Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

25. MY GRANDMOTHER TAYLOR

+2$+ MY GRANDMOTHER TAYLOR M y G RAN DM O THER Taylor was a woman of strong character and certain unshakable convictions. Her character was formed early in life. She was born in 1877 in Round Rock, Texas. Her father was a former Confederate soldier who came to Texas after the war and started a freight business, hauling goods in ox wagons from railheads to West Texas; her mother was the daughter ofa Louisiana cotton planter who, I think, pined for her former life. She died when my grandmother was twelve, and her husband sold his freight wagons and became a cotton fanner so that he could stay home and lookafter his children. He moved frOill place to place, always hoping for a better crop next year. One of the farms they lived on was next to a plantation worked byconvicts; he gave my grandmother a conch shell with a hole drilled in the pointed end and told her that if anyone approached the house while he was away to blow on it and he would hear it and come in from the fields. At times they were desperately poor. Once when I was in my teens, mygrandmother told me that I did not know how lucky I was to be able to eat meat every day. When she was a little girl, she said, her family had meat only on Sundays; the rest of the week it was beans and cornbread. The convictions that she held were not acquired in school, because her education had ended with the fifth grade. They were derived from the folk wisdom of the late nineteenth-century rural South, and she held to them tenaciously through a good part ofthe twentieth century. She grew up in farmhouses without electricity, and she was convinced that electric appliances had malign powers. She knew without a doubt that telephones had the ability to transmit lightning into houses, and that the best way to prevent this was to break the circuit by taking the receiver off the hook. Consequently, during all the years that she lived with us, no one could ever call our house during a storm, because my grandmother would have gone from room to room when it started, taking the telephone receivers out of their cradles. She also knew that if you rode on an electric streetcar, your watch would stop, and when we lived in Washington, DC at the end ofWorld War II, she avoided streetcar trips like the plague, walking blocks out of her way to ride the bus instead. My father would point out to her that he took a streetcar to his office and back every day and it had no effect at all on his wristwatch. She would answer that when Austin first got electric streetcars in 1891, her brother got on one and his watch stopped as soon as he took his seat, and that was that. She was born the year that Reconstruction in the South ended, and she grew up listening to her father and his friends recount their adventures as Confederate soldiers. Her father belonged to a cavalry unit that had simply disbanded at the end of the war; the captain told his men to take their horses and get home as best they could. Consequently, he had never formally surrendered to the Union Army. My grandmother attached great significance to this fact and whenever she spoke of her father, no matter what the context, she would always add, "And he never surrendered '" When we were living in the Philippines in the early 1950s, my grandmother managed to lose her American passport, and she had to go to the American embassy in Manila to apply for a new one. This was at the height of the Joe McCarthy-inspired Red Scare, and applicants for passports had to answer a long list of questions designed to ascertain their loyalty to the United States. The very first question on the list was, "Has any member of your family ever borne arms against the government of the United States?" My grandmother enthusiastically answered, "Yes! And he never surrendered!" The Filipino clerk who was taking down her answers excused himself, wide-eyed, and fortunately found an embassy officer who knew about old Southern ladies and told him, "Don't worry, that's not the war we're concerned about." These memories of my grandmother were evoked recently by...