In Their Shoes

By Grace Halsell. Texas Christian University Press, 1996, 252 pp. List: $14.95 hardcover; AET: $10.95.

Reviewed by Sarah McClendon

Grace Halsell has written a very interesting book which combines a most revealing character study of President Lyndon B. Johnson with insights into other leading figures she came to know as she wrote herself around the world. The book also embraces Halsell’s remarkable experiences disguising herself physically and mentally and living as a Black maid in Mississippi, as a Navajo Indian sleeping on the floor with a family of 14 in a one-bedroom-sized enclosure, and as a Mexican woman swimming the Rio Grande to enter the U.S. illegally to get a job.

At the time she did it, few people would have conceived of taking pills to darken their complexions in order to experience at first hand the problems of racial minorities. If the experiment seems merely quirky today, it is only because Americans have forgotten the chasm that once separated the races in the United States. To be reminded of that chasm, one need only read Grace Halsell’s account of how she almost was raped by the husband of her white woman employer while she was working as a Black maid in Mississippi. The utter disregard for the feelings and sensitivity of an African American woman by a domineering white man will send a chill down the back of every reader who recalls the control over Black women held by white men in slavery days.

The way some people in this great wealthy country still have to live is described by the author as she discusses her life with a Navajo family who took her in. They cooked and ate in the same small room. One gags when reading of the sanitation facilities.

She almost drowned as she swam the Rio Grande River with Mexican “wetbacks” seeking jobs in the U.S. One shudders when one thinks of her and other illegals being hunted down in accordance with U.S. laws that require this. Her detailed examination of the plight of illegals is both heartrending and excruciating.

Readers may find even more shocking her calm recitation of some of the facts she learned in multiple visits to the Holy Land, one of the first of which was the subject of her best-selling Journey to Jerusalem. Her book Prophesy and Politics detailed more of what she learned while posing as a naive born-again Christian traveling with a group organized by televangelist Jerry Falwell. Halsell, ever alert to discover the facts that escape other observers, learned that Falwell uses an airplane in his junkets around the United States that was presented to him as a gift by the government of Israel.

Halsell, who in 1979 was beaten to the ground by an Israeli soldier who might have shot her on the spot had not his officer pointed out that she was not a Palestinian, writes of American Christian pilgrims whose Israeli tour guides scrupulously steer their charges away from any contact with Palestinian Christians. She lived with such a Palestinian Christian family, and with a Palestinian Muslim family as well, and learned of the lives of both families as refugees in a land their ancestors have inhabited for more than 2,000 years and which now is being taken from them, town by town, village by village, and field by field, making them refugees in their own homeland.

She also lived with an Israeli family in a Jewish West Bank settlement. There she met U.S.-born Jewish settler Bobby Brown, who had just participated in a seizure by his fellow settlers of 750 acres of Palestinian land, which they had fenced to keep the rightful owners out, and which was being guarded for them by Israeli soldiers.

One night Brown gestured to flickering lights from the Palestinian villages around them and assured Halsell that “all the Palestinians have to leave this land” because God gave “all this land to us, the Jews.” By contrast, her Jewish hostess in the settlement, British-born Aviva, remarked to her on another occasion as they picnicked on a hill overlooking some of the same villages of Palestinians, “if they don’t have their country, we won’t have our country.”

Halsell’s observations of Israel/Palestine reveal what a complex tragedy is evolving there, and leave the reader horrified at the sinister role being played in that tragedy by some prominent American evangelical leaders in league with Zionist Israelis.

Halsell has done society a big favor in detailing throughout the book the manner in which many men consider any woman a sex tool to be exploited, rather than as wives and mothers with problems, responsibilities and aspirations of their own.

Her book takes readers into the lives of the various people she met. Some of the most unusual among them were President Lyndon Johnson, hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, and writer Gore Vidal. Her most candid account is that of President Johnson, who recruited her to work in his White House. He did not seem to need her, but just wanted her as part of his collection of workers and personalities.

Insofar as I knew the manand I watched him for decadesshe is extremely accurate in her assessment. Few people have described his great insecurity with such candor. Mostly they are either afraid to tell it like it was, or they did not understand what they saw at the time.

One of the great things about Halsell’s book is her nostalgic but realistic description of what nature’s elements meant to her in the West Texas environment in which she grew up. She describes the pervasive wind and dust, the vast open spaces and the bright stars. She also points out the lack of urban embellishments that we like to describe as culture.

In fact she is a living link between those “necessities” of today’s world, and the vanished world of the early settlerscowboys, Indians, outlaws and trail drivers. The latter was the environment of her pioneer father, a colorful trail boss who immortalized his experiences in books he sold from town to town, frequently using Grace, his free-spirited youngest child, as his chauffeur. Her account of her mother, married at 16 to a man over 30 years her senior, presents an amazing picture of an independent woman, ahead of her era, who dared to be both traditional and different at the same time.

This book also takes readers to Peru, where Grace Halsell lived for three years, Russia, China, the British Isles, the Sorbonne in Paris, Tokyo, Korea, Vietnam and Bosnia. In every one of these countries, and more, there will be surprises as Grace Halsell condenses into vivid word pictures the remarkable perspectives of a girl who grew up in the hardest of times on a West Texas ranch to become truly a woman of the world.