Michener, James A. (141 page)

'What did he do when he got there?' Quimper asked, and Jaxifer replied: 'Made his way to Vera Cruz, caught a ship to New Orleans, where he enlisted in a New York regiment.'

'You mean he fought with the North?' Quimper grumbled, and jaxifer asked: 'What did you expect?' and Quimper said: 'He could of remained neutral.'

Professor Jaxifer continued: 'The Texians found no difficulty in believing both halves of this ante-bellum legend: that the same slave was deliriously happy, yet thirsting to massacre his master.

'The post-bellum legend was more destructive. The genesis was understandable. The South had been defeated. The North, especially under President Lincoln, wanted to be generous in its treatment, but his assassination opened the way for some radicals in Congress to force upon the South an intolerable Reconstruction. One of the ironies of Texas history is that its newspapers and its people rejoiced when Lincoln was shot, condemning him as one of the supreme tyrants of all time, not realizing that he alone could have enabled their state to avoid the convulsion it was about to suffer. It was 1902 before the first paper was brave enough to print one kind word about Lincoln, and it was abused for having done so.

'The true history of Reconstruction in Texas has not yet been written and probably cannot be in this century; the legend of that tempestuous time is still too virulent. Regarding blacks, it makes three claims: that those blacks elected to office under Northern supervision of the ballot box were incompetent at best, downright thieves at the worst, it claims that blacks who suddenly found themselves with freedom did not know what to do with it; and most important, it claims that the occasional black members of the State Police installed by the carpetbagger government were brutal murderers. Nothing in the history of Texas has damaged the black more than the fact that a few were for a while members of the State Police, that hated and reviled agency.

'Again, the legend is faulty at best, infamous at worst. Black legislators seem to have been no worse than their white contemporaries and successors. Many blacks learned quickly what to do with their freedom, and either established their own homes and small businesses or went back to work on the plantations as sharecroppers. And as for the black policemen, if they did, as charged, kill eight or ten white men without warrant, the Rangers had killed eight or ten hundred Mexicans and Indians, yet the former are reviled and the latter immortalized. It is a disproportion that cannot easily be explained.'

Professor Jaxifer then threw in an obiter dictum which really stunned our Texas landlovers: if you suspect I'm overemphasizing the bitterness of Reconstruction, let me cite an incident which you better than most will appreciate. In 1868 a Republican-controlled convention, drawing new laws for peacetime Texas, recalled the hardships under which Texans who had fought on the Union side suffered: 'These patriots were mercilessly slandered in their good names and property." In recompense they would be issued free land, but it went unclaimed, because in all of land-hungry Texas no man was brave enough to stand before his neighbors as one who "had been false to the Confederacy and no better than a carpetbagger."

'You mean,' Quimper asked, 'that all this free land was waiting and no one claimed it?' When jaxifer nodded, Lorenzo added: 'For a Texan to pass up free land is an act of moral heroism.' Jaxifer smiled and continued with these points:

The hatreds engendered spawned a curious progeny. Many of the gunslingers of the Old West began by shooting blacks who had given no offense, and such bravado gained them the approbation of their fellows. Billy the Kid started by slaughtering a Negro blacksmith who made a pun upon his name, calling him Billy the Goat. He gained much applause for his quick and deadly response.

As one hagiographer has said: "A flick of his wrist, a touch of his finger, and Billy silenced forever those thick, black, insolent lips."

'John Wesley Hardin, a cold-eyed, merciless killer who gunned down twenty-nine men before he was twenty-four, was despised prior to the day when he shot two black policemen, then he found himself a Texas hero. But the prototype of the Texas gunman was Cole Yeager, from Xavier County, who announced one day at the age of eighteen: "I cannot abide a freed nigger." He proved it by shooting in the stomach a young black who had argued with an older black. When asked about this, Yeager muttered: "The Bible says 'Ye shall respect thy elders,' " and no charges were lodged

'Some time later he saddled up at dusk in the small tow; Lexington, not far from the capital, galloped through the street, and slaughtered eight unsuspecting blacks. His high spirits were excused on the ground that "this was the kind of incident that was bound to happen . . . sooner or later."

'Pleased with his reputation as a nigger-killer, he was lounging in Jefferson, up in the Cotton Belt, one Sunday morning when he saw two well-dressed blacks, Trajan Cobb and his wife, Pansy, leaving their cottage and heading for the black church. Enraged that former slaves should be "tryin' to be better than they was," Yeager whipped out his guns and killed them.

They happened to work as freedmen for Senator Cobb, the one-armed hero of the Confederacy, and when he heard in Washington of what had happened, he returned immediately to Texas, determined to bring Yeager to justice, and with his tiny wife, Petty Prue, he roamed the state, looking for the man who had killed his former slaves.

'Federal marshals, afraid of the scandal which might ensue if Yeager gunned down a one-armed United States senator, tried to dissuade Cobb from stalking his prey, but Cobb would not listen: "When a man has affronted the honor of an entire state, he must be taken care of, and if you gentlemen are afraid to go after him, I must."

'The marshals tried to persuade Mrs. Cobb to call off her man, but she snapped: "Trajan Cobb bears our name. He held our plantation together during the war, and if Somerset doesn't shoot the coward who killed him, I will."

'Fortunately, at about this time, Cole Yeager killed a white man, shot him in the back during an argument over fifty cents, and now the law had a viable excuse for arresting him. Under pressure from Senator Cobb, a fearless judge from Victoria County was brought north, and Yeager, who had now killed thirty-seven men, most of them black, was sentenced to be hanged.

