John Steinbeck was already suffering serious heart trouble when, in 1962, he and his dog clambered into a pickup with a camper topper for a cross-country trip chronicled in his famous final book, Travels with Charley.

Six decades later, Austin writer Lauren Hough sets out in a 2001 Dodge Ram van with her dog, a mutt named Woody, to discover whether they can survive a similar 10,000-mile trip in a much-altered America. The title of her resulting book comes from Steinbeck, who dubbed America: “a monster of a land.”

Tension crackles as Hough and Woody head almost immediately for the Deep South, a region where Hough had previously run afoul of a redneck sheriff during her stint in the U.S. Air Force. 

Hough is no wimp. Her past professions include, according to her bio, “an Air Force airman, a bartender, a bouncer, a construction laborer, a driver, a green-aproned barista, and a cable guy.”

Her prior book, an essay collection called Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, describes how she endured growing up in a cult, a stint in the military as an LGBTQ+ airman in a don’t-ask-don’t tell environment, incarceration in a solitary prison cell, and sexual assault.

Yet in her opening chapters, Hough is nervous enough about this particular road trip that she’s enormously grateful to the handy friend who built a solid base for her on-board toilet. In fact, she seems overly effusive about the elaborate private privy. Only later do readers learn that Hough views that throne as critical security, given attacks she’s faced as a tall Queer person with close-cropped hair in attempts to use public women’s bathrooms.

For their journey, Hough and Woody, a husky pit rescue named after the iconic singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, must rely on their not-so-trusty transportation, which Hough describes as a “2001 Dodge Ram van that looked like it might belong to a retiree over the meth cook and over the next few months would confound every mechanic who agreed to look at it.” Hough attempted to improve their survival odds by affixing a few corny fishing stickers to the bumper.

She also preps by reading Travels with Charley for the first time. She learns that other authors and critics have skewered Steinbeck’s nonfiction as heavily fictionalized. Notably, he hides that his wife joined him for more than half the trip and that he rarely slept overnight in his trusty travel trailer. Instead, he favored fancy hotels, resorts, and the estates of wealthy friends. (My Luxury Sojourns with Elaine and Charley) would have been a very different book.)

Hough’s stops tend to be spartan, if not dodgy. She seeks out dog-friendly beaches and remote forest roads and, at times, follows directions down unmarked dirt roads from wanderers, including people who consider themselves modern hobos or missionaries, rather than homeless or, in more liberal parlance which Hough sometimes mocks, “the unhoused.” 

In 2010, journalist and author Bill Steigerwald delivered a blistering indictment after retracing Steinbeck’s 11-week journey that hit 40 states in a book dubbed Dogging Steinbeck. After cross-comparing maps, letters, and biographical materials and retracing the author’s route, Stigerwald concluded that most of the characters Stainbeck encountered were likely fabricated and his settings altered. In a related 2011 essay, “Sorry Charley,” he labeled Steinbeck’s work “something of a fraud.”

Yet Seigerwald’s strong critiques seem to ignore the differences between the 2010s and the era of Steinbeck’s trip, On the road, Steinbeck, the author of classics like Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath, and Cannery Row, certainly would have attracted attention from eccentric characters who were either down-on-their-luck or over-the-top. And many more proudly weird and eccentric people, from hippies to cult members to draft dodgers, were hitchhiking in 1960s America.

In the 2020s, Hough offers Steinbeck appreciation for not ending his book by killing off poor Charley ( and thus increasing the trauma she experienced as a dog-loving child by reading Old Yeller or Where the Red Fern Grows).

“Thank fuck the dog survives,” she muses. Nor does it offend her that Steinbeck—who undertook a 10,000-mile road trip in his 50s and suffered heart trouble after a lifetime of smoking—might crave comforts after driving long hours with a dog. (Steinbeck died in 1968, six years after his travel book appeared.)

