This is the eighth in a series of articles by staff writer Chuck Haga, who is retracing the route taken by author John Steinbeck in 1960 that led to the book “Travels With Charley.”
It was watermelons that made me pull over short of Houston, plump watermelons spilling out of a roadside stand with a sign that promised they were Texas sweet.
Across the road was the Six Shooter Saloon, handy for its parking space and restroom, and inside a bartender named Patsy was explaining in a sweet drawl how she had to help a fellow leave the other night, and finally clipped him once in the jaw. “Lifted him right into the air,” she said, smiling and setting my Lone Star beer on the bar. “That’s the hardest I ever did hit a man.”
Texas. It has loomed and beckoned and threatened since this journey began, a more than 700-mile stretch that would take me out of the desert, across the plains and into the deep South.
It was good to see horizon again after a week of mountains and canyons, good to see cattle grazing and crops growing after long stretches of desert. I stared at a field a long time before I realized it was cotton, ready to pick, and I stopped and walked into the field and pulled one of the white puffs from its plant and smelled it. It smelled like a shirt, fresh-washed and hung on a line to dry.
The language changed faster than the land. The first Texan I met was a boy who held the door for me as I walked into a truck stop cafe not far from Amarillo. “H’ar’ y’all?” he asked, and I said I was fine, and when I asked him how he was, he smiled nicely and said, “Why, Ah’m fahn, too, yes sir,” and it was as warm and welcome as rich, hot coffee in the morning.
But this is a changed Texas from the brash, swaggering land John Steinbeck described in 1960. In Houston, outside Holy Rosary Catholic Church, Bill Somerville talked about what has happened. He is 50, an oil engineer, and unemployed. He smiles nicely and talks with some optimism, but carefully.
“The oil economy went bust a few years ago, and we’re still suffering the retrenchment from that,” he said. “We lost a lot of jobs, the skilled, craftsmen jobs, and those haven’t been replaced. We’ve gotten some new development, some jobs of a high-tech nature around our medical community. They’re terrific, but a 100-man think tank doesn’t take the place of a 5,000-man shipyard.
“I think the city has been through the worst of the cycle. We’ve had the collapse of the oil-related firms and all the service firms. The real estate market collapsed because those people weren’t able to pay their mortgages, and then there were some major bank failures. But we’re about geared now for a come-out. Our financial institutions have been taken over, reconstituted, and they’re stronger, ready to lend, and with that will come growth.
“It won’t be a glorious reascendancy, but we’re walking out.”
People counting on an oil recovery tend to favor George Bush, he said. “We’re a Democratic state, but he’s identified as an oil industry friend, and a Texan. We think Bush would do more for our private interests, and that’s the way people tend to vote.”
Many of the people in the churchyard this morning were Vietnamese; part of an immigrant Asian community of more than 50,000 in Houston. Waiting for recovery would have been tougher, Somerville said, without their example. “They’ve probably been affected by the downturn more than anybody, but they’re a tremendously industrious lot. They make the best of a bad hand.”
And he appreciates them for another reason. “We’re an old, inner-city parish here at Holy Rosary,” he said. “We were a parish of old folks – no young people raising families. There was never a baby crying. It was so nice when the Vietnamese people came because we could watch children again.”
Past Holy Rosary are the shops and restaurants and tract housing where many of the Vietnamese live and work, or wait for work. The issue that matters more than anything to them is jobs, said Michele Tran, 26, a waitress at the Lu Quan cafe. “It looks like Bush is going to win,” she said, and she said it hopefully.
Down the street, Ba Pham, 42, walked with his wife, Kien, 36, and their sons, Tung, 12, and Nghiem, 8. They live in a distant suburb, where he found work in a company that makes bedding. They come to Houston to shop and visit. Before the fall of Saigon in 1975, he was a naval officer. He spent years in prison before coming with his family to the United States in 1983.
“I would like to find a job in Houston because here there are good schools for my children,” he said. “I hope in a few years to go to college and learn about computers and find a job that is better.”
He is not yet a citizen. If he could vote, he would vote for Bush. “The jobs maybe come up,” he said.
The Bush campaign has hit Michael Dukakis hard in Texas on the issue of crime, but TV ads critical of the Massachusetts prison furlough program led to some embarrassment when newspapers revealed that Texas has an even more liberal early-release program, administered and twice expanded by Republican Gov. Bill Clements.
“I don’t like that, releasing prisoners,” said W.W. Ratlift, who grows pecans near Goldthwaite. “I think that it a man does a crime, he needs punishment. I don’t believe in giving ’em pain, cruelty. That’s not it. But I feel they should work, and produce, and pay for their keep.
“But the federal government’s got a furlough program, and we’ve got one here in Texas worse than he’s got in Massachusetts. The Republicans aren’t going to pull me over with that one.”
Annie Mae Kitchens works in a school cafeteria in Cross Plains. Her husband, a former oil field worker, is a school bus mechanic now. They lean toward Dukakis.
“I really don’t like to see the furlough program, but I know they have to make room in the jails for the new ones they send in,” she said.
“A lot of our crime is associated with drugs, and it seems to be getting worse all the time. My concern is I’ve got a lot of grandkids getting to that age, and I’d like to see the government do something about the drug problem. I feel they’re going to have to do more punishing of these people when they get caught.”
Has Dukakis been hurt in Texas by the ads that say he’s soft on crime?
“Oh, I don’t know. People in Texas are so concerned about the oil bust, really. That’s what matters. That affects the schools and everything.”
