Great Power in One: Miss Charles Emily Wilson

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

This the longform essay I read for the Marfa Mondays podcast, which will be available for listening for free on both iTunes and Podomatic next week. In the meantime, you can listen in to the other 20 podcasts anytime via ww.cmmayo.com/marfa. 

C.M. Mayo has written widely about Mexico, Texas, and the US-Mexico borderlands. Among her works are Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, which won the Indie Excellence Award for History, and The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, which was named a Library Journal Best Book of 2009. She is also a noted translator of Mexican literature and the editor of Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. A native of El Paso, in 2017 she was elected a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. 

GREAT POWER IN ONE:
MISS CHARLES EMILY WILSON 

BY C.M. MAYO

We tell our stories not just to rehearse the past 
but also to condition the present and, thereby, 
to prepare the future.
Bruce Jackson, The Story Is True

PART I

In our screen-enthralled world with entertainment at a click, how easy it is to underestimate the transcendent power of an oral historian such as Miss Charles Emily Wilson of Brackettville, Texas. 

 Picture her as she appears in Jeff Guinn’s Our Land Before We Die: The Proud Story of the Seminole Negro: an elderly lady on her garden-chair throne on her float in Brackettville’s Seminole Days parade. It is the year 2000. Her face bright below the shadow of her broad-brimmed hat, she wears a double-strand of pearls, a flowered skirt. A big purse balances on her knees. Two children, perhaps first graders, sit each in their folding-chair on either side of her. Even today, after books and articles by anthropologists, historians, and journalists, and after TV reports, documentaries, YouTube videos, websites, and swirls of social media posts have appeared about the history that she preserved by telling the stories of her ancestors again and again, decade after decade, to students, to anyone interested, not many people in Texas, never mind beyond Texas, have heard of her people, never mind of her. But everyone watching that parade on that day, as she sailed by, waving, would have known exactly who she was.

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