A Texas Thing

June Teenth
I grew up my main learning years in Dallas, Texas, before the Civil Rights Act, in a Texas time when blacks were called "cullards" (Coloreds), or in the respectful way, "Negroes." No one used the term "black" and especially not blacks. Racist Texans, like Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson, pronounced "Negro" "nigg-row," which allowed political career guys like LBJ to keep their white constituents happy--they caught the "nig" part right off--while at the same time showing a wee white respect for its ex-slaves, too, you dig, like not calling blacks the full-out N word, though that white-drawling emphasis on the "nig" pronunciation of the respectful "Negro" word got the message over to blacks, too, you know, the message to "stay in your place and we'uns'l get along jest fine"--besides, we had the Poll Tax in Texas up until the Civil Rights Act so there weren't many black voters in Texas in those days.

I first learned about June Teenth as a mere lad in knee pants in Dallas. Where we lived had been a pre-WWII new-community development project that had been stopped by actual WWII and then after WWII had ended my family bought the original model house in this development, which by the end of WWII was like a "mansion" (remember I'm a kid in knee-pants) sitting alone on its own hill with its high chimney and its taller-than-the-house cypress tree standing as sentinels on that hill and this house on the highest ground of that old development was just east across a deep ravine that had a fork of the West Fork of the Trinity River running through it from another high hill on whose top sat the Schepps Dairy plant and a great vacant lot on Dolphin Road on which various circuses set up on throughout the springs and summers of those days in Dallas, and that area was called "Deuce Alley" for its main street Second Avenue and was the largest black part of East Dallas--and, too, blacks were just beginning to jump off Second Avenue over into South Dallas as more and more old white families were dying off over there (like all along Forest and Colonial, streets like that) and their white children were selling out to blacks and then moving north to the Dallas suburbs of very white Irving, Farmer's Branch, Richardson, Plano, and leaving all of that area to the blacks--and this area surrounded the huge Texas State Fairgrounds that had the Cotton Bowl football stadium in it and WRR radio station studios and high tower beside it in it, and Big Tex was there by then, and the State Fair Auditorium and the Midway with all the rides and the famous wooden roller coaster, though the Fair's big main entrance gates were facing downtown Dallas and it's dominant whiteness. So to get from my neighborhood into downtown Dallas or to the gates of the Fairgrounds, you had to go through a black neighborhood, whether you took Second Avenue into town on the south or Forney Road or East Samuels into town on the north. I grew up passing through black neighborhoods--Second Avenue was mixed, too, in those days, meaning whites, Mexicans, and blacks all lived together and ran businesses together up and down the Deuce Alley part of Second Avenue. My favorite was Dave's Hot Tamales--Dave was a black man who made and served hot tamales out of a stand that you drove up to, hollered your order out the window to Dave and he'd sack up however many tamales you wanted and a girl would bring 'em out to the car--"Fiiiii doll-R, pleez" and then a "Thankee, Mam, thankee, Suh." She never "thankee-ed" me, only look at me and wink. I was kid in knee-pants but old enough to know what that wink meant. It drove me crazy. It drove me to the blues; to r and b; to soul; to funk; to jive; to bop; that wink.

The State Fair of Texas was a really big deal in Dallas in those years--and I mean really big. The State Fair of Texas began in October and ran for a couple of weeks. The Texas-Oklahoma college football game was one of the big highlights of the Fair--80,000 people filled the massive Cotton Bowl (a real "bowl" in the true sense of the word; you entered the Cotton Bowl at ground level and walked out onto it, the stadium itself being below ground level--it was quiet a weird effect coming out onto the Cotton Bowl--entering from the top row, you see?

My dad and mom loved that fair and it was important in my family because my mother's grandmother, my great-grandmother--a true old-time Pioneer witchy-woman white woman whose red flesh and equine profile some said meant she had some Comanche blood in her somewhere back down that dark, dark road that she started out on in 1857, the same year the building I now live in in New York City was built. And this old witchy woman was one of the last surviving widows of a hero (all the soldiers) of the Texas Revolutionary War when old General Sam Houston and the Texas Army of the Republic kicked the dirty Messkins's asses outta Texas, those greasy Messkins under that horrible old evil General Santa Ana (he invented chewing gum, by the way, and lived in New York City for a spell) at the Sacred Battle of San Jacinto where Santa Ana lost a leg and General Sam was shot in his writing arm and for the rest of his political life, he was President of the Republic of Texas and later governor when Texas joined the Union, he had a man who signed all his documents for him since he couldn't use his writing hand--the man signed General Sam's signature to where it looked like it read "I Am Houston" and that's what every old Texan called that signature--you can see it on the paper currency of the Republic of Texas--from 1836 on until Texas joined the Union.