■
I crossed into Louisiana and turned south into the bayou country, toward the Gulf of Mexico, along back roads bordered by still water and thick stands of oak and hulking cypress trees, hung with moss. Hand-lettered signs advertised live blue crabs for sale, or services for hire: “We clean ducks, geese, pigeons here.” The air smelled of salt water and woodsmoke, sweetened by the sugar cane harvest, just started. At a crossroads, a pair of egrets wading in the ditch let me stop and watch.
Near Abbeville, I stopped to ask for directions at a weathered, barn-like building with “Smiley’s” painted on the front and many cars parked outside. Inside, it was a Cajun dance, with accordion and fiddle moving people faster than any mere polka band could. A sign prohibited dancing with your hat on. The sign was in English, but the language of choice was the hybrid French that has evolved among these descendants of French Canadians who settled along the bayous in the late 18th century.
“Ca va?” Percy Thibodaux asked me in the restroom, and when I fumbled the response to that basic greeting he switched to broken English and began introducing me around. I have been described as burly, and one of the Cajuns speculated I was a wrestler, come to challenge the local favorite. This led to excited conversation in French until another man thumped me once on the chest and scowled and pronounced me not a wrestler, which left me feeling both relieved and a little disappointed.
The dancers were young and casual to very old and dressed in suits and ties, and they mixed as people should. Gladu Landry, a spiffy 89, said he never misses a dance. He didn’t appear to miss a woman in the place, either.
“You better get out there,” Jean Preston le Marie told me, and he offered his partner, Helene, who was gracious and patient but clearly had hoped for better. She left her first husband because he couldn’t dance, she said, and her second husband died, “and now this one works three weekends in four, so sometimes I come here by myself.” Winded, I walked her back to Mssr. le Marie and wished him “bon chance.”
Most of Louisiana is in economic trouble. The governor and the Legislature were trying last week to rewrite the tax laws to give business some breaks. In New Orleans, the mayor’s budget for 1989 is $40 million smaller than this year, and he must lay off 200 city employees.
Unemployment remains high even though 90,000 workers have left Louisiana or quit looking for work in the past three years. “The engineers, anybody with money — they re outta here,” said Johnny Sempel, who operates a small deli-grocery in New Orleans’ Garden District, a grocery that despite all the grand old homes around it trades increasingly in food stamps. “I’ve got family ties here,” Sempel said. “That’s my father over there, the thin, gray-haired gentleman. So we’ll stick it out until we go under.”
Even if he does, Bourbon St. will go on, will swarm and jam all night, every night, and not just for monied visitors. “This is a party town,” said Charlene Bruser, 28, a store clerk in the French Quarter near the famous street, the birthplace of traditional jazz. “You hear about all the unemployment, and then you go home and see on TV that we’re being taxed for something new. But you let your worries go here.”
Some old-timers grouse that Bourbon St. has changed too much to satisfy tourists. Country music, rock, even Irish balladeers compete with the Dixieland bands. It’s still jazz at Preservation Hall, though, and no trouble finding a supper of shrimp creole, or red beans and rice, or seafood gumbo that is gumbo and not soup. At the Cafe du Monde, there is chicory coffee for breakfast, very early or very late, served with beignets, thick French doughnuts buried in powdered sugar.
■
Steinbeck’s route took me north into the loblolly pine forests of western Mississippi, to Jackson, then northeast to Tuscaloosa, Ala. Much of the countryside reminds me of Minnesota – in July.
I knew Jackson only from the Civil Rights-era newsreels. But the news in Jackson this day was about a famous visitor, and an execution that didn’t happen.
Oliver North left Jackson just a few hours before I arrived. He came to stump for conservative Republicans, and he blamed liberals in Congress and the media for the country’s problems. He drew about 15 protestors who waved placards — “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” — but he impressed Myra Wells, 26, who works at the supper club where he spoke.
“I think he is a victim of the situation, kind of a fall guy,” she said. “It would not bother me to see him pardoned, if he is convicted.” North is under indictment for conspiracy for his role in the Iran-contra affair.
“I admire him for what he has done. There are very few Americans who will stand up for what they feel is right, especially when you compare it to 40 years ago, the World War II group. There is a lack of values in my generation.
“We need to get back to basics, to family, to defending each other, to a moral and decent society,” she said. Wells said she’ll vote for Bush and feel good about it. The national polls say the vice president isn’t seen so much as a wimp anymore, the lesser of two evils. But you still can find people who will vote angry, who will jab their punch cards as if taking pokes at liberalism itself.
Leo Edwards was scheduled to die in Mississippi’s gas chamber the night I passed through, but the U.S. Supreme Court stayed his execution with just hours to spare. Edwards was convicted in 1981 on charges he robbed and killed two store clerks, and he’s been on death row since.
The morning after the stay, poultry farmer R.D. Myhre joined friends for breakfast at Hank and Annie’s Parkside Restaurant east of Jackson, and they were unhappy to learn that Edwards was still alive. They laid the blame to “liberals like Dukakis.”
“He’s just too liberal for me, for this state, and the death penalty is a good example,” Myhre said. “This guy Edwards didn’t get it, and he ought to have got it. This lax attitude aids and abets crime.
“I believe in a fair trial, but once 12 citizens have given their verdict, then go ahead and give it to him. There’s just so much you can put up with.”
David Lee, an insurance agent, bristled at the mention of Dukakis. “A man who won’t let kids say the pledge of allegiance shouldn’t be president,” he said.
Do many people here feel that way?
“If they’re Southerners,” he said. “Or they shouldn’t be here.”