A Piece of My Story
Patsy Cravens

I want to take a look at three strong women in my life. They were sisters: my aunt Nina Cullinan, another aunt Giggie (Margaret) Wray, and my mother, Mary Cravens. By choosing certain memories and small pieces of their stories, I hope to see how I have been influenced by them and by the way they lived their lives in Houston—a place where I have stayed my entire life, searching for my own way and my own voice, remembering that these are my impressions, and this is my story too.

Mary

My mother, Mary Catherine Cullinan, was raised to be pretty, be good (what is “good”?), live the proper life, please others, get married, follow the rules, and be rewarded with ease, happiness, and security. She did as taught. She acted self-assured but wasn’t, in actuality teeming with self-doubt and uncertainty. The wonderful thing is that she could sometimes struggle through her doubts and uncertainties to accept some tough challenges, “step out of place,” and speak up. She determinedly helped fight the Army Corps of Engineers over a proposed dam on the Colorado River near our farm (an ill-conceived project), and she lectured on the dangers of pesticides after reading Rachel Carson.

When I was a youngster, a black man took care of our yard, walking to our house with his mower and carrying his other tools on his shoulder. One day he was gone. All I knew was that something had caused my mother to be distressed and tearful. I learned later he had been charged with raping a white woman. Mama was certain he was innocent, that he had been working at our place at the time of the rape, and so she agreed to go to testify for him. When the prosecuting attorney countered by saying he would accuse her of having an affair with the man, he was counting on her shock and shame to discourage her testimony. It shattered her. The man was later convicted; Mama corresponded with him for a while in prison, but he was eventually executed. She remained heartsick over this injustice and, I suspect, her own impotence.

I only heard that story much later on. What I remember from childhood are the anguish and silence that surrounded it. More than forty years later, I produced an oral history video in which a black woman recalls the lynching of two teenage boys in her small Texas town in 1935 and an Episcopal bishop tells about his futile attempt to stop it. Not long after that, I began a very painful study of lynching history and produced another short video using accounts of lynchings from newspaper files. The dark pain I felt was not only in my heart and soul, but in my body as well: I was sickened. In the process, I became aware of my lifelong ignorance about such events, and I now can begin to imagine the pain Mary must have felt when that innocent man was killed.

Nina

Aunt Nina was the possessor of a tremendous sense of fairness, with a love of laughter and an appreciation of the ridiculous. She was an individualist, a supporter of unpopular causes, and a seeker of honesty and the truth. She could be fierce and angry at times . . . not always “nice” and ladylike. “We should be able to talk about anything,” I can still hear her say with a note of exasperation, ”anything!” This within a family busy listing the things that could not be talked about: religion, politics, sexual matters . . . the interesting stuff.

Nina was a lone but staunch Democrat within a social group that was predominantly Republican. Many times I heard her say to someone, with ardor and frustration in her husky voice, “If you want to use the words ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ first tell me what you mean by them. Don’t just throw words around; tell me what you mean and then we’ll talk.” To me, this was about the importance of using words responsibly, not as clubs or labels that suppress and intimidate, but for clarity and communication. She would catch me sometimes making a careless remark about somebody and warn me to take care in my judgment of others—that unless I had “walked in their shoes,” I’d better be quiet.

Although esteemed in Houston society, she came across to me as down to earth, authentic, and honest, as well as a great lover of laughter. Once when we went to see Aida, the couple in front of us turned around to greet her in the awkward, fawning way that always embarrassed her—“Miss Cullinan, we’re so honored to see you.” Soon afterwards Miss Cullinan, connoisseur and patron of the arts, got the giggles. When the tenor came on stage, he was several inches shorter than his romantic counterpart and wearing high heels and a bad toupee. It was a pure Marx Brothers moment. Aunt Nina completely lost her composure and broke up laughing. Since we couldn’t leave gracefully from our center seats and she couldn’t pull herself together, it made for a very long first act.

Aunt Nina was not flawless, but she was a treasured and beloved friend to me. I am grateful for what she taught me, from her sense of responsibility to her caring about human welfare, her disdain of judgmental opinion, her readiness to talk and disagree when women were supposed to be agreeable, her belief in the importance of sharing our blessings, and her willingness to speak up against unfairness, and to laugh at pomposity and ostentation.

