The Lone Star
by Ben Lewellyn-Taylor
On billboards and bumper stickers, in political talking points and conversations with strangers, “Don’t California my Texas” is a catchall phrase for Texans concerned with a growing progressive population in the Lone Star State.
Variations gesture vaguely at the perceived threat: “Look at what they’re doing in California.” An abstraction. Surely you, the listener, agrees: California’s way of life—presumptive of a singular, liberal existence—is reprehensible. After all, they’re a blue state, with occasional exceptions. Texas, on the other hand, is red, but some say it might go blue. Closing in on the other. You can feel the shudders across the second largest state.
In The Searchers, a 1959 film based on the novel The Avenging Texans, Ethan Edwards has not been seen since the Confederate Army surrendered. He was on the losing side. It has been three years, but nobody presses him on his whereabouts. They get it: he was nursing his emotional wounds. The space made for his grief is wide. Its shape betrays the Western hero, the stone-faced man whose languages are tough-talking and gun-slinging. He is more akin to the Western landscape: how the horizon expands before him, makes way for his person.
I should mention Ethan Edwards is played by John Wayne, who famously said that he believed in white supremacy. In those words, too: “I believe in white supremacy.” Some said Wayne had been dead for decades, and his views were no longer fair game. When you Google “John Wayne white,” the search suggestion populates “horse” and not “supremacy.” White horses were his favorite to ride. White space between what is known and what we wish to remember.
In his welcome home, someone asks Ethan Edwards if he ever went to California in his years away. Edwards gives the questioner the what-for: “No, I ain’t been to California. Don’t intend to go either.” It’s not quite a joke. Frankly, the suggestion angers him. You would get this, if you lived in Texas.
The movie was primarily shot in Monument Valley, which spans parts of Arizona and Utah, between California and Texas. A billboard on my block recently featured an advertisement for visiting California: “Everyone welcome.” Two states, so close in size, a kinship of origin. Manifest destiny, westward expansion: different names draw boundaries, allow different kinds of space.
On a map, if you leaned Texas to the left, it might touch California. It’s a reach, I know.
Widely considered to be one of, if not the most, influential films in American culture, The Searchers lands at or near the top of many all-time lists. Critics still debate the racism of its central figure. After all, Ethan Edwards is a Confederate in his blood. Which is to say, the Confederacy provides a name for his hatred. A name grants legitimacy, makes room for what it contains. Ethan Edwards vows to kill his niece when he finds her, believing her ruined by mingling with a Comanche tribe.
We are to give the benefit of the doubt. This was 1959. This was John Wayne. At the end of the film, he walks away from the house’s open door, because he knows this is no longer his world. Where the house would confine him, he turns back to the land. Take as much space as you need to process this.
When I imagine watching this movie in a Texas theater, I consider the way Ethan’s barb about California would go over. Shouts and whistles. It would not be unlike the time I saw American Sniper in a sold out theater at the largest shopping mall in Dallas.
That film centers around “one of the most lethal snipers in American history.” He lived not too far from here—I often drive under the memorial bridge named in honor of him. The movie was filmed in California and directed by Clint Eastwood, once synonymous with the Western genre.
In the final scene, the movie shows the American sniper with another American soldier, and the end credits reveal that this soldier kills him. I felt heavy with grief. There is too much here: war, empire, hero myths, PTSD, American violence. How we go on. Sometimes you just sit with a feeling as the credits roll. They give you that space.
But the entire theater erupted in applause, engulfing my stillness. They had seen something entirely different: this was no lament, but an unbridled celebration of the lone gunman as a symbol of American strength. He was cut down senselessly, but the clapping enshrouded the tragedy of it all, the irony of a man lifted high for his ability to use a gun, then at the wrong end of one.
The air outside the theater was thick, the crowd marching through the mall and breaking off toward their exits. It was almost Christmas. I walked out into the night sky in a haze, looking for my car in the parking lot as the sea of pickup trucks, like white horses, stretched before me. No stars were visible, but I knew they wouldn’t be.
There is never as much space as we might like. Between me and you, there never was.
Ben Lewellyn-Taylor is a writer and teacher in Dallas, where he lives with his spouse Meg. He is an MFA student in Antioch University's low-residency program, where he also works on the Lunch Ticket staff. Ben co-hosts Book Cult with Cristina Rodriguez at Deep Vellum Books. His work has previously appeared on The Adroit Journal, New South, and FreezeRay Poetry, among others.
