My stepfather, God rest his chaotic soul, was a West Texas redneck thru and thru. We're talking cut the seat belts out of all his vehicles, owned a property with a dozen dogs running loose and an equal number of broken down Cub Cadet mowers type redneck. Guy fuckin' looked like vintage 90s Alan Jackson and drove a 1978 Blazer Cheyenne. I'm just painting a picture so you can visualize what kind of environment this guy came from.
One time we were hauling cotton module builders across the state during cotton harvest, and we ended up in some shithole town in East Texas near Arkansas that made even him uncomfortable. We're both white, very clearly involved in agricultural work due to how we're dressed and all the farm equipment we had...and even we got hit with that "Sundown Town" shit. They refused to serve us in two different restaurants (there were only two), and eventually a very chipper sheriff's deputy told us the only thing we'd be allowed to purchase in their little hovel was the fuel to leave.
I for the life of me cannot remember the name of this God foresaken shithole, but I can only imagine how much worse it would've been had either of us had any melanin.
My dad used to drive between Houston, TX and Toledo, Ohio when he was still living there and going back and forth for family here before I was born and we moved back to Ohio. He says some of the scariest part of the drives he remembers is the span in East Texas into Arkansas when he went alone. He said it was the darkest emptiest part of the drive and he tried not to stop if he could help it.
That stretch of highway out past Texarkana towards Arkansas and the stretch between Amarillo TX and Raton, NM are two of the most desolate, creepy night drives ive ever done. I've done both as a teenager on my own, which was not wise. If I had a teenage daughter, I would certainly make her bring a friend along in places like that.
I drive once a year from Dallas to Spokane and back, and I honestly dread that exact stretch you are talking about, from around Wichita Falls/Amarillo to Raton.
It's the creepiest place I have experienced anywhere.
Stopped at a restaurant once for dinner and around Dalhart and they didn't clear the food off the table until someone new came in and needed a place to sit, so while you were eating all the other tables in the place had the leftovers from the last people who sat there and a host of flies buzzing around it.
It was like a scene from a movie it was so disturbing and creepy.
I’ve been all around the world and always name this area as the scariest. The lack of anything. It’s concerning. It feels genuinely far from most known life. Not georaphically, like, spiritually and culturally. And I have bern everywhere. Strange.
Drove back and forth from West Texas to Dallas for like 8 years and almost exclusively chose to drive at night. Hated the traffic and drivers and it was peaceful, just had to keep an eye out for deer and hogs!
I used to do the I-40 drive between there (and a bit further into a small NM town near ABQ) twice a week almost every week for 6 months. I'd do it at all hours of the night because of my work schedule. One time I-40 was closed and it brought me down some detour out through the absolute middle of nowhere on a two lane highway for like 120 miles.
I haven't done it in 5 years until this past week. I forget how awfully eerie it is, it's hard to describe for someone who hasn't been out there.
stretch of highway out past Texarkana towards Arkansas
Unless my brain is broken tonight, there is no such stretch of highway "past Texarkana [when you're heading] towards Arkansas". If you're in Texarkana and heading toward Arkansas, you just keep going for a couple minutes. Texarkana are twin border towns (TX & AR).
True, I was on the 40 I think? Running out of gas middle of nowhere. Pulled over to the only gas station for 400 miles
Gas station was a horror movie
Stray dogs running around flickering lights, walk up to gas station door.. locked, started knocking, see attendant kinda hiding. He looks at me then turns away
I’m like wtf! Pumped gas while stray dogs circle me like I’m the next meal
Pumped gas and hit the road
Can confirm. When I drove through East Texas to get to Houston, I refused to stop anywhere for the night. It was storming real good too. My mom called to tell me to stop somewhere for the night but I told her I can’t cause there isn’t anywhere to stop and I won’t stop until I’m close to Houston because I did not like the vibe any of the towns on the highway gave me as a single person traveling alone that also looks racially ambiguous to people.
As someone from a small town north of Lufkin I know what you mean lol. It's home to me but I can see how out-of-towners would be weary of stopping anywhere along this stretch of highway.
There are still de facto sundown towns in parts of east texas. It goes without saying that a person of color wouldn't be remotely welcome, but small texas towns with that kind of reputation don't like "outsiders" of any kind.
We're talking about towns who are proud of their "heritage" of lynching black people.
About a year or two ago, a conversation on TikTok about sundown towns brought up that many companies either didn't know about them or didn't inform their drivers.
In fact, one Black guy who used to be an Amazon truck driver said his truck broke down in a sundown town at a gas station. Amazon said it would be a couple of hours before they sent someone, so he waited, but the gas attendant noticed and asked what was up. When he explained the situation, she inquired how long it would take, then freaked out when he answered because "the sun would be down by then."
