Coming in South Broadway, from the direction of Houston, I’d have seen a different place. The East Texas Fair Ground with its acres of rose gardens, the lovely old Victorian houses with their deep front porches on spacious, magnolia and chinaberry shaded lawns, swimming pools, banks of azaleas and roses, lawn sprinklers cleaning the dust from the air, all the trappings of the prosperous small southern city, would have woven their relaxing spell. As I pulled past the Broadway movie theater I would have entered into the heart of Tyler, the tree-lined square where the mossy-green dome and gray concrete blockiness of the old Smith County courthouse in its park dominate the surrounding department stores, banks, five-and-dimes and movie houses.
Tyler, the town/city, is in fact in the 1950’s still an uneasy conjunction of Old South gentility and new southwestern oil men, rich farmers and poor sharecroppers, rose gardens and brick factories. Most locals are happily oblivious of that, in large part because of those nearly invisible Cotton Belt railroad tracks. They form the hidden equator of the place, neatly and without any fuss separating everyone and every thing into their proper hemispheres.
I notice, though. That sense of both sides of the tracks, the awareness that the world moves in different ways at the north and south ends of town is built into me, as they say, from the ground up. It comes from being told since infancy about how my great- grandfather’s family had founded the town, one hundred years before, at the edge of my great-grandfather’s plantation (he had then, in true pioneer spirit, given up on the place as “not worth much”, sold out and moved 15 miles further west - the town had thrived despite him.) Told about my uncle Will, the County Clerk, my cousin William, head of a small South Texas college, my aunt Zula, the “dean” of East Texas school teachers, my uncle Hulan, a prosperous businessman in Dallas. Told all this by my mother, the daughter of a welsh sharecropper, who had married “the most eligible bachelor in town” and seen his family, less than happy with the marriage, ever-so-politely distance themselves from the young widow with nine children after his premature death from leukemia.
North and south of the tracks, these are lives I understand. The understanding comes from growing up amid friendly, boisterous, north Tyler kids whose sights seemed never higher than a regular job and a bungalow off of West Bow, whose idea of a good time was one of those wild, midnight races to Dallas. From picking blackberries with my mother’s relatives on small dirt farms around Lindale. From studying 5-10-5 fertilizer and how to milk a cow as a required course in junior high. From hot summer days divided between happy splashing with friends in the free municipal swimming pool off Bow Street and solitary hours in the cool, dark wooden reading rooms of the Carnegie Public Library, one block south of the square. The library, my babysitter as my mother worked her shift at the clothing factory, became my true home, where my imagination learned to roam universes.
Understanding comes from self-consciously wearing worn-but-neat hand-me-downs to a high school full of fashionable, south Tyler teens who seemed to pay no attention to what I wore. A school where the teachers, wise to the nuances of southern society, pressured me to take more Latin than I really wanted, because I was “a gentleman.” From the way south Tyler friends, instructed by their mamas, carefully invited me to the parties that they knew I could never afford to attend. From the way they all expected me to move on to a top college, even though I had no clue how to afford it (When the time came, the Elks Lodge, without being asked, came up with a scholarship.) From learning that, in the peculiar fashion of old southern towns, blood was thicker than water, family counted more than circumstances. Only years later would I come to realize the high school's role in creating the adult city that Tyler would become. It was the mixing bowl that stirred together north and south, formed friendships that would continue through long adult lives and enable the city to become a whole place, and eventually make those Cotton Belt tracks irrelevant.
Perhaps that’s what the old tracks are reminding me. That lives lived “across the tracks” are not necessarily bad lives, that there’s common humanity at both ends of town. That it takes both sides of the tracks to make a place whole.
Life goes on about the busy city square. The old timers relax and swap yarns on their shaded benches in the park. Strauss’ Department Store (Fine Clothes for Fine People) carefully ignores the thriving Woolworth next door. The Citizen’s National Bank and the People’s National Bank continue their perpetual war for customers (Mama prefers the Citizen’s - their elevators are manned by real operators.) The city bus that runs all the way from the south end of town to the western edge makes its hourly swing through the square. No one remarks how the bus empties on the south side of the square and fills up again as the bus heads north. I circle just north of the square, past the Trailways station where I boarded the bus that took me finally away to Houston, turn to cross the tracks one more time and move on out, headed south.
