Over My Dead Body

Chapter 1

The highway sang beneath my tires.

I, however, did not feel like singing. What I felt like was doing a U-turn, going back to the George Bush Intercontinental Airport on the north side of Houston, and catching the first flight back to Washington. Sure, I was more than halfway to my destination, but it was only a two-hour drive back to Houston down U.S. 59; and significantly less than that to the airport.

My memories of this highway were mixed. I vaguely recalled being piled in the back of our old Ford station wagon for the five hour drive from our little town in Shelby County, hard by the Louisiana state line and more Cajun than Texas, to Houston, which was, in the 1960s the biggest city in Texas, but not yet the fourth largest city in the United States, and except for Third Ward which was the predominantly black section of the city, not all that hospitable or welcoming to people of color, but was nonetheless friendlier than Shelby County or any town in Louisiana. Back then, the high buildings, constant traffic and concrete sidewalks were a novelty to a kid accustomed to one- and two-story buildings and dirt roads, and my mom liked to shop at the big stores like Dillards, even though, just as they did in Shelby County, she had to wait for white customers to be served first.

"If I have to wait, I should at least be able to buy first-class merchandise," she always said. And, that was true. The little clothing store in our town sold dresses that looked like they'd gone out of style when Woodrow Wilson was president.

In 2003, Houston had changed. Now, officially the fourth largest city in the country, after gobbling up many of the small towns encircling it, and with two beltways, the outer one large enough to include Washington, DC and Baltimore, people of color could live anywhere in the city they pleased, and no longer had to wait to be served in department stores. Unlike the rest of Texas, which was controlled by Republicans, Houston was a stronghold of Democrats, and now they weren't the ones wearing white sheets and burning crosses like they'd been when I was a kid.

In other words, it was almost a nice place to visit. Unless it's where you came from, or near where you came from. Then, as a cousin of mine whose name I can never remember always said, "The best view of Houston, or anywhere else in Texas, for that matter, is the one in your rearview mirror as you're leaving." According to him, there were only two kinds of Texans, regardless of their color; the ones who never left, and the ones who never came back.

When I graduated from high school and, against my mother's wishes, joined the army instead of going off to Prairie View College on the valedictorian scholarship I'd been offered, I vowed to be in the second category. When my parents were swept away in a hurricane that hit the coast south of Galveston while they were visiting a relative who had a house on the 'colored' section of the beach, I'd broken that vow to attend the memorial service. Their bodies were never recovered, so there were no 'graves' to visit, and when the service was over, I jumped in my rented car and left, again vowing never to return.

I'd broken that vow a second time a few years back when a distant relative left me some property just north of Houston, and I'd had to personally present myself to the court to settle the estate. During that visit, I'd gotten caught up in a murder case that, fortunately, turned out okay, got the property settled, and when I settled back in my seat on the plane flying me back to DC, thought I was finally done with the place.

It was not to be. Family came first; even distant relatives that you could barely remember had a call on you. When they asked for help, you helped. Wherever you were, unless it was in the middle of a war zone in the middle of a battle, you dropped what you were doing and came to their aid. That's just the way I was raised.