Brownwood, Katherine Ann Porter, Lynching, HPU
Katherine Ann Porter
1890-1980
Indian Creek Cementary
(Near Brownwood Texas)
Texas Monthly 1997
“ Porter rebelled too against the strict Protestantism of her early
upbringing by converting to Catholicism, her first husband's faith and
the bane of Southern Protestants, in 1910 and in her later bohemian
lifestyle. She also resisted the rigidity and cruelty of the racial
stratification of Texas around the turn of the century. In an
uncompleted short story of 1933-34, tentatively titled "The Man in the
Tree," Porter told of a lynching and how it affected the family of a
little girl based upon herself. The child's reaction to the lynching is
one of disgust and a desire to flee a place where such a miscarriage of
justice could occur: "I-I-I'm going to leave . . . get as far away as
I-I can . . . I w-won't stay in this filthy country.... I won't s-stay
here and-and-and be murdered too!" In 1956 Porter wrote in a letter
that she had "left my native land to get away from . . . the Negro
Question."
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