Tgk1946's Blog

From Spying on the South (Tony Horwitz, 2019) pp 242-9

THE NEXT EVENING, BACK IN CROCKETT, I MET THE TYPE NICHols described, during a Republican candidates’ forum at the Moosehead Café. Joni Clonts was running the show, with a short staff, so she recruited me to be timekeeper and ring a motel desk-style bell if any of the candidates spoke for more than their allotted two minutes.

A crowd of about a hundred gathered, all of them white and most middle-aged or older. Before the forum started, several men circulated with flyers, one of which noted the “pathetic” score an incumbent Republican had been given by a group called Heritage Action for America.

“He’s a cuck-servative,” one man said. “No balls, and a conservative in name only.” I later learned that the phrase “cuck-servative” derived from a species of porn that portrayed white husbands humiliated by wives who preferred black men.

Another pamphleteer called himself “a voice of the watchdogs,” keeping tabs on serving Republicans who had “sold out conservative values.” He noted with approval the “top ten hot-button issues” cited by one of his preferred candidates, a retired colonel, including the elimination of “the weaponized IRS.” In fiery red letters, the colonel’s flyer declared: “I am mad as hell!”

The forum at the Moosehead turned out to be tame by comparison. A pastor offered a prayer, the audience said the Pledge of Allegiance and sang the national anthem, and then a dozen candidates made opening statements, speaking in a folksy manner about their family, church ties, military service, and local roots.

“Been farming and ranching all my life, live on a dirt road, I work hard, and I’m honest,” a candidate for county commissioner stated.

Their political stances seemed secondary, in part because they were so similar. All were fierce defenders of religious liberty and the Second Amendment and heated in their opposition to taxes, the federal government, and funding for Planned Parenthood.

The only real debate occurred when a candidate for sheriff spoke about the “uneasiness all across the nation” and called for “twenty-four-hour patrols” in the county. The incumbent defended, at length, his toughness on crime and noted the impossibility of constantly patrolling a 1,250-squaremile county.

This put me on the spot, because he talked for more than two minutes. I couldn’t bring myself to ring the bell on this imposing sheriff in a Stetson and cowboy boots with a .357 Magnum strapped to his belt. When I finally did, at the three-minute mark, the crowd sang “God Bless America” and the forum ended.

“You were just enforcing the law,” the sheriff said, coming over to give me a bone-crushing handshake.

Joni, meanwhile, was relieved that “the radicals” in the audience hadn’t been disruptive. I assumed she meant the extremists I’d met earlier, but apparently there was an even fringier contingent. “They like to talk about storing food, survivalism, and all that.”

It also appeared that I was the only non-Republican present, though I didn’t confess to this. “I think they were having their own forum tonight,” Ray Wilson said of local Democrats. “In a phone booth.”

A retired high school principal, Wilson said he used to be a “yellowdog Democrat,” but the growth of government had turned him into a yellow-dog Republican. “What irks the knickers off a true Texan is Washington poking its nose into everything.”

Even so, having moved here six years ago from Galveston, he was struck by the depth of the conservatism and religiosity in this part of Texas. “In the yellow pages I counted 348 churches in the county and only one bar,” he said.

I hadn’t known there was a single bar, and asked him where it was. If I couldn’t find any Democrats to canvass, I might as well talk to drinkers.

“Across from the Whataburger,” Wilson replied, and ten minutes later I bound Wild Bill’s Sport Bar & Grill, a shedlike building tucked behind a small restaurant. Inside, it took me a moment to get my bearings because there were no windows, very dim lights, and so much smoke I could barely make out the pool tables and a few TVs broadcasting a women’s cage fighting match.

Eight people sat at the bar and all turned as I approached, apparently startled by the appearance of an unfamiliar customer. When I joined them the woman next to me asked if I was an oil pipeliner.

“No, just a visiting writer.”

“You should write my story,” she replied. “The Single Life of a Married Woman.’ Married three times but acted like I was single.” She let out a raspy laugh. “I got two kids and three broken ribs to show for it.”

The barmaid, named Bunny, had also been through hard times. A slim, buxom woman of about forty, in skintight jeans and black top, she said she’d been married four times, once to a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. As such, she’d been designated a “featherwood,” which she defined as “badass girls” attached to “peckerwoods,” a prison name for white supremacists.

“I’ve stepped away from all that,” she added, and had also given up her earlier career as a dancer. “The kind where it’s not really about the dancing.”

