A Dog Without Papers
The Southeast Texas town where I was raised was once the subject of a photography book titled Rough Beauty. It was kitsch masquerading as high art, replete with black-and-white photos of BBQ festival queens, Mormon missionaries, and tattooed men posing shirtless in front of trailers. The photographer was a former Clinton administration press officer who thought he’d try his hand at something more artsy, so he set about documenting our quaint folkways.
A notice for a gallery exhibition describes the book thusly: “Behind the harsh stereotypes is a town of bootstrappers struggling to get by against a background of crushing poverty almost reminiscent of the Great Depression.”
Sure, Vidor is relatively impoverished — with incomes $20,000 below the national median — but The Grapes of Wrath it ain’t. Rough Beauty gives the impression that we were an undifferentiated mass of mudsills, but Vidor has its rich and poor just like everywhere else. However, the class differences are compressed. The poor may be poorer, but the well-off aren’t so well off.
Vidor’s elites, if you can call them that, are mostly petit bourgeois. There were the Packards, a Mormon family with about a dozen kids, half of whom grew up to be lawyers at the family firm. The Wrights owned the BBQ joint in town. The Woods family ran the local grocery store. There were also various and sundry owners…
