I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: german immigration to texas in the 19th century

  • Skeleton in the Closet (from Deep in the Heart)

    Skeleton in the Closet (from Deep in the Heart)


    “Pass Grandpa Schlinke the fried chicken, Sheila Rae,” my grandmother Dude said as I was about to take a drumstick from the platter in front of me. “You know he always gets the first piece.”

    How could anyone forget, I thought. I picked up the platter and gave it to my great-grandfather, who sat like a king at the head of our dining room table. He looked imperious as he sat there in his starched white shirt and black trousers held up by dark suspenders. His face was inscrutable as he searched the platter for his favorite pieces. He found the two best ones with white meat, the breast and the pulley bone, and picked them up with his fingers.He placed them ceremoniously on his plate. With something of a grunt, he passed the meat to my Grandma Schlinke, who was seated on his right.

    And so, the order was established. Every dish went first to Grandpa Schlinke, and then made its way from him to the rest of us. Uncle Toby, my mother’s brother who lived with us, sat next to Grandma Schlinke. Then came Daddy, who sat at the foot of the table at the opposite end from Grandpa. Mama sat next to him, and I sat in the middle between her and Dude, my mother’s mother. Dude had to be next to Grandpa so she could jump up to get him more sweet tea or homemade rolls. He had a healthy appetite.

    Grandpa and Grandma Schlinke were my grandmother’s parents. They lived in Houston with my Uncle Otto, who was their youngest son. Once each summer they came to Richards which they considered way out in the country to stay with us for a few days. Everything changed when they visited. For one thing, we ate every meal in the dining room, which we rarely used. For another, I slept on a pallet on the floor because we really didn’t have enough beds for everyone. It was okay, but I was usually happy to see them leave.

    They were mysterious to me. I first believed part of the enigma was they didn’t speak English well. They had spoken German until their thirteen children brought English home from the public schools. As I got to know them better, I decided they weren’t big talkers in any language.

    Every morning after breakfast, Grandpa Schlinke would order me to bring him the newspaper, which he would take to a rocking chair on the front porch. There he would sit and read and rock. Always dressed in the same white shirt and black pants with suspenders. And bare feet. One of the few comments he directed toward me was to caution me about shoes. “Shoes are the tools of the devil,” he pronounced.

    I tried very hard to like this crusty old man because he was Dude’s father. I loved her so much I knew I should love him, too. She was always thrilled to have her parents visit and wanted everything to be just right for them. I felt I should try to entertain him, since Daddy and Dude were at work, and Mama was gone to college in Huntsville, where she was working on her degree. Uncle Toby was forever listening to his “Back to the Bible” broadcast on the radio and working crossword puzzles. Grandma Schlinke constantly cleaned or cooked. She would sweep the kitchen several times a day. Who knew why?

    At any rate, that left me to sit with Grandpa Schlinke on the front porch while he rocked. “What are you reading today, Grandpa?” I asked one morning. “The news of the day,” he replied. “Anything in particular?” I persisted. Being eight years old, and trying to play the genial hostess for this gruff ninety-something-year-old man was challenging.

    He paused in his reading and stared into the space in front of him. His eyes were small for his big German face with a nose like Pinocchio. A slight breeze blew the few tufts of his white hair as he rocked. I tried to follow his gaze. The crape myrtles directly in the center of our vision were a brilliant hot pink and in full bloom. The grass was perfectly manicured and emerald, green. Across the dirt road was Anna and Tom Owen Smith’s neat white frame house that looked very much like ours. Nothing stirring there. Beyond their house we had in our sights the roof of the general store where Dude worked. I heard a bee humming in some verbenas near where we sat. There were no other sounds. It was going to be a long day for me with this old man.

    “I was in jail once,” Grandpa Schlinke said from out of the blue. “The sheriff came to my house and arrested me and took me to the county jail.” He stared some more. My mind snapped to attention. This was a news flash. My first thought was, did Mama know? She wouldn’t have liked to think that her grandfather had ever been in jail. I knew that without a doubt. That was the wrong image of our family, for sure. Surely, Dude must have known. Maybe she had even been there when the sheriff came to take away her father. How old had she been? My mind was racing with a million questions. I had to be careful, though. This was a situation requiring great diplomacy to elicit valuable information. I walked on eggshells.

