Leaving Texas

Texas this morning the sounds they just sing to me
I feel alive again and with every footstep that's settin me free
Hey old friends,
Keep alive the good times we've had in those rollin',
Rollin' hills
They will always be a part of me
Whenever I think of Texas memories

Oh Texas I'm just a little lost but I'm keepin' on,
Just like that morning star, that's ahead of me,
I keep shinin' on
'Til I make it to the borders of the Rio Grande
There I'll catch me one last sunset 'cross the prairie

 -Jerry Jeff Walker Leavin’ Texas

I'm going to leave old Texas now

They've no more use for the long-horned cow

 They plowed and fenced my cattle range

And the people there are all so strange

 I'll take my horse, I'll take my rope

I'll hit the trail at an easy lope

 I'll bid adieu to the Alamo

I'll turn my head toward Mexico

 The hard, hard ground shall be my bed

And my saddle seat shall hold my head

 I'll tell Saint Peter when I go

A cowboy's soul ain't white as snow

 Yet in that far-off cattle land

He sometimes acted like a man

 —Cowboy/folk song

I know two songs about leaving Texas: Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Leavin’ Texas,” and the often-covered cowboy folk song, “I’m Going to Leave Old Texas Now,” with versions by Peter Row and Don Edwards, Riders in the Sky, and Joe Platt, among others. Neither one of these departure songs feels like it is about me, and not just because they are voiced in what passes for a Texas accent—more on this later. Both these songs are nostalgic for a Texas-that-was. “I’m going to Leave” mourns the loss of cowboy culture and the freedoms with which it associated. Leaving Texas in this song is as much about time as it is about place: the speaker is leaving for Mexico because Texas has “no more” use for his skills; although he does not use the language of extinction, the long-horn cow, the sign of his usefulness and belonging is no more. This is a song about estrangement, particularly from the “people” who now populate the state—they are of the wrong kind, and there are probably too many of them. The journey—and the imagined future—of this song do not end in Mexico; the speaker imagines himself in an encounter with St. Peter, who may or may not—the song is not entirely clear—be able to imagine the context in which the speaker lived his life and lived out his manhood. Although the song is all about nostalgia, the title carefully employs the future tense: the speaker is about to leave, is just leaving, is in the act of leaving “now.”

Leavin’ Texas” also catches the speaker in mid-departure. It is even more explicitly caught between the past and the future, unfolding in a continuous present of the present participle, “leavin”. The missing “g” at the end of that participle in the song’s title marks both the presence of a Texan speaker and the soon-to-be absence of Texas. The song feels a little different from the previous one. While we don’t know why the speaker is leaving the state and crossing the Rio Grande, there seems to be a positive energy associated with a movement forward and out: the journey is structured not only by “leavin’ but by “movin’ on’” and “keepin’ on.” Caught in the act of leavin’, the speaker pauses for one last, nostalgic glance, “One last sunset ’cross the prairie.”

I have my own nostalgia about Texas that has nothing to do with longhorn cows or the manliness of cowboys, although for the first five years I lived here I was always on the point of buying cowboy boots. When I flew into Houston in the middle of a, well, Texas-sized thunderstorm to take up residence there in 1990, it was a Democratic (and I think a democratic) state. Ann Richards had just been elected governor. During the Republican National Convention that took place in Houston in 1992, the story goes they had to import anti-abortion activists; there was no developed local anti-choice movement. While the Democratic party in Texas tended to be more libertarian than traditionally liberal in its leanings, I took its individualist ethos to be part of a rugged charm I could see in Richards’ swashbuckling self-presentation and hear, in a more traditionally gendered form, in the many folk and country songs about the state—some of which I had already learned long before my plane touched down for the first time at what would become George Bush airport.

I spend a lot of time these days thinking about leaving—if not leavin’—Texas. How could I not, when the governor, the state attorney general, and the legislature spend so much time inventing new cruelties and passing them into law? When almost everything I value in my work and in my daily life is undermined by our state government? When I cannot be sure that pregnant students will get the care they need? When casting a vote has become a bureaucratic trial? When public schools must display “gifts” from individuals and corporations that feature the words “in God we trust”? When children are gunned down in their schools and the governor makes gun ownership easier? When parents of trans children are being sued for child abuse if they try to find health care for them?  When, despite Texas’s relative affluence as a state, maternal mortality is shockingly high? When my colleagues in public universities are told that they cannot teach the histories of race and gender that would provide a context for all of these urgencies?

