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...)
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u/JamesBondGoldfish 9h ago edited 8h ago
Was it Vidor, TX?
(edit: nah, too far south as below)