Peripheral Vision: Hommage to M. Flannery O'Connor

Robie McKnight wanted to get a look at the new-born me as soon as I arrived with Mom and Dad for my premier visit at Nonnie's and Pappy’s.?I was all snuggly in a big wicker laundry basket, the kind used for hanging wet clothes out in the sun—Mom always said you could smell the sun in the sheets and pillowcases, which she ironed anyway.?I have seen black and white photos of me in that basket, smiling, and perhaps smiling back at Robie as he was remembered to have proclaimed to Nonnie, “Mrs. Holder, that’s sure the prettiest White baby I ever did see!”?My Grandfather, Pappy, got a kick out of Robie’s racial qualifier and loved to tell and laugh at the story.?But do you know, that neither Robie, nor Frank his son, nor Frank’s wife, whose name I never learned because I was not on a need-to-know basis, were ever photographed that I ever saw in any of the the family albums, even though they were there at Nonnie’s and Pappy’s more often than not, the two men mostly off on construction jobs with Pappy, while Frank’s wife, the younger Mrs. McKnight, doing my Grandmother’s washing and ironing and cleaning to a great extent, that is whatever was left to do after my Moher finished with it? Doesn't that seem peculiar to you? ?If the jobs Pappy was working on were close enough to the house, he would come home for dinner (aka ‘lunch’ up North) and would bring home with him the McKnights, the Elder and the Younger.? And there, right at my Grandparents’ big kitchen-dining room table, Pappy would always ask Robie, the farmer preacher, ‘to return thanks,’ and Robie would offer a beautiful prayer and a different one every time.?Pappy respected him, valued him, liked him and, I believe, even loved him and his family in Pappy’s own crippled Southern way.? And yet, as I say, they were not in the picture, Robie and Frank, never in any of the pictures.?

The Germans have a phrase they use to describe experiencing something a bit odd that you might notice just out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to see it, it is gone.?This has its origins in the practice of the Kings of Prussia and the Dukes of Brandenburg, and most famously ?Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf, of bringing Protestant refugees from whom Catholic Empress Maria Teresia of Austria-Hungary could no longer extort any money safely to their estates where they permitted them freedom of religion and freedom from most harassment.?The King of Poland, without of course consulting his subjects, took Maria Theresia's unwanted Jews. The result was shtetls and some Jewish neighborhoods, not ghettos, in Poland, purpose-built by the 'King of the Four Religions,' and in German territory rings of little refugee villages around cities like Berlin through which the traveler by personal or Post coach might catch sight of a sign with entirely too many consonants crammed together into one word, and of people dressing a little differently and, if the coach made a stop in one of these places, the German-speaking traveler might cock his or her ear and not know what he was hearing people speaking, but he would know for sure that it was not German.?That is because it was Czech, or, as most Germans of that era would say, ‘Bohemian.’?Hence, at long last, the origins of the saying, ‘Das kommt mir wie b?hmische D?rfer vor’ or ‘That’s seems a little like Bohemian villages to me.’?It was not that there was anything wrong with Bohemian villages populated by Bohemians in Bohemia, but the fact that they were in what may loosely be termed the German Empire or the Kingdom of Prussia was just a little weird.

Growing up in the segregationist South, of which Texas was a big old part, was a little like those ‘Bohemian villages.’?It was a little weird, more than a little I would say, and I know.?Thousands of people have known this, especially those at the receiving end of African slavery for three hundred years and of Jim Crow for another 150 and counting, and every sorry thing that came out of all that.?Those who perpetrated unspeakable cruelty and degradation as well as their White descendants, both the apologists for the ‘Peculiar Institution’ and those who loathed it, more privately than publicly, also noticed the weirdness. How could one not??It is the great theme of Southern literature to which the the post-Puritan moral malaise of the North cannot hold a candle. The great Southern writers from Faulkner to Penn Warren to McCullers, to Caldwell, to Williams to Capote, all knew it, all despised it, but only one, Mary Flannery O’Connor, understood it for what it was, and she could get into the skin of racism and its irrationality through her characters like nobody's business because she knew exactly how it worked and how it is passed on, a little like the disease of lupus from which her beloved father and then she herself suffered and died—not by indoctrination so much as by infection, by folding, warping, fraying and tearing apart of the fabric of our humanity of which the idiotic excesses of public segregation were just a mirror image. In her theological and radically Catholic view, that is exactly what humanity needs, redemption of that warped humanity, the very job Jesus Christ came here to do.?

