The Land Remembers

Prologue

[JOHN enters. He carries nothing. He looks at the audience for a long moment before speaking.]

John

I am not a man who made speeches.

I made land grants.
I made ferries.
I made a family.

The speeches came from other men —
men who needed the world to know
what they had decided.

I only needed the world to see it.

[He looks down at the surveyor’s chain at his feet.]

I came from Vermont with this.
A surveyor’s chain.
A man who measures land
believes in what he can prove.

I still believe in what I can prove.

I. What Vermont Gave Me

John

Vermont was cold in a way that clarifies things.

When the ground is frozen four months of the year,
you learn what endures and what doesn’t.
You learn to build for permanence.
You learn that a thing is either sound or it isn’t,
and the winter will tell you which.

My state outlawed slavery
before it was a state.
That fact is in me the way cold is in stone —
you can warm the surface,
but the cold stays in the core.

I carried that into Texas.
Not as a conviction I had to explain.
As a fact I had to live.

[A pause. He picks up the surveyor’s chain, holds it briefly, sets it down again.]

I came south in the 1820s.
I was a soldier by service — a private in the 31st Infantry, in the War of 1812 —
a settler by intention,
and a man by whatever standard
the world around me was using that week.

The standard kept changing.
I did not.

II. The Land

John

On July 22, 1832,
I received a headright grant.
Two thousand, two hundred and fourteen acres
along the Colorado River.

I measured it myself.

Land is honest.
It doesn’t care who you are.
It only cares what you do with it.

I built a fort.
Then a house.
Then a ferry.
Then a community, around the ferry,
that people called Webber’s Prairie.

They named it after me.
I was still standing on it when they did.

[He looks out, as if at the land.]

I want to be careful here.
The land I stood on had carried other names
long before I arrived with my chain.
Those names are not mine to give back.
I can only say that I know they existed,
and that I did not have the wisdom, then,
to ask what I was measuring.

That is my failure.
I name it plainly
because the rest of this story requires plainness.

III. The Choice

John

People ask — they have always asked —
what I was thinking.

When I chose her.
When I filed the bond.
When I stood next to her in public
and did not pretend otherwise.

As if there were a moment of decision.
As if I woke one morning and thought:
today I will do the thing that costs everything.

It wasn’t like that.

It was like measuring land.
You walk the boundary.
You mark what is there.
You do not invent a different boundary
because the true one is inconvenient.

She was there.
She was real.
She was a person the law was trying to unmake.

I believed in what I could prove.
I could prove she was a person.
The law could not prove otherwise,
despite considerable effort.

[He is very still.]

On June 11, 1834,
I filed an emancipation bond
before Alcalde Williamson at San Felipe.
I pledged half my land.
I pledged my future.

The terms of that bond were never fulfilled.
Two children I had promised as payment
I refused to deliver.
The land was forfeited.

I lost the ground.
I kept the family.

I would make that exchange again.
I would make it every morning
if the morning required it.

IV. The Republic

[Lighting shifts. Colder.]

John

In 1836, Texas declared itself a republic.

They outlawed our marriage.
They voided her freedom as a legal category.
They made it a crime to be what we were.

I want to say something clearly about this.

The Texas Revolution was fought,
in significant part,
to protect the institution of slavery
from a Mexican government moving against it.

I know this because I was here.
I know this because I watched
what the settlers who arrived after independence
were willing to do
to a family that looked like mine.

Noah Smithwick — my neighbor,
a man who was present for much of this —
wrote in his memoir that he honored me
for standing by my children
whatever their complexion.

I appreciated his honesty.
I did not need his honor.

My children needed food and education,
not the admiration of men
who admired us from a safe distance.

[A beat.]

I hired an English tutor for them.
The neighbors threatened the man.
He stayed as long as he could.
Then he left.

I found another way.
I always found another way.

V. The Departure

John

In 1851, we left Webber’s Prairie.

Not because I had given up.
Because the land was already gone —
forfeited to Cryer seventeen years earlier —
and the people who surrounded us
had made their intentions clear.

Staying was not courage.
Staying was giving them what they wanted:
a reason.

We went south.

The town kept my name.
Webberville.
A monument to a family
that was driven out before the sign was painted.

I do not find that ironic.
I find it accurate.
The land remembers what was built upon it,
even when the people who built it
are no longer welcome.

VI. The Rio Grande

[Lighting returns to warm.]

John

In June of 1853,
I acquired land in Hidalgo County.
El Agostadero de la Gata grant.
On the Rio Grande.

We built a ferry.
Licensed. Official. Documented.

On the other side of that river
was Mexico.
Where slavery had been abolished.
Where no marshal could cross.
Where the law said: a person who reaches this bank
is a person.

We ran our ferry.
We did not ask
everyone who crossed
where they were going.

[A long pause.]

I had a family.
I had a ferry.
I had a river.

A man can do a great deal of good
with a family, a ferry, and a river.

I was a Unionist.
When Texas seceded,
I did not.

Confederate forces arrested my sons.
One escaped.
We crossed into Mexico and waited.

Then the war ended.
And we came back.

We always came back.

VII. What I Leave

John

I died on July 19, 1882.
Near the river.
On land I had measured myself.

I leave children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren settled along the Rio Grande — documented in census records, in land partitions, in the compound they built around their mother after I was gone.

I leave a name on a map in Travis County
that belongs more to them than to me.
I leave a bond in a box in Austin
that my great-great-great-granddaughter
will hold in her own hands
one hundred and forty years from now,
and understand.

I leave the surveyor’s chain.

[He looks at it.]

A man who measures land
believes in what he can prove.

Here is what I proved:

That a family built in defiance of a republic
can outlast the republic.

That land forfeited for freedom
is not land lost.

That a name on a map
is less permanent than a name in a bond,
less permanent than a name
spoken by descendants
who are still here.

[He sits. The only time in the play. A brief stillness.]

I am not a man who made speeches.

But I am a man
whose choices
are still being read.

That is enough.

[He stands. He picks up the surveyor’s chain. He exits carrying it.]

[Darkness.]