At the 1936 Texas Centennial celebration at the State Fair, my great-grandmother was honored with two other surviving widows and it was the biggest deal in her life and she had her picture made with the governor of Texas and John Nance Garner, President Roosevelt's vice-president in the 1930s--'36 being an election year and FDR was at the Texas Centennial campaigning. The event also granted my great-grandmother a pension that she lived on the rest of her life, plus her name was put on a plaque at the Texas War of Independence memorial in the Mall in front of the Hall of State Building at the Fairgrounds--and may be there to this day for all I know--the woman lived another ten years exactly until the ripe old Pioneer white-woman age of 89.

When I was a real little kid out in Abilene, Texas, the postmistress of the US Post Office there then was Sam Houston's daughter--she had married an Abilene man who was kin to my family, and their son, who was named after General Sam Houston, was a poet protege of my grandmother's and one day during the Great Depression, a time of deep personal depression in this country, this young poet wrote a short poem that he then took with him to the roof of Abilene's highest building, the sixteen-story Wooten Hotel, and this poet once there tried to take wing, you know a flight of depressed fancy--and in a poetic sense he made it, you know, his soul did go fluttering out of his body about halfway down, but in a real sense, he quickly lost altitude and plummeted straight down to a crash landing right in the middle of North 3rd Street, the poem still clutched to his bosom. All you could read of the poem was "'Yes,' the answer comes, startling but drumming against my skull like being trapped in a parade of pains..." The rest was washed away by this poor poet's blood. I know because it was hanged framed on the wall behind my grandmother's big walnut desk from behind which she ran the Carnegie Library, just up the street from the Wooten Hotel. My grandmother, that bloodsoaked poem, and the Carnegie Library have long since been taken from the face of that part of the earth--only alive in the memories of people like me. God, I'm getting so F-ing sentimental these days. Bad news for a writer--and a wolf, too.

Every year the State Fair of Texas set aside one whole day as "Cullard Day" and it was always called by my dad "June Teenth Day at the Fair," and, as was like my dad, that's the day every year we all knew we were going to the Fair because June Teenth Day was also my Dad's Day at the Fair, too. Opening day? Never. School kids day, my day, never. June Teenth Day, always. Since our last name was also the name of a color, my dad justified us as "cullard" people--and besides, the Fair was less crowded on June Teenth Day and also the entertainment was totally different--one of the first times I heard jazz was at the Texas State Fair in front of the "Cotton Club of Harlem" girlie show tent on the Midway, the same year I saw color teevee in one of the pavilions there and also a Tucker automobile.

June Teenth is Emancipation Day for Texas blacks. On June 19th, 1865, blacks in Galveston, Texas, learned from a Union officer who'd taken charge of the town after the Confederacy surrendered at Appomattox that THEY had been FREED 30 months earlier when "Lincoln really freed the slaves" on the real Emancipation Day. Why, come on, it was just that those old Texas whites--those good honest white Christian folks of Texas had just forgotten to tell their black slaves they were free--"Wha, it jest slipt our minds--why we got nothin' 'gainst darkies as long as they keeps their place." That's the white Texas attitude to this day toward blacks and Mexicans, too, especially illegal Mexicans (white Texans call 'em "Messkins"), the reason Bush is building that horrible wall from Tijuana all the way thousands of miles around to Brownsville, Texas, at 2 million bucks a mile, and, of course, as usual at the expense of We the people (and I emphasize that WE, since WE don't really think of ourselves in that WE term--we're more the "I" kind of people--too bad--divided we fall--old bitterly racist Andy Jackson told white folks that way back in them good ole Plantation days--2 million bucks a mile, folks. Don't you wish you were even in the distant proximity of just a million bucks?

I've told you all how to get rich quick, too, like Bill and Hillary and Johnny Boy Edwards and Obama and Tom DeLay and Karl Rove and Unka Dick Cheney; they're all the same, invested to the hilt in the same stocks--Exxon-Mobil (they haven't yet released their huger than ever profits for this quarter yet), Wal-Mart, Halliburton of Dubai, Euro Dollars, Gold (Pappy Bush and his Carlyle buddies own 51% of the world's gold--you might as well buy a few bars, too), HMOs (become a big HMO shareholder and get the best of healthcare that way), pharmaceutical stocks--there ya go--next dividend time, you'll be rich as Just Plain Bill and Even Plainer Hillary.