Giggie

Margaret Wray, Aunt Giggie to us, adored animals and kept unkempt, friendly dogs of various types lying around her house. She possessed a prodigious wit and a naughty sense of humor, which her friends adored, but which eluded most people because she hid it behind her soft voice and the self-effacing way she let her husband take center stage. Still, she was a natural born humorist: she wrote quite funny Ogden Nash-type rhymes and odd, off-beat observations on very small pieces of paper, which she left casually lying around. Both she and Nina found pomposity totally ludicrous and took great humor in anything that pricked somebody else’s stuffiness.

While Aunt Nina had no lawn at all—her tiny, jewel-like house sat near the bayou in trees, underbrush, and a smattering of camellias—Aunt Giggie had a large lawn where she grew exuberant islands of clover that she left unmown. The clover was always tall and luxuriant, and I can remember spikes of white blossoms perfuming her yard. The foliage made a lovely, cool spot for us young ones to loll around in, talking and dreaming on hot days. I can still feel its cool and smell the sweet scent.

That memory has since inspired me to do an imitation. I now let my lawn go unmown and uncontrolled for a while in the spring (breaking the unwritten rules of Proper Living Houston 2000). I love to see what flowers hide there, waiting to grow: blue flax, clover, and wood violets, among others. It drives my neighbors nuts, because I live in a proper place where perfectly mown, perfectly green, pure St. Augustine grass is a necessity and a point of prestige. For me, though, it is no chemicals, no blowers, no lawn crews, no perfect lawn competition—just the random designs of nature. And Nature has her way for a while, thanks to my dear aunt.

When the three sisters were getting old, I hired a cameraman to tape them, hoping to hear some of their favorite memories. Aunt Nina hated to be photographed, but she agreed to it since it was “for the children.” And once she got going, she told me things I’d never heard before. There were memories of their wonderful childhood house downtown, on Rusk at Crawford near Enron Field; living near Maurice Hirsch and hearing his sister play the violin through the open windows; the fire that destroyed the family’s stables and the horses that panicked and ran back in; their streets topped with wooden blocks that made a powerful clatter when the horse-drawn fire engines passed by; the girls crossing the street to keep away from the taverns on Main Street; walking down the bayou to Harrisburg for picnics on the weekends; going to school in a wagon; fun days spent riding the trolley out Bellaire Boulevard and into the country; daylong excursions to the Neuhaus farm, way out on Voss Road, where Woodway now runs. Her sisters joined her for the second taping, and they got into a familiar argument on camera over something trivial, in their usual, sisterly way.

In a world where bigger, larger, grander, newer, and more opulent seem to be the order of the day, I look back to Mary, Giggie, and Nina as models of lives lived without pretension but instead with simplicity, a sense of responsibility, and human caring. They knew what mattered—and it wasn’t makeup, glamour, rich carpets, fancy cars, glittering display. I went from a teenager’s embarrassment over their clothes to an imitation of them. Today leather ground grippers, faded Levi skirts, and sweaters wrapped around the waist are some of my favorite outfits.

Mama taught me respect for our black neighbors, as best she could. Aunt Nina taught me about sharing our largess with others. And Aunt Giggie reinforced the lack of pretension they all shared: her house edged on the slightly shabby, with worn chair covers, old scatter rugs, and dogs underfoot . . . pretty much the way I live today. When my sons were teenagers, I went through all the uncertainties of a parent, wondering how they would turn out. But then one son, at thirteen years old, went outside one morning only to come back in, saying, ”You’ve got to go outside, Mom, get down low and look at the dew on the grass—it’s beautiful.” I knew then that some things would be all right, and they are.

Because of these women, I have a sense of civic responsibility and try to give back from life’s goodness to me. I feel very fortunate. I champion the underdog and mistrust authority. I hate capital punishment. I try to speak up and speak out when it is important to do so. I enjoy books, good food, unfettered gardens, friends, and going without shoes. I love my work and my cameras—or rather the work I do with them. My sons are lovely, kindhearted men, and I cherish them, their wives, and their children. I love a good laugh. I adore nature, storms, trees, bugs, babies, birds, dogs, children, the ocean, and dancing in all its forms. My dogs are underfoot and spoiled. I feel intensely connected to my God, who is not male, and I am wary of institutionalized religion. I worry over human rights and civil rights, the injustice and inequality in our world. I fret over the complacency we privileged few enjoy when lulled by the belief that “things are better” so we can rest on our successes. I deplore the racism and homophobia I see all around me and within me, in hidden nooks and crannies, reinforced by my good luck in being born white and well-off in America. And I keep on learning and changing, thanks, in part, to those three.

Copyright©2000 Patsy Cravens