A Hundred and a Handful

by Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz

     “The U.S. government was giving away land; that’s how my great grandaddy ended up in north Texas,” my mama tells me as her hand moves deftly around the diorama we’re making. In school, we’re working on family history. Mama already helped me draw a family tree. Now we’re working on a replica of a town where someone in our family lived.

     “It wasn’t much,” Mama says, placing the cardboard church at the top center. “But it sure was special to me growing up, you know.

     “Orinston, Texas,” she tells me with a nod of her head.

     According to Mama, Orin Stocker, my great, great granddaddy moved his family from the Galveston area and settled just shy of the New Mexico border. He worked hard and eventually invited kin and friend to join him. When I asked how many people lived there, Mama says, “About a hundred and a handful.”

     The church stood alone on its block. Mama swirls glue on the board on both sides of the building and invites me to sprinkle the green construction paper we cut up confetti-like over it. When it’s dry, we’ll place flowers made from crepe paper and toothpicks to show the gardens that everyone in the community tended to.

     “The office where my granddaddy and, before him, great-granddaddy, ran the small town was here,” she says, placing the miniature building adjacent to the church.

     “The school was across the street, here,” she continues. For a moment she is lost in its memory as she cradles the replica in her palm. “I loved going to school. We had two rooms for learning and a library! A library at the school and another one for the public right next to it, can you imagine?”

     She instructs me where to place other buildings we’d made. There is a mercantile next to the city office. The doctor’s office and that of the Black woman dentist. There was an empty lot where fresh vegetables from people’s gardens were swapped and bartered; we placed little baskets full of paper corn and beans to show that. Houses where the people lived are nearby, within walking distance, though some people had cars.

     Mama eyes the board curiously. “I never planned to leave that place,” she says under her breath.

     “Then why did you?”

     The water tower we made from a ping pong ball and pipe cleaners suddenly trembles in her hand. She turns to me, and I watch sorrow’s fingers press the corners of her mouth downward.

     “Didn’t have a choice,” she says.

     I ask her what happened, but she doesn’t tell me; just keeps instructing me where to put things until the town is done.   

     “Now, let’s see if my memory’s right,” Mama tells me, pushing the diorama away for a better view. She sighs.

     “There were a lot of people taking the government up on the land,” she says. “People moving west, coming from places like Georgia and Alabama. Ranchers and farmers. They brought their way of thinking with them.

     “That little town of Black folks wasn’t a bother to nobody but them. We were on some good land. Maybe they wanted it. Or maybe they couldn’t stand us building something of our own. They decided they’d take it away.”

     “What’d they do?”

     Mama shakes her head. “You are too young to hear about it. One day, when you’re older, if you still want to know, I’ll tell you the details. But for now, all I want to say is that a lie made a group of White men destroy our neighborhoods and terrorize our people.”

     “Did they hurt you?”

     She shakes her head again, swiping tears from her cheeks. “Daddy got us out of there. Mama threw me and your aunt Cissie in the backseat and then he drove until we couldn’t hear the screaming no more.”

     “Can’t you ever go back?

     Mama says she can’t. “Your granddaddy went back with some men a short time later, and they salvaged what they could. Before I went to college, I felt brave enough to ask him to take me there. I don’t know what I was expecting.

     “There was a highway and a strip mall where we thought Orinston used to be.” Mama turns the diorama in a slow circle. “The town is gone, like we’d never been there at all.”