Dear Garrett..

Welcome to Seguin, Texas

I loved our new farm in Texas. The 122 acres came equipped so all we had to do was start farming. We had a ford tractor with all the implements. We had a tractor barn and a hay barn — a chicken house, a smoke house, and a grain storage building. We had a house to live in also.  Our live in-house had two bedrooms and one bath.  There was no air conditioning and only a wood stove for heating. It will truly benefit with air conditioner installation gainesville fl. We had our own water well with a concrete water tank next to the windmill for watering the cattle where my brothers and I would be baptized by Mom in a few months.  Mom baptized Laura in the bathtub because she was a girl.

Willie and I farmed the acreage until Willie became scared enough to leave our farm, our family and Texas.  While he was with us, Willie taught me how to farm enough to farm our place when he left.  Our family situation became even more complicated and dangerous when Mom became pregnant by Willie.  Once the community figured out what was going on, Mom told us she was given a warning by the Guadalupe County Sheriff.  The sheriff told Mom, “Don’t have that baby in Guadalupe County.”

I cried when we drove Willie to the bus station in Seguin.  I had worked with him on two farms. He never said much when we were working, he was strangely silent. He had more on his mind than I was aware of at my young age.  I just enjoyed being with him while we did our work.

We never saw or heard from Willie after we dropped him off at the bus depot.  I heard he moved to Los Angeles.  He couldn’t return to Louisiana. My brother, Harvey, told me later he learned that Willie was on a work parole program when he worked at the dairy in Ringgold.  When he left there with us, he had that to worry about — plus the problem of having taken up with my Mom and our family. Mom’s pregnancy with Willie was “off the chart dangerous”.

I ran the farm myself after Willie left.  Whenever it came to handling something new, our neighbor, Johnny Hurley or Stanfield Volkman would come over and help get me pointed in the right direction — like how to plant or cultivate the corn, etc.  After a couple of rows of training, I was off and running on my own.  We grew corn and water melons.  We leased out some acreage for some negro folks to raise cotton.  I enjoyed seeing them in our fields chopping and picking the cotton by hand.  I mowed some of the pastures to keep them healthy.

Some of our acreage was covered with mesquite.I am fond of mesquite to this day because we had it on our farm.  I hunted in the mesquite a lot — brought home a lot of rabbits.  I chopped a lot of mesquite wood for the stove in the winter.

We killed a good many snakes on and around our farm — rattle snakes, water moccasins and chicken or what some people referred to as bull snakes.  When I wanted to relax, I would drive the Ford tractor down to a stock tank and turn the engine off.  I would place my single shot 22 rifle on the tractor steering wheel and wait for a moccasin to raise its head to the surface of the water.  I didn’t miss many shots.  I’d watch a snake or two twist and splash on top the water. Then after relaxing for a bit, I would head back up to the house to see what needed doing next.

I was 14 when it came time for Mom to have the baby.  I drove her into the Seguin hospital even though Mom was warned not to have the baby in Guadalupe County.  When we dropped Mom off at the hospital, my siblings and I were placed in a home.  My brother Harvey reminded me that it was the doctor’s home who was delivering the baby.  About ten hours after leaving Mom at the hospital, we were  informed that the baby was born.  A few hours later we were informed that the baby had died.  I asked how the baby died.  Someone told us that it’s lungs filled up with fluid.  Mom had named the baby girl Zion Wilson.  I don’t remember having a service.  We just went home when Mom left the hospital.  The baby’s body was placed in an unmarked grave for the indigent in Seguin which I was able to verify with records at the Seguin courthouse a few years ago.

A couple of decades ago, I was discussing the event with a woman named Rosie Turner in Seguin who knew my Mom very well.  When I shared my recollection of the events of the baby’s birth and death, Rosie said, “That’s not how the baby died.  The sheriff had that baby killed.”  I am still trying to get to the bottom of what really happened to the baby.

Shortly following the birth and passing of the baby, we met another black man.  Life had become unstable following my Dad’s passing.  With the arrival of this new black man in our family, life was to become more unstable.  His name was Jimmie.  He looked like a big man to me.  His 6′ 2″ stature seemed to tower over my younger fourteen year old frame.  It was night-time when I first laid eyes on this new person.  He was standing on a vacant lot in what felt like a creepy, dangerous and foreign neighborhood in Seguin, Texas.  When I saw him in the night, it seemed like a dark person appearing in the darkness.  As I came closer to him, I could see he appeared to look like a mean man.  He also appeared to be drunk.  I remember my Mom then introducing me to him.  He seemed to barely notice me if he noticed me at all.  I wondered why is my Mom introducing me to this man?  She said he was Rosie’s brother.  I wondered how she had come to know him. In the weeks to come, this man would be seen progressively more and  more around our family. Within a month or two he was living with us.  Within a year he would become my step-dad.