    “What did you do?” I asked. I was trying to keep excitement out of my voice so that Grandpa would continue. He sat and looked upward to the blue sky, apparently for direction. “I had eleven living children of my own, and then my brother died. He left two more, Arnold and Amelia. I promised him I would take care of them for him. So now we had thirteen children on our farm. There was no money and the cotton crop was very poor.”

    He stopped. I waited. No one got arrested for having thirteen children and a bad cotton crop, did they? Surely not. Grandpa turned in the rocker to look squarely at me. He looked right through me with those beady eyes and spoke again. “I had a neighbor named Neville Johnson who told me we could make a lot of money in a new business that wasn’t hard to learn. Neville had capital to get started. So, we made a partnership. Neville and me. Partners. Sealed with a handshake and our word.”

    Grandpa paused, gazing again at the crape myrtles. Finally, he turned and looked down at me. He seemed to have reached a momentous decision. I held my breath. “We built a still and made moonshine whiskey in the back of my farm. We made good money for a few months. I was getting caught up on paying my bills. My children were eating regularly. Life was better.” His eyes grew moist. “One night Neville Johnson didn’t come to the still. Instead, the sheriff came that night and busted up everything we had. He arrested me and took me to jail. The deputies threatened me with guns and called me a kraut-head. The booming business was over.”

    I nodded encouragement and waited expectantly for more of the story. Grandpa calmly picked up his paper and resumed reading. Apparently he was finished. A few questions would be left unanswered.

    I asked Dude about this episode later, and she said she knew. Of course, everyone knew. He had come back from jail after a few months. Her brothers had planted the cotton while he was away. The moonshine money had kept them fed and clothed until the next cotton crop was sold. That was all you could say about it, she implied.

    I never took up the matter again with Grandpa Schlinke, but somehow the story made him seem real to me. Maybe the reason he didn’t talk a lot was he was too busy with his memories of people who were no longer there. Like Neville Johnson.

    *******************

    The blossoms of the crape myrtle tree in our front yard will soon be ablaze with the bright pink signature color I love most – perhaps because pink was the color of the ones in the yard at my grandmother’s house in Richards, Texas. Crape myrtles love the summer heat in South Carolina as they did the brutal Texas heat seven decades ago; today I was reminded of this story my great-grandfather shared with me when I was a child while we sat on a small front porch one summer looking at nothing but pink blossoms and his memories.

  • dreamers shipwrecked in Galveston in 1868


    “We were eleven weeks on the ocean [leaving Bremen in the Province of Hanover, Germany on the Bark ship Fortuna for Texas] and when we were right near Galveston, the ship ran on a sand bar. We stayed there all night and part of next day before we were taken off. The ship had broken in the middle and was about to go all to pieces. By that time all our belongings were wet from salt water. At that time I was less than two years old but I have often heard my father say there was a family on board that kept praying and all the other people tried to get to them because they were all afraid except those who were praying.

    On the ship with us was my father’s mother and my mother’s father. My father’s brother John Koym and his family, Ferd Koym who was single, and my mother’s brother William Buls and his family, Andrew Buls, also single, as was Sophie Pletzech, who came along, too.

    There was a family by the name of Poshen, and a single man by the name of Carl Rando.

    I remember all of them very well. We stayed in Galveston several days and dried the belongings the best we could and then we moved to Brenham by train and from Brenham, on an ox-wagon driven by a negro driver we went about two miles out in the country, to an acquaintance of my father, where they were farming. Then we went on to Weimar. We lived there about 16 years and after I married Lena Reinhardt. I and a good many of my people moved to East Bernard, where we have lived all these years…”

    German immigration to Texas in the nineteenth century after the Civil War was partly driven by advertising in their newspapers for farm laborers to replace the African American men, women and children who once were slaves but now were free to leave the cotton, corn and tobacco fields of their masters to seek paid wages elsewhere. Many slaves left the farms without a backward glance which meant white landowners needed help with their cash crops, help to do the manual farm labor they couldn’t or wouldn’t do.

