God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(5)

In 1960, my father finally got the opportunity to be president of a little independent bank in a strip shopping center in East Dallas, between a drugstore and a beauty salon. He built that bank into a major institution, and used its resources to renovate the declining neighborhood, granting innovative loans to young people willing to apply “sweat equity” to resurrect the old houses. Texas was a place where ambitious young men like Don Wright were welcomed and given a chance to succeed.

Many years after my father had put down roots in Dallas, he paid a visit to Stratford-upon-Avon to see if he could figure out what had caused his ancestor to leave such a civilized spot and move to Kansas, where he lived in a sod house, like an igloo made of dirt. Our ancestral English home, on the other hand, is a tidy brick row house on West Street. My father knocked on the door, but no one was there. Daddy remembered his grandfather as a cantankerous old man who hated children. Perhaps my ancestor’s dark mood was colored by regret.

Years later, Roberta and I were in England, hiking in the Cotswolds, and we also made a pilgrimage to the old place. A young man from Bangladesh answered the bell, saying, “Master not here.” While we waited for Master to come home, we walked over to the Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried. He’s inside the chapel, but the churchyard itself is filled with Wrights, the patrilineal mother lode.

We finally did meet the landlord of the two-bedroom house that gave birth to our portion of the Wright clan. He cheerfully confided that it was now an illegal jeans factory—a sweatshop, I suppose, but on a small scale. The rooms upstairs were filled with sewing machines. The landlord gave me a pair of very nice jeans as a souvenir.

I must have inherited some of the restlessness that propelled Edwin Wright to leave the land of his birth and my father to fight his way out of Kansas. By the time I graduated from high school, I was sick of Texas. I did everything I could to cleanse myself of its influence. I had been pious, but I became a bohemian existentialist. I ditched the accent, which I hadn’t been conscious of until my first session in the language lab when I heard myself speaking Spanish—with that high nasal twang so typical of North Texas.

I’ve seen the same thing happen to people who come from other societies with a strong cultural imprint; they reverse the image. But being the opposite of what you were is not the same as being somebody new. As soon as the doors to liberation opened, I fled. I wanted to be someplace open, tolerant, cosmopolitan, and beautiful. I thought I would never come back. I turned into that pitiable figure, a self-hating Texan.



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STEVE AND I PEDALED to Mission San Juan Capistrano, a plain, whitewashed structure with the traditional belfry. The mission was named after Giovanni da Capistrano, a friar who defended Christian Hungary against the Muslim invasion in 1456. There’s a carved wooden icon of the saint inside a glass case; he has a red flag in one hand and an upraised sword in the other. As he gazes heavenward with a beatific expression, one of his sandaled feet rests on the head of a decapitated victim.

Outside, several Indians were taking down a huge tepee, stacking the lodgepoles on a flatbed truck. A young man who was watching the others work told us that there had been a Native American Church ceremony here on the campo santo—the graveyard of their ancestors—the night before, with eighty-five people crowded inside the tepee. “It’s a lot of work,” he said, as the others hefted the giant poles and bore them toward the truck.

“I can see you’re doing your part,” I observed.

He grinned and said, “I’m with management.”

“Is that your altar?” Steve asked, gesturing toward the low mound of red sand that remained from the ceremony. The altar is usually crescent-shaped, signifying the journey from life to death, but this one was angular. An older man leaning on the tailgate of the truck had been watching us with squinted eyes, but he suddenly brightened and acknowledged that the altar was his handiwork—“the Quanah Parker altar,” he said, referring to the last great Comanche chief.

Farther down the river we passed the ruins of the old Hot Wells Hotel, a once grand resort where Will Rogers and Rudolph Valentino came to take the waters. A pioneering French filmmaker, Gaston Méliès, set up a movie studio next door in 1910, hoping to turn Texas into what would become Hollywood. That didn’t happen, although the first movie to win an Academy Award for best picture—Wings in 1927—was filmed nearby on Kelly Field. We rode on, leaving behind the alternate history Texas might have had.

There was a time when Steve and I considered moving to L.A. and going into the movie business—our own alternate history. We had just sold a script to Sydney Pollack, right after he finished directing Tootsie, when he was the king of Hollywood. On the first-class flight home, we mulled over what our lives were going to be like from now on. A friend of ours in the trade had warned that writing movie scripts was like raising children for adoption. On the other hand, we’d be consoled by the weather and our enormous wealth.

Sydney made Out of Africa instead of our script, but our next project was for Jane Fonda. When we arrived in her office in Santa Monica, she opened the door and stuck out her hand. The collar on her blue blouse was turned up, and it matched the startling blue of her eyes. Her hair was blond and leonine. This was at the peak of her exercise video sensation, and she looked like she could jump over a building. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Jane Fonda.”