We Were Illegal

April 1, 2024
Disturbed by a rise of xenophobic extremism in her home state of Texas, journalist Goudeau (After the Last Border) sets out in this ruminative account to investigate whether her family has always been as welcoming toward strangers as they were during her childhood. She is shocked to discover that her ancestors tore a destructive path across America that included owning slaves and participating in lynchings and feuds. Tracing her family’s migration from Virginia—where in the late 18th century her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Slowman Reese was a plantation overseer—to Tennessee and then Texas, Goudeau unspools a narrative in which the family’s early entrenchment in slavery festered as white supremacist beliefs and a penchant for violence in Slowman’s descendants—whom, in Goudeau’s telling, went on to play surpisingly pivotal yet below-the-radar roles in Texas history. Among them are Robert Leftwich, a land grant agent involved in early 19th-century schemes to get Anglo Texans to rebel against Mexico; Sam Houston Reese, a sheriff who waged a deadly feud with his political rivals in the 1890s; and the author’s great-uncle Frank Probst, a Texas Ranger implicated in the 1945 murder of a Latino migrant worker family. Introspective and detailed, Goudeau’s questing narrative, which strikes out in many directions in search of answers, at times feels circuitous. Still, it’s a valuable contribution to Texas history.