The Magic Valley

While undergoing my transformation into a full-fledged tomboy in the latter part of the 1950s, I also was navigating elementary school and extracurricular activities that included riding my 20-inch blue Huffy Customliner bicycle, building forts in a stand of mesquite trees behind our house, and reading Army recruitment flyers displayed in metal racks lining a wall in the downtown post office in Brownsville, Texas – just a stone’s throw from the Mexican border.  At the time, the town’s population was about 49,000 – 10 percent or so of us were Anglos, as we were known at the time.

One day I asked my mother how the town got its name.  “Is it because so many Mexicans live here?”   “No,” she answered, and went on to explain that the town was originally a U.S. Army fort that came to be named Fort Brown, and evolved to the name Brownsville.  She neglected to tell me it was originally called Fort Texas and, more importantly, that it was where the first battle of the Mexican-American War was waged.  

This spot at the tip of Texas also marked the last battle of the Civil War, which, ironically or not, was fought and won by Confederate soldiers defending enslavement.  But it was a lost cause, as the battle took place several months after the South surrendered to the North.  My grandmother gave me a commemorative coin in 1965 celebrating the centennial of the blood bath.  She was a child of the Deep South – conceived on a cotton plantation in Mississippi where her daddy was the overseer of the enslaved, working for the master of the plantation.  Like so many of her generation, my grandmother never could not use the word “colored” when referring to Black folks, nor could she bring herself to learn Spanish when landing in the borderlands after marrying a much younger man who took a job in Brownsville just a few years before the Great Depression.

Situated at the very southern tip of Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, Brownsville is of particular note because it shares a border with Mexico, making its borderlands profoundly rooted in Mexican history, its culture bursting with bright vibrant colors, flowing embroidered skirts for the women, guayaberas for men and flavorful foods, whether tamales, cumin-laced pinto bean soup or enchiladas. And of course there was the music – cancion ranchera, intense rhythmic songs of heartbreak and love, and mariachi, a feast of stringed and brass instruments, the songs festive and sonorous.

 The Valley’s Texas affiliations were somewhat secondary, the results of colonization that took place after the U.S. won the Mexican-American war in the mid-1800s and took Mexico’s territory north of the Rio Grande.

The town that started as a fort is also notable because it’s home to the Port of Brownsville, which opened in 1936 during the Great Depression on the premise that a deepwater port and easy access to the Gulf of Mexico was, among other things, vital to the future of the Valley’s abundance of agricultural offerings — cotton, citrus fruit, and an array of vegetables.  Brownsville was the apex of the “Magic Valley” – a moniker that originated with real-estate developers in a stratagem that began fifteen years earlier in the 1920s, when developers began hawking dreams of abundant agriculture to Anglos from the north seeking new opportunity.  Their inducement?  A bounty of magical-ness – water for irrigation (think rapidly running Rio Grande) and plenty of cheap labor in the Mexican population (think porous border). 

Brownsville’s downtown was built along the Rio Grande River and includes a bridge that connects to downtown Matamoros, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipus. Every day and into the evening there was a constant flow of traffic – by foot, by car, by bicycle – Mexican workers were crossing the bridge daily to work as housekeepers, laborers, and farm hands.  Children and adolescents were crossing the bridge to go to school on the Texas side.  Anglos were crossing the bridge to eat and imbibe and maybe shop at the town’s market – bountiful, a feast of folks bartering, laughing, saturated with Spanish.  It was an open border that only elders like me remember today.

Besides the porous border, the port, the abundant crops, and the Rio Grande, there was yet more magical-ness in the Valley. The piece de resistance:  a thirty-five minute drive to the Gulf of Mexico via a two-lane causeway that connected the small town of Port Isabel with Padre Island.  There, seashore saltgrass, and sea oats blended with sand dunes at this most southern part of a lovely and long stretch of a sparsely populated (at the time) island stretching north for 113 miles. The center portion is still preserved in its natural state as Padre Island National Seashore.  It’s also the longest barrier island in the world and that is not Texas braggadocio, it’s seriously true.   

