Recent Reads

Pioneer Preacher : a biographical narrative about a Baptist missionary pastor in west Texas, by Opal Leigh Berryman.

In the early 1900s, George Carroll Berryman, his wife, and their young daughter moved to La Mesa, a tiny, struggling settlement on the high and treeless plains of west Texas. In the years that followed, he and his family faced drought, disease, and despair, not to mention rowdy cowboys, horse thieves, mysterious murders, political backbiting, malicious gossip, the Ku Klux Klan, the confused amours of flighty young men and women, and the oily machinations of aggressive evangelists trying to profit from his groundbreaking missionary work. Their daughter, Opal, was there to see it all.

She acknowledges, in her comments on the back of the book jacket, that she has selectively condensed events from eight years of her family’s life in west Texas into the space of two narrative years in the book, but insists that “[T]he delineation of our life at La Mesa was pretty much as we lived it. The northers, the sandstorms, the bedbugs, the pesthouse were very real. What I have tried to show is that the hard and lawless West that has been pictured in fiction as a land of bad men was also a land of good men, who worked to make it better. This is the actual story of our lives there.”

It’s natural to compare this book to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. If anything, Pioneer Preacher is grittier and more immediate. Opal tells her story in the first person, and although she as narrator is innocent of the full meaning of much of what she describes, the reader can see the forces moving behind the events and conversations she describes. She’s privy to disagreements and arguments between her father – a liberal and tolerant man who strives to see and bring forth the potential good in all around him – and her more conventionally-minded mother. They argue, and they struggle, but it’s never in doubt that they are fundamentally and faithfully devoted to each other even when they disagree. Young Opal also indirectly observes the workings of bigotry of all kinds, racial, political and religious, in the community, as well as the threat that lawless men pose to its safety and development. Her father’s well-intentioned efforts do not always succeed, and good people sometimes suffer in ways that he cannot alleviate, but his wisdom and intentions are never in doubt so far as his daughter is concerned.

George Carroll Berryman was plainly a hero to his daughter, and her memoir is a superb account of life on the west Texas frontier. It deserves to be better known and more widely read.