Captain Sam Foster and MLK Day

Today is Martin Luther King Day, our newest national holiday. It seems a good day to share one of the most striking comments I’ve yet to read from the pen of a Confederate soldier. Stay with me on this one.

From Texas Confederate Captain Samuel Foster’s Diary.

Captain Foster was a company commander in the 18^th Texas Dismounted Cavalry and had fought in a dozen major battles over 2 ½ years of war. This entry in his diary was written somewhere on his long walk home shortly after the final surrender of the Army of Tennessee in April 1865.

"May 19, 1865

I saw some Negro children going to school this morning, for the first time in my life. In fact, I never heard of such a thing before; nor had such a thing ever crossed my mind.

I stopped a little Negro girl about 12 years old dressed neat and clean, going to school with her books—

I asked her to let me see what she was studying—She pulled out a 4^th Reader a Grammar Arithmetic and a Geography—I opened the Grammar about the middle of the book and asked her a few questions—which she answered very readily and correctly. Same with her Geography and Arithmetic.

I never was more surprised in my life! The idea was new to me.

I asked her who was her teacher. She said “a lady from the north.”

I returned to camp and think over what I have seen.

I can see that all the Negro children will be educated the same as the white children are. That the present generation will live and die in ignorance, as they have done heretofore.

I can see that our white children will have to study hard, and apply themselves closely, else they will have to ride behind, and let the Negro hold the reins—

I can see that the next generation will find lawyers doctors preachers, school teachers farmers merchants etc. divided some white and some black, and the smartest man will succeed without regard to his color.

If the Negro lawyer is more successful than the white one, the Negro will get the practice.

The color will not be so much as knowledge. The smartest man will win in every department in life.

Our (white) children will have to contend for the honors in life against the Negro in the future—

They will oppose each other as lawyers in the same case.

They will oppose each other as mechanics, carpenters, house builders, blacksmiths, silver and goldsmiths, shoemakers, saddle makers etc.

And the man that is the best mechanic lawyer, doctor or teacher will succeed."

I was blindsided by this utterly unexpected diary entry when I was researching for my first novel Whittled Away. I can’t add to Foster’s eloquence and perceptiveness.

But I will sadly note--then came Jim Crow laws and separate but equal schools, which were very separate for 100 years, and never equal.

Now 152 years after Texas Confederate Captain Foster sat on a log and wrote that diary entry on his 1,000 mile walk home after three years of a brutal war, a war in which the victory of his army would have kept black men enslaved, I so hope we are finally well down the road of the vision Captain Foster foresaw in 1865.

45 Years and a Trip to Piedras Negras

Gentle Readers,

You stuck with me last year when sometimes I meandered from writing about writing, and instead shared some personal aspects of my life-- the sorrow of my mom passing away and the joy of grandson Rory’s birth. Today is January 8^th--Juanita’s and my wedding anniversary every year, and today begins the 46^th year of our marriage. We tied the knot in Urban Park Methodist Church in Dallas on January 8, 1972, 45 years ago today.

Here is a photo of our very first “date,” an impromptu trip to Piedras Negras, Mexico after an afternoon University of Texas football game in 1969, a year the Longhorns won the National Championship.  Someone in the car—not me—said turn right and we all go home, turn left and we can go to Mexico. Well…we were very young, and you’ve got start a romance somewhere.

Nita and I are the couple in the middle, with the Mexican barkeeper’s head stuck between us. Yes, we landed in a cantina in Piedras Negras. What a beginning, huh? Who’d a thunk I’d be telling this story nearly half a century later.

I’d stick in one of those beautiful church wedding photos to commemorate our anniversary, but wedding photographers were beyond our means back in ’72. I could put in a beautiful wedding photo from either of our sons’ more recent weddings. But this is my blog, so instead you get to see the very beginning of our nascent romance, in a Mexican bar.

Looking at that old picture, the post-game trip to the border was an odd kick-off for us. Neither Nita nor I were ever “wild things,” even if we were children of the ‘60’s and met at the most liberal university in Texas. We were both raised Methodists, for heaven's sake. (By the way, I really can use liberal and Texas in the same sentence, but only when referencing The University, not the capitol building and its inhabitants.)

Odd beginning or not, I’m here to say 45 years later, that the sweet gal changed my life, that in the four and a half decades since we said “I do” to each other, the biggest joys in my life have revolved around her. She has blessed me in every way, and I love her as much, likely even more, this morning than I did on January 8, 1972.

Enough of the mushy stuff, and thank you for your patience.