 My grandfather, in 1926, a decade before the port came to be, was lured to the tip o’ Texas from Nixon – a tiny town south and east of San Antonio and just west of Smiley.  Papa, the moniker his grandchildren used, didn’t come to the Magic Valley to farm land for copious crops.  He came with a wife and hopes of cultivating a business that would serve the coming population boom — a grocery store full of the delicious cornucopia of the Magic Valley.

As the story goes, Papa needed a job, the necessity of which tugged at the scrappy but handsome 20-year-old fitted with an athlete’s body from his days running track and playing football.  His brown hair slicked back and parted down the middle — a popular men’s style of that era — emphasized his high brow, bowed upper lip, and slight dimple in his chin.

Speculation leads me to suggest that the gal he married (my grandmother) before leaving his hometown of Nixon had no-nonsense expectations that he would make hard work and a decent amount of money the cornerstone of their young marriage.  Here’s the kicker – in his senior year of high school, Papa wooed and courted this gal, who was ten years his senior and his English teacher to boot! But Papa’s hustle for Zenobia got complicated when the principal (most likely in his late twenties) interjected himself into the pursuit of Zenobia, whom both of the guys must have considered to be quite the catch.  And that she was with her dark and wavy hair cut into a short bob, her very bushy dark eyebrows framing brown eyes that, in snapshots, show her lost in thought. Family lore has it that upon hearing of this second suitor, Papa marched into the principal’s office and socked his competition in the face.  I’m not sure, but as punishment Papa may have been prohibited from attending his high school graduation ceremony.  

He also won and quickly lost a track scholarship to Southwestern University in Central Texas. His very first week on campus he managed to coax a cow up the stairs of a bell tower.  For that outrageous prank he was expelled, according to stories passed around the family.  There is no record, it seems, of what happened to the mistreated cow or how its removal was orchestrated. But this feisty guy who would become my grandfather was after Zenobia, come hell or high water, and probably could not see himself as an academic or an intellectual.  Instead, he had street smarts and was primed by the culture and his young life in rural Texas to find work and make a family.

He may have felt responsible for Zenobia after the fisticuff with the principal.  I have to wonder if my grandmother lost her teaching position when said principal found out her student had designs on her.  Bits and pieces of stories I’ve heard from various family members suggest Zenobia somehow lost her means – teaching was one of the very few jobs available for women at the time – and became dependent on her former student.  They were living in the small town of Nixon and married in 1926 or thereabouts. 

Zenobia – almost 30 – may not have had any other option.  She was at the end stage of child-bearing years, which might have given her some consolation that she wouldn’t have lots of kids.  As it turns out, that wasn’t the way it worked for her.  And life as a spinster wasn’t appealing, much less viable, since she had no way to earn a living.  At least that’s the way it appears to have played out.  Her sole consolation may have been that she had a taste of an independent life, one without men during her twenties. And while passing through the decade of the Roaring Twenties she fell in love with a woman she met when they were both teachers.  (Here's that story.)

Family stories suggest that around the time Zenobia married Papa, he found an ad in a local newspaper for an assistant at a gas station in Brownsville. The fiesty guy jumped at the opportunity, loaded up a friend’s truck with personal belongings and headed to the very southern tip of Texas with his teacher wife, Zenobia, whom he rarely called by her given name – a guy thing still going strong these days. Instead, Papa called her Sweetheart, which came out Texas-y, with “heart” sounding like the word “art.”  As a child, I heard him call her Sweet-art as he was coming in the door for lunch.  I always thought it was sweet, but later in life I thought differently when I found out he cheated on my grandmother.  But in the beginning, it was a story about a guy and a gal who wanted to make the best of their delicate situation.  

 The couple drove 260-some-odd miles to Brownsville, where Papa took a job managing a gas station that also sold tires.  Eventually, he would buy the gas station, and over time convert it to a grocery store, the only one in town, where he sold fresh vegetables, watermelons and citrus grown just up the valley.  It was in the back of the store that the family set up a home – a few bedrooms, a kitchen, a bath. 

