Half Broke Horses

Gertrude sent me a book, “Half Broke Horses”. Gertrude, who has lived in New York City all her life, didn’t know quite what to make of this novel about a woman growing up in the Southwest a hundred years ago.

After I read it, I recommended Jeannette Wall’s “novel”, based on memories of her grandmother, to the book group I go to at the Garland Public Library. Everyone in the group loved it.

The heroine of “Half Broke Horses” grew up in Southwest Texas. The harshness of that area is something city people (like Gertrude) can’t imagine.

My father’s older brother, Uncle Dick, was a pioneer in West Texas around 1900 He bought land for $1 an acre. As a teenager my father worked on the ranch one summer. The family was so poor that all they had to eat was oatmeal. My father refused to eat oatmeal for the rest of his life.

The battered frame house was nothing like the one we saw on television’s Ponderosa. Standing in the front yard, ankle-deep in sand, the horizon was like the rim of the plate, not a hill or a house or a tree in sight.

Jeannette Wall’s grandmother lived about the same time as my father and in a similar situations. While the Texans who go to the book group at the library did not grow up in such harsh conditions, most of them had grandparents or great-grandparents who did.

Readers in Garland thought it outrageous that the woman whipped the students in her one-room school, but laughed at her using the hearse-turned-school-bus in her personal taxi business. They admired her spunk, an independent woman who found ways (sometimes of dubious legality) to overcome any difficulty.

Texans are proud of their pioneer traditions; Governor Perry carries a gun when he goes out for his morning jog. When I mentioned something funny that happened on one of my trips, Nellie announced, “I don’t want to go anywhere outside the borders of Texas.”

People assume that the place where they grew up is the best place in the World. When I moved to Chicago, people said to me, “Aren’t you lucky to live in wonderful Chicago?” An interesting city, but I gladly left Chicago’s snows and came back to Texas’s brutal summers, now that everything is air-conditioned.