A TEXAS FUNERAL

In keeping with a philosophy of watching weirdo movies, A Texas Funeral, is right up there. However, it made a good point or points about many things and did what movies can do if you watch them in this way: instruct and provide lessons. The movie portrayed most of the stereotypical views of the South, running the gamit from the romanicism of the culture, which is mostly myth, to being a hotbed of right wing Christians. Somewhere in the middle are most of us. For us slow talkers, the yankees of New York think we are stupid while the gays of San Francisco love us. Go figure.

What I liked in A Texas Funeral was the typical view on African Americans of the Sixties. The AA character in A Texas Funeral was a Vietnam vet who had some clever lines and did a mockery in the bathroom mirror of some of the stupidity of his white friends. The movie should be seen merrely for that scene if for no other. ***

***The below is taken from the soon to be published, Brothers, a memoir of five brothers growing up in the South from 1920 to the early sixties.

It is really hard to know for us where the racism issue was. For one thing we had little contact with blacks but we had much affinity with them. Anybody who says that “class” doesn’t exist in the American society of our upbringing or now for that matter is at best out to lunch or worse, disingenuous. For us, the informal class system was probably the land owners, the Landlords, who were usually one and the same; the merchants or maybe any of those that “lived in the better sections of town.” And, then there was us: the proud poor. After them, came maybe the white trash of the White Line and, sadly, of course, were African Americans.

The one thing we knew for sure was that the bottom of the food chain were the blacks. But, honestly, we didn’t think about it. When we do think about those times, we realize that there was something that united those of us on the bottom or close to it. Poverty. When you are poor at any level, you are poor. I will have to say this though: we never used the “n” word or talked disparaging about those that might be considered lower than us.

Our world view probably left a lot to be desired but in a sense, we were part of a survival generation, attempting to make life work for us without lots of cogitating our navel very much. I guess we knew a little about world events and things like women getting the vote, flappers, and the biggie, prohibition. Outlawing alcohol brought on the era of the bootlegger and we had family on my Mom’s side who were right at the forefront of making sure the “drink” was readily available. We never called it moonshine or anything for that matter but those who did, called it “white” whisky."

One advantage to being poor if there is such a thing is that the survival mode plays itself out as the big world events escape you because you either have been denied participation or simply didn’t know they were going on. Take the crash of 29, didn’t do anything to us as we were as poor as you could be anyway. For those above us, it meant people were having strokes, jumping off buildings, and other sorts of acts of desperate people. It was the beginning of the Depression—no run on banks for us.