Getting It Straight
Gwendolyn Scott

Let´s get this straight: I do not love Houston. I have lived here off and on for the past twenty-nine years, but I do not love the place. I think my aversion (my unease) comes from my first memories of being in Houston. My two sisters and I used to spend a couple of weeks during the summer down here. (I call it down here because I´m from Lovelady, which is north and east of here.) It was the custom back then, in the early sixties, for relatives who lived in the city to invite their country relatives to the city for some acculturation—a chance to see what the future held—an opportunity to get out of the sticks.

Among my first experiences with Houston was a visit to Aunt Agnes´ house. Aunt Agnes and Uncle James had only one daughter, Rita. It was unusual at that time for people to have just one child; everyone I knew had at least two, and most people—country people—had four, five, or six. Aunt Agnes lived on Altoona, a street on the near northeast side of Houston in an area known as Kashmere Gardens. We had heard of Altoona, of course. Whenever Aunt Agnes and Uncle James visited, they always seemed to mention the name of the street in some context or another. Usually it was something like: “Well, it´s time to head back down there. Altoona is a long way from here.” I always thought they were rubbing it in, that they lived on a street while we still lived on a dead-end dirt road; escaping menial farm labor and moving to town was a universal ambition among blacks. We would get Christmas cards from them, and being a word junkie, I used to stare at the word, A-l-t-o-o-n-a, an image of the moon forming in my mind.

Finally (I guess I was nine or ten), my sisters and I went to visit Aunt Agnes on Altoona Street. I didn´t want the place to be beautiful, grand. I didnÍt want to be impressed with Altoona Street, but I was disappointed when I wasn´t. The house had two bedrooms, a living room, a tiny kitchen with a table too small for all of us to sit around at one time, a dining room with plastic still on the chair bottoms, and a back door with a screen that sagged in places. It was smaller than our house! The puny backyard was bordered on one side by the garage and on the other side by the neighborÍs garage, so there was the feeling of being walled in. A clothesline stretched almost the whole way across; I felt as though I were in an outdoor closet. The house sat so close to the street that the front yard was all but nonexistent. A three-foot high wire fence separated the yard from the sidewalk.

We arrived on a Sunday afternoon, and by Sunday night, I was ready to leave. My bed was a pallet on the floor. I was accustomed to falling asleep to the chirp of crickets, the throaty soprano calls of night owls, and the grup-grup of frogs. Back then, city men wore taps on their dress shoes. I lay awake that Sunday night listening to the shing of metal on concrete, cars humming by on the street, and people talking, sometimes loudly, to each other. I would have called it a den of iniquity had I known those words, but I didn´t know them, so I just lay there, disapproving and wanting to pee. I donÍt remember their bathroom, but something about it must have been unnerving because I wasnÍt about to go stumbling through the dark house to use it.

We stayed with Aunt Agnes for several days, then we went and stayed with Aunt Lois. I had been to her house several times before. It was nicer than Aunt Agnes´; Aunt Lois and Uncle Ross owned the vacant lot on the south side of their house, so I felt I could breathe better there. But Aunt Lois was openly dismissive and contemptuous of us, her younger brother´s country children. She seemed to be especially critical of me. When I was seven, I went to live with them in Livingston and be a playmate for my cousin Dudley. But that arrangement only lasted two weeks because I learned to make myself throw up every time I ate„I didn´t like Livingston, Aunt Lois, or Dudley. Staying with Aunt Lois meant making your bed the minute you got out of it, eating practically nothing all day, and incessant visits from relatives and her friends. She took us on rides downtown. We went into department stores where she didn´t buy anything, and we were warned not to touch anything. The white store clerks watched us with disapproving stares, making sure they caught Aunt Lois´ eye to warn her to keep us in close check. To me, the experience was no different from what IÍd experienced in stores in Crockett or Lovelady. It seems we were “colored” no matter where we went.

Two years later, I announced that I didn´t want to go to Houston for the two-week stay. My sisters went, collecting new and hand-me-down clothes from our older city cousins, but I stayed at home. The next time I spent any appreciable amount of time in Houston was when I´d finished college. My cousin Rita, whose husband was in the Navy, had had a baby and wanted to move into an apartment. She needed help with the rent. I decided that I would have a better chance of finding a job in Houston, so I moved into a one-bedroom apartment off Tidwell on Parker Road with her and her son, Cory. We lived only a few blocks from Aunt Agnes. She and Uncle James had left Altoona Street and moved to a neighborhood with nice, two-story houses that white people were practically giving away in their flight from an encroaching and increasingly mobile black middle class.

I´d received one job offer from the Social Security Administration for a position in Kansas City. However, I didn´t want to leave Texas for a variety of reasons, and I turned it down. That was a big mistake. I looked for jobs at the bank and in the school districts around Lovelady, but civil rights laws against discrimination notwithstanding, blacks weren´t hired in local businesses in 1971. My job hunting experience still brings tears to my eyes. A woman at an employment agency told me a degree from Prairie View A&M was like a diploma from a fairly good high school. She didn´t feel she could “do anything for me,” and she didn´t. I would catch the bus at the corner up the street from the apartment and spend all day in downtown Houston filling out applications. I even went to some of the same department stores I remembered from those long ago summers.

