I found myself twenty miles outside of Center, Texas in hopes of finding the burial site of that last iteration of T.J. Alexander. I was in Center with no cell phone signal. Actually, I did have a signal but it was analog. Analog: the equivalent of dial-up Internet. I thought after 9/11 the U.S. government required digital service in every corner of the U.S., maybe in every corner except the Center.
Driving down any road, I could see the metal roofs of farmhouses and huge panels of chicken wire peeking through gurgles of sun rays. Now I see it; now I don’t. When I arrived at the hotel, a sinking feeling of regret came over me. For about thirty seconds I seriously considered driving thirty-five miles back to Shreveport, Louisiana after I saw the accommodations from the outside. Not only was the culturally diverse migratory work crew gathered around a pickup truck in the parking lot throwing back their rotgut from a violated paper bag but the doors to all the rooms were on the exterior. Warning #1: Hotels don’t have exterior doors. I had driven for many hours and was too tired to drive back to Shreveport, so I proceeded to check-in with the front desk clerk. She was a nice enough lady – short, older, slightly obese with thick black-rimmed glasses. Her Texas Bouffant was the first clue that she was born and raised in the Lone Star state, which isn’t a bad thing; it just reinforced a stigma about Texas women and their hairdos. Through the Plexiglas window, she leaned into a little hole while she slid an index card under the window,
“I’ll just need you to put your vehicle information on this card for me, please,” she said.
Perhaps the blank stare on my face gave me away but I looked up at her in very surreal terms and asked her,
“What would you like to know?”
“Vehicle, make, model, year, and license plate, is all. Do you have insurance? If you do, put that on there too, Hun.”
“On this index card?” I asked in complete disbelief, turning my head slightly towards her computer monitor hoping that technology would save me.
“No, Ma’am. All’s I need is that little bitty information and I’ll get’chu yo’ key.”
I could feel her curious eyes giving me the once over as I filled out the index card. Was she laughing inside at the city slicker who had never seen an index card to write down vehicle information? Maybe she wanted to know why I was in town. I was too tired to fight. I had a full day planned the next day and I just wanted to get something to eat and relax. She handed me the keys to a room upstairs, just above the pickup truck. Oh great! Now I’ll have to listen to all the lies they will surely tell once they are good and liquored up! I had no illusions about the room considering the franchise: Best Western. It’s okay, I thought, this is a two- day gig—in and out.
It was late afternoon but I still had time to make a courtesy phone call to Timpson Area Genealogy and Heritage Society to let them know I had arrived. I had phoned weeks earlier so they could pull the information on all of the African American Alexander’s in town so as not to waste any time trying to start the research from scratch. To my surprise, they prepared references for me but I had to schedule an appointment to view the materials for the next morning at 9:00 am, sharp.
I arrived in Timpson, a 20-minute drive from the motel, at 8:30 am but I had trouble finding the location of the genealogy society. I phoned for directions because my GPS kept dropping the signal wherever the cell phone towers switched from digital to analog and back to digital. The first time I called, I described to the lady who answered the phone where I was using landmarks as my points of reference but my rapid-fire details may have been too descriptive and caused her to be confused. It was 8:50 and I feared I was going to be late. All I got out of that conversation was to go through the “blinky light.” As I drove around and around, I was looking for a sign or symbol that read “Blinky Light” as instructed. I didn’t see one. At 9:05, I called for directions, again, hoping someone else would answer the phone and someone else did. When I spoke to the new lady on the phone, she kept referring to the blasted “blinky light” but as I began to describe the landmarks around me, I realized that we had a semantics problem, so I asked her if she was referring to the flashing yellow light and she said “yes, the flashing yellow light!” That was an instructive moment. I was circling and circling looking for the spectacular “blinky light” when it was clearly hidden in plain view by another name. My problem was that I did not understand the local language and how they viewed the flashing yellow light but once I figured out the language differences, I was on my way.