No Resting Place Read Free

not begin the study of it until the fifth grade, the level my father never reached. What he knew of history he had picked up from me as I brought it home piecemeal from school, and in that he had shown no more than a fatherly interest. In fact, of all my subjects history was the one that interested him the least. Not from me had he gotten his unaccountable prejudice against Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar.
    â€œNo son of mine is going to play-act that devil!”
    And thereupon my father, who lacked book learning but who had history in his blood, told me of an episode from out of the earliest years of our state not known to my teachers, and which if they had known, they would have found unsuitable, especially in that glorious centennial year, for transmission to us schoolchildren.
    Whether or not to tell me this old story after all had lately been causing my father perplexity. This indecision of his was something new. He had meant to tell it to me all my life, for he felt himself singled out and charged with a duty to keep alive in us this memory of the dead, and I was his only child. It was such a terrible story, he had been waiting until I was old enough for it, or at least until I was as old as he was when he was told it. With this, my thirteenth year, that time had come. Meanwhile, my father had begun to think not only of how old I was, but of how old he was.
    With this year had also come our state’s centennial celebrations. All those parades, all that pomp and pageantry, all that oratory, all that Lone-Star-flag-waving roused to even louder indignation and cries for redress the throng of ghosts that haunted my father and piqued him to speak out, to enlighten, which was to say to disillusion me, with their story, of which he was the custodian. The glowing account of the Battle of San Jacinto that I brought home from school omitted any mention of the contribution that was decisive in the Texans’ victory, and of the ingratitude, the perfidy and the persecution with which that contribution was repaid. All accounts omitted it, suppressed it. My father was one of a bare handful of Texans, the others being a few college professors of history, who knew about it. The impulse for him to tell me was strong. What deterred my father was my wholehearted participation in those centennial observances. Texas molds its sons early. Had he waited until too late to tell me?
    Having once hesitated, my father faltered in his purpose and temporized with his ghosts. Theirs was an old, old story, and nothing that anybody could do now, certainly nothing that a thirteen-year-old schoolboy might do, could atone for the injustice they had suffered, for history’s neglect of them. By criticizing the textbook version of events, held gospel by all, I would only get myself in trouble with my teachers and my schoolmates.
    My father began to wonder whether his child might not be happier not knowing about some of the things that had happened on his native soil. Evidence was everywhere that ignorance was bliss and that those who got ahead in life were not the mavericks like him but those of the herd, all bearing the same brand. In inheriting the suspicions and ancient hatreds of my color and class I would have a sufficiency without the addition of one all my own. Perhaps he ought to take that old story and that tribe of troubled spirits with him into the grave. Let my heart not be a battlefield for the strains of blood that coursed through it. Let the roses that bloomed wild in the spring have no more thorns for me than for others; let them be for me, too, pretty to look at, fragrant and above all mute—not fraught for me alone with bitter memories.
    The roses were much on my father’s mind just then. In fact, for the past several days they had allowed him no rest. They disturbed him waking and sleeping, mentally and physically: a steady prick to his conscience, a steady throb in his right forefinger from an infection following a prick by