Hershel Parker
Thank you, Stephen Kiernan, for the heads up on Facebook about the Netflix showing.
I had never heard of the movie but after THE BAKER'S SECRET I trusted Kiernan's judgment and made a note to watch it. I just finished it. As I said, I had not known who was in THE HIGHWAYMEN. Kevin Costner was. His father was my 2nd
cousin, so I look at Kevin's ears and nose and listen to his voice carefully. I
think he must be one of the bravest movie stars working now, to let himself
look like a believable Frank Hamer.
I was prepared to be moved by a movie that takes place in the Depression just where this one is. I have been steeped
in Texas and Louisiana and Oklahoma in the last months. For I few years I have been publishing about the American Revolution, mainly events that involved kinfolks I never knew about until recently. That is, I am learning Southern history by finding relatives who were involved in momentous events, and even are in historical records, sometimes. Following Hill cousins, one a Texas Ranger, I recently wrote an article on the 1862 Great Hangings of Gainesville, Texas, that will be in the Southwestern Historical
Quarterly (I found an unknown very early history of the hangings. Cousin Aaron does not come out well.) Lately the Texas Revolution has been on my mind, particularly Nacogdoches, where my Revolutionary veteran William Sparks died in 1848. I sent off a thing today, an unknown piece written in Nacogdoches by a participant in the so-called Runaway Scrape. The first portrait in Frank Dobie's OUT OF THE OLD ROCK, Cousin George McGehee, was in the Scrape at the age of two months. George told his mother's story, a thrilling tale involving another McGehee cousin. I am about done with a longer piece on the 1836 flight to the Gulf ports and the Sabine.
The Panhandle of Oklahoma has been on
my mind. I explained to a cousin the other day that the "IT" she found in a document did not include Guymon--that was OT. In 1952 when I
was an apprentice telegrapher in Red Rock, OK, we had OT and IT tickets on
great hooks in the AT&SF depot, printed before statehood. Two
Mississippi brothers went out to Oklahoma Territory around 1900 and homesteaded near Guymon, my
grandfather Gene Costner and his brother Mode (Moses Amariah) Costner. Mode
stayed there and died there. There were years when the only kinfolks the older
children knew were the two Costner families. My parents are there in the 1930
census--something I learned recently. They had been in the Panhandle of Texas during some of the worst of the Dust Bowl. Guymon must have been a brief stay. After I was born they got to Escobas, on the Rio Grande, for four or five years. You can't rely on anything. I am in the 1940 Federal Census as born in 1930. We did a lot of Model A driving across Texas in the Depression.
Also, I have been thinking about Texas and
Louisiana for weeks because the flight to the Sabine in 1836 put the Texian refugees
near places I worked at on the Kansas City Southern starting in 1952--Noble, Zwolle, Many, DeRidder,
Dequincy. I was in a TB warehouse east of Shreveport, out toward Texas, one summer. They had not heard of streptomycin. I found a place that had. For two years I was night telegrapher (8 pm to 4 am) on the Kansas City Southern at Port Arthur while I went to school in Beaumont. I am so old that when I graduated with highest honors in 1959 Dan Rather read my name aloud--on the radio, in Houston. I thought for the last several years that my Melville Collection (books and research files) would go there, to Beaumont. That fell through early this year and after much distress my first choice, the Berkshire Athenaeum, under a new young director, came through this month with a welcome to the books and research files--an enthusiastic welcome, publicized at once. I will not have to put 60 bankers' boxes at the curb, after all.
So, I was all set to be powerfully moved by a Depression movie that took place in Texas and Louisiana and Oklahoma and that starred Kevin Costner.
The movie never had a false move until the slapstick ending, the exchange of drivers. Mr. Gault would have had
to pee when they changed drivers. Did they shoot two endings?
Thank you,
Stephen, and congratulations to your friend, the writer John Fusco. It was a splendid movie.
---P.
S. I had to check. If you are Southern you are either kin or connected, Double Cousin Lois says. Clyde Barrow is my 8th cousin 11 times removed, through the Knoxes. Mississippi cousins, deal with it.
Well, Kevin is my 2nd cousin once removed. In the South . . . .
