Beyond Buc-ee’s and Beyoncé: Stephen Harrigan’s Tale of Texas

The late, great Texas newspaper columnist, Molly Ivins once confessed, “I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults.” I think Molly also would have dearly loved Stephen Harrigan’s recent super-sized (of course!) history of Texas. big wonderful thing is suffused with the same kind of shake-your-head-and-laugh-to-keep-from-crying attitude that Ivins brought to her sharp-witted analysis of the Lone Star State.

Harrigan shines bright in that small firmament of Texas literati. As an author and long-time writer for the Texas Monthly, he knows of what he speaks. Like Ivins he often finds himself in that uncomfortable role of celebrating the undeniable vibrancy of Texas to a national audience while at the same time skewering its also undeniable retrograde tendencies. Not many folks can hold that creative tension well. Heck, the state itself can’t. It pushes out Buc-ee’s and Beyoncés in equal measure.

What Harrigan can do is find a telling quote to set your mind spinning with Texas-sized wonder. The book’s title comes from Georgia O’Keefe, one of the many unexpected visitors to the state who populate these pages.

“I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” remembered Georgia O’Keefe, who arrived in the Panhandle as a young artist and teacher in 1912. Her first impression was grander than even [Teddy] Roosevelt’s. Her new home was not a state, not an empire, but a world. Texas, she thought, was “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.”

—big wonderful thing, p. 6.

Harrigan has a more measured view of the place, but not much more. He sets out to tell an epic tale, beginning with the remains of ancient, mysterious peoples who left flint artifacts in the Panhandle. Moses Austin and his more famous son, Stephen F., don’t show up until almost 100 pages in, allowing for a rollicking, if bloody, recounting of Spanish and Native American encounters. But once Moses arrives, imagining “that Texas was the place where his destiny slumbered” (98), the onslaught of (U.S.) Americans is relentless.

From the outset, the invaders had varied reactions to the place. Even Stephen F. called Texas “a wild, howling, interminable solitude.” (101) One participant in the doomed 1841 Santa Fe Expedition described it as “a wide waste of eternal sameness.” (223) And a Vicksburg woman, visiting during the Civil War, lamented, “Oh, the swarms of ugly, rough people, different only in degrees of ugliness. There must be something in the air of Texas fatal to beauty.” (301)

These are the kind of golden quotes you come to Harrigan for, because you also are going to find O’Keefe waxing, “That was my country…Terrible winds and a wonderful emptiness.” (459) And later the irrepressible former governor of Texas, Ann Richards, whose hairdresser described preparing her late 80s big hair this way: “I rat the tar out of it…Then spray the hell out of it. We defy gravity.” (793) You can’t help but love folks who see the grandeur in all this excess and yet retain the ability to see the farce as well.

Harrigan doesn’t just stick with the brash and the bullheaded, though. He also keeps a steady eye trained on the other actors who shaped modern Texas. People like Lorenzo de Zavala, a Tejano leader who ended up as vice-president of the short-lived Republic of Texas; Barbara Jordan, the fiery African-American congresswoman who ran for US president; and Selena, the iconic Tejano singer whose tragic death at the height of her mid-1990s popularity only cemented her legacy.

Heartlands has a special heart for Texas, despite its travesties that run from the trivial to the globe-threatening (fossil fuel addiction anybody?). But even Tex-skeptics will find an entertaining read in big wonderful thing. It’s a 900-page, photo-filled joy ride through one of the most vigorous and consequential places on earth.

Stephen Harrigan makes a great narrator who can’t help but rejoice at the utter failure of one of Stephen F. Austin’s longings for the place he came to call home. Harrigan uses Austin’s words as his epigraph:

“I hope that a dead calm will reign all over Texas for many years to come—and that there will be no more excitements of any kind whatever.”

—Stephen F. Austin, February 6, 1835

Yeah, right.