Robert Guzman
Ms. Pierce
English 1301
22 September 2014
My Life in Isolation
Well… not in complete isolation; I grew up in Nome, Texas where there is one stop light, a couple of stop signs, open fields filled with Brahmin, and few sane people. With a ratio of human to cow roughly being 1:400 you could “go out on a limb” and say that Nome has a strong agricultural background with high resistance to change. The few people in Nome consist of ninety-percent elderly, ten-percent youth; and the youth were “hell raisers”, “trouble makers”, or “punks”. The youth, to be considered at least one of those, were judged on three main differences and the judgment spread through the town like the black plague.
Before I begin, I am going to give you a brief of Nome. The rushing of people to Nome, Texas for the oil boom was similar to the gold rush in Nome, Alaska; hence the name. Formed when racism was openly accepted into daily life of Americans, Nome was and still is segregated, the “Great Wall of Nome” just so happens to be the railroad originally laid by Texas and New Orleans Railroad Co. when the oil boom first happened, which is why African American Families live on one side of the track and whites on the other. Nome’s agricultural background is solely responsible for the segregation issues, issues brought up with younger generations, and the resistance to change; although, I am not saying an agricultural background is a bad thing because we as humans need agriculture to survive.
Nome’s judgment is based on three things, as said before; they are: 1. Are they employed? 2. Does their sense of style include: Levi straight fit or boot cut jeans, boots, and baseball cap or cowboy hat? 3. Do they have white skin? If you didn’t fit that quota then you were an outcast, a troublemaker, or a burnout. If you were black or Mexican then you were definitely some type of indentured servant or manual laborer on rice farms, Brahmin farms, or an errand boy. Nome’s agricultural background is held together by just a few families who own the majority of land in and around Nome and they have kept those farms in their family no matter what for generations upon generations going back to the early 1800s; and those families knowingly set the quota for acceptance in the small social system Nome has acquired. They keep those biased opinions alive through any means necessary. I recall back when I first moved there, there was an incident that pokes out past all of the other appalling situations.
On my property was an old pear tree that black kids would climb to the very top to retrieve the biggest pears, they were there just waiting until their game at the gym next to our house started or until it was time to go home. While they were climbing the tree my brothers and I would wait at the base of the tree and ask for them to get us a pear too; I got my handful of pears and ran to my mother who was sitting on our front porch letting the cool breeze cool her off while she was taking a break from unpacking. As I neared my mom, an ancient man and his twenty year younger wife(classic gold digger story) drove up on his golf cart and exclaimed, “What are they doing over here?” pointing his decrepit finger towards the pear tree filled with black kids throwing pears down to my brothers. My mother retorted, “What do you mean? Who do you mean?”
“I mean those blacks in your tree, ma’am”, he said somewhat respectfully as to not insult the new neighbors.
My mother spoke righteously, “Sir, they are doing nothing wrong, they are just eating those hard pears that my family can’t eat all of! What’s wrong with them being over here? They were here long before me and I can’t tell them to leave!”
The man was dumbfounded, staring at the people in the tree with disgust and his younger spouse sat there smiling like a robot that said nothing; I’m sure she was just thinking of the wealth she was going to attain at his death bed. After a short moment of awkward silence, he changed the subject to welcoming us to the neighborhood. That same man is the one giving younger kids a hard time when they do things out of Nome’s judgment system; Geez, most of my family thought he would have kicked the bucket by now, 15 years later he is still giving people a hard time. The only difference, he is refined to his front porch, cursing and yelling at just about anyone who passed by-just like Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose[->0] from “To Kill a Mockingbird”-where he will most likely live out the rest of his days. He yells at the younger kids going through the neighborhood, yelling at them just because they dress weird or have a different color skin, or simply because they are walking aimlessly around just to kill time.
That yelling is only the start of the oppression to mock every last movement of the preceding generation, the middle aged people start to spread rumors, talk behind your back, and notice every wrong thing you or your family did. To the point that when you had the option to work, it would be taken away from you very quickly because the possible employers would hear of these rumors and because they wouldn’t confront you, you had no way of ever defending yourself. At one point kids couldn’t go door to door to sell raffle tickets or candy for a fundraiser because the rumors would begin to fester into kids selling or asking for drugs from door to door. I personally, and two of my friends, were victims of this; we were accused of breaking into houses for drugs, when we were actually feeding a neighbor’s cat while they were away on vacation, or asking people for drugs when all we were doing was selling raffle tickets to win a car!
Nome’s affliction, though I am no doctor, is the inability to allow change into their neighborhood. Yes, change is very scary, frightening actually, but is inevitable-thankfully! Eventually Nome’s agricultural background will become history and it will make way for new, younger, and modern-thinking families.

[->0] - http://www.bookrags.com/notes/tkm/CHR.htm#23