Of a drum and history

Monday afternoon the phone rang, and my mother was on the other end.  She was in town and wanted to bring by my grandfather’s snare drum that he’d played when he was in the American Legion Band in Comanche around 1920.  (She has a semi-panoramic photograph of the band taken at about that time, along with a photocopy of the $100 check that represented the first prize in a marching band competition they won that year.)  I used the drum a bit myself when I was in high-school band, but in the thirty years since it’s sat in various closets at her house.  Which was fine, until she had to finish cleaning out her parents’ house, which she finally sold last year after it had sat empty for a decade.  Everything there had to come back to her own house, which doesn’t have much space left.  Try cramming two households’ and a barn’s worth of Stuph into one not-that-large house and see what happens.

Having to clear up the grandparents’ house also made her acknowledge that she needs to sell some of the parts that have a commercial value, such as my grandmother’s collection of miniature lamps, so she also told me she wants to sit down and work out some kind of commission deal where I sell things for her through Waring Stuph.  I’m all in favor of this.  Indeed, I’ve been trying to get her to do just this for a couple of years now.  I think that the sheer quantity of things she now has either to give house room to or get rid of has forced her to it—and she knows that because I am STILL unemployed after TWO AND A HALF MOTHERFUCKIN’ YEARS, I could really, really use the cash that would come from a commission sale.

Finally, we got around to the reason she was in Austin in the first place instead of in Comanche.  For several weeks, she’s been keeping me posted on her contacts with a guy who is an editor for the Cox News Service Washington bureau.  He’s beginning to write a book about racial cleansing in the American South (i.e., counties where the entire black population was killed off or driven out), and when he came across Comanche County, he apparently decided it was a prototypical example of what happened later and more thoroughly elsewhere.  (Our pogrom happened in 1886; most of what he’s going to be talking about happened in the 1900 to 1920 era.)  Mother and one of her semi-cousins are probably the two people in the world who know the most about exactly what happened in Comanche County, who was involved, and why it happened as it did, and they had several long conversations about whether they should try to help this writer by providing what they have and what they know, or whether they should shut up and keep to themselves, for fear he’d twist the facts of the incident to suit the thesis of his book.  In the end, they decided it would be better if they helped with the book—have him “inside the tent pissing out,” so to speak—in the hope they can make him understand that there are significant differences between what happened in Comanche County, which was driven by a murder, and other places where the primary motive was racial hatred.  (Descendants of the night-riding vigilantes still live in the county, although today hardly anyone will talk about what they might have been told about the affair by those who were there and knew what went on.)

The writer had flown into Austin on a research trip; some of the materials he needs are in the Barker Texas History Collection, and he also wants to drive up to Comanche and see the locations he’ll be writing about.  He arranged a meeting with Mother and Phil (our cousin who’s the other authority) in Austin because Phil lives nearby, and Mother rarely if ever minds coming to Austin.  Now I’m waiting to hear how the meeting went and what they’ve decided to do next.

The Discordian titillates Eris with the atomic manuscript of his vacillating lamp.  Fnord.