Remember the Alamo, but don’t forget Joe
It’s a good thing we fight over how the mission’s history is told — and how to represent William B. Travis’ slave
It’s a chilly morning in March 1836, an hour or so before sunrise, and the long-dreaded invasion of the Alamo is underway. More than a thousand Mexican soldiers under the command of Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna are frantically trying to breach the walls of the old mission compound while coming under relentless fire from outnumbered, outgunned Texan defenders. At the crumbling north wall, a young man named Joe, enslaved since birth, stands beside the young man who had paid $450 for him slightly more than a year earlier. Both men return fire, but within minutes of the attack Joe watches as a Mexican sharpshooter’s bullet pierces the skull of his owner, Lt. Col. William Barret Travis. According to the 2015 book “Joe,” he watches the commander of Alamo forces tumble down a recently built earthen slope, watches him fatally stab a Mexican soldier who has attacked him and then watches him die. Travis is 26, Joe is 20 or so.
Thanks in large part to Joe, the only combatant — as far as we know — to have walked out of the ruined mission alive, we are able these many years later to “Remember the Alamo” with some specificity. Along with Alamo survivor Susanna Dickinson, he gave his eyewitness account in haunting detail, first to Gen. Sam Houston at Gonzales and then to delegates gathered at the grandly named Washington-on-the-Brazos to declare independence from Mexico and hastily form a government. “He related the affair with much modesty, apparent candor, and remarkably distinctly for one of his class,” recalled William Fairfax Gray, a lawyer and land agent who heard Joe’s account.
Remembering the Alamo all these years later — and working to tell a more comprehensive story — Texans are struggling these days with how to remember Joe.
And that’s a good thing, we believe. Instead of applying broad swaths of official semi-gloss over moments in our collective history, particularly the troubling ones, we’re re-considering, recollecting elements of our past, including how we remember the Alamo. We fight among ourselves, of course, and that’s a good thing, too. For too long, the story of the Alamo and Texas independence has been told in the manner of a glorified myth rather instead of a complex history.
Actually, we’ve been fighting over the Alamo off and on for more than a century, ever since our forebears woke up to the fact that the “cradle of Texas liberty” was in danger of crumbling into hallowed soil. For decades, nobody seemed to care that stones from the old mission were being cannibalized into new construction, or that a building next to the iconic chapel had become an Army warehouse. Nobody seemed to notice when chunks of the outer wall and the gateposts disappeared.
Shortly after the turn of the century, two capable, strong-willed women did notice. Their divergent notions of how to remember the shrine ignited the Second Battle of the Alamo. Twenty-two-year-old Clara Driscoll, whose grandfather had fought at San Jacinto, used family money to purchase the Long Barrack to keep the structure from being razed or becoming a hotel. Later, she decided that the building was an eyesore detracting from what she considered “the Alamo” (the iconic chapel) and should be replaced with a memorial park.
To San Antonio school teacher Adina De Zavala, the Harris County-born granddaughter of Lorenzo de Zavala, the first vice president of the Republic of Texas, the Long Barrack was the Alamo. It was she who had initially urged Driscoll to save it. She famously barricaded herself in the building for three days, without food or water, to keep it from being razed. She succeeded, partially. A history-ignorant lieutenant governor allowed the top floor of the two-story structure to be knocked off while the governor was out of state; what was left stands today.
The Third Battle of the Alamo more closely resembles a Thirty Years War, as skirmishes have erupted off and on for the last three decades over a number of contentious issues: how to wrest control of the Alamo from the conscientious but less than capable Daughters of the Republic of Texas — and from the Anglocentric version of the story perpetrated by Walt Disney and John Wayne; how to broaden Alamo history beyond the iconic battle and tell the story of the Alamo as a centuries-old Spanish mission; what to do with Alamo Plaza, cluttered for years with traffic and bounded by historic buildings wooing tourists with schlock; whether to relocate the Cenotaph, the sculpture commissioned during the Texas Centennial to honor the fallen heroes. (Even though it was to be moved by only 500 feet, a native Baltimorean named
Dannie Scott Goeb — aka Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — rose up and shouted “NO!”