Hogue’s 2020s travelogue set in post-COVID-apocalypse America offers some of Steinbeck’s seemingly fanciful 1960s characters’ modern street cred—given the very colorful folks she meets in her own rambles. Unlike Steinbeck, who took few notes and likely relied on memory–or imagination–Hogue perpetually stops to record her journey, eventually filling a whopping 900 pages that, under editors’ orders, is boiled down to 310, some 50 pages longer than Travels with Charley. 

Some of her most memorable musings come after Hough engages people who wander without her resources. One early encounter occurs in New Orleans, the city where Steinbeck called off his road trip and headed home.

Just outside the city’s famous Cafe du Monde, Hough spots an unnamed elderly New Orleanian wearing a tracksuit who is ignored and insulted as she begs from individuals waiting in a line for beignets. Hough joins this queue—along with Woody, since the restaurant offers a handy outside cash-only window—and overhears a trio of obnoxious snobs rebuff the woman, first claiming they have no cash and then scoffing: “She doesn’t even look homeless.” 

Hough sees the woman retreat to lean against a brick wall and then waves her over. 

“Her name was Dorothy,” Hough writes. “I could hear the pride in her voice when she told me she was born and raised just over in the Ninth Ward.” Dorothy, Hough learns, lost her home, like thousands of others, in Hurricane Katrina about two decades ago. And three years prior she’d suffered a stroke and lost her job. 

Their conversation is interrupted when another tourist hollers out a warning and misgenders Hough: “Hey bro, it’s a scam.” 

Instantly, Hough and her dog decide to hate him. 

“I wished Woody was an attack dog. I wanted to ask him how the fuck breakfast is a scam,” she writes. Hogue offers Dorothy $20 for food, which her new acquaintance is forced to gum, given that while “living rough” she has been robbed of her last set of dentures.

A few miles later down a Gulf Coast highway, Hough crosses the Mississippi state line and reaches the Redneck Riviera, where she learns that the feds’ post-Katrina efforts did help rebuild another American’s home—the stately Mississippi plantation of slave-owner Jefferson Davis, the president of the rebel Confederate States of America. 

“The good news is that, since it is designated a historic landmark, federal funds that might’ve been used to fix literally anything else were used to rebuild the traitor’s last residence. Glad we took care of that,” Hough writes.

Some of Hough’s anecdotes are sharp, some musings are laugh-aloud funny, a few are rants filled with a stream of expletives over setbacks or maddening on-the-road realizations as Hough explores an America that, in many ways, seems just as divided by political and economic differences as it was during Steinbeck’s trip. 

Hough cannot time-travel to make her comparisons. She does attempt to avoid the cell phone’s siren call and steers clear of the interstates that arrived in the 1970s. While navigating backroads, she tries to ignore constant text alerts from friends and fans, as well as social media feeds that tend to magnify our divisions and our anger. That’s tough for Hough, a social media influencer whose posts on a Twitter account based on her prior dog often went viral. Yet In face-to-face encounters, she and Woody find far more tolerance and friendliness than expected.

Given the risks she takes and the attacks she’s faced, readers will be holding their breath for a major loss, scary breakdown, homophobic attack, or life-changing disaster for her or for Woody. Indeed, some disasters inevitably occur. 

Spoiler alert: Hough survives her solo trip as an openly queer veteran, writer, and dog-lover to deliver a travelogue full of pathos, insights, solidarity—and some side-splitting and spot-on observations.

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From deep within I heard: “not a woman.”

The desert stretched out in front of me as I drove. For months, feelings I couldn’t put my finger on simmered. I realize in the rearview mirror that my egg had been cracking, a term that refers to the process of discovering one’s transness.

I am the first out transgender and queer person in my lineage, but I would be foolish to think I am the first altogether. 

Self-portraiture and family photos serve as a mirror and a portal; looking into my reflection, I am looking for those who came before. I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams. 

I grew up in a high-control fundamental Christian environment. In one of my lowest points as a young person, following an unexpected pregnancy and subsequent abortion in college, I moved to Texas for the first time at 21 years old.