Once, after going to an address supplied by an employment agency only to find out that the business was closed and the building abandoned, I stood in knee-high grass waiting for a bus to take me back downtown. A pickup truck full of Mexicans passed by, and I didn´t have to know Spanish to know what they were suggesting. Two or three of them stood up in the bed of the truck, grabbing their crotches and grinning luridly. When the bus finally did arrive, the black bus driver told me I was not in a good part of town. When I told him the next address on my list, he said IÍd do better to find another agency.

For the next three months, I was soaked in sudden rain showers, splattered at curbs, and shouted at from a wide variety of vehicles. The nicest thing to happen was a very respectfully worded proposition from a white man in a Lincoln at the corner of Caroline and Main. I finally got a junior accounting clerk job at Automotive Paint and Supply on Austin, south of downtown. I was paid minimum wage, about $4 an hour. I ate grilled cheese sandwiches at a diner for lunch and lost nearly ten pounds in three months.

I rode the bus through downtown every day, looking at the skyscrapers and wondering why, how, and why again. I wanted to blame someone for that daily regimen of humiliation and rejection I had endured, but who? The anonymity of all those people on the street rendered them blameless. The only visible and nameable entity was Houston; I could blame Houston. The rejection had felt personal, and I developed a palpable hate for the city that hung on even after I got the clerk job. My only relief from my misery was my weekend visits home. One of the guys at the store would take me to the Continental Trailways bus station on Fridays, and I would catch the six oÍclock bus north.

The bus route to Lovelady passed a new apartment complex that sat on the edge of a field ten miles north of the city. I fantasized that I lived there, in the upstairs corner apartment next to the field. I lived alone, with no furniture except for a bed, a television, and a large chair for reading. I worked in one of the high-rises on the north side (the work I did was never part of the dream). I drove a used Ford that Daddy had signed for, but I made the payments. I daydreamed of coming back to the apartment on Fridays, going straight to bed, and waking up at four a.m. and driving to Lovelady in the dark morning air with the windows down.

In July my boyfriend asked me to marry him. He graduated from Prairie View in August of 1971 and took a job with Humble (now ExxonMobil). We were married less than a week later and moved into a cavernous, one-bedroom apartment with dark green carpet on the west side of town, a place called The French Quarter at the corner of Hillcroft and Westheimer. We also had a car. Houston is a different place if you have a car. Even downtown looks different from a car window. We went on long rides around town and occasionally out to dinner. My favorite diversion was to drive out Memorial with its wide esplanade. The street dipped, swooped, and swerved, taking us past large houses sitting half-hidden behind even larger trees. Friends lived in Clear Lake, and we visited them almost every weekend. We shopped in the stores—not buying, but looking, planning—and I began to think I could find a better job. My attitude toward Houston dragged itself from hatred to reticent dislike.

Eventually I got a job at Texas Commerce Bank as a loan clerk. For the first time, I was among the skyscrapers. The bank building was on the corner of Main and Rusk. Joining the waiting crowds at the lights, padding through the rain to the parking lot four blocks from the bank, I finally felt accepted, as if I belonged in Houston. I felt Houston-like. The office politics, the gossip, the petty squabbles were fun for a while. I even enjoyed the job, for the most part. Still, after a year, we became restless.

Tired of the increasing traffic, intimidated by our deteriorating neighborhood, and needing to make more money, we decided to move to the small-town intimacy of Lake Jackson. It surprised us how often we went back into Houston. Sometimes we came into the city just for dinner; the four restaurants in Lake Jackson at the time fried everything. The town also had no theatres nor museums, and high school football is not one of my passions. Finally—four years, three apartments and a house, and two babies later—we moved back, but we stuck to the suburbs this time: Missouri City.

I´ve lived in the suburbs for ten years now. It is quiet here, most of the time. Birds are plentiful, domestic disturbances unheard of. My house is spacious and quiet with plenty of blank walls and half-empty rooms. Behind the subdivision is a pasture, and along the road at the front are plowed fields where someone grows cotton, soybeans, or grain each year. My street is a cul-de-sac, so there is little traffic. A decent amount of time will pass between cars, and it is possible to indulge in short, meditative episodes of inward-dwelling. I grow rosebushes in my backyard, which is separated from my neighborÍs by a tall wood fence.

If the ultimate luxury is peace, then the next is choice, and Houston´s proximity gives me that. Sometimes when I have the urge to be in the mix of things, I will go downtown, usually to shop for fabric. The little craftsy stores in Missouri City, with their wall-hanging straw hats and ceramic pigs, don´t qualify as real stores. When I go downtown, I get an injection of the urgency and possibility of this world. The ebb and flow of the people at the lights and the unceasing stream of cars suggest a sense of purpose, a reason for the constant activity. Still, even though I need to remember that sometimes, I will always carry the never-healed wound of rejection from long ago. Maybe we all need to know that we are not invincible, but we don´t have to forgive the messenger.

No, I don´t love Houston; got that straight?

Copyright©2000 Gwendolyn Scott