The Cobbs were there when the execution took place, and they groaned as the rope broke, allowing Yeager to fall unscathed. Some in the crowd cited an old English tradition which said that under such circumstances, the condemned man had to be set free, in that God had intervened, and there were murmurs to support this, for many in the audience felt it was unfair to hang a white man primarily because he had killed niggers.

'However, Cobb, with his good right arm, whipped out his revolver and announced: "We are not hanging him according to old English law. We're using new Texas law. String the son-of-a-bitch up"—and it was done.

'One of the more interesting illustrations of how difficult it was for Texans to adjust to the freed Negro came in Robertson County, not far from where we sit. A gifted black, Harriel Geiger, had been elected to the state legislature, and during his tenure in Austin had studied law and become a member of the bar. He excelled in defending black prisoners, but this irritated Judge O. D. Cannon of the Robertson bench, who is described in chronicles as "that hot-tempered segregationist." In any trial involving a black the judge had been in the habit of listening to whatever evidence the white man chose to present—he did not allow any black to testify—then growling, spitting, and sentencing the black to a long term on the prison work force. Naturally, he did not take it kindly when Lawyer Geiger, with the skills he had mastered as a legislator, came into his court arguing points of law.

'One hot afternoon Judge Cannon had suffered enough: "I been warnin' you to watch your step, nigger, but you have insolently ignored my counsel." With that, he whipped out a long revolver, held it three feet from the lawyer's chest, and pulled the trigger five times. The coroner's verdict: Harriel Geiger had been guilty of repeated contempt and had been properly rebuked.

'I agree, there are elements of humor in this incident: the irascible judge, the presumptuous new lawyer, the challenge to old customs, the sullen revenge of the men who had lost a moral crusade in the War Between the States. But I have here in my notes, which you are invited to inspect, a score of other incidents which contain no humor at all, and I shall cite only one more to remind you of the seriousness of the problem we're discussing.

in 1892 in Paris, Texas, a black man named Henry Smith ravished and killed the three-year-old daughter of one Henry Vance. No doubt of the crime, no doubt of the guilt, no doubt of the sentence of death. But how was he executed? He was driven in a wagon through a crowd of ten thousand, then lashed to a chair perched high upon a cotton sledge, from which Vance, the dead

girl's father, asked the horde to be silent while he took his revenge A small tinner's furnace was brought to Vance, who heated several soldering irons white-hot. 'Faking one after another, he start) the prisoner's bare feet and slowly worked his way up the body, burning off appendages but keeping the torso alive When he-reached the head he burned out the mouth, then extinguished the eyes and punctured the ears. When he felt sated, he offered the irons to anyone else who wanted to share m the revenge, and his fifteen-year-old son took over. Ten thousand cheered

The black man deserved to die, but no man ever deserved to die in such a manner. It was made possible only because legend said that the black was not really human.

'It would serve no useful purpose for us to continue to explore the hideous record, for my point is made. Relations between white and black in Texas have been contaminated by legend. I am not asking that you attack the legend, or even make a great fuss about it. But do not prolong it. Don't give it added vitality Let it die Speak of your Texas blacks as human beings, no better, no worse than the Czechs, the Poles and the Irish who have helped build this great state.'

When Professor Jaxifer finished, Lorenzo Quimper said: 'Do you expect us to forget how your colored people behaved during Reconstruction? I remember well hearing my father tell how his grandfather, General Yancey Quimper, was accosted by a colored who wanted a pair of boots, free. This colored, six months from chopping cotton, had been elected to the legislature, and he told my grandfather— I can hear my father's words as he told me. This colored, he said: "General, I'm a legislator now and I'm entitle to free boots." And my grandfather said: "Freemont, you are entitle to a swift kick in the ass." And you know what? That colored had my grandfather arrested.'

'Does this old family legend have any relevance 7 ' the professor asked, and I could see Quimper flush, and he said with roiling bitterness: 'A man in my town, big oilman worth millions, was ridin' home the other day in his Cadillac. He sees this poor old colored in a broken-down Ford, mendin' a tire by the side of the road while three strappin' young blacks is sittin* by the side of the road laughin' at the old man's efforts. My friend stops his Cadillac, gets out in that hot dusty road, and helps the old man change the tire while the three young bucks sit there laughin' at the both of them. Now what do you think of that?'

'Commissioner Quimper, that story's been circulating through Texas ever since we've had automobiles. Do you really believe it happened . . . this year ... to your friend 7 '

'Let me tell you . . .'

'Don't you see, Commissioner? It's today's legend—1911 version updated.'

We had the makings of a serious confrontation, for Professor Jaxifer showed no signs of backing down; however, Miss Cobb intervened: The story you told, Professor, about my grandfather,' and she accented the my heavily, 'is true. He grieved over the loss of Trajan Cobb so painfully that he had a monument erected to him at Lammermoor: to a trusted friend.'

Ransom Rusk delivered a judicious opinion, which I allowed to stand as the judgment of our group: 'Professor, you've honored us with a thoughtful paper. You must be aware, surely, that we cannot revise all of Texas history and correct all imbalances. The best we can do is project an honest course for the future.'

'You could not have stated the case more eloquently,' Professor Jaxifer conceded. 'All we blacks ask is that the legends not be embellished with new additions. The old ones we can never change ... at least not in this century.'