Finding the Man in the Picture
Part One
There is a framed picture hanging on a wall in my parent’s home. This picture fascinates me. When I visit I often find myself pausing to stare at the image of a handsome and striking young man who sits with his wife and their two-year-old daughter. His face doesn't reveal much emotion, but something behind his eyes and in his story draws me to him.
The little girl is my mother, and some part of me understands that the young man is my grandfather. But this is not the man I knew as Papaw. His face is not old and sagging and marked with spots and deep lines, as I remember it. The face in the picture has a chiseled jaw line, prominent cheek bones, and smooth, brown skin. His lips are full, soft, and even sensual. His hair is black as coal and looks as though it received a lot of attention and was a source of considerable pride. The Native American woman who made a surprise appearance in our family tree a few generations back certainly left her mark on his face.
In the picture my grandfather is wearing a three-piece suit with a white shirt and tie. I never knew him to dress like that. By the time I came along he wore wore Coveralls all the time. I can hardly remember him wearing anything else. Obviously this was my grandfather in a dapper moment, dressing his best for a family photo. A closer look at the picture reveals the truth about him. An air pressure gauge sticks up prominently from the breast pocket of his fancy suit. The hand casually draped across his thigh had already begun the thickening process that would eventually produce the strongest pair of hands I ever saw.
This was not a man accustomed to suits and ties. This was a man who needed a tire gauge at the ready. This was a man who knew a day’s work. Spotting the gauge there in his pocket made me smile and was comforting to me for some reason. Yes, that’s the man I remember so fondly. I knew he was in there somewhere.
The first time I saw this picture I was shocked to realize that my grandfather had been handsome once upon a time. With his hair, that skin, and those exotic features, he could be on the cover of “Gentlemen’s Quarterly” next month.
But of course, he wasn’t on the cover of any magazines. My grandfather was a country man, hard and uneducated. He was not sophisticated in any way that you or I might recognize, though I imagine he could teach us a thing or two. And the life he lived soon turned those smooth, young features into something older, something rougher, something like worn leather.
The picture was taken in 1939. They had no way of knowing it, but the Great Depression was drawing to a close and World War II was about to begin, bringing new kinds of hardship and deprivation. My grandfather was nineteen when the stock market crashed. He was certainly not among those speculating in stock at the time. When it happened, I think it was probably nothing more to him than a bold headline in an East Texas newspaper. The depression hit his kind later, when paychecks shrank or disappeared altogether. When that happened, men like my grandfather returned to the soil. You can always grow food, and if you have food you can figure out the rest.
Sometimes I wonder what Papaw expected out of life. I have a sense that he expected to struggle hard and pull his living from the earth with his bare hands. This is what it meant to be a man – to know your place and to stand between your family and destruction. You had to make your own way in the world, by whatever means necessary. The Great Depression only made the thorns he already expected a little sharper and the sweat of his brow a little saltier.
His name was Van Zany Cox, and he was born in Oklahoma in 1910. He and his family were poor white trash. That’s the truth of it. That’s what people called share croppers who had too many children and lived in a boxcar. His mother, my great-grandmother, who lived long enough to hold a great-great-grandson, had to work in the fields while she was pregnant. She bent her back to pick cotton while his siblings hung low in her belly. Five of seven lived, three boys and two girls. Van Zany was the oldest, so he bore certain responsibilities. He was called upon to leave school as a boy to work with his mother and father and to help raise his brothers and sisters.
Family legend tells us that he swore his two younger brothers would never have to drop out of school, and they didn’t. Nolan went to Rice University and Lowell played football at Texas A&M.
When the Texas oil boom hit, the family moved to East Texas, hoping to find dream jobs with the big oil companies. There would be regular paychecks and real houses to live in, and a company store where you could buy clothes and food and even candy for the children sometimes, or so they heard.
They were like the Joad family in “The Grapes of Wrath,” only the handbills told these Okies to head for Texas oil. It was the right decision, and all of our potential lives hung in the balance. The way I see it, they carried us all with them in the jalopy, my mother, her children, my children, and all who will come after us.
