Taking Out the Trash in Tulia, Texas

The title of this book was inspired by the headline on the back cover: “Tulia’s streets cleared of garbage.” A massive narcotics operation swept up 15% of the African American population of this town in the Texas panhandle. It was designed to get “trashy” people off the street. That’s how Tulia’s respectable folk characterized their famous sting and I believed them.Like any good story, Taking out the Trash is riddled with conflict. There is the conflict between the supporters and critics of Tulia’s big drug bust that you would expect. But most of the fireworks went off inside the rough-and-ready coalition on my side of the fight. My colleagues may wish I had kept some of the potentially embarrassing details to myself. If the differences I chronicle in this book were primarily a clash of strong personalities they wouldn’t merit as much attention as I have given them. But the conflict was never personal; it was philosophical. Sting supporters faced a dilemma. They could admit that Tom Coleman, the undercover agent paid to buy drugs on the poor end of Tulia, was an unreliable lost soul; but that would have meant tossing every indictment. Alternatively, by covering up Coleman’s dirty little secrets, they could preserve the fruit of 18-months of labor and eight jury trials. Either way, you couldn’t be honest about Coleman and support the sting.The people on my side of the fight wrested with a similar problem. Mere victory in Tulia had little monetary value. To make the bad guys pay you had to file a civil rights lawsuit, and that meant claiming, without nuance or equivocation, that the sting was racially motivated. Racism couldn’t just be part of the motivational mix; it had to be the heart and soul of the operation. Sting opponents had to portray Tulia as a pestilent vestige of the Jim Crow South. Racism was clearly a feature of the Coleman operation. But the good people of Tulia weren’t trying to run off African Americans; they were trying to fix their community’s drug problem. If that sounds naïve it is a distinctly American brand of naiveté. None of the men and women who sat on eight Tulia juries witnessed a single sting defendants using or selling drugs. Jurors and defendants occupied parallel social worlds. But none of that mattered. It was common knowledge that “those people” were part of Tulia’s drug mess. This logic doesn’t withstand careful scrutiny, but it’s vintage Americana.Having lived a good portion of my adult life in small Canadian and American towns, I knew there was nothing atypical or particularly antiquated about Tulia’s white community. If racism was at work in the Coleman operation (and I had no doubt that it was), we were witnessing a contemporary and ubiquitous species of bigotry.If Tulia was simply trying to run off its trashy black folks, would Middle America object? Could you attract media attention to that a story like that? And if no one was concerned about Coleman’s victims, why would they care about his credibility issues? This conundrum divided our unwieldy coalition from the beginning. People like me were part of the problem, of course. Winning was never enough; we wanted the truth. How could we expose the dark side of America’s drug war by telling white lies about Tulia? You won’t find much polemical argument in this book. The moral, to the extent there is one, emerges from the narrative. The discord of a morally ambiguous story is unresolved; all the loose ends are left dangling.Technically, this book is a work of narrative non-fiction; not a novel, exactly, but a book of true stories that open up the soul of a community. The dialogue is based on notes made during, or shortly after, actual conversations. I talked to everyone in Tulia that would talk to me. I wanted to get the story from a multitude of angles. I spent a lot of time in the Tulia library poring over back issues of the Tulia Herald. The quick and the dead both get their say. If you don’t know what was going on in Tulia circa 1959 or 1979, you are sure to misread the events of 1999. The Coleman fiasco was decades in the making.There is much in these pages to offend readers on both sides of our great American culture war. Social conservatives will protest the coarseness of the language; progressives will decry the use of dialect. Mea Culpa! But if you fiddle too much with the lyrics you lose the melody. Viewed from the outside, “Tulia” was a simple story. But for the folks living close to the action (on both sides of the conflict) everything was messy and exceedingly painful. Taking out the Trash has plenty of tender, poignant and hilarious moments; but the sturm und drang never let up. I invite you to take a deep breath and step inside Tulia, Texas. May this story change your life as it has changed mine.Alan Bean Arlington, Texas December 1, 2009