Because They’d Been Just As Stupid As I Was Being: Stephen Graham Jones’ Growing Up Dead In Texas

The art of writing is a challenge on the best of days, mixing up genres only adds to the complexity. Some have a challenging time writing without astray from facts and heavy duty research. For others, fiction flows a lot more smoothly than trying to stick to the verifiable truth. The latter appears to be the case with novelist Stephen Graham Jones, who nevertheless tries his best to present the facts without the comforting and inoffensive guise of a fiction in his book, Growing Up Dead in Texas. Just what is this work? A little bit of a memoir, a little bit of a mystery, and a little bit of a Bildungsroman (a coming-of-age story focusing on psychological and moral growth) supercharged with subtle exercises in creativity.

Time itself gets all bent out of proportion. The narrative takes us from present day 2012 back to 1985, when a monumental cotton fire kicked off, and then it bounces along points in-between as well as much further back than the narrator could have been alive to witness much less report.

However, much of the work has to do with an author who has gained the perspective of a few years grappling with his younger self. Some of this has to do with the tragic fire, some of this has to do with the philosophy of Hot Wheels, some of this has to do with this or that influential teacher, some of this has to do with answering phone calls (or not answering them, as the case may be), and all of this has to do with that subtlest of all liars: memory.

Which is not to say this work is unbelievable or easily disproved. The point of a book like this is not in the timeline or the details. It’s a work that mostly feels right. For the folks who lived through the events, there may be some quibbles about this or that timeline. For the rest of us, it’s an experience in emotional connection to a time, place, and persona.

Growing Up Dead in Texas is as much a memoir as it is a well-researched presentation of times past and places distant. However, at its core, the book is about being haunted by the people we leave behind, the places we try to escape from, and the past we are inextricably linked to.

To approach this work less as a straight ahead memoir than a creative non-fiction exercise, we ought to view the Stephen Graham Jones of this book as cut from a similar cloth as the J. G. Ballard who appears in either The Empire of the Sun or Crash: The character might share a name as well as some memories and personality quirks as the real author, but it’s all but impossible for a reader to take all the specific events of the book without a grain of salt. Here, Jones often invokes the old chestnut about how in a novel, this or that would happen and then ultimately undercutting those expectations. If this were a novel, then a person would be able to hear both sides of a phone call. If this were a novel, then X comeuppance would happen to resolve Y setup. Sometimes fate is fickle enough to fulfill such expectations, often it is not. This all hearkens back in my mind to the Author’s Note for Donald E. Westlake’s spin on tabloid reportage, Trust Me On This, which wisely notes that novelists must strive for credibility and verisimilitude whereas reporters are working with real life, which has no such obligations. Jones book treads a line between the truth and events we can believe; he is a reporter motivated by the novelist’s needs.

The power of Jones’ book is in its imagery, the evolution of its characters and incidents, and the evocation of the West Texas location. This is a book told with Jones’ authoritative voice, a work where the details might slither by us and some of the characters might not get the fairest shake in the description department, but which leaves us with a sense of the weirdness of coming of age in such a desolate, unexpected place where cotton and oil are both king.

The real treasures for regular readers of Jones’ fiction is seeing how some of the disparate elements in his various novels stem from real views. I’ve come to Jones’ work from The Only Good Indians, which includes a rather beautifully related basketball game between the daughter of one of the men responsible for the strange supernatural intrusions and the antagonist of the piece, the Elk woman in disguise. Imagine my surprise to encounter this seemingly throwaway moment:

The gym I grew up in, the old gym in what used to be the main part of Greenwood, it was a Quonset too, though with more room around it. Not enough to dive through, but enough for cheerleaders anyway, if they were careful, kind of kicked to the side. The lights took something like fifteen minutes to heat up. One time, kicked out of the school I’d been trying to go to for a couple of weeks (Midland Lee or Midland High, I tried them both), I sneaked back, lucked my way through the halls of Greenwood and hid in that gym shooting baskets in the dark until my old math teacher zeroed in on the dribbles I couldn’t help—the clock always counting down from ten—just stood there in the doorway and told me, her voice not even raised, that I was wasting all my potential, that I didn’t have to do this, that I could be anything, that other kids would kill to have what I had. The usual story; I’d heard it before, from Ms. Everett, from Ms. Easton, and would get it in the way Godfrey looked at me that last semester before I was supposed to have graduated. I’m not mad at her for it. When Ms. Marugg told me that, I mean, she was probably younger than I am now.

I don’t know.

As to why I came back there instead of the thousand and one more places I could have gone, it has something to do with that basketball tournament after the fire, I suspect—after that morning, basketball was sacred, a holy act, you were pure just because you played—but it also had something to do with my uncles telling me in the fourth grade to look on the wall for their initials.

It took until the sixth grade, when the pegboard was the hot thing, but I finally found them, up high on the wall, like they’d carved them in their day.

It felt good, rubbing my fingertips over those grooves, those scars.

Because they’d been just as stupid as I was being, I mean— here was the proof—but they’d made it through somehow, got away. Maybe I would too. Maybe this was all part of it.

(Growing Up Dead in Texas, 97-98)

The connection between basketball and sacredness as well as the long reaching touch of ancestry to the present are particularly telling. The former speaks directly to that surprising game in a full-on novel that would not come out for another eight or so years. The latter is all the more intriguing since the connection between adults making stupid decisions in the past themselves (whether as kids or younger men) and being haunted by them is something that drives not only The Only Good Indians but works like Mongrels, Mapping the Interior, Flushboy, Not For Nothing, and even the recent My Heart is a Chainsaw. This is one of those themes that can be found running along throughout Jones’ fiction. It’s a classic, though unspoken, element in everyone’s maturing: We must understand that the people who came before us, who are supposed authorities now, are actually at heart the same sorts of screw ups that we are. At the very least, those authorities are at least capable of performing the same mess-ups that we do. It’s a vital lesson, and one every parent who is wise both welcomes and dreads.

Growing Up Dead in Texas is a provocative book. A personal reflection and recollection on an event that shaped the local history and maybe had a lasting impact on one curious young man destined to grow into a curious writer. It’s an unusual book but one that’s both readable and enjoyable.

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Growing Up Dead In Texas is available in eBook, paperback, and audiobook editions.

WORKS CITED

Jones, Stephen Graham. Growing Up Dead in Texas. MP Publishing Limited: 2012.

“Because They’d Been Just As Stupid As I Was Being: Stephen Graham Jones’ Growing Up Dead in Texas” is copyright © 2022 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the MP Publishing Limited paperback edition, released in 2012.

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