In San Antonio, I found the space and freedom to explore and reinvent myself. I’ve found community, connection, and dreams of possibility in the three times I’ve moved to this beautiful place with its rich history of Indigenous, Black, and brown people fighting for liberation.

I first heard John Denver’s famous song about the West Virginia mountains as a young teenager. I clasped on to the romantic song as a symbol of a special place and time of belonging, something I had yet to authentically experience. Now, as a big kid, I believe where I belong is exactly where I am: San Antonio.

Well-intentioned friends and family members in other parts of the country raise their eyebrows and in a hushed tone ask me what it’s like living in Texas. I don’t disagree; the state is increasingly transphobic—but so is our country. Trans people represent a sense of possibility and self-determination that undermines the colonial project that is America. Still, I remain hyper-aware of my surroundings when I leave the sanctuary of my home.

In these images and collages, I look back to see where I come from and orient myself toward the person I want to be. As the one so often behind the camera, I step in front of it to place myself in the story. Collaging and physically manipulating photographic prints, these images span moments of curiosity as I wander on mylifelong journey to find home within.

I am present. I am here. Not a woman and not a man: Conveying my experience of gender with words is clumsy at best. I find peace when I occupy the place in between.

Like mighty agave plants, defending themselves as they take up space, trans people are majestic, precious, and not going anywhere.

The post A Mirror and a Portal appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In Texas, Juneteenth is often described as the day that Union Major General Gordon Granger marched upon the shores of Galveston to announce the Emancipation Proclamation—on June 19th, 1865. 

But freedom in Texas was achieved both after and before formal emancipation. 

Following June 1865, those newly freed Afro-Texans who’d heard the news still had to battle the psychological toll of slavery, briefly remaining bound to the familiarity of plantations for fear of white violence, racist policies, and uncertainty. Eventually, Freedmen established more than 500 Freedom Colonies and even migrated to urban centers like Houston for better employment opportunities as well as, they hoped, safety. According to the National Park Service, “Emancipated people settled in the Big Thicket [a forested region in Deep East Texas known as the ‘biological crossroads of North America’] and survived off the land, using the woods of southeast Texas for homesteading, hunting, and foraging.” 

And, prior to 1865, many Afro-Texans reclaimed their sovereignty and autonomy well before the federal government acknowledged their basic humanity, though there’s a dearth of centralized information about Black placemaking in Texas from this time. This reclamation was called “marronage”—a term borrowed from French for this act of antebellum self-emancipation. The word most often refers specifically to runaway slaves, or “maroons,” who broke free to set up isolated communities in places like East Texas, Louisiana, and throughout the Global South. 

Ferns in a bog along the Kirby Nature Trail in the Big Thicket National Preserve in Kountze in October 2005 (Randy Mallory/UNT)

There are only piecemeal accounts of how Black maroons actually created their own communities in the dense, jungle-like swamps and forests of Deep East Texas. Newspaper clippings and oral histories leave just crumbs of stories related to these outlaws who sought refuge in the Thicket. 

Regardless, marronage showcases that some Black Texans had already gained sovereignty long before it was granted to them. Maroon communities in the woods embodied the intricate connection between the natural world and Black people. Ecospirituality, reciprocity, and Indigenous technologies from Africa and America have always been the drumbeat of Black survival in this state. 

Diana Jones Allen, director of landscape architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington, has dedicated much of her research to the history of maroons in Coastal Louisiana and the connection between environmental justice, identity, and cultural landscapes. 

From the Carolinas to Haiti, Brazil, Jamaica, and even Florida, Allen has described how Black maroons operated as landscape architects who had the forethought and technical skills to work with the natural world. Allen’s work points to why studying Black marronage is essential to both ecological preservation and understanding the true meaning of freedom in Texas, on Juneteenth 161 years later. 

The Texas Observer spoke with Allen in early June. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

TO: What is a maroon community, and why are they important? 