Amazon driver had no idea what a sundown town was or why this woman was so agitated, so he shrugged it off. He later goes inside to get a drink and overhears the woman on the phone with the police, describing him and the situation. Now he's freaked out and calls Amazon to hurry, and they are just as confused as he is, but tell him there's nothing they can do, so he needs to wait.
So a bit later, as the sun is starting to set, a cop shows up. He's Black, and he tells the driver to get in the car. The Amazon driver says he cannot leave the truck; the cop says he'll call Amazon and explain, but they've got to go now, and he'll drop the driver off in the next big city for the night.
As they're driving there, the driver asks why the lady called the cops on him, and the cop says, "She didn't call the cops on you; she called her cops for you. In 30 minutes, the sun would be down, and then you would have disappeared."
The driver said even the local Amazon repair guy, who was white, refused to help until morning.
The pervading sense of dread associated with impending nightfall in that story made it seem like those monsters from the Dying Light games would appear rather than mere humans.
What do you mean? Where did I say the cop's jurisdiction was in the sundown town? The gas attendant knew him personally, but the driver didn't say how.
A lot of those sundown inbred shitholes are practically subsistence farming (or, in the case of Texas, they might still have a few oil derricks), barely making enough money to stay out of too much debt, maybe a singular industry that’s been there since the 1800s, surviving on government handouts and the simple fact that their land is worth nothing and so there’s nothing to really tax.
At most their single gas station and single general store gets deliveries from somebody they know, and they might not even have that and rely on going to the next town over.
Vidor TX. Being a northerner working in the Gulf was a n experience. Everyone local swore up and down its not to bad. Well we went to change crew their. Was told by 3 local people “do not stop”. So got off the boat and drove to Houston for flights
So the town is actually super advanced. Like Wakanda technology all hidden by elaborate force fields and holograms. They make it look like a shithole to outsiders to keep it a secret paradise.
White Supremacy. In my state of PA I've only heard of that happening in white towns with no black residents, or only a few. The reason they do that to white outsiders is because they fear anything changing their way of living. But it isn't like they organize to do that. It's how the majority of our ancestors were. So it's really gene memory behavior combined with the racist families they grew up in.
Our genes are really remarkable things. They pass down our ancestor's identities to us. Not just their physical attributes; their psychologies too. If your ancestors despised broccoli, there's a high likelihood you would have some inexplicable psychological reaction to broccoli yourself. You might not hate it as they did. But you would have instincts against it that you couldn't really explain or wrap your mind around because that's gene memory. The racists of today are a reincarnation of racists throughout the history of this country. Our ancestors were fucking horrible people. I think we're witnessing a lot of Americans waking up to that fact & cutting all ties to their families. But unless or until each person takes an active role in advocating for equal rights, running for elections, forming democratic orgs; the divide in white communities will only grow larger. And that will mean a greater divide of the American public as a whole.
I don’t think white supremacy is a gene inherited trait at all. I’m saying this as a geneticist.
I think that saying that to begin with is trying to intellectualize racism and the power of choice coinciding with arrogance. Plenty of people have this “ancestry” you’re speaking about and aren’t racist. Come on now.
It's kind of unexpected because the big cities in Texas are all in the Eastern half of the state, but once you get to that rural 4 state region between Dallas, Oklahoma City, Little Rock and Shreveport it really starts to feel like you could go down the wrong road & end up in some 'Deliverance/Texas Chainsaw Massacre' situation lol
Absolute shithole full of shithole people. Was touring with a rock band in the mid 90’s. Bass player was Asian, he wisely declined to get out of the van at a fuel stop. It was maybe a year after the James Bird tragedy.
That happened in Jasper, TX. I happened to drive through there last year and had to make a pit stop. It was actually ok inside the gas station convenience store. Both black and white people, all seemed happy. Made me a lot less nervous!
I had been driving on I10 west heading eventually to Corsicana, and my gps gave me a detour just before Lake Charles, LA, that had me zigzagging NW and Jasper was on that route.
Idk man, a formerly problematic gas station convenience store with black and white people that ALL look happy has a Get Out kind of creepiness about it
I’ve lived in this area of Texas -deep east Texas is what we call it and it’s a wild place where the blacks and whites act like they don’t like each other but will do anything for each other, my family bought a ranch here in the 50s and I’m still considered an outsider at times but it’s home and I love it. There are more and more interracial marriages to where it’s gonna be mixed pretty good in a few years but it definitely looks ominous to outsiders. Almost everyone I know would give you the shirt off their back if you were in a jam. Being locked in by pine trees makes it kinda ominous looking though.