What an in-your-face joke the Clinton's little campaign bullshit of picking a campaign song for Hillary--I voted for "Onward Christian Soldiers"--but Hill liked Celine Dion's---HOLY SHIT, HILL, Celine's a god-damn Canadian--you ain't running for president of Canada.... Does Hillary have to show her passport when she goes to Canada? Does Hillary even need a passport as a Senator? Do Hillary and Bill look zombie-like to you like they do to me? Maybe it's the makeup. Hillary, by the bye, is sooo DUMB. She is praising the US soldiers for doing the job they were sent to do in Iraq. How dumb is that? She's running on the strength of Slick Willie's "Big Willie Pop"--we gonna his always smilin' ass when we get her--and don't you think those two know what they're up to? Look at the power her being president would give her and Slick Willie. 'Cept, Americans are dumb voters same as they're dumb followers--we are human-sheep hybrids--we'll follow these foolish shepherds right on over the brink--here we go, little lambs--who have gone astray.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

IRONY in Terms of June Teenth/From Austin, Texas
Investigators were struggling to piece together what happened Tuesday when David Rivas Morales died defending the driver from members of a crowd leaving a Juneteenth celebration. There could have been anywhere from two to 20 attackers, Austin Police Commander Harold Piatt said.

The car in which Morales, 40, was a passenger had entered an apartment complex's parking lot when it struck a 3- or 4-year-old child, Piatt said. The child was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

The driver got out of the car to check on the child and was confronted by several people, Piatt said. When they attacked the driver, Morales got out of the car to protect the driver and was attacked as well. Police said no guns or knives were used.

The driver got away and is cooperating with investigators, who are not releasing his name.

Margaret Morales said a young boy came to her door to tell her that her brother was lying on the ground outside. She found David Morales, sprawled on the pavement 100 feet from her townhouse, battered and choking on blood.

She said her mother came running after hearing her screams, but police wouldn't let either of them get close to him.

Police arrived one minute after receiving a 911 call, by which time the beating had stopped, department spokeswoman Toni Chovanetz said. But the Morales family complained that medical help was slow in coming.

David Morales arrived at the hospital about 35 minutes after the 911 call was received, said Warren Hassinger, Austin-Travis County Emergency Services spokesman. Emergency officials said police ordered them to wait until the area was secure.

An estimated 2,000 to 3,000 people were in the area for a city-sponsored festival for Juneteenth, which commemorates Texas slaves getting the word that they had been freed.

Several hundred people had filled the parking lot and street as the daylong festival at a nearby park ended and spilled over into the surrounding neighborhoods, said Katherine White, a Morales family friend who lives in a townhouse next door to where the beating took place.

Police said the injured child was a girl, but White said it was a boy with long hair he wears in ponytails.

Margaret Morales said her brother, who was staying with her, was a painter on his way home from work. The driver, whom she knew only as Victor, picked him up and dropped him off everyday, she said.

The Morales family remembered David as a caring brother who loved the San Antonio Spurs and was thrilled when they won the NBA title last week. Earl White, Katherine's brother, said David Morales enjoyed sitting on the porch, watching the neighborhood children play in the parking lot.

"I just want the people caught and brought to justice," another sister, Elizabeth Morales, said. "I want them to feel the same pain that they caused my brother."

Sicko Opening a Week Early Due to Demand; Michael Moore's a Hustling Genius NEW YORK, June 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Due to the fantastic reaction SiCKO received at its premieres and pre-release screenings, the overwhelming demand from audiences who want to see the film, and the early reviews from critics, Michael Moore's highly anticipated and entertaining film SiCKO will open in New York City this Friday, June 22nd, one week earlier than originally planned. Sneak previews of SiCKO will be held around the country on the evening of Saturday, June 23rd.

SiCKO will open exclusively at the AMC- Loews Lincoln Square Theater this Friday, June 22nd -- one week prior to its nationwide release on Friday, June 29th.

Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of The Weinstein Company said, "Last night's standing ovation at the N.Y. Premiere of SiCKO confirmed what we believed to be true since the film's launch in Cannes, which is that audiences love the movie. Ever since the film began generating tremendous word of mouth we have been contemplating opening SiCKO in one theater in NYC and sneaking the film in the top markets across the country and last night validated that plan. Sneak previews for a strong movie like SiCKO are a great marketing tool."

SiCKO is written, directed and produced by Michael Moore. The film is produced by Meghan O'Hara and co-produced by Anne Moore. Kathleen Glynn, Bob Weinstein and Harvey Weinstein serve as executive producers.