Texas

James A. Michener

ISBN: 0-394-54154-5

Read 1999 April 27 - 1999 November 10.

Reviewed 2000 January 12-15.

Nineteen ninety nine was a tough year around our house. It was time for me to get out of the GPS Systems (a.k.a. Rogue) Group at JPL and that, combined with the ages of the kids looked like a good opportunity to move back to Texas. A ton of work was done on all of these problems. All of that is documented elsewhere. There was significant pain.

After having agonized over reducing my set of "books to read" to 24, this one seemed appropriate to the occasion. Would it give an unfair bias for or against? Would it interfere? Would it be read in half a month? I didn't think so. I thought it would be relevant entertainment in the midst of multiple crises and it was.

Michener writes a history of Texas that, like historical fiction should, parallels the real history but has detail at a level that, though it cannot be known today, is helpful in producing a "flavor" for the subject. Texas has a long history in many phases. This is a long book.

As always, I was interested in the map. Where was all this happening? I wanted to know and consulted the maps with each section several times to get oriented.

At the beginning there is a section detailing everything that was actual fact or fiction in the book. I consulted this too at the beginning and end of each. If I learned actual history, I wanted to know it.

I learned things about Texas, not about history but about style, attitude, and origins. I could see where towns like Wortham had come from and what they were like in their founding years, much noisier than when I was there. Some of the heirs to those oil fortunes were still there and I could see an example of how that all came about. I could see why my own ancestors and those of friends came to Texas from places like Germany, Ireland, Boston, and Tennessee. He didn't talk much about the Panhandle, except for that one "Commission" meeting in Amarillo, and the joke about the area:

(p. 340) "What's the weather going to be down there?" I asked the pilot, and he turned back to tell me: 'Like those three men lost in the Arctic. Howling wind, thermometer way down, dogs howling, and one fellow says: "Thank God for one thing: We ain't in Amarillo on a bad day."'

Or the story about the heated election in Texarkana:

(p. 820) "They're both fine men. Eminently eligible for the big post, they think. Haven't made up my mind yet, but when I do I'm gonna be damned bitter about it."

The literary device was the "State Commission on Education" which was, of course, entirely fictional. The author is on this commission with several high society types who, as it turns out, are descended from various of the fictional characters in the story, and play out in the modern day some of the stresses of the centuries. The commission is appointed by the governor to update the history curriculum in state educational institutions and meets at the end of each section of the book where they talk about some of the things in that section, typically. They meet in various places and see modern (mid 1980s) versions of places like San Jacinto, Big Bend, etc. and they are hosted by the various millionaire and billionaires on the commission in various places, one even in New Mexico (albeit the "Republic of Texas") where the stereotypical difficulties between the two places are played out in a tavern parking lot. This gives Michener the opportunity to give certain facts and discussions that don't otherwise fit into the narrative but which are important to the persona of the state.

The big sections themselves go all the way back to Cabeza de Vaca, why he was here, what he was trying to do, what he did. A boy followed him around and narrated what happened, much of it in what is now Mexico. The boy grows up and is in or an ancestor of someone in another section of the book. Through luck and hard work, this is repeated over and over through the centuries right up to the present overdevelopment of the 1960 area of northwest Houston. Wow! Talk about hitting close to home.

Michener took a lot of heat for the book, he isn't starry eyed enough about the giants of Texas history like Sam Houston and he doesn't ignore the problems of Hispanics versus Anglo relations like most Anglo Texans (don't say anything bad...) would prefer. These particulars don't bother me. I have a forming ambition to be part of the solution to some of those problems in my own modern Texas some day. The only two things that bother me about the book are: (1) It is fictional and so all those names and events I learned, though plausible and representative, are just in the author's imagination. And they're wild too, some of them. This presents quite an interesting viewpoint on human nature and why people would love or hate Texas. (2) His modern day point of view is only from the millionaires. You could get the idea that every fifth or seventeenth generation Texan was a ranch-owning, airplane-flying, conservative Democrat, fourth heir to a bunch of oil or cattle money. It's true that everyplace I ever lived I knew some people like that but it was not my personal experience, it was not the majority, and I don't really care much for the view of Texas from the very top. I don't consider those places to be the very top myself. My Texas is something else.

Still, Michener spent the rest of his life in Austin, an adopted Texan, and after Michener's life and all that he did and wrote about, that's quite an endorsement right there.

Partly from this and partly from the other work and the fallout from the not-made move, my interest in Texas is rekindled, not that it ever flagged much.