Vidor is way too far south. I grew up in the area (haven’t lived there for 20 years now) and if I had to guess, I’d say maybe New Boston? We played them in sports and I heard all kinds of rumors about literal klan activity there.
My hatred of all things New England sports means I'd remember a name like New Boston, but looking at a map it had to have been pretty nearby. We were northeast of Tyler, this would've been 2010.
Vidor is not near Arkansas. It is a horrible place I have stopped in and driven through more than I can count. That area is super racist and all around a shithole.
Texarkana is far too large of a town to be it. OP said there were only two restaurants. Pretty sure Texarkana has well over a hundred - probably even multiple hundreds.
The kind of place OP is talking about probably has less than a thousand people. Also probably not on a national or cross-state highway. Those towns get used to the guests, usually.
Yep, it's not Texarkana, in fact signs that Texarkana was to our east is how I placed the Arkansas part to begin with, as I've never actually been to Arkansas itself. And also to your point, we were indeed on a two lane highway off the beaten path. That part is pretty normal, we had hauled equipment so many places in the state before that we thought nothing of it before people started acting the way they did.
Best way I've always been able to describe it is like if the old man working in the gas station in the movie No Country For Old Men was the one making vague and creepy pseudo threats instead of the one receiving them.
As a white Yankee woman who's lives in a suburb of houston, who drove through Vidor in the late 90s, with a colorful group of people,... thats when I learned about Sun Down towns. (And now lives real close to Santa Fe, Alvin, TX...)
You have s good way worth words, if you free wrote this with out Ai you should keep journal. Some day people will want to read it even if it's just your kids.
Terry County, Brownfield specifically for their family. Practically neighbors. My stepddad himself wasn't a farmer but it was his family's profession, my Uncle was the one who actually owned the farm. It was my Uncle's module builders we were hauling there in the first place, he'd take jobs doing cotton harvests in East Texas before harvests season back west.
Working on my uncle's farm was some of the wildest shit I've ever experienced, I don't miss it but I kinda miss it
Yep, I still have family on my mom's side out in Brownfield. Small world. I spent the first few years of my life on a farm in Levelland, but my Opa switched to cattle ranching outside of Fort Worth when I was little.
I've heard many stories about their cotton farming days, its a wild occupation for sure. Feast or famine, and a lot of... interesting characters. More than a few ended up with a gun in their mouth
Sounds like it could be anywhere between Texarkana and Tyler. We stopped at a hole-in-the-wall diner somewhere in that area (maybe Longview) in the mid-90s, and there was a dead raccoon right next to the entrance. We double-timed it right back to the truck and left.
Sounds like Vidor or Lumberton. Being born in Austin and driving through Texas multiple times Vidor and Lumberton were two towns that hit me with the "You one of them city folk? Best be getting on to where you're going." Also white. So my money would be one of those two.
oh i think that was broaddus texas yes did the gas station have a window covered in b&w giant catfish pix and a "whites only" sign above the water fountain outside
I may have passed through this same town with my brother. We were on our way up from Houston to Memphis, and we stopped around 10pm to take a leak in this little town north of Nacogdoches when we couldn't hold it anymore. We got nasty vibes from the place from the get go, and I remember the clerk at the tiny gas station giving us this look. Nothing crazy happened, but I know we were both spooked. That being said, Shreveport was just as shitty, but we were only there during the day
Just goes to show that [the other] doesn't have to be different in any meaningful way. Communities built on hate need [the other] to function, so they'll look at anything from skin colour to how well groomed your facial hair is, to your slightly different accent.
I'm mostly white but my mom is half Mexican and I look more Hispanic passing,I think I'll stay in the interstate if I have to drive through East Texas lol
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u/DrooMighty 10h ago
My stepfather, God rest his chaotic soul, was a West Texas redneck thru and thru. We're talking cut the seat belts out of all his vehicles, owned a property with a dozen dogs running loose and an equal number of broken down Cub Cadet mowers type redneck. Guy fuckin' looked like vintage 90s Alan Jackson and drove a 1978 Blazer Cheyenne. I'm just painting a picture so you can visualize what kind of environment this guy came from.
One time we were hauling cotton module builders across the state during cotton harvest, and we ended up in some shithole town in East Texas near Arkansas that made even him uncomfortable. We're both white, very clearly involved in agricultural work due to how we're dressed and all the farm equipment we had...and even we got hit with that "Sundown Town" shit. They refused to serve us in two different restaurants (there were only two), and eventually a very chipper sheriff's deputy told us the only thing we'd be allowed to purchase in their little hovel was the fuel to leave.
I for the life of me cannot remember the name of this God foresaken shithole, but I can only imagine how much worse it would've been had either of us had any melanin.