It seemed half the schools in the state were named Bowie or Crockett
and most of the other half either Stephen F. Austin or Sam Houston.
They were the patron saints of the only religion that mattered
and necessitated a yearly pilgrimage to the Mecca of the Alamo,
there to ponder the great sword of a knife that had made history
on some remote sandbar or other, and the tiny room its namesake
met his end in, there in his tubercular death bed to be shot through the head
more times than anyone really wanted to count, and contemplate
Crockett’s portrait, his almost girlish face and long Tennessee hair
that would have gotten him laughed out of any 1950’s bar
in Texas, if not killed. Of course we never imagined the true savagery
of the event, or the suspect motives of the gang of thieves
who wanted to steal a whole country pretty much in the name
of Whiteness. We were true believers. We wanted to step across
a line in the sand, face down thousands, hear our names shouted
like oaths over the blazing green battlefields of our past.