Maroons were self-liberated enslaved people.
I call them self-liberated because they were not freed. They chose to liberate themselves. 

In the U.S., escaped enslaved people [in general] were trying to go and be free in the North. Marronage was different because not only did they not want to be enslaved, but they didn’t want to be a part of the system at all, right?
They saw the flaws. … It’s not just that [maroons] were people that were trying to escape enslavement. Maroons were different. They wanted to make their own communities, their own way of living, and their own values. And so they had to be isolated to do that. 

Oftentimes, we talk about slavery, as if there was slavery and then there was 1863 or 1865 and then everybody was free. But there’s so much messiness in between that. Can you expand on that?

Enslavement in the Americas … was really based on capitalism. It was based on production. And this production, of course, took labor. But it also took knowledge, right?


So in Louisiana, the French needed to clear and drain the swamps. The landscape was quite different from the Europeans’. They discovered that in Africa there were certain landscapes, for example Senegambia, where it was a lot like Louisiana. And so people in Africa knew how to build levees and how to do drainage and they also knew how to grow rice. The French were almost about to die, but then they started particularly bringing in slaves that had this knowledge and brought them into Louisiana, which had a similar landscape.

Even if you look at the East Coast, like the Gullah people—they didn’t maroon themselves, they were kind of left there—but they were able to survive. They developed the whole culture because they had this knowledge.
Maroon communities throughout Texas, Louisiana, and other places were brought here for this knowledge; they were able to take it into these landscapes and continue to figure it out. And they also exchanged knowledge with Indigenous people.

More than anything else, more than like revolt or escaping, marronage was to the enslaver one of the greatest threats. Because marronage proved that the key to slavery was making other human beings believe that they couldn’t live without you or without this system, but maroons in a landscape somewhere prove to other enslaved people that it is possible that, actually, we don’t really need them and we could live on their own. It was a substantial threat to the slavocracy.

Is marronage actually freedom? If you are forced to go to a place to isolate yourself in order to be free, is that really freedom? 

I think the practice of marronage is freedom. I’m finishing up my book, and I’m about to send it off to the press, and one thing I do ask is, ‘What is freedom?’ 

Freedom is being able to decide for yourself what am I going to do in place of slavery? What am I going to do today? What am I gonna eat? How am I going to dress? And so on the plantation, almost all of those decisions were made by someone else. 


Can you tell me more about why maroons had the upper hand in the wetlands, swamps, and forests? 

We have this attitude towards nature that anything that can’t be built upon is worthless. So you have to drain it, fill it, clear it. … That land in its “naturalness” has no value, which is totally untrue.

So marronage can then happen in these places that other societies felt were forsaken. … That was one of the positive things for maroon communities; there were places for a time that were felt to have no monetary value. 

The other thing is the fauna. Alligators, bobcats, coyotes, all these natural animals that were there that were very threatening, but Indigenous and African communities had a different relationship. A spiritual connection with the plants and animals. Maroons figured out a symbiotic relationship with the alligators and water moccasins and all, wherever they were, be they in the the wetlands of Louisiana or Texas or the hills in Jamaica and Haiti. Which Indigenous people had figured out before Europeans came in. 

Why is it that we do hear about maroon communities in places like Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, but we don’t hear a lot about Black marronage and sovereignty here in Texas? 

If you’re just looking at maroons in the U.S., you’re right; Florida comes up and Louisiana, and there’s a lot of stuff on the Great Dismal Swamp, the sea islands, but you can’t find Texas. 

So complicated, right? Because Texas was really Mexico. And then there was this war in 1836 where a group said we’re not going to have slavery anymore, and then some other people said we want to have slavery, and they had a war and they created Texas. And then, you know, Texas tried to be its own state … then Texas became part of the United States. So I think the true history of Texas, especially in terms of Black people, is very complicated and has been submerged. I mean, that’s why I think [Director of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project] Andrea Roberts is so great… finding all those Freedom Colonies and enlightening people.

