Oyster Creek, Texas. No oysters, but plenty of mean little white boys. That’s the Oyster Creek I remember. If it offends some, so be it. Our experiences speak for themselves. Gilbert, me, and John. Louis was too small to remember.
A town of little under a thousand people, Oyster Creek is an hour south of Houston. Someone once called me crazy for saying that this town was an hour south of Houston. “You’re crazy, that can’t be. You’ll be in the ocean.” Well, we were a couple of miles off the coast. The point is, we were near Houston, and we were near the coast. But this town has nothing to do with Oysters. A creek does run through the north part of town, but only a couple of homes overlook the creek. The other creek, which I never knew the name to, splits the town into south and north. The highway, FM 523 splits it east and west.
Oyster Creek is the stepchild of Brazoria county. It’s surrounded by Freeport, Clute, Surfside, and Angleton. We Oyster Creeksters were backwards. I felt this as a child. That’s why we wanted to move away the moment we moved there. Un rancho, that’s what it was. This would be our home for eternity, at least we thought that as children.
One drives around Oyster Creek today and is surprised to find an old town where empty homes are left to fall apart, and cracked streets with grass hanging over them yearn for cars and pedestrians. Back in the day, this was not the case. Kids were everywhere: at the park; community center; creek; bars. Yes, bars too. This is where I learned to play pool at age 6. My mom fell for a Freddy Fender lookalike named Joe. Joe moved to Oyster Creek a couple of years after returning from Vietnam. He purchased a small white house on Lake Drive; it originally belonged to the neighbors, but they moved it over and built another house on their property. A much nicer home.
So, what about these mean little white kids? Being new, my brothers and I knew no one. We saw other kids playing around the neighborhood, but we were never invited to play. So, instead we played by ourselves in our back yard. Once though, the kids did want to play. If one could say that “throwing rocks at one another” is a sort of child’s play. Our parents had went to the grocery store in Freeport, a few minutes outside Oyster Creek. They left Gilbert, me, and John alone at the house. We were bored, so we went outside to throw a ball around; a football, I believe. As our backyard was next to a park, we saw kids playing basketball. We envied them, but didn’t invite ourselves to play. We threw the ball around, each of us hoping they would invite us. They didn’t. But, as we threw the ball around, we heard one of the kids hollar at us, “Hey wetback.” This was probably my first encounter with the word, but I knew what it meant. The other kids laughed loudly. My brother immediately yelled back, “Honky!” My heart pounded. Oh boy, what’s going to happen now. It seemed I was always getting my ass kicked and I was only 5 years old; I vaguely remember being punched in the stomach in Portland, Oregon, and another time in Angleton, Texas. Both times Gilbert stepped in to help out. To this day, I look up to Gilbert as my personal bodyguard, as well as my older brother; it’s like getting two for the price of one.
The kids stopped playing basketball and ran up the our fence, standing about 50 feet away. There were about six of them and three of us. I think Gilbert could have taken on about three of them, and I could have taken 1 and a half, leaving John to take on the smallest one; the other half would have to be dealt with by me or Gilbert. As names were being called back and forth between Gilbert and the other kids, one of them threw a rock at our house. Gilbert called us to run into the house, and we leaped on our back porch and into the back door to the kitchen. We looked outside the window and saw the kids grabbing rocks around the basketball court. As we planned our strategy, they threw more rocks at our house. Either they were good throwers, intentionally not hitting the windows, or they sucked and should never be allowed to act as pitchers on any softball or baseball team. We decided to run out to the driveway and grab some rocks. They wanted war, we would give them war. At that time, I hadn’t learned about non-violence, so I went along, hoping to teach these kids that they were messing with the wrong boys. We were “Reyes’s” afterall.
TO BE CONTINUED…
