Cultural Cowardice

A little while back, I did a 6 p.m. appearance/signing in Houston and decided I wouldn’t drive all the way back to Fort Worth. I stayed at one of my rural go-tos, Best Western, in Madisonville, and presumed I’d finish the drive the next morning.

I got sidetracked.

The human brain does some strange off-line processing when we sleep, and that night mine got busy. Upon arrival the evening before, I’d checked a few emails, watched some provincial TV, and then crashed. Around dawn, the ol’ cranial command center reminded me where I was: Madisonville.

So, I thought, groggily.

Cranial command was succinct. Volga is just east. And so is Lovelady.

Oh, I thought. Right.

Volga, as in hometown of J.A. Siddon. Lovelady, as in the vicinity of where some of my friend Robin Wells’ forebears lived. There were some things I needed to follow up on, and I was in the right neighborhood to do it. It just hadn’t occurred to me the night before.

Over a decade back, I had stumbled across an incredibly important letter while doing research for The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas (The History Press, 2014). It was a communication from the time from Siddon, the postmaster of Volga, to Cecil A. Lyon, the chairman of the Texas Republican State Executive Committee in Sherman:

For Humanities sake if you have any influence with the Federal government prevail on the proper authorities to investigate the conditions that prevail in this country as regards the Negro. Some [illegible] 20 or 30 colored people were murdered at Slocum in Anderson County, Texas for no other cause than the Lord had made them Black; the State of Texas will have a farce of a trial for a show to the world, but no one will ever be punished for these monstrous crimes. Most every plantation that works any considerable number of Negroes carry on a kind of peonage, for instance they will pay a Negro per day, charge him unheard of prices for the necessities of life as for instance 40 cents per gallon for kerosene 10 cts per Bot[tle] for search light matches with a studied effort to keep the Negro in debt. For the merest infraction of plantation rules they are flogged unmercifully and should they try to indict one of these plantation bosses why they would give him a pass to the Happy Hunting grounds. I am not a lawyer, but there should be a law on the statute books of the nation to punish such practices as these when a state will not. There have been a number of Negroes murdered in this county by whites and no arrests have ever been made. In conclusion, I will say I am a white man, am a Republican on National issues although I vote in the Democratic Primaries. If the United States can abolish such practices as these later I will tell you where to find some guilty parties. Will kindly ask you not to make my name public in connection with this as I would fear assassination.

Siddon’s letter changed the trajectory of the research for my book on the Slocum Massacre.

In the old days, the position of postmaster in an unincorporated area was no small thing. Though informal, it constituted the only political representation there. Lyon forwarded Siddon’s letter on to the U.S. Attorney General, George Wickersham, requesting a federal investigation, but nothing seems to have come of it except Siddon — the first postmaster of Volga (according to the Texas State Historical Association) — disappears from history, and, seven years later, the Volga post office is shuttered. The small school in Volga eventually folds in with the Lovelady Independent School District. And Siddon’s earnest request, that his name not be made “public,” appears to have been ignored. There’s no proof of an “assassination,” but Siddon is listed in JP Precinct 4 in the 1910 Houston County census — and by the 1920 Houston County census, his name disappears.

When most of Siddon’s neighbors (in Houston County, Anderson County, and most of the rest of East Texas) ignored blatant injustice — or deferred to the established mandate of white primacy — Siddon refused or forgot to keep his head low, and his attempt at what we now refer to as “whistleblowing” was probably even more unpopular then than it is now.

In the early 20th century, a 2.0 version of the previous plantation system in East Texas was still in full effect. Blacks were still being beaten. Blacks were still being murdered. And — talk about white privilege — Black women and girls were being raped by white men at will and without consequence.

My friend Robin Wells’ great-great grandmother (on the maternal side) lived in Houston County JP Precinct 4 around the same time as Siddon, and she was raped by her mother’s white employer when she was only 14 years old. The result was Robin’s great grandmother. Later, Robin’s family left Houston County and moved to the Dallas area. Robin’s grandmother and great-grandmother remained wary of and cagey around white people for the rest of their days.

“The lawlessness of rural East Texas didn’t exist in Dallas,” Robin said, “but [Blacks] were still quick to suss out whether a particular white person was predatory or potentially fair.”

*****

Today, on maps, the Houston County town of Volga no longer seems to exist. The Slocum Massacre happened farther north, mostly in the southeastern portion of Anderson County. When conducting research for the book, I’d discovered the Volga lead late, and, though the letter was significant, I’d never made a trip to the area. I wanted to. It seemed important. And the morning after the Houston signing, I had the opportunity. It was belated due diligence if nothing else, so I headed east instead of north toward home.

When I studied the maps I always carry (yes, real ones, paper foldout), I noted Volga’s proximity to Lovelady. I figured I could kill two birds with a half tank of gas and be headed home by lunch.

I was wrong.

If you look up the Volga community historical marker (No. 11069) online, the “Texas Historical Markers” site Weebly displays a nice picture of the marker and the wording, which lists Samuel D. Knox (not James A. Siddon — another coincidence?) as the first postmaster. It also provides the location of the “Site of Volga Community” historical marker. Location: 7.6 miles west of Lovelady on FM 230, then west on Hyde’s Ferry Road 1.8 miles to CR 3485, then north on CR 3485 .6 miles. It even lists GPS coordinates: 31.065939, -95.581230.