She began pouring brightly colored shots into small plastic cups and passing them around the bar. “Wet Pussy,” she said of the first, a mix of butterscotch schnapps and tequila. Next came a Redheaded Slut (peach schnapps, Jagermeister, and cranberry juice) and a Blow Job (vodka, coffee liqueur, lots of whipped cream).

“It’s not just what’s in the Blow Job, it’s how you drink it,” Bunny instructed, wrapping her mouth around the cup and tilting her head to take it in one swallow.

By this point I was feeling very far from the churchy town of Crockett as I’d come to know it over recent days. When I mentioned this to the others at the bar, a young woman said, “If you don’t go to church in this town, you’re a heathen. If you’re here drinking, you’re truly damned.”

She was a newcomer to Crockett, from the Dallas area, and worked as a waitress. “A gay couple came in the other day and everyone was staring at them,” she said. “One woman even said aloud, ‘That’s an abomination. I wanted to tell her my brother is gay, God says to love everyone. The Bible is a guide, it’s not a hammer.”

She disliked the racial dynamic, too. “It’s all smiles one minute and the N-word the next. They don’t think they’re racist because there’s a few black people they know and like.”

At Wild Bill’s, two of the drinkers were black, as was the bar and grill’s manager, who emerged at one point to share puppy pictures on his phone with Bunny, the former Aryan “featherwood.” I’d seen little such social interaction in Crockett, or elsewhere in East Texas.

“Don’t even try making sense of this town,” Bunny said, pouring another round of obscenely named drinks. “When people ask me what Crockett’s like, I tell them it’s somewhere between Mayberry and Deliverance.”

IN THE MORNING, I TOOK A COLD SHOWER AND RETURNED FOR my fourth visit to the Moosehead Lodge breakfast club and its rotating cast of locals. The topic of the day was immigration and terrorism.

“I like that Trump wants to keep Muslims out; they’re exporting their war here.”

“We have a pussy in the White House, paying Muslims to kill us.”

“And Saudi Arabian Wahhabis paying for a Muslim compound in our own backyard.”

This comment came from a man named Don, the loudest and most openly bigoted of the Lodge members. He told me he’d worked for an oilfield services company and spent time in the Persian Gulf. “There’s a mosque and a training camp,” he said of the “compound” south of Crockett, ‘guarded by guys with automatic weapons.”

Perhaps it was my hangover, but for the first time I took issue with the Lodge, telling the men I’d heard rumors of this sort elsewhere in Texas and very much doubted them. I also mentioned that I’d been a Middle East correspondent and spoke a little Arabic. “Tell you what, I’ll go down there and check it out and report back to you,” I suggested.

After much hemming and hawing around the table, Don drew me a map of how to find the “compound,” just beyond the county’s southern border, outside a town called Groveton. “Be real careful,” he said.

I drove through pasture and woodland for about thirty miles, turned town a farm road and then an unpaved route that brought me to a heavy metal gate, as Don had described. It had a security keypad and a high fence “inning to either side, but no phone or call button. I followed the fence line for a few hundred yards, trying to see what lay beyond, but glimpsed only trees and a bit of rolling open land.

I couldn’t find neighbors, either, so I circled back to Groveton and visited the small police station. The county sheriff, Woody Wallace, behind a desk on which perched his very large Stetson. When I told him I was a writer, curious about the “Muslim compound,” he let out as audible sigh.

“You were at the right place,” he told me. “It’s caused me all kind of bother.”

As soon as construction began at the site two years earlier, he said, “the rumors started flying. It’s a mosque. A Muslim school. A terrorist training camp.” Then a story circulated that people from the compound had tried to buy guns and the storeowner kicked them out.

“People went nuts over that,” he said. “We’d get calls about armed men being out there. Folks were seeing all kinds of strange things and telling me, ‘Woody, you got to do something.”

He did — going to the property several times when the security system set off false alarms and no one was there to turn it off. “What’s actually there,” he said, “is a big-ass house.” It belonged to a doctor from Houston, of Indian or Pakistani descent, who’d bought the property as a second home and visited occasionally with his extended family. They were rarely seen except during shopping trips into Groveton.

“The women cover their hair but not their faces, and the men wear skullcaps,” he said. “I don’t know for sure if they’re Muslim or something else. Not my business, unless they do something illegal, which they haven’t.

But the rumors persisted, and when a YMCA camp elsewhere in the county announced plans for an educational seminar on Islam, “people went berserk again,” he said. Protestors camped outside the facility and cooked pigs, “to offend Muslims,” and in the end the seminar was canceled.

