Posted on 09/26/2003 6:31:02 AM PDT by BellStar
WHITE COOTS. WHITE BOOTS
Curly’s Corner in Seabrook, Texas in the ’50s was an island in the road, an oasis, a landmark of a general store for crabbers and fishermen. It bobbed like a cork in the roadway at the confluence of Texas Farm to Market Road 528 (now Nasa Road One a/k/a the Texas Blue Star Highway) and State Highway 146 (soon to be one peg leg of the Grand Parkway or Outer Belt). Curly’s Corner was relentlessly lathered and shaved through the years of highway widenings like the lopped off locks on the floor at the Carlos of Nasa Barbershop in Webster, until all that is left of the ice house-bait stand now is of very little mercantile use. No better than what old timers call nipples on a boar hog.
What actually remains is a sign that masquerades as a building in the middle of the road. Seabrook regulates signs and buildings. Curly’s morphed into a Diane Arbus kind of sign-building. Today it has a chipotle faux Santa Fe feeling. The old place had shiplap siding and parking all around, pristine white crab nets flapping in the breeze and tubs of cane poles that reached like the grasping claws of blue crabs in a basket or the fingers of Edward Sizzorhands toward the cumulo-nimbus clouds in the Texas ceiling, the firmament of the big blue sky. Crab traps and handmade (from feed-sacks and porch screen under wire) “wonder” sunbonnets dangled and twisted in the wind like piñatas from the sheltering eves of the overhanging roof.
The raised concrete dock area all the way around cold sweated with the melted ice from the walk-in cooler where the big latch on the ultra-thick door thunked in place with authority, after it belched an arctic blast into the countenance of the curious. The white flag flew to signal dead bait availability. Sinister outdoor one eyed cats lurked. You could tell they were thinking way outside of the box. The asphalt burned like the devil on my bare feet until I could scramble up there where the ice had thawed into cool puddles. “Quando caliente el Sol aqui en la asphalt”. It almost seemed to sizzle when the fire under my feet was quenched.
There were gigs and Coleman lanterns for floundering. Shiny lead sinkers had funny shapes: (1) Mikkimoto pearl drops, or (2) tiny hoagie buns that clamped the line vertically as a parotid gland grips like a clam on the optic nerve, or (3) an extra large Mr. Peanut. Then, (4) the mysterious: some really large ones that pointed like inverted Egyptian pyramids were on display “a lado de los” (next to the) garish green, red and white corks, and lures of the gold and silver spoon.
There were fake plastic shrimp lures that were about as useful (for fishing) as the ubiquitous WW II plastic toy soldiers from Woolworth’s, but the imitation shrimp were as big a seller as American flag lapel pins are to Rotarians today, when they were offered by Curly to first-time fishermen who had a deep and abiding disdain for the look, price, feel and smell of shrimp - dead or alive.
On the deck were handmade Adirondack chairs whose old-time tested pattern, along with the simple utility of rubber coated chicken wire crab traps, provided a craft, a trade and a living for some of my peers, the Woodstock children of the ’60s. The times were slower. There was time to stop and smell the crustaceans in those days.
Now the women who ran with the shrimp and the beers at Curly’s were skanky: Pearl, Southern Select, Jax, and Lone Star. But for Pearl, those were only the beer names. If you ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon (“The beer that made Milwaukee famous”), a local would look you up and down and query, “Who sent for you, anyway?” The men were picturesque, funny and colorful. There weren’t many garden club women in charge or underfoot. There were a few Sacagawea’s and Miss Kitties. The little boys like me felt luckier than an East Texas dog born with two natural magic markers. We were confident, male, white and carefree. I don’t say that because it was fair or right. I say that because it was the way it was and it seemed righteously natural just like Augusta Country Club must look in the not so wise eyes of Hootie and the blowhards. Scintillant in the eyes of a child, it seemed it would never end.
But there was something blowing in the wind beside the white flag of dead bait. The snaggle-toothed men who fished the bays and brought the shrimp to Curly’s back step were white. They wore white boots. There were lots of old white coots in white boots. Sometimes, late at night, they wore white sheets, so that black men would not dare to wear the white boots. Later that racial focus switched to the Vietnamese. It sure did not help matters in Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana that dog was said to be a Vietnamese delicacy.
There was a street. Cotton Street. It was just off SH 146 near the new Eckerd’s. I like to think of it as a sort of a River Styx of a mythical and sentimental side street to the Grand Parkway where my own handpicked personal enemies will be bowed and banished in the afterlife. Lost forever ‘neath the streets of Seabrook, it’s the river that never returns. It is gone, because it wasn’t a real street. Ms. Cotton owned the two-block dusty ragamuffin of a road. She owned all the houses. She thought she owned all the occupants. She was no Marilyn Monroe, but Cotton was queen. I, a baby lawyer at the time, had a client - Burnett Cousiamano. He and his wife Connie lived on Cotton Street. He wore white boots. He was a deckhand shrimper - sometimes he paid me with shrimp and crabs in a big sack, much to the chagrin of the Widow Gregg, my first spouse, who tended to open life’s door with sore afraid trepidation anyway. Over the Cousimano mantle in the place of honor in the tiny living room on Cotton Street in Seabrook, Texas, was a picture: Not a velvet Elvis and not a picture of a Brad Pitt version of Jesus Christ. It was a giant picture of Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
And a few years later, in the council chambers of Seabrook, Texas, where I was later to be City Attorney, I witnessed the local Wizard or Grand Dragon or High Muckety Muck of the local Klan try to terrify, taunt, threaten and bluster about a parade permit to protest about and intimidate Vietnamese fishermen who were replacing these white-booted bigoted bullies one job at a time. He tried his best to cause a confrontation. It was obvious that the fight was more important to him than the permit. But the Chief of Police, Bill Kerber, was in charge. Kerber had courage. And Kerber kept his cool.
The Klan marched down SH 146 - in sheets in the heat - to thin crowds choc-a-block with cops, peacefully. I will forever respect the calmness with which the chief handled an explosive situation. Seabrook’s loss was Kemah’s gain - he now is the Kemah City Administrator. One can ride the river with that man. I am proud to be his friend. And we all owe him a debt of gratitude for his grace under fire.
A few weeks later, on a Sunday, I was eating breakfast at the Regatta Inn, on Clear Lake (now the Sundance Grill). That same Klansman and two other lovelies came by in a shrimp boat decked out as if it was time for the Blessing of the Fleet. But these were different kinds of decoration by different kinds of fisherman – far, far away from Galilee. They wore white boots and full hooded sheets. They were armed with rifles and shotguns. They had an effigy of a Vietnamese fisherman hanging by the neck from the mast. This man I mentioned dropped his hood in the heat. He was a wizard. But he was not Frank Baum OZ. He was HBO OZ. His nombre even fit: pescadore in Espanol. He sold culvert. He died last year and I hope the possible revival of the political incorrectness of that era died with him. But it is still there-just below the surface-beady little eyes that you could blindfold with a dime-staring at us from the dark-contained only by a thin veneer of civilization.
So Curly’s, like life or TARA, evolves as point and counterpoint, good and evil. We the people have capacity for both. We have a choice as to what kind of people we want to be. It is not what life gives us, for it gives us as many kinds of fishermen, as it gives us many kinds of fish. It is what we do with what we are given that takes the accurate measure of the man.
Dick Gregg
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