The “absolute equality” mural in Galveston in 2024 (Josephine Lee)

As Juneteenth approaches, what does the history of marronage tell us about the meaning of freedom? 

It tells us that it’s possible, and it’s something that takes action. You can’t really have marronage without slavery, right? That freedom is possible, but you gotta go from the plantation to the thicket. 

So I think that’s the message for us, especially today: that we got to go from the plantation to the thicket. It’s gonna be tough, but we gotta take action. 

What is lost when we separate environmental history from Black history?

Oh my goodness, you really can’t. There’s this great book. It’s called African American Environmental Thought, and I’ve read that book and I’ve used it so many times.

It’s complicated because on one hand, you know, Black people have a love-hate relationship with certain landscapes because they were landscapes of slavery, right? That’s why a lot of people don’t want to be near a plantation. 

And also there’s this misconception too that Black people aren’t environmentalists, but actually we’re some of the first environmentalists. Like you go back to the maroons … that’s one reason, like I said, they brought us here—because we were environmentalists.

And also it’s just symbolic: Like, if the land dies, we die. Not just because it feeds us and gives us air to breathe and water to drink, but spiritually. We’re so connected. 

It’s part of our freedom.

The post From the Plantation to the Thicket: Juneteenth, Black Freedom, and ‘Marronage’ in Texas appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In 1863, Betty Simmons was about 20 years old, and her 3-year-old son, Charlie, would soon be made to work in the field. 

In her 1938 interview with the Federal Writers’ Project, Simmons said: “[They take them young].” (These interviews were rendered by government workers in an excessively heavy dialect—in this case, for example, “Dey tek dem young”—which is converted here into standard English.) The prospect made her incredibly uneasy, but Simmons; her partner, George; and their children had few options. They were among the 182,566 people—30 percent of the Texas population—then reduced to property and held as slaves. 

Simmons was not born in Texas; an owner’s financial collapse had set her on a long journey through slavery’s widespread and deep-rooted network. 

Simmons initially lived among family in Henry County, Tennessee. Long before she was born, her father was given his freedom for saving his owner’s life, and he lived nearby in a cabin. She remembered how her Aunt Adeline helped her out of a bit of trouble, and she mentioned a sister in her interview narrative. In 1850, their apparent owner, William Leftwich Carter, counted 18 people among his property, ranging in age from 6 months to 70 years, half of them children. Though the county was known for its tobacco, Carter reported large yields of butter and fruit, plus smaller quantities of potatoes, corn, and other crops. Simmons does not mention participating in their production; she may have been too young. This first chapter of her life ended abruptly when her 82-year-old father fell while picking plums from a tree for the children. Not long after, Carter sent Simmons and her sister 40 miles away to be with his newlywed daughter.

Simmons might have been less than 10 years old at the time of the move. Mary Clementine Carter and Henry Washington Lankford married in 1854 and lived in Carroll County, Tennessee. The Carters made their practice of slavery generational; children owned the children of their parents’ slaves. Simmons said her primary task was to care for, or “nurse,” the young, a role often assigned to older children. A 20-year-old woman, a 1-year-old baby, and two girls, ages 14 and 11, possibly Simmons and her sister, were recorded as Lankford’s property. 

The practice of slavery provided owners with transferable wealth, as with other forms of property. Slaves could be rented or sold for cash, traded for land, insured, mortgaged, and seized to satisfy debts. “Wash” Lankford operated a store, but his alliance with dodgy business partners left him with large debts that precipitated his financial ruin. Lankford scrambled to hide his enslaved people while putting his plans for Simmons in motion. 

He told his wife, “[I think I better send Betty down to help brother Newt with the corn].” Simmons spent two days working on the brother’s farm, and on the third day, Newt brought her to two men who stood at his gate in a buggy. One man asked, “That the gal?” Newt answered, “Yes,” and the man responded, “That’s a small gal.” 