During these years, Papa and his bride, Zenobia, would have three children  – two girls then a boy, one right after the other – then, speculation suggests my grandmother would have at least one, maybe two miscarriages before she birthed her fourth child, a boy.  And that was it for her!  In defiance of social norms, Zenobia refrained from seeking permission from her husband and drove to a Houston hospital with a friend in tow to have her tubes tied – also known as tubal ligation, a sure fire way to prevent pregnancy forever.  How exactly my grandmother managed to circumvent patriarchal rules requiring hubby’s permission is lost to history.  

While navigating the Great Depression (fresh on the heels of the Roaring Twenties) following the stock market crash in October of 1929,  Zenobia the teacher was raising her four young children, then homeschooling them in the kitchen – one wall of which featured a blackboard and a map of the world – before eventually sending them off to public school.

Up front, Papa kept the grocery store afloat.  When World War II came along, the store flourished and continued to do so into the 1950s, when Mr. Pace, as Papa was known around town, also sold groceries to the cargo ships that came into the Port of Brownsville.  It was during that time I began “working” at Pace Grocery. I was maybe seven years old.  

As part of my self-assigned duties to keep things orderly and tidy, I would stick the soft wooden handle of a feather duster in the back pocket of my pants, and start walkin’ the aisles, ostrich feathers floating above my tiny butt cheeks. I sashayed down each aisle, and if necessary – or not – dusted off the tops of canned green peas, green beans, kidney beans, and the like.  Then it was off to the shelves featuring bottled 7-Up and Coke six-packs and my favorite drink to take to the beach, Delaware Punch. 

That beach would be the one on South Padre Island.  It was my favorite playground.  Early on, when I was three or so, my crawling younger sister and I spent lots of time at the beach with our mother and daddy.  Old black-and-white snapshots show our daddy sitting in the sand with me and my sister, we’ll call her Starr.  There’s one picture of my daddy, Curtis, standing in the waters, gentle waves caressing the wet sand, holding my sister with me standing by his side.  But those family jaunts to the beach faded quickly after my mother, Mozelle, ushered Curtis to the door and said bye-bye on the premise that her husband was not doing his job as a father and husband, ie. he had a hard time holding down a job and he drank too much too often.

It was after Curtis left that I found myself spending lots of time at Pace Grocery, particularly summer months while school was out.  When I wasn’t feather dusting around the store, I was chatting it up with Papa’s two butchers behind the meat counter, bagging groceries, or rearranging the toys on the tall spinner rack in a front corner of the store where customers walked through the double swinging doors to grab a cart.  I loved the energy I felt in the grocery store, especially with the guys who worked there, all really nice and polite to me.  Reflecting back, I realize I emulated them – their mannerisms, their way of walking, their confidence, the way they carried a feather duster in the back pocket of their jeans.     

Some days Papa let me ride shotgun in his often dusty black two-door Ford sedan when it was time for him to head downtown. On the way, he’d stop at the bank to make a deposit before picking up the mail at the post office, which was my chance to check out the Army recruitment flyers I sometimes took home with me.  While I remember my grandmother – we called her Nana – often reminding me to act like a lady when I sat cross-legged in her generous Lazy Boy-style upholstered rocking chair, I do not recall my grandfather going in that direction.   

Papa paid little attention when I scooted to the other end of the bench seat in his Ford sedan to imitate him.  I’d lean my bent elbow on the edge of the open window and feel the push of warm gulf winds as we drove from one place to another.  There were a few days when he let me go to the port with him, like the one time I went on board the ship and into the captain’s office, where Papa sat down across from the captain himself and wrote on a yellow legal pad a list of supplies the ship was in need of – things like waterproof boots, mooring lines used to tie up large ships in port, pounds and pounds of potatoes, pork and beef, and bags of oranges.

For some of us girls, it was easy to get away with gender-bending stuff back then. The word tomboy was spoken affectionately.  And why not?  We were not threatening.  Some even thought us adorable. We were gender neutral, if you will, on the outside — no breasts, no pubic hair, no lipstick.  Some tomboys would even grow up to be straight.