Van Zany lied about his age and got hired by the Humble Oil Company. That company would later become “Esso,” then “Enco,” and finally, “Exxon.” My grandfather was always grateful for his job and proud of his company. He trusted that the company would take care of him, and as far as he was concerned, it did. He lived in the Humble Oil Camp in a company house. He shopped at the company store. His children were among the mobs who flooded into the public schools from the oil camps around the state.
Eventually he bought that company house and moved it onto his own land. He added a room or two, including a bathroom for himself complete with a real shower. He covered the old-fashioned slate with red brick and lived in that house until he buried the young woman from the picture and was later buried himself by his three children.
He knew his place in the world and was happy to have it. I think his shiny hardhat and regular paycheck were the best he could hope for in life, and he never stopped being grateful. He worked for the same company until he retired, and he proudly carried his Exxon credit card with him until the day he died. He was constantly topping off the tanks of his vehicles so he wouldn't get in a bind and be forced to buy some other, lesser brand of gasoline.
But most of this happened before I knew him. I am the third of his eight grandchildren, and I only knew him as Papaw, our beloved grandfather. He always kept ice cream in the freezer for his grandchildren - chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry - and he told us the same silly stories over and over.
“I had a little dog, his name was Rover. He died all over except for his tail, and it turned over.”
“I had a little mule, his name was Jack. I put him in the stable but he jumped through the crack.”
I recognize the full lips from the picture, but when I knew him some sort of paralysis had lessened his control over them, so that there was always a little drool seeping from the corner of his mouth that he wiped away with a handkerchief or the back of his hand. His hands and fingers were thick and calloused after forty-five years in the oil fields. As a boy I was fascinated by his hands and would watch, amazed, when he used them for some ordinary task, like carving turkey at Thanksgiving or tying a hook to my fishing line. Some accident along the way had caused him to lose much of the feeling in one of his hands. He used to hold his numbed fingers in the flame of a candle to our delight and amazement.
He had land enough for a serious garden and would sometimes load the grandkids into a makeshift train of wagons and haul us around behind his miniature tractor. When I was a small boy, I used to dream of driving that tractor myself, a thing I understood to be so far beyond me that I could not allow myself to hope for it.
He always seemed happy with what he had. His Humble Oil home was humble indeed, but it was enough for him, as was his land and his garden and his vacation trips. How he did love to travel after he retired. He was thrilled with the KOA campgrounds, the Stuckey’s, and the snapshots he and Mamaw proudly put into the albums they kept on the coffee table. The fruit he brought home from the Rio Grande Valley always seemed exotic and wonderful to him. His grandchildren, who had never wanted for fruit or much else for that matter, could not understand his delight at a Ruby Red grapefruit.
I think wanting more of the American dream was a kind of blasphemy to my grandfather. Anything more than he had was beyond his station and utterly out of his reach. Like me wanting to drive his tractor, there were things in life he dared not hope for. He didn’t even think of hoping for them.
This is what my grandfather and others like him came to know, came to understand and accept without question. You should know your place. You should accept the slice of the American pie that the powerful people give to you, and you should be grateful for it. To step out of your place and want more is to be selfish and spoiled, and perhaps is even against the will of the frightening God whose word thundered from country pulpits and billowed the canvas tents of small town revivals.
I think people who have been kept in their place by the immutable forces of power sometimes carry in their hearts the unfertilized seeds of lost chances and unclaimed dreams. These sterile and hardened kernels can never grow, but lie buried and festering. And if anyone else is seen stepping out of his place, that kernel can split open, not dropping tender roots of desire and goodness, but bursting with a pent-up and mindless rage that searches for no proper object, but only seeks expression and release.
I remember the day when the rage inside my grandfather rose up, as if it were something independant of him, and showed me a person as unfamiliar then as the man in the photograph is today. I remember the day I discovered that there was something angry and frightening inside my Papaw.
Click here to read part two.
rlp
Humble Oil Camp
Picture of Humble Oil Camp House
Rio Grande Valley - Home of Texas Citrus Fruit
Stuckey's
KOA Campgrounds
Coveralls
7:26:30 AM 
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