That White Southern weirdness, that whiplash of reality in human relations, thinking you understood one thing but then coming to find out that you understand nothing, was what was just about to happen to 5-year-old me in about 1956.?Gotta start on 'em young!

Even in between jobs, Nonnie and Pappy always kept the McKnights steady on the payroll.?Nonnie was the bookkeeper and paymaster.?The pounding sound of an adding machine with manual crank could be heard from the office, as well as discussions between my Grandparents about how to decipher Pappy’s entries in the all-important ‘Time Book.’?I marveled at her efficiency and seriousness, so different from when she was spoiling me rotten by sewing me a historical costume to my specifications in a jiffy, or feeding her chickens or nonchalantly decapitating one of them for supper without use of an axe or hatchet.?Then she was having fun with me, and was all smiles. ?The Office was for business.??I knew that, if I got in the way or chattered too much, lecturing to my Grandmother on diverse subjects that recommended themselves to my young mind, I would soon find myself elsewhere such as in the blast furnace of a South Texas summer afternoon.?But one question I did manage to ask her was about the big book of checks she had, in which I could see that she wrote in her immaculate hand.?I learned that this was the means by which 'Guy C. Holder, General Contractor (& Architectural Engineer)' paid both his men and the people he bought materials from, such as the Alamo Iron Works in San Antonio, or the plumbing supplier in Luling who for some reason had pictures of naked ladies plastered all over his shop, by Vargas I think, though not knowing that artist at the time.?Pappy, on seeing my gaping mouth and confused look informed me that that was “all just a bunch of monkey business.”?Anyway, I guess Nonnie had to write Mr. Monkey Business a check too.?“Would it be possible to write just anybody a check at any time, such as me?” I managed to ask.?“No, it would not!”?And outside I went.

If Robie, with or without his son Frank, were there at my Grandparents’ place in Leesville, it would be for purposes of ‘landscaping’ (which used to be known as just damned hard work) under the direction of Mary Josephine ‘May’ Holder, Mrs. Holder, Nonnie.?Until I started to school, if I was there, and Robie was there, and he was doing anything at all with a wheelbarrow, he would always give me a ride in it without me asking.?After one such one-wheeled dash over the smooth Saint Augustine grass, Robie deposited me at the entrance to the glassed-in porch which separated the main part of the house from The Office and also from The Shop where marvelous things were fabricated by Pappy himself or by his master carpentersand cabinet makers--those Square-heads, Bohunks and Polaks!-- whom he referred to as ‘mechanics.’??Ride now over, there I was, and there Robie was with the outside door to the glassed-in porch open and Nonnie not far away (and eavesdropping) in The Office, and me thanking him, which I never omitted to do having been ‘raised right,’ as the ones raising me always said, and he must have asked me a question, because I said, as I thought all kids who were raised right were supposed to say, “Yes, Sir!” And Robie went on his way to finally get some work done again.?The next thing I knew, I had been grabbed by my scrawny little left arm between the shoulder and the elbow, and whipped around as though my arm were a lariat.?“Guy Christopher!”?It was Nonnie, as she snapped me around to look at her right in both eyes, “Do you know how you just embarrassed Robie?!”?“No Ma’am.”?“You don’t ever say ‘Yes, Sir’ to him.?You just say ‘Robie.’?And, you had better hope that Pappy never hears you say anything like what you just said.”?

‘Confusion’ would be inadequate to describe what had just happened to my moral and cognitive processes, but it certainly did open up a very large, even vast, and interesting topic, my Grandfather.?What would Pappy actually do if . . ." If Nonnie spent her days with her adding machine and her domestic and outside servants, and driving herself and me around, on various errands and to various appointments to specific people in Nixon, Luling, Gonzales and Seguin, with whom she had business or just wanted to meet for coffee, or, God-forbid, to spend hours upon stinking hours at the beauty parlor, Pappy spent his days dealing not only with clients and suppliers but as a man among men.

