portrait (1985). In 1989 Graham published the highly regarded biography, No Name on the Bullet: A Biography of Audie Murphy. In 1998, Giant Country: Essays on Texas won a Violet Crown Award from the Austin Writers League. In 2003, his Kings of Texas won the Carr P. Collins Prize for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, awarded by the 45 Bridget Scott Texas Institute of Letters. His most recent work is Literary Austin, published in 2007 by TCU Press. Graham is pastpresident of the Texas Institute of Letters and has won important awards for criticism and teaching. A writer-at-large for Texas Monthly magazine, he lives in Austin. NINE BALL, CO R NER PO CK ET T H E D A Y I learned to write my name, in the first grade, I wrote it all over the windowsill and wall at the back of the one-room schoolhouse where eight grades, one per row, studied grammar, history, spelling, geography, and rudimentary social manners. I don’t know why I scribbled my name a hundred times or more in that place, at that time. Perhaps this was the first sign of future authorial ego, or perhaps it was just the elation of seeing the words one wrote made public. In any event the teacher did not view my exercise in first-person assertiveness with the same delight that I did, and I had to stay after school to wash the penciled markings from the white paint. This previously unrecorded event took place in Lucas, Texas, a small community in Collin County, about eight miles east of Allen. Not much has been written about Lucas. Founded in 1870, the site does not even appear on several maps in histories written a century later. In the 1940s, the time I defaced public property, Lucas consisted of two stores, NO T E S F R O M TE X A S 46 [3.236.219.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:11 GMT) two churches (one Baptist, one Methodist), one cotton gin, and one schoolhouse, which with its softball/baseball field, was the center of the community. The main business of Lucas and its surrounds was raising cotton, the old staple of southern economy. It involved a lot of stoop labor, followed by lulls and long hot days of those endless Texas summers, and then, at cotton-picking time, great excitement and anxiety. An untimely, prolonged rain could destroy a year’s work, just as the absence of rain could, and the vagaries of market conditions were always a worry. Wars, incidentally, were excellent stimulants for higher profits. Armies needed cotton for everything —ammunition, uniforms, and hospitals. One year I recall, when the cotton was all picked and packed loosely into a trailer pulled by a tractor, I was placed on the top of the heap by my father and rode high up there, regally, king of the cotton, to the gin which was less than a mile away. The gin was a strange and somewhat uncomfortable place. My father worked there from time to time, moving the huge bales around with a dolly as though they were feather pillows. There was a pond rife with snakes, and the old men who lolled around the gin would always embarrass me by asking if I slumbered in bed. The culture was entirely southern. The men dressed in overalls or khaki pants and shirts, and if anybody had walked around in a pair of cowboy boots he would have been laughed out of the county for putting on airs, for being a drugstore cowboy. There were more mules in the county than horses. The significance of the mule in my father’s life was made clear to me once when he told about the first John Deere tractor he ever owned. He bought it a few years before I was born. Curious about it—this was later, when I had begun to develop a historical consciousness—I asked him how he acquired that DO N GR A H A M...