    Enter the Germans who faced political revolutions of their own, declining opportunities for farming in their homeland, varying degrees of religious persecution – murmurings among friends to brave the ocean voyage for a new life in America grew louder. The Koym and Buls families in the Province of Hanover in Germany shared not only a passion for economic improvement but also a two year old grandson named Hermann (who many years later wrote the above newspaper article about the shipwreck for the Galveston Daily News). A German friend who was already established on a farm two miles outside of Brenham in Washington County had sent word to Wilhelm Koym that Texas was the promised land. Friedrich (William) Buls was 62 years old, a widower with four adult children who were planning to risk their lives for fortunes and adventure across the high seas.

    The Bark ship Fortuna was a cheaper form of sailing vessel for the immigrants which indicated this group’s unremarkable socioeconomic status. Tens of thousands of poor working class Germans crossed the Atlantic in similar difficult conditions, but this small band of wayfarers was significant to me.

    Hermann’s maternal grandfather, Friedrich (William) Buls, was my 3rd great-grandfather, the widower who made this voyage at the age of 62 with his four grown children. His eldest son 32 year old Joachim Andreas Christian Buls (Andrew), the “also single” son in the newspaper clipping, found a wife in Texas and married Sophie Bartels Schawe in Salem, Washington County one year after the Galveston shipwreck. Sophie was a widow with three children when they married; she became the mother of another four children with Andrew Buls.

    The third child born to Andrew and Sophie on August 02, 1873 was a daughter, Bertha Emeline Selma Buls. Selma grew up on the family’s Washington County farm, spoke German in the home, had no formal schooling. When she was seventeen years old, she married another German Charles C. Schlinke who had been born in Brenham in Washington County.

    Selma Buls Schlinke was the woman I called Grandma Schlinke when she visited us in Richards, Grimes County, Texas throughout the 1940s and 1950s until her death in 1956. Grandma and Grandpa Schlinke had 12 biological children – one died as an infant – my grandmother Beatrice Louise Schlinke was their fifth child born October 20, 1898 in Rosenberg, Texas. A circuitous journey brought my grandmother Louise (with her husband James Marion Boring, Sr.) to live in the little town of Richards that was a hundred miles west of Weimar where her mother Selma was born and raised.

    Several additional twists of fate brought my daddy, mama (named Selma Louise) and me to live with Louise Schlinke Boring when I was two years old in 1948. My grandmother Louise who I called Dude as a toddler (because I dropped the second syllable of “Dudese” which I’ve never understood until our granddaughter began skipping unimportant second syllables in her initial communication of language) had a small house in Richards but the hospitality was warm just like she was so we had regular visitors every year. Grandma and Grandpa Schlinke visited us in the summer for a week or longer – they loved to get away from the big city of Houston where they lived with a son Otto and his wife Patrina on Posey Street, a lower middle class neighborhood of blue collar workers and small entrepreneurs. My Uncle Otto owned a grocery store located behind his house.

    Faded photographs I found this week plus a folder marked simply “Buls Family Genealogy” captured my interest about my mother’s maternal ancestors. I have several tiny pictures that I believe were taken of Buls relatives in the 1920s or 1930s on a farm which could be in Washington County. I don’t know the names of these German Texans because none of them were identified by my grandmother, but she carefully saved these 3×2 inch images of a particular time and place so I understand their importance to her; whether they are my family or yours, I found them compelling.

    Harvesting crops was a family affair

    Truly “horse and buggy” days in Brenham, Texas

    Typical farmer with his plow

    High Corn (not High Cotton)

    Texas farmer and his hardest workers

    Texas woman riding a horse – in my DNA

    Finally, I’ll close with one of my favorite pictures…taken before 1953.

    I am standing between my mother Selma –

    and my grandmother Dude.

    Grandpa and Grandma Schlinke are seated.

    I am the child of shipwrecked dreamers who refused to give up when their ship went down in the salty sea on the Texas coast, who then traveled by train, and then by a cart pulled by oxen to arrive in a beautiful country where no one spoke their language. I honor their memories as I celebrate the dreams of all who still dare to dream today that America is a land of hope.

    Onward.

    **********

    Stay safe, stay sane, please get vaccinated and please stay tuned.