What Are We Supposed To Remember When We Remember The Alamo?

Having just returned from 5 days in San Antonio for the Men's Final Four, I was especially interested in seeing the new release of John Lee Hancock's movie, "The Alamo." As a little girl, my Daddy Tom used to bounce me on his knee singing, "San Antoni-antonio!" and my mother would swoon whenever and wherever she heard Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys sing "San Antonio Rose."
I was 7 years old when my mom and I boarded a Greyhound bus bound for the Hill Country of Texas. It was summertime and I wore a pink sun dress adorned with red roses, chosen especially for our destination. After what seemed an eternity in the back of that dielsel-fumed mode of transport, we set our feet on the black dirt of Texas and my mother wept for joy.
I still have a picture of her and me taken in one of those cheesey bus station photo booths. She wanted to memorialize the moment. There I am, all baggy-eyed and wrinkled from the journey...long brown hair pulled back behind a white plastic headband...cheek to cheek with my mom who's looking every bit "The Rose," herself.
We stayed the night at my mother's cousin's and the next day, walked the hallowed grounds of that mighty shrine to Texans and freedom: The Alamo. It was a big deal. We bought cheap souvenirs and took lots of pix, read every placard and studied every relic. We savored the shade of the great old cottonwoods and paid homage to remains of Bowie, Travis, and Crockett at San Fernando Church nearby.
It was a time of innocence.
I returned to the Alamo last month hoping to re-connect with some of that sweetness. The first thing I noticed: It's not a very big building, is it?
Somehow it seemed so LARGE back then. But I was so small.
Unexpedtedly, I found that my hunger for stories of conquest and battle had been replaced by a nagging idea...that men fought then and fight now for visions far less grandiose than freedom and that those folks we have dubbed as heroes because of that fighting....maybe weren't the superior beings our elementary school textbooks played them out to be.
Battle sickens me, as does its apotheosis.
And so I approached Hancock's movie with a great deal of curiosity. "How," I wondered "will he treat the subjects...Sam Houston, Davie Crockett, Jim Bowie, and General Santa Anna? How will he honor the righteous cause of the Mexicans who sought to stave off the influx of manifest destiny knocking at their northern portal? Will he acknowledge the pre-Texas days of men whose lives had been lived as phonies and swindlers and drunkards?"
He did okay. Rising star, Patrick Wilson, stole my heart as William Travis. The cinematography of the battle was remarkable and the landscape is much more authentic than that of the old John Wayne version.
The real surprise is Billy Bob Thornton as David Crockett. He is a fine actor.
There is this scene in which those under seige have grown powerfully tired of the Mexican army's penchant for playing the trumpet "decuello" before firing on the mission every night. In an attempt to cope, Crockett, a closet fiddle player, stands on the walls of the fortress at sunset and plays a descant to the trumpet tune...a la Nero as Rome burned. Consequently, his melody is so enchanting that the Mexicans choose to forego that night's bombardment. In response to the absence of canon fire Crockett replies, "It's amazing what a little harmony can do."
Too bad it wasn't all fiction.
It really happened.
And I saw the movie just down the street from my home in El Paso, Texas, just 3 miles from the international boundary separating Texas and Mexico.
And after the movie I relieved myself in the ladies room with Mexican women in stalls on either side of mine.
And I saw the reflection of their faces in the mirror as we washed our hands.
And they saw mine.
And we tried desperately to just be nice to each other as we spent those moments together...knowing...that we were remembering the Alamo very differently.
And yet the same.