Woody tried to ignore the clamor and get on with the business of policing crime, of which there wasn’t much in this rural county. “Mostly just dope and the theft to support it,” he said. “Can’t tell you the last time we had so much as a bar fight.”

Why then, I wondered, were people so quick to panic about a far-fetched and nonexistent threat of Muslim intruders?

“People are scared,” he said. “We’ve got open borders; people see what’s happening overseas and are scared it will happen here. Everyone’s on edge.”

This anxiety wasn’t confined to immigration. He mentioned that day’s news, which included Black Lives Matter protestors scuffling with Trump supporters at one of the candidate’s rallies.

“It’s like things are breaking down,” he said. “Civil unrest. Nobody trusts anyone they don’t know, and they certainly don’t trust Washington.”

He counted himself in this camp and planned to vote for Trump. But he wasn’t optimistic about the future. “Something’s going to happen, somewhere. Then people will come here to hide, because everyone here has guns and knows how to use them. This will be a safe place, though maybe not for that Muslim doctor and his family.”

I RETURNED TO CROCKETT DEPRESSED OVER THE FEAR AND division Woody had described. But I also felt a perverse elation at the prospect of sharing what I’d learned with the Moosehead Lodge. “Busted my bubble” was a phrase one of them used when others set him straight on some point of fact. I couldn’t wait to bust the whole table’s bubble regarding the “Muslim compound.”

So I was there bright and early the next morning, enjoying my breakfast as the others talked about Trump’s proposal for a border wall. Then I mentioned that I’d driven to the compound, seen no gunmen or anything else, and spoken to the sheriff.

“We all know Woody,” one of the men said. “Good guy.”

Then I told them the sheriff had debunked all the rumors about a mosque, or training camp, or gun-toting Muslims.

“Woody has to say that,” replied Don, the oil-field veteran. “He’s probably getting paid by them.”

The others concurred, except for one man, new to the table, who ran a grocery in Groveton and had met the doctor and his family when they came in to buy deer feeders. “They’re from Pakistan, I think, and the women wear colorful clothes. They spend a lot of money.”

“That’s their strategy,” another man countered. “Spend a lot of money so everyone’s happy and doesn’t ask questions.”

“Damn right, they send in someone real quiet-like, so no one realizes what’s coming.”Don reiterated that he knew “for a fact” there was a “camp” and armed guards, and when I asked his source for this, he replied, “I’ve got photo. graphs taken while flying over it.” “Can I see them?”

“I don’t give anything to the press. You’re just a pack of liars.” Another man chimed in, “Come back in a few years and you’ll see, it’ll be all Muslim around Groveton.” “At least by then,” Don added, “we won’t have a Muslim in the White House anymore.”

I drained my coffee and decided it was time to get out of Crockett. ] went over to thank Joni Clonts for the café’s fine food and service and her hospitality in letting me use the Moosehead as my office for much of the week. She gave me a hug and offered two bumper stickers for the road, my choice of Cruz or Trump. She hoped the latter would win. “He may have a mouth on him, but that’s okay, a lot of Texans do, too.” And though she doubted he was a sincere Christian, “that could change. God will touch him. God is good, he’ll give our country another chance.” She also hoped God would touch misguided liberals in Houston County and beyond. “I pray for them. They’re wrong in their politics, but they don’t know they’re wrong.”

I pondered this as I drove out of town, past church signs declaring “He Is Risen!” and “Jesus Is Lord—And His Word Is Our Authority.” I liked Joni and many others I’d met in and around Crockett. They’d been very welcoming and open about their beliefs, while doubtless suspecting I didn’t share them.

But the Moosehead Lodge left a bad taste in my mouth, and not only because of the bigotry at the table. Like Olmsted, I’d embarked on my journey believing—or at least hoping—that Americans on opposite sides of the national divide could listen to each other and air their differences in a rational and coolheaded fashion.

Not so in Crockett. The Lodge members were intent on walling themselves off from any dissenting view or contrary information. No amount of “fact” about the “Muslim compound,” not even the word of a familiar sheriff, could penetrate their protective shell. I felt as though I’d been firing a BB gun at an armor-plated vehicle.

A few dozen right-wingers at a small-town café obviously didn’t comprise a scientific sample. But I’d heard enough similar commentary at other stops—and incessantly on the car radio—to sense the political “drift of things” in the territory through which I’d traveled. Leaving Crockett, I felt as Olmsted had after his testy encounter with slave masters in Nashville. “Very melancholy” and pessimistically wondering “what is to become of us . . . this great country & this cursedly little people.”