13 A HANGMAN’S SON

The first time that Tom White saw a criminal hanged he was

just a boy, and the executioner was his father. In 1888, his father,
Robert Emmett White, was elected sheriff of Travis County, Texas,
which included Austin, then a city of fewer than fifteen thousand
people. A towering man with a dense mustache, Emmett, as Tom’s
father liked to be called, was poor, stern, hardworking, and pious.
In 1870, at the age of eighteen, he migrated from Tennessee to the
still-wild frontier of central Texas. Four years later, he married
Tom’s mother, Maggie. They lived in a log cabin, in the desolate
hill country outside Austin, where they herded cattle and
scratched the earth for whatever food it might yield. Tom, who was
born in 1881, was the third of their five children; among them was
Doc, the youngest, and Dudley, Tom’s bruising older brother with
whom he was particularly close. The nearest schoolhouse—which
had one room and a single teacher for eight grades—was three
miles away, and to get there, Tom and his siblings had to walk.

When Tom was six, his mother died, apparently from
complications after childbirth. Her body was laid in a plot where
Tom could see the grass growing over her. Emmett was left to
raise Tom and his siblings, all of whom were under the age of ten.
A nineteenth-century book profiling distinguished Texans said of
Emmett, “Mr. White belongs to that class of solid, substantial
farmers of which Travis county can boast....He is well known in
the county, and the people have the greatest confidence in his
energy and integrity of character.” In 1888, a delegation of