Texas hasn’t gotten its due as a major piece in the complex puzzle of American art. We’re here to rectify that. Every three weeks, H. Drew Blackburn will conduct a thoroughly scientific analysis of the 254 integral (one for every county) books, movies, tv shows, albums, podcasts, songs, and magazine articles — you name it — that best exemplify the Texas spirit. These texts, products of immense talent, dig into the marrow of our being. When it’s all said and done and we’ve built The Texas Voyager collection, we’ll (figuratively) head to the Johnson Space Center in Houston and shoot it beyond the atmosphere, into the cosmos. A wise person once posed the question: “What if the aliens are hot?” Hold onto that hope — this is our chance to impress ‘em.
Beyoncé’s eighth album, “Cowboy Carter,” has a provocative cover.
There she is on a horse waving an American flag, sporting red, white, and blue — the same flag and colors that cannot be separated from the United States’s sordid past and present on domestic and foreign land.
After all, Beyoncé does sing about a “whole lotta red in that white and blue,” on the album.
But, to interpret this piece of art in good faith means to wrestle with its meaning — the full scope of what it means to be a Black American. It is possible to critique the empire and have pride in your downtrodden people’s contributions, especially when that history has been intentionally suppressed.
One of the most blatant elements of the artwork is Beyoncé’s homage to rodeo queens and cowboy culture, both at Beyoncé Bowl and in the album cover. Look even closer and you’ll find that the horse she’s sitting on is a Lipazzener. They’re an interesting breed. When Lipazzeners are born, their coat is brown or black; over time, it turns into a whitish-gray. This is the historical record of the cowboy. Black and brown at its inception, and gradually over time, whitewashed.
You see, Black cowboys were essentially the cowboys back in the day.
From slavery — because slavery was whatever it needed to be, not just picking cotton — to the post-antebellum days in the South, Black cowboys played a crucial role in cattle ranching and driving.
“They didn’t have white cowboys,” Larry Callies, founder of The Black Cowboy Museum in Rosenberg told The Barbed Wire. “Black (men) was called a cowboy because of his skin,” said Callies, who is a fourth-generation cowboy and a country singer. “They called Black people ‘boys’ in the 1800s. The white man was called the cowhand. (Back then) you better not call a white man a cowboy. He’d say, ‘I’m not your boy. I’m a cowhand. Cowperson. Cowdriver.’ Not a cowboy… until Hollywood.”
If you close your eyes and imagine a cowboy, what you probably see is a solitary, six-foot-something, gunslinging white man. Pretty too, but in a hyper-masculine way. It’s an image made popular by Hollywood and the Western film genre at a time when media in the United States began to take shape and find its voice outside of European traditions. Westerns are early American folklore and propaganda — tales of heroes settling and taming the West, painting Native Americans as savages, bestowing virtues of vigilante justice, capitalism, and individualism. There’s no irony in the fact that our country’s first blockbuster was D. W. Griffith’s disgustingly racist opus “The Birth of a Nation,” nor is it a mistake that Black people were largely excluded from the motion pictures that helped manufacture the American identity.
It’s by design.
“It’s hard for me to say that wasn’t intentional because if you had came to Texas, if you had gone to Oklahoma and you were talking to white cowboys and you were talking to cowboys where the cowboys lived, they would’ve told you about all these Black cowboys. That’s not a secret,” Ron Davis, curator of American history at San Antonio’s Witte Museum, told The Barbed Wire. Davis is co-curator of the museum’s exhibit “Black Cowboys: An American Story.”
Davis actually traces the history of Black cowboys back to West Africa, well before the transatlantic slave trade. “There were West Africans who for a thousand years tended cattle,” Davis said. “Nations, tribes, and countries that had cavalries before European contact. These were skills that were already a part of certain people in West African traditions.”
Davis recalls a slave narrative written in the 1700s by Olaudah Equiano who was captured at around nine or 12 — eventually, he became a freeman. In it, he talks about his childhood in West Africa, and while he doesn’t specifically write about tending cattle, he talks about a herd of cattle getting exchanged when a couple was about to get married. “You don’t just go get a herd of cattle in the 1700s. That means to me that cattle is a central part of your culture.”
When the practice of tending cattle made its way to America, it began to take a new shape, something Davis calls a Creolization of culture — blending aspects of different customs to create something new. “You’re taking these different aspects of West African, Spanish, Mexican, and British cattle ranching, and it becomes the cowboy over time.”
According to Davis, J. Marvin Hunter, the president of the Trail Driver Association, kept a manifest of everyone who went on a trail run. Hunter’s calculations put the number of Black cowboys on cattle drives at one in four. If you include Mexicans, the number becomes three out of four people of color.
The stories of Black cowboys — like the famous Western legend born into slavery Nat Love; ranch hand and longhorn tamer Bill Pickett; and the first Black U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves — aren’t as much an anomaly as you were led to believe. These men were the original cowboys.
Hollywood finally got around to giving those aforementioned names their due as heroes with a sprinkling of films, notably, 2021’s “The Harder They Fall,” but Black cowboys are fundamental to Texas history, present, and future. It would take more than a mere sprinkle to represent them.
That goes for the icons and the men whose names have been lost to time — on ranches in small towns and in and around cities like Fort Worth, Austin, and Houston.
That’s why we’re putting Black cowboys and their untold stories in the Texas Voyager collection.
“We as African-Americans have experienced everything that any other American has and we have survived and maintained our contributions to every industry that exists,” said Aaronetta Pierce, who is steering committee chair for the “Black Cowboys: An American Story” exhibit in San Antonio.
“We are not new to many things, but understand that Black cowboys have always existed. There may not be (many) books written, but they know what their ancestors taught them. And so we belong in — and we are rooted in — these traditions. Just like any other American.”