We are talking about White men, Brown men and Black men on all his jobs, of which there always seemed to be more than one at a time.?These were his men, his army, and he was one of them, a true son of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Nance Garner if ever there was one.??What mattered was getting the job done, doing a good job of work and making sure that his men got paid so that they could take care of their families and continue to work with him.?And what also mattered to Guy C. Holder was respect.?One of his clients in the old days once told me years later two things that did not surprise me.?For one, this president of the oldest bank in Texas, at Yorktown, for whom Pappy had done extensive work in practically rebuilding the bank but making it look like the same 1840s historical structure from the outside, told me that he was always impressed with how kind my Grandfather was toward his men, with how he spoke to them with respect for their persons and their work.??The other very interesting fact he banker told me, just between us, was that many of the ranchers and other clients of my Grandfather, including Pappy’s competition, did not appreciate the fact that he paid his men practically according to union scale when there was no union in that Taft-Hartley right-to-work-and-be-poor State of Texas, at least not for construction workers with the exception of electricians. Why, he even paid the Negros and the Mexicans that way.?I hope that is true, though sometimes people exaggerate, even in praising others—not I, of course.?And, he also mentioned what I had heard directly from people for whom Pappy had built homes, such as about half of Alamo Heights in San Antonio, practicing the Spanish Colonial architecture he loved.?‘He bid high and came in low.?He gave us a completion date and was then finished before he said he would be.?He was more than a man of his word.’?

Both my maternal Grandparents came from very rural and dirt poor Texas, he from Brown County in West Texas and she from McNeil, in the Hill Country, north of Austin.?Whereas Nonnie was still fighting the Civil War, her Grandmother Williams having been quite an equestrian and a notorious courier for the Confederacy, charming her way past Union officers across Louisiana and sometimes through their beds, Pappy was a man of the present, so he had the full compliment of early 20th Century ethnic, national and racial prejudices and epithets in his mind and vocabulary.?This had been tempered drastically, however, by a German-Jewish businessman, Mr. G. A. C. "Gaucho" Halff, owner of the Southern Equipment Company of San Antonio and, among other things, WOAI Radio, who liked the job my Grandfather did for him on his home and so had him build a new radio station, which Pappy later remodeled to accommodate television..?Gaucho Halff was an innovative entrepreneur, and sometimes by accident. As an example, Mr. Halff created demand for his WOAI Radio, and reduced the inventory of his Southern Equipment Company all at the same time, by giving away crystal sets to San Antonians. In 1922/23, Mr. Halff had ordered two boxes of the little radio kits, but, through a clerical error, two box cars of them showed up instead, thus providing the new radio station owner a ready means of saturating the market, which he in fact owned having donated the radios used to tune in. Single and childless, Mr. Halff treated young Guy Holder like a son and set him up in business which weathered the Great Depression, with offices in San Antonio, Amarillo and Port Aranzas, this supplemented by political appointments as an an inspector for the WPA.?Mr. Halff also had my Grandfather manage the ranch he bought near Leesville and had Pappy outfit it with outbuildings, sturdy corrals, stock tanks and even lakes for sport and his gigantic Santa Gertrudis cattle, first bred on the King Ranch.?He kept a stable of quarter horses for his cowboys, every one of them African American, and some special Tennessee Walkers for Nonnie to ride, which I am told she did daily and usually bareback.?Jews and Jewishness were not the subject of ridicule or anything except remembering the goodness and generosity of Mr. Halff, and as Nonnie liked to say quite simply, that “Jesus was a Jew, too.”?

But there were other groups to pick on: Italians, aka ‘Dagos,’ for example, except that Pappy's best friend was an Army buddy from WWI and of Italian ancestry.?The Holders and the Canyons played endless rounds of Canasta every chance they got.?I know because I was there and could never get the hang of the game.?And there were the Germans, the fiendish arch-enemies, ‘the Huns,’ whom my Mother was not allowed to date in high school, one ‘Hun’ in particular, whom she often described in front of Pappy many years later even in my hearing as “the nicest boy I ever met.”?And yet, any number of German-Americans, of whom South Texas can claim an abundance, worked for my Grandfather.?He described those ‘Square Heads’ as the best craftsmen there were, with the ‘Bohunks’ and ‘Polaks’ almost as good.?And, yes, then there were those people on whose country we had planted ourselves, formerly the State of Tejas-Coahuila, the Mexicans who in my day sometimes preferred to be called just that, no hyphen necessary. ?As anybody knows who knows Mexican workers, and Pappy knew them very well, there is not a harder worker on the face of this earth.?To this praise, in case he forgot and my Mother was present, she would add, “And they will give their last nickel for their kids!”?That was a little something Mom always held in reserve for any Anglo disparagement of the Spanish-speaking.??My father, having “spent four years in the g@#*%&d South Pacific,” had a simplified view of democracy, as previously quoted by me somewhere—“Democracy means I’m just as good as you under the law and not a bit better.”—and of race—“All blood is red.”?Of course, the whole history of the treatment of East Asians and then Pearl Harbor opened an abyss of ignorant prejudice and race hatred even in him.?All the Native Americans, the Comanche, Kiowa, Tonkawa and others had ‘moved’ so ‘they’ were not an issue.??