While my mother, Mozelle, did not discourage my tomboy-ness, she was intent on following the cultural norms instilled in her as a child and then as an adult.  She was a good soldier and learned “the rules” for girls, as taught by her mother, just like all the other mothers were doing with their little girls.  Part of this guidance consisted of warnings about morphing into an old maid and languishing in a life of spinsterhood – like what happened to my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Allyn, who never married and was well past the childbearing age when I met her.  However, she had smarts and was a good teacher, so who cares?  One day I intentionally left her class, ostensibly to pee.  I was really going to shave my face.  (Here's that story.)

By the time I got to Miss Allyn’s fourth-grade class, I was surely making headway as a tomboy.  Living in the Magic Valley was, in retrospect, the ambrosia and nectar that nurtured me.  With my father gone, my mother assumed the task of taking us to the beach, where we’d do the usual kid stuff  –  play in the sand, collect random shells that washed up from the ocean floor, and dodge jellyfish tentacles that stung like the devil.  The beach will always be a part of me. (Here's that story.)

Even though we were U.S.Citizens and went to the Methodist church, most of the holidays my sister and I celebrated as kids were related to Mexico or the Catholic Church or both. 

In late February, we looked forward to Charro Days, a fiesta celebrating the traditions and heritage of the borderland.  The festival’s dances and parades started in 1938, purportedly to lift people’s spirits during the Great Depression. Charro Days played out on the main street in downtown Brownsville and was named for charros, traditional skilled horsemen from northern Mexico known for wearing colorful clothing and silver embellishments.  

Parade floats carried children dressed in richly colorful traditional Mexican costumes.  Us girls wore white cotton blouses with scoop necklines and puffy short sleeves tucked into showy skirts with an abundance of hues – not my sort of outfit.  Instead, I envied the costumes worn by the boys  – black pants, a vest over a white shirt accented by a black, dangly cloth tie and a sombrero. One year, I was part of a group of kids carted to a local television station, where we danced intently to the rhythm of trumpets punctuating the Mexican Hat Dance, and later that day on the evening news we watched it with nuestros familias.

I remember growing up in Brownsville as fun and diverse, although I didn’t think of it as heterogeneous at the time.  The blending of cultures just was what it was.  People spoke Spanish, English, and Spanglish.  We frequently drove across the river to Matamoros, shopping in the market there, where color was everywhere and the smells of fresh tortillas and candies floated through the air.  Most of our toys came from there  – marionette puppet banditos, the bingo-like board game Loteria. To wrap up our visits, my mother, Mozelle, would take us to a bar where we would sip on Shirley Temples and eat salty pepitas (pumpkin seeds).  My mother sometimes drank a margarita, and if not, then something with rum in it. 

Mozelle, after her divorce from my father in 1957, became a divorcee, a scandalous way of life – some would suggest in that day and age – and a moniker that had a vice grip when you were wearing it.  In today’s world, we simply call her a single mom.

In her 1950s world, Mozelle, the single mom, felt lots of pressure to get the scarlet D off her chest by finding a man.  In fact, she most likely agonized over the coercion poking at her.  After her divorce from Curtis, she set out to prove herself to herself by earning a master’s degree in education while entertaining herself on the dating scene – one fellow from up the valley in Harlingen, who sold insurance, and another guy, Russell, who lived on the beach in a small cabin and drove an old Army Jeep.  For kicks one day, he drove it on the beach near the water’s edge, popping defenseless jellyfish, followed by a laugh and the swig of a Carta Blanca beer.  I told him I did not think it was funny.  My mother did not say a word to either of us.

Social constructs silently screamed at Mozelle to nevertheless keep going on a quest to find a decent man to marry.  On one particular evening, as she stood in front of the bathroom mirror, our mother mentioned to my sister and me that we would be staying at our grandmother Nana’s house overnight. She followed that up with a smile in the mirror and freshened up her red lipstick before the three of us got in the car and headed out.  

 This particular night, Mother was going to Matamoros, just across the Rio Grande.  “Going across” was the jargon of the day, used to explain exactly where you were going to go.  Out of one country and into another.