There is a new McBride novel link in this post, because the main characters in my newly begun manuscript, Texas Ranger Captain James Callahan and Sergeant Constantine McCloud, are going to spend some time in Piedras Negras, Mexico. They visited in the fall of 1855, not after a football game, and 114 years before Nita and I got there.  Regardless, those old Rangers maybe even had a cold Negro Modelo cervaza in the same cantina where Nita and I had our first date.

But my new book characters won’t have as a good time as we did, because bullets were flying in 1855, and Captain Callahan ordered the whole town of Piedras Negras burned down the night he was there. I guess his beer wasn’t cold enough, or maybe it was too hoppy. Anyway, I’ll be writing more about that in future posts.

We woke up to 20 degree temperatures in Lockhart, Texas. Thought we were at the North Pole.  Have a good week.

A New Novel About A Guy Named Constantine

It’s 2017, and the house is quiet. We have un-decorated and taken down the tree, stored the ten stockings hanging from the mantle, and stashed the talking, belching, rump-shaking naughty Santa Claus doll that scares grandson Jackson. 

Since 2016 is gone by, here's my favorite family photo of the year, one my wife sneakily took one afternoon last May. That's Jackson with the pacifier and me with the Longhorn t-shirt. It must have been a good meal.

The Dallas Cowboys are in the NFL Play-offs, and I’m pecking away at a new manuscript. Life is good.

Writing-wise, I’m leaving the Civil War behind me in favor of 1855 Texas, with the action starting just a few miles from where I’m sitting in Recliner #7.  The foundation of the new book sprung from my assigned “spirit” in last year’s local Historical Society fund-raising Cemetery Ramble “Talking With the Dead.”

I took on the role of Constantine Connolly who lived and died in Lockhart and is buried here. Over two nights, I told his life story twenty-four times, condensed to eight minutes. I feel like I know the guy fairly well now. So now, I’m writing an early Texas novel based on his real experiences as a new immigrant.

As a young man in 1855, two years after his arrival in Texas from Alabama, Constantine served a three-month stint in the Texas Rangers. He was the 24 year-old First Sergeant in Captain James Callahan’s company of Rangers during the “Callahan Expedition” into northern Mexico. 

The official purpose of the expedition was to pursue and punish Lipan Apaches who had been raiding into central Texas with growing impunity. Callahan’s unofficial agenda also included capturing as many runaway slaves living across the Rio Grande as they could.  

There’s a lot of historical back-story to Callahan’s Expedition that I’ll work into the novel plot, but the key thing is that Captain Callahan led 110 Texas Ranger militiamen across the Rio Grande River—illegally— into Mexico to punish a band of Apache raiders for the depredations they had been making into central Texas.

The outnumbered Rangers wound up in a gunfight with both Indians and Mexican cavalry, who did not welcome the Texans into their country. The Rangers  withdrew to the border town of Piedras Negras (across from modern-day Eagle Pass, Texas). 

When darkness fell, Captain Callahan ordered his men to torch the entire town of Piedras Negras, home to about 1,000 people, to provide light and to distract the Mexican soldiers, while his men were ferried a few at a time back across the flooding Rio Grande River into Texas. 

There are lots more details in the period accounts of the expedition, including how the US Army officers in Eagle Pass reacted to Callahan incursion into Mexico. To summarize, it was not the Texas Rangers’ finest hour, even if it was a popular action with the Anglo settlers in central Texas who had endured two decades of horrifying Indian raids. The home folks saw Callahan's reprisal raid as a bit of long-overdue sweet revenge.

The actual battle between Callahan’s Rangers and the combined forces of Mexican cavalry and Indian warriors is called the Battle of Rio Escondido, since the conflict took place near the Escondido River.  As far as I can learn, there’s not been any movies made about the battle by either Mexican or American film makers, but here is a poster for a Mexican film with the same river title. I’ve no clue what the film is about, but I like the art of the poster.

I’m writing the new book with a residual sense of gratification that the McBee Civil War trilogy is a done deal, as we say down here.  Perhaps it’s normal that after three years of living every day with the characters in my head, I’m still hearing their voices as I’m creating new characters.

And I’ve indulged in every novelists’ sweet dessert of putting a new book’s characters in contact with characters from an earlier book. The new novel starts in 1853, which would make the young Confederate soldiers who marched off to war from San Antonio in 1862, 10 year old boys in 1853. Two of those of those Confederate soldiers, Bain Gill and Jesús McDonald, are the main characters in Whittled Away, my first Civil War novel. They already have made a cameo appearance as 10-year-old boys in an early chapter of the story of Captain Callahan’s expedition.

So, Happy New Year to each of you. Keep reading good books.