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Texas makes you tough

Cindee Talley

I’ve been thinking a lot about the influence of “place” on who we become and whether or not that influence ever wanes.  

In A Strong West Wind, an account of a Texas high plains girlhood, Gail Caldwell writes, “How do we become who we are? The question belongs not just to genes or geography or the idea of destiny, but to the entire symphony of culture and its magisterial march—to Proust’s madeleines and Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud” and anyone’s dreams of being someplace, anyplace, else. I was a girl whose father had taken such pride in her all her life, even when it was masked as rage, that he had lit a fire in me that would stay warm forever. I was the daughter of a woman who, on a farm in east Texas in the 1920s, had crept away from her five younger siblings so that she could sit on a hillside and read—a mother whose subterranean wish, long unrevealed, was that I might become who she could not. Each of us has these cloisters where the old discarded drams are stored, innocuous as toys in the attic. The real beauty of the question—how do we become who we are?—is that by the time we are old enough to ask it, to understand its infinite breadth, it is too late to do much about it. That is not the sorrow of hindsight, but its music: That is what grants us a bearable past.” 

In this opening passage, Gail Caldwell sets forth the primary question of her memoir. While it is not just “genes and geography,” Caldwell leaves no doubt that she was permanently shaped by the landscape and culture of the Texas Panhandle. Sense of place is with her even as she moves on to Austin and later the East Coast, where, she says, she faced adversity “like a tornado knocking on the side door before it levels the land” (113). As a burgeoning writer, she says “I had discovered an edifice within that was stronger and safer than anything I had ever imagined—my own little storm cellar, born in and formed by that Panhandle wind, stocked with calm and crystalline desire.” Even as she describes an ambivalent and sometimes adversarial feeling for her Texas plains roots, she leaves no doubt that the place shaped her and made her tough.