As Mozelle drove me and Starr to Nana and Papa’s house that late afternoon, she spent the first part of the drive reminding us of the friends she was going to Matamoros with. “Remember Dick and Marie?”  Mother expected me to recall the couple who was “going across” with her that evening.  My sister would have no clue, as she was in utero when the couple came into our family’s orbit, six years earlier in Portland, Indiana.  The couple lived in the second-floor apartment above ours — this was when I was quite young and Mozelle was still holding out hope that Curtis would work out as a husband.  Dick was usually off somewhere doing deals, according to what Mother told me over the years.   She had many fond stories of her friendship with Marie and Maries’s wicked sense of humor, a daily entertainment feature to prop up the chin of an anxious and pregnant Mozelle, while my charmingly handsome, well-mannered and blue-eyed father struggled to hold down a job.

Now, half a dozen years later and a divorce behind her, Mother was poised to reconnect with the couple who now lived in a far away place – Salina, Kansas. It’s my best guess that Marie and my mother stayed connected via telephone calls and written letters after the two women parted ways in Indiana – Mozelle to Brownsville and Marie to Salina.  “Surely, Kay, you remember Dick and Marie.”  Looking at my mother, I shook my head yes, but really meant no, didn’t remember a thing about them.   

Turns out I would never again forget Dick and Marie.  That holiday season of my fourth-grade year, the couple introduced Mozelle to a man who would become our stepfather.  He had come with the couple to the Magic Valley during the holidays and was going to Matamoros as my mother’s plus-one. I vaguely remember meeting him one time very briefly but my child mind thought nothing of it at the time. 

When the new year arrived shortly after their first meeting, Mozelle took a leave of absence from her teaching job, leaving us with Nana, all through January and into February.  Along came Valentine’s Day with my mother still gone.

That’s when the standard black, rotary-dial telephone in Zenobia’s house rang mid-afternoon.  It took her five or so rings and maybe seven or so steps to get to the phone.  

“Hello,” she said after placing the large, heavy earpiece of the horn-shaped head-set against her ear.   “Yes,” my grandmother answered.

My sister and I stood perfectly still, watching her listen to the voice on the other end.  “Thank you,” she said.  I stood there expectantly, curious to get more information about the call. I had a sense it had to do with the whereabouts of our mother.  I found it inexplicable that she had intentionally left her teaching job without explaining the whys and wherefores to me or my sister before taking off, or much less picking up the phone and calling while she was away.  Something didn’t feel right – like the winds were shifting big time.

Turns out Mozelle had sent me and my sister a telegram.  “What did it say?” I asked my grandmother. (The same question I asked my mother a few years earlier when she “found” the farewell note from my father on the kitchen counter after we returned home from getting my tonsils removed.  Here's that story.

Nana repeated the message verbatim.  “Happy Valentine’s Day to the two of you from the two of us.”  

“What does that mean?”  My feathers were beginning to ruffle.

My sister said nothing, just listening or perhaps tuning it all out.

Zenobia took a few moments to respond.  “Well,” she said, “I think it means they are married.”  Her brown eyes were on me.  

My fourth-grader self was perplexed and maybe a bit nervous that my world really was going to shift.  In retrospect, I think Nana may have had prior knowledge of the courthouse event that took place that day in a little town in Oklahoma, just over the Texas border.  (Why they took their vows in Oklahoma, I still don’t know.)  Or, perhaps Zenobia may have intuitively known what was going on with her daughter – the social pressure Mozelle felt to shed the divorcee designation and leave the Magic Valley.

 So the Valentine’s Day telegram is how my sister and I found out that beginning pretty darn quickly we would have a male included in what had been a single-mom family of two girl children.  This man was an unknown quantity, except that his name was Bill and he was from a place called Kansas and had three children from his first marriage — one girl and two boys, one straight and one gay, as I would eventually find out.  

When fourth grade concluded at the end of May that year, it became clear that instead of spending our summer days at church camp and the beach on Padre Island, my sister and I would be learning the ins and outs of Salina, Kansas.  No more beach, no more fresh citrus, no more Spanish everywhere, just a couple of U-Haul trailers at our house, one in the driveway, one in front of our house parked  along the curb.  It didn’t take long for the new man of the family to fill the trailers and car trunks and backseats with all of our belongings.  

