Reviewed by H.W. Brands
Sunday, May 29, 2005

THE DIEZMO

By Rick Bass. Houghton Mifflin. 208 pp. $22

Historians don't invent facts, but they select and arrange them. Novelists are less constrained in one regard but more constrained in others. They get to invent facts, but they can't arrange them willy-nilly; novels have to make sense in ways that histories don't. A serious novel fails if its plot utterly blindsides readers; the deus ex machina is the mark of the third-rate writer. But real people -- historical people -- are blindsided by facts all the time.

Historical novelists -- Rick Bass, for example -- operate under both sets of rules. Bass starts with a story known to Texans but to few others. Texans celebrate the Battle of San Jacinto, fought on April 21, 1836, as the Yorktown of the Texas Revolution, but the victory of the Texas rebels that day over the Mexican forces of Gen. Santa Anna didn't definitively secure Texan independence. Mexico refused to acknowledge its loss of Texas, and a desultory war continued. In 1842 a Mexican army raided San Antonio; the Texans responded with an incursion against the Mexican town of Mier. After killing some 600 Mexican soldiers, the outnumbered Texans surrendered.

Santa Anna's policy dictated that the Texans be treated as traitors and pirates, and they were ordered executed. But the local commander refused to carry out the order. The Texans tried to escape; nearly all were recaptured. Santa Anna issued another execution order, but again the locals refused. A compromise was reached: White beans were mixed in a jar with black beans, at the ratio of 10 to one. The Texans were compelled to draw, and those who drew the black beans -- 17 men -- were blindfolded and shot. The others were set to work on a chain gang and then transferred to the notorious Perote prison. Many of the Texans died of overwork, disease and starvation. Only after nearly two years in captivity, and after the diplomatic intervention of the United States, were the survivors released and allowed to return home.

Much has been written about the Mier expedition. Relatives of the prisoners filled contemporary newspapers with denunciations of Texas President Sam Houston for not doing more to obtain their release. Survivors recorded their personal accounts. Texas historians have told and retold the tale for over a century. Every Texas school child learns about the black beans of death. Texas patriots revisit the scenes of the prisoners' tribulations as if they were stations of the Cross.

Bass has clearly consulted the historical literature, at times to a fault. His novel takes the form of a survivor's memoir written decades later. The memoirist quotes other people's correspondence in a way historians do but aging frontiersmen don't; elsewhere, he recapitulates parts of the story that modern non-Texans need to know but that 19th-century Texans would have taken for granted. A related problem comes with the territory of much historical fiction. How is the discriminating reader to assess the prose style of a fictional memoirist? Good writers avoid clichés -- "The loneliness felt as heavy as a trunk of lead," Bass's protagonist recalls -- but amateur memoirists often embrace them. And how does one respond to a plot point that Texas school kids will see coming but uninformed readers will find clever? All of which highlights the difficulty Bass labors under in writing a story at once familiar and unknown, personal and collective, and which makes his overall success the more commendable.

Bass recaptures the bravado of many of those who joined the expedition and the ambivalence they felt as it segued from self-defense to simple looting. "I knew it was wrong," his narrator says, but he couldn't quite get himself to leave. An ounce more decisiveness and he would have been spared the trials that followed. Better than the historians, Bass conveys the human cost of those trials: the unrelieved chafing of the prisoners' chains, the sickening smell of gangrenous flesh, the insanity-inducing attacks of a thousand lice, the exhilaration of momentary escape and the doubled despair of recapture. Bass also explores the strange dynamic that developed between the prisoners and their Mexican guards, who were scarcely better off than the miserable Texans.

More than most histories, Bass's book is a work of the imagination; he gets to make things up. Less than most novels, it's constrained by concerns of likelihood; the improbable events he relates actually happened. The Diezmo isn't a landmark of either history or fiction, but it's a compellingly effective blend of the two.

H.W. Brands, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of several books, most recently "Lone Star Nation." His next, "Andrew Jackson," is forthcoming in the fall.