The monument remains where it is.)
San Antonio Express-News reporter Scott Huddleston, who’s covered the Alamo for years, reminds us that for about 10 years interested parties have been trying in earnest to work together on telling the complete Alamo story more accurately and more effectively. In 2014, San Antonio formed a large, diverse committee that included Alamo traditionalists, historians, San Antonio residents, representatives of the General Land Office, Bexar County officials and others in an effort to develop a vision and guiding principles. (Both objectives were adopted that same year.)
Patrick almost killed the effort with his line in the sand about the Cenotaph, but then-Land Commissioner George P. Bush and San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg managed a “reset” of the project in 2021. Since then, a 27-member, nonprofit Alamo Trust has guided a $550 million makeover of the Alamo complex. The ambitious effort includes a $250 million Museum and Visitor Center in the historic Woolworth and Crockett buildings across the plaza from the Alamo. The majestic gateway to the Alamo, so to speak, is scheduled to open in 2027.
In the lobby will be nine bronze sculpture vignettes highlighting the Alamo story, including one vignette dedicated to Joe. The manner of his depiction has roiled feelings among members of the Alamo Museum Planning Committee.
The proposed sculpture, as previewed in photos of real-life models, shows Joe, musket in hand, standing guard as Travis sits at a desk writing his legendary “VICTORY OR DEATH” letter from the besieged Alamo. It’s the gun Joe is holding that has people upset.
Planning committee member Deborah Omowale Jarmon, CEO/director of the San Antonio African American Community Archive, maintains that the statue suggests that Joe was “happily enslaved” and that he supported the Texas Revolution as an armed combatant. One of three Black members on the panel, she announced last week that she is “serving under protest.”
Aaronetta Pierce, a longtime San Antonio civil rights leader, wrote an email to the panel in January, calling the depiction “difficult to justify, an enslaved man holding a gun and guarding his master.” San Antonio, she wrote, is “too intelligent to produce such an illogical, historically incorrect” scene.
Kate Rogers, the Alamo Trust executive director, told the Express-News editorial board last week that she and other leaders of the project are taking the concerns seriously. She said planners will reconsider the matter at a May 9 meeting.
“It’s important to us on this particular topic to be very respectful of the African American voices on the committee,” Rogers added. “Obviously, there’s concern with this portrayal. So because the vote was split that way, and because there’s still concern within a very critical group, we’re going to bring it back.”
“Joe: The Slave Who Became An Alamo Legend,” the groundbreaking 2015 book by Ron J. Jackson Jr., and Lee Spencer White, suggests that Joe likely was armed as he and Travis vainly sought to repel Mexican soldiers at the north wall. Joe himself told Sam Houston and the delegates in Washington-on-the-Brazos that he carried a gun and fired it during early moments of the battle.
But so what? An armed Joe standing guard over Travis tells us nothing about the young man’s significance. Pierce and Jarmon are right to object; the image is misleading.
“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee,” the fictional narrator of Herman Melville’s novel “Moby Dick,” reports (echoing a passage from the Book of Job). A real-life Joe also had an experience; he was entrusted with it. What needs to be depicted is his sharing. To this day, we are indebted.
In a way, Joe was carrying on a family tradition. His remarkable older brother, William Wells Brown, escaped slavery after numerous attempts, becoming a noted abolitionist, lecturer and storyteller. Brown’s 1853 book, “Clotel,” the story of the mulatto daughter of an American president, is the first known novel by an African American. (Both men, by the way, were grandsons of the legendary frontiersman, Daniel Boone.)
Also like his brother, Joe escaped slavery. On the evening of April 21, 1837, the first anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto, he fled Texas. Decades later, according to the co-authors of “Joe,” he accompanied James Travis, the Alamo hero’s brother, on a brief visit to San Antonio. Joe showed him the exact spot where his brother had died, recounted what happened on that tragic day.
At the Alamo, Joe will soon be telling his story yet again. We owe him our most respectful attention.