When it came time to leave my sister got in the car with our mother, who sat resolutely behind the wheel of her light blue two-door Ford Falcon.  I knew my sister Starr would make sure I had the first ride with the stepdad.  She wanted me to feel the pain.  

Bill started the engine, shifted his white Chevy station wagon into drive, his foot easing down on the accelerator .  My eyes were anchored to our red brick house on Lilac Court, its white front door with wooden slats –  I was remembering the day before when we saw Nana, who waved as we backed out of her driveway. I have no memories as a young child of her kissing my cheek or even blowing me kisses.  Later, I called a few fourth-grade friends to tell them I was moving and felt empty and downhearted when I heard their voices say good-bye.  As we drove off from the house I had tears in my eyes.  It was a sad day in the Magic Valley.

On the drive north, through Austin and on to Dallas, then to the Oklahoma state line, and finally the flatlands of Kansas, my sister and I found ourselves taking turns riding in the car with our stepfather, Bill.  Sitting on the passenger side in the front seat, it was difficult for me to fathom what life might be like with this man who did not seem to have taken a liking to me. He was not interested in anything I said during our shared time in the car – a clear disdain for girls.

Finally, we reached Salina, and much to my surprise, the town was filled to the brim with white folks – certainly counterintuitive to everything I knew.  One day shortly after we arrived, I asked my mother why there weren’t any Mexicans in  our new town.  “Because they don’t live here,” she answered.  End of discussion. I think she was glad to be away from the Texas borderlands.

I tried to embrace the life experience presented me. Hello, Salina! Fifth grade here I come! Carrying forth my tradition of outing myself in elementary school, I got busted two months into the year for dancing the wrong role.  My teacher in Salina, like my second-grade teacher in Brownsville, apparently was assigned to the National Dyke Patrol Unit. (Here's that story.)

 It must have been cold and snowy outside the day Mrs. Nissley spotted “subversive” me because I remember she was wearing her coat, buttoned up. Our class was warming up in the auditorium, kicking up our heels to square dance music, which was mystery music to me, as I was accustomed to Mexican mariachi and ranchera tunes.  My unfamiliarity with the beat, rhythm, and lyrics of square dancing gave me pause.  But I gave it a try and began to feel the vibe just when it was promptly nipped in the bud.

Mrs. Nissley pulled the plug on the music, the kids came to a halt and my teacher walked over to me and my boy partner. “Kay, girls don’t do that.  They don’t lead.  That’s what the boys do.”

All the students in my class were staring at me and my partner, a gawky, freckled boy who did not say a word as he gazed down at the linoleum floor and stood perfectly still, except for his dangling arms.  

I looked up at Mrs. Nissley, puzzlement written across my face. “What do you mean girls don’t lead?  That’s just what I was doing.” 

“Sorry, but it’s not for you to be doing, and that’s just the way it is,” said my teacher nicely while schooling me in the rules of the patriarchy. She walked away and turned the record player back on so we could continue learning about dances done in barns and I could learn my role when dancing with the opposite sex, the one with the penis and the privilege that came with it.   

The boy and I got back on the floor and proceeded to step on each other’s feet until the music ended.  It would have been nice to have cowboy boots on, but that would have to wait until I got back to Texas.

So for the time being I would have to endure Kansas while learning quickly that the borderlands were just a blip on a map, lingering only as a memory a million miles away where my soul and spirit grew up and carried with them the magic of the Valley. No more warm and inviting colorful Charro Day festivities.  No more going across for a trip to the market.  No more Spanish wafting through soft breezes.  No more beach to share with the shells and the jellyfish and the sea oats.

But the one thing all those million miles had not separated me from was the legion of women determined to correct me, keep an eye on me, and scrutinize my behavior, chiding me  – whether Mrs. Nissley, Zenobia, Mozelle, and the rest on the long list.

Nevertheless, I persisted.  I was not taken aback by it.  These were experiences that clung to me in a neutral sort of way.  In the rearview mirror, I recognize that I was indifferent to other people’s judgement - part of the whole coming out thing, poking the patriarchy.

...the stories continue

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