Nonnie remembered Mr. Halff's Rancho Quién Sabe as a paradise, but, when I was in the third grade and we were up from Kingsville visiting, a Christmas I think, my Mother showed me a tree once at the very end of a long sand and rock road that ran along the barbed wire fence indicating the Quién Sabe's property line that told a very different story from that of paradise.?

We were ‘up visiting,’ because we no longer lived there as the reader may have noticed in passing.??We had lost the farm in Leesville to bad luck, but mostly to a fire that broke out because it was so hot and dry that the pump wouldn’t even prime.?Garbage pickup in rural South Texas of the 1950s being definitely DYI, Mom had been burning trash, she telling me to stay in the yard as I had just cut my leg on some broken glass in the trash pile a couple of weeks before.?The wind blew, the fire jumped and a field of careless weeds and maize caught, the smoke rising instantly.?No one could explain exactly what happened next, and this is what happened.?Dad was working his shift at the San Antonio Light, so he was no help. Among a veritable convoy of neighbors who saw that smoke and who then showed up immediately with shovels and all kinds of things with which to control a brush fire, there was Robie McKnight.?I was headed toward the fire with a pitcher of Cool Aide, but Robie told me to get back in the house.?He then, according to my Mother who was by that time surrounded by the fire, drove his truck up a little closer to the trash fire and burning field and then, being miraculously equipped with tow sacks (aka ‘gunny sacks’) and two big galvanized steel cooler cans of water which he was planning to take to one of Pappy’s jobs, soaked those sacks and himself, and ran right through the fire, covering my Mother with the wet sacks, picking her up and running with her out of that fire.??That is what she said happened.?What happened next was that Mom cranked up the phone to get the operator at Littlefield’s Store to call the ‘fire department’ in Nixon, eleven miles away.?“That’s long distance.?Who’s gonna pay for this call?” snapped the operator.?“I will!” interrupted Lois Schmittekamp, on the party line as usual, “and if you don’t put that call through right now, I’m gonna come up there and put it through for you!”?A couple of hours later, what looked like a toy truck with a little ladder and a bell on it finally showed up. ??I wonder if anybody thought to check Robie for burns.

“They say they hung people on this tree back in the 1920s,” Mom explained.?“What people?” “People they thought needed to be hung, people like Robie and Frank.?No wonder God sent a flood to wipe out Leesville!”

Pappy lived within a system he had inherited, and he had to live there.?He did not try to change the way things were.?He tried to do right by the people he worked with.?There was nowhere else, as Flannery O’Connor tried in vain to explain when she sadly declined a request from James Baldwin to visit her in Georgia.?He wanted to honor her, to meet her, to hear her perspective on the struggle for civil rights, and to ask her a few very pointed questions about some things she had written.?“I would be pleased, so pleased to meet you anywhere in the world, in New York, in Paris, on the moon, on any planet you name, but not in Georgia, not in Milledgeville where I am free because I am invisible and forgotten,” she wrote.

Every year Pappy took me and Robie and Frank to the Stock Show and Rodeo at Joe Freeman Colosseum in San Antonio.?Nonnie did not always go, though when Roy Rogers and Dale Evans made an appearance one year, she was right there.?But the normal thing was that we four men went by ourselves, in Pappy’s big Oldsmobile.?We left early that morning, just like going to the job, except Robie and Frank dressed like they were going to church.?We looked at all of the US Army and Air Force and agricultural exhibits, ate some good food and had a good time.?We did all this until it was time to go to into the Colosseum for the Rodeo, together, or so I thought. ?But, I thought wrong, as often happened in that matrix.?There was not one entrance, but two, and guess what they were??Later, after Pappy and I had found our seats, which must have cost a lot because they were right up front, I asked where Robie and Frank were now.?Pappy pointed off to the end of the great indoor stadium.?“That’s the Colored section, Guy Christopher.”?

So much has changed, but so much hasn’t.?So many have suffered and died for that change.?So many are suffering and dying still.??And now, we don’t see it out of the corner of our eyes.?It is right in our face, week after week, day after day.

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?Guy Christopher Carter, 05/07/2023