Texas Tales by Truman
When I first moved to Texas, in 2014, day after day in bar after restaurant after zoo after gas station I’d see the shutters come down on the faces of the people who showed up for work that day. They looked in confusion at some big oaf with a funny voice asking for the bill instead of the check and the crisps instead of the chips.
So that was my fault but became my bad - I accepted that I was the odd one out and adapted. Still, maybe once a week, I get the thousand-yard stare by a good ole boy or girl who just wasn’t ready to be verbally assailed, and they facially if not visually back away.
You see, Texans talk their way and I love it. The Texan diphthong takes a single peremptory syllable and makes it two. It gives the lonely monosyllable a buddy. Think well – way-ell; trap – tray-up; cat – kay-ut. Then there’s the warm soft hand on your cheek of pie becoming pah and night becoming naht. All this rounded off with the goodnight kiss of library becoming the never-fail comfort of lie-berry.
The king of the hill, for me, is the genuine haven’t-seen-ya-in-ages-buddy sincere hug and pat on the back of Appreciate Ya. Two simple words delivered with eye contact most often from a total stranger in a public setting for whom you’ve done nothing more than hold open a door or offer some similar vestigial kindness to. It brightens the crappiest of days.
Think about these two words. Someone you’ve never met and with whom you may have zero in common lets you know that they appreciate you. It is so much more than Thanks or even the bolo-tied and booted Thank Ya. In my hometown, more accurately my town of birth what with Fort Worth being my hometown, Thanks is replaced by the begrudging parsimony of Ta. Yeah, like the sticky stuff they put on roads.
Appreciate Ya. It is a simple feat of language greasing the wheels of human interaction. That guy you held the door for isn’t simply grateful he is personally appreciative of what you just did. That, my friends, is massive. Trust me, I know. I’ve been many a place where language is functional. In Texas language lives and breathes warmly upon all of our faces.
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That warmth grew tepid eventually settling to room temperature – around 72 f/22 c year round courtesy of air conditioning and heating through out the house. We were in isolation. The pandemic locked us down for a little while after Spring break 2020. March 13 was the last bar receipt I gleaned that year. Texas shut down slowly, work went online, friends also self-isolated. Mrs T. and me opted for online grocery shopping and restaurant food delivery when we were tired of cooking. After an initial period of teaching Zoom-based online the colleges I work for decreed that was divisive for a host of stupid reasons not worth our time. The second half of the year and into 2021 I taught students I never saw let alone met with.
My accent and intonation changed, reverted. I managed to j=hang on to a collective being a bunch and tin foil was still aluminium. I was talking only to English friends and family via a variety video call apps, while contact with American-speaking friends was sparse. My fresh bay-zul went back to ba-zil; I began to park my car in the ga-ridge, once more. It was all terribly non-American, some might say that it was un-American but not to my face because those guys were staging protest daylong drinking sessions in shuttered bars, and crowding into family homes for post-church Sunday get-togethers.
Texas opened back up in March 2021 and I got my two vaccine shots early doors, as a first responder – the designation given to shame-faced educators in regard to vaccine priorities. I’ve heard Appreciate Ya a ton of times and have restarted prefacing suggestions with We might could… and that has me feeling Mighty farrrn all over again.
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Words matter. Immigrant. Alien. Immigrant alien. Non-immigrant alien. Common terms on government forms – oh! The seemingly endless forms, as opaque and linguistically abstract, as they are offensive and interminable. Have you ever been a terrorist? No! Have you? Have you ever been a Nazi? Again, hell to the no. Violated anyone’s of religious freedoms? Engaged in Moral turpitude? Trafficked any humans lately? I’m assuming that the right answer to all of these is “No,” unless you wanted to work at the heart of a recently ousted Administration.
It strikes me as pretty much universal that in a modern Western culture shaped by America, the use of the word alien conjures up images of otherness, of little green men, some mysterious life form, from a planet far, far away.
In all cases, the alien is the enemy, a nefarious space traveller, from an unimaginably different and inferior land hell-bent on invading and destroying the Homeland. Green is the color of envy, of course. Here I sit, an alien, every time I’ve filled out a form for the U.S. government. Looking back, I was transformed from Homo sapiens to alien, unnoticeable by outward appearance, sometime around 2013 when I completed my first U.S. immigration form, back in old Blighty. Nobody commented on any marked change in my appearance or evident intent to invade and destroy. To me, and those I met, I was the same old guy – Big T to most, Big ‘Un to the linguistically reductive.
An Immigrant Alien I am, for now. I will be returned to Homo sapiens status once enough time has passed and money has been siphoned to government coffers for me to become a U.S. citizen. A chain or an anchor I will never be. While alien was the official government term for those people who come to the United States legally, with money, a job, and advanced college degrees, there is a cesspool of pejorative shorthand for other types of people – there, I said it: the almost never heard p-word – who come to this country to rejoin their kids, husbands, wives, ailing parents.
Chain migrant. The person who enters legally, answering all the dumb questions, replicating photos and processes, getting flu jabs whether they want them or not, paying the fees after fees after fees. Anchor baby. A child born with the same degree of intent, love, and hope as those good ol’ boys and girls born to U.S. parents. Anchors, the kids whose parents most likely are here on a visa – the aliens – who pay and stay, graft and grind, giving their hearts and minds, and taxes – labelled negatively by some.
Chain. Whoa! The yolk limiting the Homeland’s span and scope and ambition. Anchor. Oh! The weight. Dragging down the Homeland. Alien – the little green men and women invading the Homeland with their skills and their educations; their hard work and dedication.
In April 2021 the Biden Administration ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol to change their language in reference to immigrants. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the government department responsible for processing most immigration applications through a hitherto wilfully hostile and opaque system, received similar commands. Aliens became noncitizens; Illegal Aliens are now undocumented; and references to assimilation must be changed to integration. There is humanity herein, recognition of immigrants as people rather than as a monolithic threat. Those like me, with extant immigration documents, retain their A-number – their Alien identification – until their five years as a Green Card holder passes and they can apply for citizenship. An Alien I remain, for now, but at least I see that other people are welcome and being welcomed.
Words matter. People matters.