Comanches and Colored Girls
Lars Eighner
Out of East Texas a Survival Story by Lars Eighner
Photo (left) from: Wikipedia, Free Encyclopedia, Online. Reprinted from: The Texas Observer - Books & the Culture (Volume 89, Number. 14), Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s (Texas A&M University Press) by Sunny Nash,
_______________________________
Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s is fine writing about bad times.
Bigmama did not shop at Woolworth’s because in 1950s Bryan, an African American woman could not try on clothes in a downtown store, could not take them back if they did not fit, and would be followed around to be sure she was not touching things or stealing. “African American” was not quite the right word for Bigmama, but she would have preferred it.
“Folks scared of the word, Comanche, gal!” she scolded. “They hate anybody they believe got one drop of that blood. Safer to be African than Comanche!”
Comanches and Colored Girls by Lars Eighner
“Prairie people” is how she referred to her father’s people, who, she said, were sometimes captured in childhood and sold when the slave traders could get away with it—if Bigmama was right here is an un-mined vein of American history—and who after slavery settled in with the African-American population of Anderson in Grimes County. There they remained undetected by whites, who could not distinguish one nonwhite from another.
Bigmama shopped from the back of Mr. Watkins’ blue Chevy. She disdained his frumpy offerings, but Mr. Watkins did not mind reminding his customers they had few alternatives. “…[W]hen y’all get a ride to town to shop for what you want…y’all won’t need me to come ‘round showing you nothing no more, now, will y’all?”
Bigmama was Sunny Nash’s grandmother, and this is Sunny Nash’s story of growing up in Candy Hill, a euphemistically named African American neighborhood in Bryan. Nash, now a successful writer, photographer, and television producer, has a disarming way of slipping in and out of her childhood memories, sometimes relating her vignettes on the heroic, mythical scale in which a five-year-old girl perceives the adult world, and sometimes reporting events from a re-evaluated, more realistic adult perspective.
Cousin Hudge we meet in the mythic family story form: he was a man who grabbed a fiddle out of burning trash barrel before the fire popped even one string, and ever afterward could play anything with strings from the moment he took it in hand. In her adult memories, Sunny accompanies Bigmama to visit a cousin in the hospital. It is 1954; Brown vs. the Board of Education has been handed down. Bigmama observes the occasion by sitting in one of the comfortable chairs in the whites-only part of the hospital lobby. This, of course, forever impressed Brown on Sunny, then five years old, but that Sunny recalls Bigmama’s citation of the over-turned precedent (Plessy vs. Ferguson) and its date (1896—when Bigmama was six) is truly remarkable.
Yet it is Plessy vs. Ferguson—the ghost of Jim Crow—that haunts almost every page of Nash’s memoir, for it is almost ten years before Brown has the least effect in Bryan. The Reminders are necessary. Memoirs of bad times are necessarily written by survivors, and should there be any hint of that not every moment overflowed with anguish, pain, and misery, some apologist for the social order will always be ready to say, “There, you see. It wasn’t so bad.”
Bigmama Didn’t Shop at Woolworth’s
It was so bad. The bittersweet testimony is not evidence of the tolerability of the intolerable, but is witness instead to the almost indomitable resilience of the human spirit. Somehow one Christmas with a pathetic spindly little tree will be taken to make up for having to plan scrupulously any expedition downtown—taking into account, for example, that there will be no restrooms you can use, that if you know a diner that will sell you lunch you will eat it in the alley, or that if you are lucky in the kitchen, a grocer will call you ignorant if you say there is more to broccoli than the stems he sells for a nickel a bunch. A deformed bit of fir tree simply cannot erase the day Bigmama has to teach a bitter lesson:
“I’m sorry I have to teach you this ugly word, colored,” she said. “I don’t want to! I have to! I wish I didn’t! But if I don’t make you understand, you’ll have one hurt after another all of your life, or you’ll go out and get yourself killed.”
Other critics have been lavish with the word, but somehow I doubt that “poignant” is the word the author desires or deserves for such passages. This is a survival story, as compelling as that of any shipwreck or plane crash, and everywhere it is spiced with the candid view a child has of the exceptional, the bizarre, rendered in the same matter-of-fact manner as the commonplace:
Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's
One old lady we called Aunt Gnat had lost her teeth so long ago she hardly had gums. Did having no teeth stop her from eating? No! That old lady ate everything—soft or hard, cooked or raw, living or dead. She cracked bones faster than Sugar Ray’s dogs. She said she didn’t want anybody pretending to take care of her by running her business. All she needed was the Lord! With the Lord, she said, she could gun herself all the way to hell and eat every roasted body down there, including the Devil himself!
This might have been a mighty witness to the power of faith, but as Aunt Gnat held (loudly) that the Lord was free, no preacher with a healthy respect for the collection plate would invite Aunt Gnat to testify. Even Bigmama, for all her levelheaded realism, would not handle money with her bare hands, and fished it instead from her treasury with tweezers held in her white-gloved hands, until a friend brought her some surgical gloves for handling the odious currency. It would be years before a child who witnessed such a thing would learn the word “phobia.”
Nash poses a final, Bryan-specific story: what does an Aggie look like? It is said they look a bit like the boys at Allen Academy, whose tall back fence borders Candy Hill. At the theater Nash sees a few buzz-cut white heads, looking identical from the vantage of the colored balcony. How can they tell one another apart? She wonders. It is not until 1977 that an Aggie looks like Sunny Nash.
Bigmama Didn’t Shop at Woolworth’s
###
________________________________
Lars Eighner is the author of Travels with Lizbeth, Pawn to Queen Four, and other books, as well as hundreds of essays, short stories and reviews. Lars Eighner, a native of Corpus Christi, Texas, now lives in San Antonio.
Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets - “Remarkable . . . irresistibly funny.” The New Yorker. The true story of a modern Robinson Crusoe and Huckleberry Finn, a homeless man and his erstwhile companion, a dog named Lizbeth, and their unbelievable, funny and poignant adventures on the road and living on the streets.
Footnote: In 1977, Sunny Nash graduated from Texas A&M University, becoming the first African American to receive a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Journalism from the University. She talks about her experiences at Texas A&M University in her book.
