The stories that stuck with me from my first visit to Texas

Last week, I went on a reporting trip to Texas (courtesy of The Independent’s subscriber-led donations programme, which supports original reporting.) My purpose was to attend the seventh event on Nigel Farage’s oddly named American Comeback Tour, sponsored by a right-wing US organisation, called Freedom Works, usually affiliated with Republicans. It was my first trip to the Lone Star State – and perhaps, unfairly, I wasn’t expecting much.

When you live in New York, Americans from elsewhere in the States are quick to tell you how unfriendly it is. “Try living in London, love,” you often find yourself saying when Americans act shocked at how New Yorkers don’t talk to each other on the subway or rarely know their neighbours (in Brooklyn, we know our neighbours pretty well and even cat-sit for them, so I would say there’s a fair amount of exception to this rule.) They often want you to know that the rest of America is different; they have “southern hospitality”, after all.

“Southern hospitality” is what I expected when I went on my first American reporting trip in 2019 to Alabama, but it’s not what I got. In a small bed and breakfast with a crucifix on the door, the landlady shook her head about me travelling on my own and the people in the house across the street displayed a placard on their porch that read “PRAY TO END ABORTION”. For the most part, I was looked at with suspicion and a vague distrust. I had naively imagined an Alabama akin to the North Carolina described by a friend, where rural children would run out to the fields to gather fresh watermelons out of the ground while their fathers barbecued and everyone in the town was welcome. At the very least, I’d supposed, people would be starry-eyed about my British accent and want to ask about the Queen. No such luck, though. I was just another outsider they couldn’t wait to see the back of.

Dallas, Texas, was a little different. As soon as I jumped in an Uber, people proved themselves friendly and helpful. “Yes, ma’am,” came the answer to every question I asked. The hotel receptionist greeted me with, “Hello, Miss Holly!” every time I came in and out the door. People took detours from where they were going to point out their favourite shops on Main Street to me in small towns, and also stopped to explain where was safe or not to go. Women in shops asked me about my upbringing; men in taxis told me their life story as soon as I asked if they were local.

Of course, there were Trump-minded Republicans at the event I attended who yelled at me that my face mask was “evidence of Democrat control” and that I should go to back to “communist England” (or, failing that, “communist New York and California”.) They were the ones who jumped up to do the Pledge of Allegiance and cheered as an evangelical preacher denounced equal marriage and the erosion of gender roles. But such people were clearly in the minority.

There’s always a story or two that sticks with me after a reporting trip. Way back during the Brexit referendum, I met a woman in Middlesbrough who was struggling to keep her two-seat hair salon on a council estate and who told me she’d never known the name of the prime minister or the names of any parties in a general election. In Alabama, a middle-aged man in factory overalls told me offhandedly that his 20-year-old son had died of an opiate overdose three years earlier. Shrugging, he added, “What can I say really? I used to party when I was young too,” and showed me a picture of his son on his phone. The young man was pictured sitting in a warmly lit living room, holding a guitar and laughing.

In Texas, a young man called Raisul told me he’d moved to Dallas from Long Island because he believed Texas was “everything people will mean when they say America” in the future. He was a liberal-minded Democrat and insisted that the state would be as good as blue soon.

A few hours later, I met a man in his forties called Dan who wore a Texan flag face mask and told me he worked at the local prison. He was a single dad to a 16-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl, and had been since they were very young, after the children’s mother became addicted to drugs. They lived in a tiny, 6,000-population town surrounded by fields and his son hoped to be able to go to college to study physics, but that would only be possible financially if he achieved a sports scholarship. At the moment, both son and daughter attended the local school and were taught by the same teachers Dan had been taught by when he was their age.

When I asked Dan if he’d been vaccinated, he said he wasn’t planning to. He believed he had a natural immunity and a strong constitution. His son had had Covid and recovered; he and his daughter had been asymptomatic. What hovered in the air between us was the politics surrounding that decision, though neither of us brought it up. Eventually, he asked me: “So, you must see a lot of crime in New York City?”

“Rarely,” I said, and he seemed surprised.

“If you ever visit,” I added, as we parted ways, “look me up.” He promised that he’d try.