Tag: East Texas

Sufficient disquiet

IMG_0436My bedroom window overlooks a cemetery. Half a century ago, when I was troubled by Monsters Under The Bed and other assorted nighttime horrors, that thought might have disturbed me. Now, I find the view pretty serene except for those early summer mornings when city workers roll out lawn mowers and weed eaters at first light.

General James Smith and family rest in pace in perhaps the most-seen and least-noticed cemetery in town. Surrounding streets hustle us daily to town and to Lowe’s and to Kroger, but the little park in the crook of one of Henderson’s truly monumental intersections is generally unheeded and forgotten, much, I’m afraid, like those who rest there.

That’s rather sad. Even a shallow surf of the www brings waves of info about General Smith. He cut something of a figure in early Texas. He was a veteran of both the War of 1812 and the Texas Revolution, the donor of land for the city of Henderson, and a Rusk County delegate to the Texas House. His Fellow Founders thought enough of him to name our neighboring county in his honor, and it’s possible that a design on his coat button inspired the Lone Star itself. That’s quite a resume.

Urban legend once held that grateful Hendersonites buried Smith standing up, facing the downtown square a mile away. As far as I know, snopes.com has never investigated, but I think I can debunk that rumor on my own. Up close, the tomb is only about chest high. If the general is upright, he was a short man indeed.  It’s a cool story, but discountable. That’s a good thing; poor ol Gen’l Smith deserves a comfortable repose after all that soldiering and representing and namesaking and logo designing and all.

So General Smith and I sleep snoring distance apart. His rest is horizontal (hopefully) and eternal; mine, not so much. I haven’t worried about Monsters Under The Bed in a very long time, but different thoughts sometimes bump my nights and disturb my slumber. The general’s world is not mine. I doubt he ever spent a night wondering if his online bank account would be hacked, or if his central air unit would hang on through one more summer, or if his students would survive the latest high-stakes, state-mandated standardized assessment. Surely those nineteenth century Texians had it easy. On the other hand, though, I can’t say that I’ve ever lost much sleep over uprooted and hostile Native Americans, or a marauding Santa Ana, or wondering whether or not I could make a midnight run to the privy without stepping on a rattlesnake. Sufficient unto each generation is the evil thereof, I guess.

I’ve known sidewalks

I’ve always liked the Langston Hughes poem that begins “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.” The words are mildly shiver-invoking. Hughes understands memory.

I don’t really know rivers–unless  you count zipping across the Sabine into Longview a few times a month–but I’ve realized lately that I have known sidewalks for a long time. That’s been my pleasure the last few weeks: becoming reacquainted with the sidewalks I once knew.

The first sidewalk in my world still edges North High. I played there with my cousin. We rode tricycles and pulled red wagons and sometimes aggravated an even smaller boy named Murray who lived next door. Passing now, I can close my eyes and picture Aunt Modine pulling curbside in her brown and white car, elegantly dressed and ready for her afternoon kaffeeklatsch with Aunt Wilma.

Farther along, I remember a spot across from the old library that once had an incredibly nasty word dried into the cement, pruriently delighting fourth-grade boys. That word is no longer there. I looked for it the other day.

Downtown, there’s a chunk of purgatorial pavement in front of the building that was once Sears & Roebuck. I hit the curb wrong with my bicycle late on a Sunday afternoon and slid along on elbows and knees. I didn’t think my wounds were serious, but my mother had a conniption when I limped into the house. I had to get a tetanus shot. The shot was more traumatic than the crash.

Most intriguing, though, is the sidewalk that hovers above the street near the joining of North High and North Marshall. That intersection is no longer on my beaten path, but I pass by occasionally. I almost always think Halloween when I do.
nhigh
We finished up the usual trick or treat trek in that neighborhood one year.  As best I can calculate, it was 1965 and I was a first grader. Time was late—probably not yet seven o’clock, but it seemed late—and dark and chilly. I remember standing high on that embankment that night. A souped-up car roared by on the street below. The shutter clicked somewhere in my mind, and the moment has been with me for nearly fifty years. That’s my frozen-in-time Halloween memory: that sidewalk and that cool, October darkness and that sputtering car. Some people have special songs that conjure up potent memories. For me, the roar of a distant engine on an autumn night is still slightly spooky and always means Halloween on the sidewalk above North High Street.

I’ve known sidewalks for a long time.

On the trail of the Junior High ghost

HISD Administration Buildling
Random lights still burn in the old Junior High

When I was a kindergartener contemplating first grade, older kids used scare my buddies and me sockless by warning that Real School teachers were mean ol’ ladies who, if we talked or smiled or even breathed wrong, would whip us with an Electric Paddle. That was enough to strike fear and trembling in the heart of a six year old.

As an elementary school-er, dread of the jump to Junior High was more intense: They’ve got three floors and a block-long building. How will I manage to change classes in five minutes? Will they really make us take showers after PE? Does the principal have an electric paddle?

Even more ominous was the whispered rumor, “You know that school’s haunted, don’t you?” I remember the first time I heard the story of the Junior High ghost. The version passed along to me by a friend on my grandmother’s front porch went like this [cue ghostly voice]:

Before the school was built, there was an old lady who lived in a run-down house on that block. She loved to read. At night she would stay up late reading, and people passing would see a light in her window.

After she died they tore down her house and built the school. Now she roams the halls of the Junior High. Every night, she gets a book from the library, turns on a light in one of the rooms, and spends the night reading. If you pass by the school late at night, you’ll always see a light somewhere in the building. That’s the ghost reading.

I freely admit that the notion of a ghost who passes her night curled up with a good book instead of rattling chains and spinning her head is pretty tame (and perhaps a little lame), but it was true that random lights did burn all night in the Junior High. There was always a light somewhere in that building, and those days were long before high-stakes testing kept the midnight oil burning on the desks of data-disaggregating teachers.

Since a rainy October evening is a good time to contemplate the nether world (and since the ghostly beyond is more pleasant fodder for thought than either electric paddles or communal showers after PE), I decided to do a little research.  Just where might that ghost have lived while she was still corporeal? This is what I found:

A 1906 map of Henderson shows the location of a high school at the corner of North High and Van Sickle.  That would be the northwest corner of the current campus.  Judging from the building’s footprint, it is clearly not the Junior High/Admin Building we know and love today.  That’s not surprising, since the big red building was constructed in (I believe) at least two parts in the 20s and 30s.

1906 map 1

Source:  Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin

Another map from the same year shows a slightly different angle. The high school is there, but it’s not labeled.  I flipped the snippet to make it fit on this page, so the directions are a little askew.  The view here is as if we were standing in front of the contemporary building, making ghost-warding novenas to the back of the Methodist Church (or to the back of Henderson Savings, for those who put their trust in Mammon) across the street.  East Main would be about a block to our left.

1906 map 2

Source:  Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin

Unfortunately for Tracy-the-Ghost-Hunter, most of the school block was apparently vacant in 1906.  This is not what I wanted to find.  I wanted to see a map with a great big red X saying “This is a run-down house inhabited by an elderly woman who is famous for reading far, far into the night.”  No such luck.  Research can be frustrating.

So for now the trail of the Junior High ghost goes cold.  Without the hard evidence of X marking the spot over her earthly dwelling, we must assume that her spirit is still as urban-legendary as an electric paddle.  Although I’ve spent most of my life in various schoolhouses, I’ve never seen an electric paddle.  I’ve never seen a ghost, either, but I have often seen those lights gleaming late into the night in the deserted school on North High Street.