A Tinge of Vulgarity

A Tinge of Vulgarity explores the submerged stories of Texas women. It begins with my mother: Beauty, beast, crazy lady, hysterical creature—or so it seemed at the time when I was an impressionable, blonde, blue-eyed child who had inherited the role of my mother’s keeper. This painstaking role imposed paradoxical feelings of both pride and shame; and the duality perplexed the sensitive, feminine child that I was, arousing the fantasy of my own death or disappearance. 

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There was one question that kept me alive as a young child: If I killed myself, who would keep my fragile mother alive? And so I chose to live. 

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Even after my mother disappeared from my life, even after it was determined she was murdered, I chose to live and embrace my own voice so that I might claim hers, drowned as it was in the waters of Ladybird Lake and before that, in the dismissal title of hysterical woman. 

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The violence that claimed Betty Jo’s life and immersed it deep into the muddy waters in the heart of Texas, was not the sole act of her perpetrator, but the systemic notion that a culture imposed, suggesting that, “Women were to be seen and not heard.” While women’s voices were placated, their breasts and legs were celebrated—just like pieces of fried chicken selected for the Sunday meal. 

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The goal of this non-fiction narrative is to acquaint readers—and myself, my daughters and their daughters and sons—with the women, named and unnamed, of their history. Those women that continue to live through them and enliven their strength, their voices, their visions, and their beauty—so that they might enhance this earth and celebrate a new culture, beginning with their birth culture, Texas.