Wayne Miller

1 In December 1961, George Trabing shot Winifred Jean Whittaker and left her body beside the Trinity River in one of the long twin shadows of the I-10 overpass. In August 1988, George Trabing took me out on Trinity Bay in his twenty-five-foot sloop and taught me how to sail. Past the bridge he cut the engine and I felt us lock suddenly into the wind dragging overhead—invisible, unrelenting machine. 2 Trabing was in a “narcotics-fueled frenzy” when he murdered Whittaker while searching for more drugs “on the Negro side of town”; when he attempted to assault a fourteen-year-old girl, then returned her home; when he burglarized a house in wealthy River Oaks for $7. In the subsequent trial, which lasted three months, the prosecutor sought the death penalty but did not succeed. 3 The Trinity River enters Trinity Bay by way of the Anahuac Channel, which was cut through the marsh-pocked delta by the Army Corps of Engineers and on the map looks like a straw thrust into the bay’s broad bladder. Those afternoons George took me sailing, I don’t think we ever went over to the northeast side of the bay. 4 He drank cans of beer from a plastic cooler; I drank 7-Up. He taught me to tie knots and watch the mainsail for luffing. Those afternoons were a favor to my father, who still had to work while I was visiting from Ohio. George—who’d become a professor after fifteen years in prison— had his summers off. 5 Trabing was finally arrested in the lobby of the Auditorium Hotel, which, I’m shocked to discover, became the Lancaster—and where, on September 10, 2001, I had drinks after seeing Salman Rushdie read. The event was picketed by Muslim fundamentalists; police barricades maintained a channel through the crowd. I don’t remember what Rushdie read or anything he said. I remember passing through that compacted organ of anger and into the vastness of the theater, bright red and lit with sophistication. The protesters remained outside, and Rushdie was the only person facing their direction as he spoke— and, of course, it was September 10, 2001. 6 The family of Winifred Jean Whittaker must despise George Trabing— who is surely both abstract and the very most powerful expression of real. They would be right to say it was a racist travesty of justice he became a professor and remained for the rest of his life in Houston—their town—walking free with his title and the prestige it carried. They must find it horrifc he could spend twenty years running a master’s program for prisoners, that he had the means and time to own a boat and teach a boy to sail. 7 My god, why did my father let George Trabing take me out alone on his boat? To show friendship, to offer trust? As a teenager, my father had wanted to be a priest, though by 1988 he’d long since become an unshakable atheist. I know George was his good friend, and no doubt my dad thought I would enjoy sailing. Beyond that, it was a religious decision— an atavism, a proof of faith— I’m pretty sure. 8 Dare I say?— Of the men I spent time with as a child, George was among the kindest and most generous—and he offered me a respectfulness I didn’t, at twelve, deserve. I sometimes flip through the Royce’s Sailing Illustrated he gave me, and I recall his insistence that a sloop rolled by the wind would quickly right itself. Surely he told me that only to allay my fear when the boat heeled hard and I yelped, thinking we were going over. He is to me both an abstraction and a very powerful expression of real. Which is why I’m still here in the library this late in the afternoon, retrieving articles from 1961-2 on “George Trabing.”