For years, more than 25, as Texas turned redder and hotter and angrier, I took comfort in my bubbles: Houston, that blue city with the most diverse population in the U.S.; Rice University and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, of which I have been a part since its beginning; my circle of friends; my feminist husband; my feminist sons.  For all those years, I have sheltered in place, venturing out to demonstrations and community events, volunteering (but not very often) with various progressive organizations; sending money (but not very much) to causes and candidates I believed in.

Over the years, when well-meaning friends from across the country and the world would ask me how I could live in Texas, I would try out different responses. Most of them involved some degree of counterattack: for their assumptions, their condescension, their inability to imagine cohabiting with people who did not share their political views. I thought of them as precious, parochial, condescending. I offered up Houston’s diversity, our (former) lesbian mayor, the art scene, even—and perhaps not fully relevantly—the wonders of the Houston restaurant scene. I reminded Californians that Ronald Reagan started it all, and accused New Yorkers of living in a city that no ordinary person could afford.  I noted, correctly, that there were more Democrats in Texas than in in any three New England states combined. I even, G-d help me, defended Houston’s weather: eight months of pleasant temperatures (I may have lied and said nine); long, luscious springs; 300 gardening days. I told them about the beauties of Texas rivers, and even sometimes played Lyle Lovett’s Texas River’s song. I talked about the blueness of Texas’s cities and of the Gulf (carefully omitting any mentions of Galveston’s frequently “chocolate” surf), of the mixture of Spanish, French, Anglo, and creole cultures along the shores of that admittedly volatile body of water.

Although my remarks, some would say my screeds, were explicitly directed outwards, to friends, colleagues, and strangers I just stop myself from calling “elites,” the real audience for this rush of verbiage was always myself. Although I was a sucker for many of my own strategies, the most effective for me, the speaker, was compartmentalization. Friends would come at me with Texas, I would counter with Houston. I would play a substitutive and comparative game: Ann Richards (now long dead) for Ronald Reagan (ditto), Annise Parker for any mayor anywhere, Lina Hidalgo for, oddly but I think rightly, Andrew Cuomo. If Rice was my immediate bubble, Houston wrapped me in a version of that blue bubble wrap that comes with so many items shipped by Amazon.

This worked for many years. Even when Houston failed to pass the H.E.R.O. bill, I insisted that this was an anomaly, a sign of the right’s frightening but ultimately doomed ability to frame a populist argument. Like Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, who is willing to concede the northern extremities of England to gothic violence, I was willing to give up on 90 percent of Texas’s land mass (although a far smaller percentage, perhaps 57% of Texas’s population, who live outside the blue urban counties across the state.)

Houston seems as blue as ever, its population as diverse, its arts scene as active as it ever was. But it no longer functions for me as a protective bubble. A Facebook friend who was planning on attending a conference in Houston posted to say she had cancelled her trip after the passage of SB8. She was unwilling to pay sales tax to the Texas government. I tried to persuade her that by not spending money on Houston she was theoretically contributing to right-wing revenge campaigns against the city, but I found I could not really argue with her. We agreed that she should contribute money to local (Houston, Texas) reproductive rights organizations. I was surprisingly tired after our short and amicable Facebook exchange. Yes, it is weary work defending the place you live, and it is exhausting to wake up almost every morning to a new day of cruelty and pettiness. But what made me bone tired was feeling denuded of my bubble, the mollusk without a shell. Like the hermit crabs who pop out of their holes, unshelled, in the dark, in Galveston, I feel the need to run. I fear that I will be running in the opposite direction, north and east. I fear the day that, like the speaker in Leavin’ Texas, I will have to pause for one last sunrise—this one over the Gulf of Mexico. It might be a long, and continuous leavin’ — an extended “now”—but the leaving has begun.