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Chapter three The Colonel Jefferson Davis, Senator from Mississippi, defending slavery, said in the [U.S.] Senate that the South had solved its social problems so that the white population could become the leisure cultured class and the slaves would do all the drudgery. This was the ambition of our two thousand white people in . . . [Fort Bend] County in 1860 (Wharton 1939, 167). They went to war to protect the sacred institution of the South (ibid., 171). In the foyer of B. F. Terry High School once hung an oversized oil portrait of a Confederate officer, the handsome Colonel Benjamin Franklin (“Frank”) Terry.1 County people greatly admire his numerous exploits and acknowledge his importance to the successful economy of Fort Bend. The mythology of his background, his character, and his victories embodies the Southern ideals of the county. With a genealogy older than the Texas Republic, he became its idealized hero. As a planter and an entrepreneur, he enriched the county. Clarence Wharton, an early partner of James Baker’s law firm, Baker and Botts, wrote the following in his often-cited history of Fort Bend: “He [Terry] looked like one of the Norsemen who came over with Leif Ericson. A man of great dynamic force, he was a tireless rider and unerring shot. His aggressive nature did not irritate but by common consent gave him a leadership which the county folks were ready to acknowledge.”2 B. F. Terry High School, built in 1980, was the second high school constructed on the western side of Fort Bend County. Journalist and local historian Tim Cumings told me that, when the school was named, Terry was the colonel 55 considered a local hero and the school board was not hampered by any misgivings about his Confederate past. Indeed, in the 1980s B. F. Terry High School conducted fund-raisers for the parent-teacher organization in which their African American school principal dressed as a slave with chains on his legs and was auctioned off to the highest bidder. Community protests ended the mock slave auctions some years later. Several Terry alumni from the mid1980s have told me that they and many other former students did not find the event offensive; in fact, many still consider the auction to be just another way in which to generate monies. For many years, the large image of the colonel in his gray uniform so prominently displayed at the entrance made it impossible for anyone at the school to forget the Confederacy. Yet, in an odd juxtaposition, the Confederacy is remembered, while the reality and terror of slavery have been forgotten . I wonder, though, how many who come through the doorways are aware that the school buildings were constructed on land once worked by slaves. After hearing that the “slave in chains” event is still not seen as problematic, I imagine that the county’s slave history stands in a similar place of neutrality . It is as if the colonel’s portrait and his slave labor have become “presences of diverse absences.”3 The grandness of the hero and his massive numbers of slaves working the county’s plantation land create the metaphorical space of Fort Bend. The spirits of the slave-owning hero and his laborers in bondage are “like the gothic sculptures of kings and queens that once adorned NotreDame and have been buried for two centuries in the basement of a building . . . . These ‘spirits,’ themselves broken into pieces in like manner, do not speak any more than they see. This is a sort of knowledge that remains silent. Only hints of what is known but unrevealed are passed on.”4 Thus, the slave auction fund-raiser, with its resulting ambivalence, is a hint of the past. The terror remains silent. Frank Terry, a broad-shouldered man more than six feet tall, does not offend with his “aggressive nature.” The distinction of appearance, relegating the colonel to a Nordic genealogy, augments his position as hero. Wharton’s reference to whether his subject offended others is significant. Throughout the texts written by local authors the idea of whether men are polite, humble, or proper is constant.5 This is especially notable when the descriptions are of African Americans. “Polite” equals “good.” Yet the aggression of the white war hero is considered valuable. Wharton uses the word “conspicuous” in describing Frank Terry’s arrival in the county. His entire narrative about Terry is infused with continued ide- [3.133...

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