The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 85, July 1981 - April, 1982 Page: 426
497 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Contrasted with Adalia's undistinguished landscape, Lytton Springs
was an exotic oasis, a foreign geography: deep yellow sand with ber-
muda grass and flowering bitterweed, giant oak trees, underground
streams of cold water feeding shallow wells. A big tabernacle, which
accommodated all three denominations, drew believers and nonbe-
lievers alike to sermons warning against the primrose path leading to
"eternal and everlasting damnation." I remember an outstanding
Nazarene evangelist, Bess Williams, whose compelling oratory and
hell-fire sermons attracted immense crowds. She put many a "hard sin-
ner" under conviction.
Evangelists concentrated on preaching against corruption resulting
from short skirts, painted lips, bobbed hair ("Long hair is a woman's
glory"), playing cards (the devil's books), booze, red-light districts,
motion pictures ("the filth of Hollywood"), and "mixed" bathing.
Fear of burning forever in a fire "ten times hotter than any on Earth"
brought sinners to the mourner's bench as the choir softly sang "Ye
who are weary come home." Mothers scurried through the hay-strewn
aisles to beg the young, sitting with bowed heads on back rows, to
"turn from their evil ways."
Though near the age of "accountability," I did not swim in the
countyseat's new pool-I swam only with my brothers in water holes
along a creek-but my patronage of the movies, Chaplin and Fatty
Arbuckle, posed a thorny question. How I welcomed the cotton fields
after those revival meetings ended!
The opening of school in the full swing of harvest meant a three-
mile walk, "a sort of crusade," as Thoreau explains in his essay, "Walk-
ing." The early-morning winter walk to school took me along fence
rows lined with the fernlike greenery of prairie lace and a scattering
of frost, across plowed fields to disturb coveys of quail, up the big dirt
road to meet noisy schoolmates, their dinner pails flashing in the sun.
Returning home, I might ponder the mystery of cobwebs hanging in
shimmering light of late afternoon and forget grammar and arith-
metic. Such walks, Thoreau claims, prevent "rust," and preserve health
and spirit.
Often in winter, onslaughts of icy winds roared across the prairie
and shook the floor of our frame house. On these days we frequently
cut wood for the fireplace, using the green mesquite in our pasture
to supplement cords of live oak hauled from woods twelve miles dis-
tant. We built fires and burned thorns from prickly pears, making a
food for cows, an earthy communion between man and beast.426
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 85, July 1981 - April, 1982, periodical, 1981/1982; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101208/m1/484/: accessed May 1, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.