The
image of Texas has been besmirched as of late, from the decidedly
not-ready-for-prime-time Rick Perry's fiasco of a presidential
campaign to his recent channeling of George Wallace and blocking
needy Texans from getting the health care they deserve, all so he can
look tough to the mean-spirited and ignorant, otherwise known as the
Republican base.
Or,
take Ted (I'm a nut-job) Nugent (Pulease!), from his paranoid blather
at an NRA gathering to his suggestion that maybe the wrong side won
the Civil War. Huh? To an outsider, it must seem that Texas is
populated by right-wing, gun-toting, fundamentalist, homophobic,
Neanderthal, know-nothings. I can't blame anyone for thinking that,
since I live here, and sometimes I think it, too.
Yet
the truth is Texas is no cultural or intellectual backwater. We're
home to a bevy of top-flight museums, research universities, fine
dining, and other accoutrements of cosmopolitan life. The fact is a
number of damn-fine writers also hail from our state, Mary Karr and
Larry McMurtry, to name two. But the problem is we don't trumpet our
best and brightest, just our dumber and dumberers.
A
case in point is this past January. One of our best Texas writers,
Annette Sanford died, and I've been surprised that not much has been
written to honor this gem of Texas letters. Maybe that's because she
was, as Clay Smith once described her in the Austin Chronicle,
“a deceptively simple writer.” Her best stories creep up on you
like morning glory vines and before you know it you're surrounded by
a kind of rough-hewn beauty often in a place you least expected. As
writer Kathryn Eastburn wrote, she was “Texas's Eudora Welty, as
fine a short story writer as anyone of her generation.”
I
didn't know Annette well. I remember only meeting her twice, but for
me at least those meetings were important, if not providential. In
1989 I was a newbie high school English teacher at Victoria's Stroman
High School undergoing the usual baptism of fire reserved for first
year teachers.
I
will never forget that first day meeting my last period senior CLA
(low-level) English class. Think Welcome Back, Kotter's
sweathogs and you'd have a pretty good approximation of them. But, of
course, this was the eighties, and all the girls had their hair
teased up to what looked like to me a foot or more. And they all wore
black clothes with dark eyeliner globbed on so thickly they looked
like a casting call for the Bride of Frankenstein.
On
that first day my rookie knees were sure shaking, but, as has
fortunately happened to me more often than not in my career, I grew
to love my, as I wryly called them, pre-crime class. But, even so,
when we started a career unit in the spring, I knew I needed more
than divine intervention to get them, in the throes of senioritis, to
do anything, much less a research paper in which they had to
interview someone in the career to which they aspired. I figured I
better to do an interview myself to show them it could be done.
So
without a lot of thought, I realized I needed to find a writer nearby
because that's what I've always wanted to do. That's when I decided
to interview Annette Sanford. She was close, only about 40 miles
away, and through my wife's family, I had a connection of sorts. Her
brother, the late artist Charles Schorre, was a good friend of my
wife's parents.
It
worked out, and on one of those beautiful crystal clear Gulf Coast
spring days that are so sweet because they're so rare, my wife,
4-year old daughter, and I drove north on I-59 from Victoria to the
sleepy hamlet of Ganado, Texas.
There
Annette greeted us at her door. She was a little more serious than I
would've hoped, even stand-offish. She'd every right to be wary of
us, since I was acting like some kind of
literary groupie coming to ask that question all real writers
hate: how do I do what you did?
But
taking my daughter, a 3-year old blond bundle of energy, proved
fortuitous. Her presence melted Annette's heart. Annette sat us down
and served us lemonade with old-fashioned sugar cookies with such
aplomb that my daughter would remember it for years later.
We
also got to know Lukey, her husband. He was a big man, a retired
letter carrier, equal parts earnest and self-effacing. You could
understand how, as Annette explained to me later, he served as a
counselor of sorts to some of the less-than centered writers who
frequented writing conferences they attended together. I could just
imagine him setting some confused somebody straight.
He
showed my daughter his huge jigsaw puzzle he was working on on a
fold-out table in the living room and invited her to help. Truly, it
was like a scene from one of Annette's stories where the older and
wiser couple takes care of the younger and decidedly not-so-wise
couple.
After
awhile Annette and I went back to her study behind her house to talk
shop. She admitted she wasn't a quick writer; that it always took her
a long time to get everything right. But she did get it right more
often than not because her writing sticks with you. It's been years
since I've read her stories, but I could never in a million years
forget the sassy narrator of a “Trip in a Summer Dress,” and
Miss Ettie of “Limited Access,” who because she wasn't born to
let things waste, must watch TV 24-7.
That
afternoon Annette gave me some advice that's always stuck with me.
She said that a writer had to get used to rejection. Her advice was
to put each rejection on the wall, not to be scared of them but proud
of them because they were badges of honor. I know that I haven't let
my many rejections stop me. In fact, since Annette's been one of the
few real writers who has encouraged me, I figure it's because of her
that I still harbor any delusion that I can write.
The
last time we met was 1990 when she read some of her stories to my
juniors. Since car chases or drive-bys was not Annette's forte, I had
some trepidations. My usually antsy students, I thought, might get
bored and embarrass themselves and me. But instead they acted like
angels, sitting quietly as Annette read in her genteel Southern
drawl, beautiful, demure, and bitingly intelligent, reminiscent of
accents heard in a Horton Foote movie, like something from another
time.
After
she read, I escorted her out of my class. Then in the hall all hell
broke loose. Kids were screaming at each other, acting their absolute
worst. I can't remember exactly when it was, but replaying it in my
head I figure it must have been right before a holiday. I was
embarrassed, but if Annette noticed she didn't let on.
Like
the 25-year veteran high school English teacher she was, she wore a
calm smile as she walked through the bedlam. And that's another
reason Annette Sanford has meant so much to me. She was not only a
top-notch writer but a damn good high school English teacher, I
suspect. I was more than lucky to have met her. When she died, not
only the Texas literary world but the wider literary world lost a
real gem. I just wish more people would have noticed.