Both are inaccurate.

The GPS coordinates put you in someone’s front yard, and the marker is not on CR 3485. It’s on the south side of 3455.

The Texas Historical Markers image clearly wasn’t current. I spent at least two hours trying to find the marker, and it didn’t look like the marker in the picture. The actual marker was hidden, concealed by roadside foliage. When I finally located it, I had to pull some of the bush cover away to even read it. I took a picture. It wasn’t just concealed. It was cracked — practically in half.

Another coincidence?

The Weebly site also noted a Supplemental Plate: from “Archie Adams’s Diary 1873-1897 & Volga Memory Club.” I couldn’t find where the Volga Memory Club still existed, and the members definitely seemed to have forgotten about the marker. And Archie Adams?

I recognized his name from my research. He was allegedly shot and killed by a Black man named Alex Watson in July 1903 because Watson wanted to work for another “master” at a different farm and Arch Adams tried to stop him. Apparently, Siddon wasn’t the only one troubled by the flourishing peonage system in East Texas.

*****

The history is there, but no one remembers it or tries to keep its remembrance current. Its “currency” seems worthless to most Texans, and there’s a stark reason for that. Robin, who left Dallas in 1976 and went on to become an assistant professor at MIT and Stanford, then a lecturer at Princeton, succinctly identifies it.

“The ‘economic model’ of East Texas was one of ‘predation,’ ” she said. “Black people were preyed upon in a society built on the foundations of depriving Blacks of their labor, their lives, whatever assets they might own, their bodies — whatever a white man might have wanted.”

Robin lays it out very plainly:

The denial arose because of the hypocrisy of whites, who called themselves Christians and godly people, who rationalized that they were “civilizing and saving” Black people. They did not want to think of themselves as lawbreakers. And they did not want to admit that what they got by preying upon Black people were ill-gotten gains. That the land titles were fraudulent, that the “debts” owned by Black people were fraudulent, that the prices Black people were forced to pay was equivalent to thievery. I think that deep down, there is a vast pool of shame in white Texans that compels them to deny what happened. That shame eats away at their sense of self and makes them lash out, so that they deny ever more vigorously because the truth is too painful to bear. So, any attempt at truth-telling invokes not just denial but an increasingly violent and retaliatory denial, because to tell the true history attacks white Texans’ core sense of who they are. The retaliatory denial is akin to the retaliatory murder of Black people in Slocum for daring to own property and having their own community.

A state historical marker acknowledging the Slocum Massacre was placed in southeastern Anderson County in late 2015 and dedicated on MLK Day 2016. But the Slocum Massacre had spread into Houston County as well. In Houston County, it was referred to as the Slocum-Augusta Massacre (Augusta in northeastern Houston County). The good news is that Constance Hollie-Jawaid, a descendant of victims of the Slocum Massacre, and I applied for a state historical marker acknowledging the Slocum-Augusta Massacre last spring, and it was approved in September 2024. Hopefully, it will be ready to place soon.

The bad news is the victims of the Slocum Massacre/Slocum-Augusta Massacre still lay in unmarked mass graves in Anderson and Houston County, and the State of Texas seems to have no interest in doing anything about it. No excavations, no official death certificates, no proper funerary rites.

Desecrated Black bodies are no big deal in Texas, especially since the devastating costs of this history were bore by the victims. And digging into this history threatens to expose the level and extent of which white predation occurred here.

“Denial is borne of shame,” Robin said, “and in perverse fashion, being shame-bound makes one even more violent and predatory, hence increasing the shame and hostility toward the truth.”

And it gets worse.

The obvious and most prevalent “currency” of denial in Texas is almost exclusively white, but the victims individually engaged in denial as well. The emotional expense of this reprehensible history was too painful and destructive. The victims mostly kept the memories of injustice to themselves because they didn’t want their offspring or descendants burdened by its incredible weight. They didn’t want their children or their children’s children to start life in psychological debt — which white people should be able to understand, especially since their forebears saddled Black Americans with it.

How low will Texas and Texans continue to go?

There is something truly evil and vulgar about ignoring white predation and forcing the descendants of the Black victims of it to accept and acquiesce to a state-sanctioned regimen of denial. It’s vile and crass. It’s unjust. It should be considered un-American and un-Texan, but here we are. And it’s a perfect encapsulation of the current Texas State Legislature’s mindset and vision for our future. Adding insult to the injured, figuratively and literally.

Houston County isn’t the only example, of course. Try finding the “Lone Star” historical marker in Cherokee County, where they burned an innocent Black man named Leonard Johnson at the stake the month before the Slocum Massacre occurred. Or look in Cooke County, Gainesville, where practically everyone trumpets their annual Medal of Honor celebration but daily dishonors the victims of the Great Hanging, a month-long atrocity committed when local “heroes” hanged 42 Union sympathizers in October 1862 during the American Civil War.

Attempts at uncovering, teaching, and remembering this type of history are being legislatively assassinated, and the scant, related monuments left unkept and ignored. Sometimes, I wish Robin would’ve stayed in Texas, but could she have learned, understood, and expressed what she knew and shared with me if she’d have been educated here?

They say everything is bigger in Texas — but there’s nothing big about cultural cowardice.