They told Simmons to gather her things and encouraged her to ride with them to a boardinghouse some 26 miles away, supposedly for two to three weeks of work. Once secured in the buggy, the two men revealed themselves as slave traders. Simmons began to understand the full extent of the ordeal, learned of Lankford’s ruin, and realized she had already been sold. At this moment, Simmons also heard of the “break,” or the crisis building between the North and the South. Simmons spent her first night on the road at a home owned by the father of one of the slave traders. By the mid-1850s, a well-developed network of holding yards, informal waypoints, ships, trains, roads, and trails supported the forced migration of enslaved African Americans from the Upper to the Lower South. Simmons woke up “in a stir.” The traders hurried the women to gather their bundles so they could meet the train headed to Memphis. The women took turns walking and riding in the buggy. 

Simmons noted that the men arrived separately, but she did not know how. Advertisements in newspapers like the Memphis Daily Appeal published routes, schedules, and modes, allowing slave traders to choose how to transport their human goods. In Memphis, they waited at a trading yard, also called a slave pen, for the ship called the Ohio. Records from the SlaveVoyages database show a steamship named the Ohio carried enslaved people from New Orleans to Galveston. The records do not currently confirm details of Simmons’ specific journey. 

Upon arrival in New Orleans, Simmons said, “[I was satisfied then I lost my people and ain’t never going to see them no more in this world].” She entered the trading yard. Simmons overheard the traders say that there were three such places inside the small river city. Its walls were built of planks, “fixed up” around the yard. Sandbars served as additional barriers, and the watchman acted as a final reminder of their imprisonment. At this moment of the account, Simmons told the interviewer that guards and traders whipped people on the train and in the yards. 

The town contained dozens of hotels, markets, streets, and homes where others profited from the trade in enslaved people. Those trapped in the camp understood how their ages and abilities translated into the price required to remove them from the place. They assessed one another, sharing details of their histories and the unfortunate circumstances that led them there. By this time, the Civil War, no longer a break, was well underway. Simmons said they laughed and wondered why “[they kept on filling up when they were going to be emptying out soon].” 

Colonel Frederick Forney Foscue bought Simmons at an auction and set her on her journey to Texas. They traveled the Red River to Shreveport, Louisiana, where Foscue retrieved his buggy, then headed to Grand Cane in Cherokee County, Texas. The colonel had bought more people than could ride, so, again, Simmons took turns walking and riding to the new site of her enslavement. Simmons’ narrative accurately recalled the places where they settled, moving from Cherokee County to two sites in Liberty County. Foscue had moved from Alabama to Texas in 1854 and was recorded in Cherokee by 1860. 

Foscue was a large planter and slaveholder who dedicated his time to agriculture. The conditions of slavery could be made as unbearable as desired by a master. For the 32 people he enslaved, this translated to laboring for all but two hours on Saturdays and on Sundays. They worked at night. They lived across six cabins and kept small subsistence plots, and some raised small animals. The plantation utilized overseers, who, Simmons said, were “mean” and “rough.” They returned mothers to the fields, away from their newborns, after just one month. They did not shy away from meting out punishments with whips and, in at least one instance, dogs. 

The war continued, drawing in the younger men and leaving the older men to run the plantation. Simmons valued the change in conditions. Foscue also left to serve as a recruiting officer for the Confederate Army. Though not shared in Simmons’ narrative, records reveal that the colonel was a lawyer and a member of the Texas House of Representatives during the 8th and 10th sessions and a senator in the 11th. 

When the war ended and freedom came late to the people in Texas, Simmons, George, Charlie, and their baby Mittie, though born in slavery, no longer had to live under its systemic, oppressive, and dehumanizing rule. The family remained in Liberty County for almost 40 years until George’s death prompted them to move to Beaumont. 

In the 1930s, government workers interviewed Simmons and other formerly enslaved Americans as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project. These workers recorded the personal histories of more than 600 Texans. Researchers ignored the value of these interviews for decades. Their increasing integration into state and local histories enriches the historical record and provides us with memorable and authentic reflections of Texas life.

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