TULIA RESIDENTS UNCERTAIN ABOUT RETURN TO NORMALCY

With the prying eyes of outsiders gone, at least temporarily, the routine
of daily life returned to this small Panhandle town Tuesday but everything
wasn't back to normal. Some residents weren't sure Tulia would ever be back
to normal and some wondered what normal is.

"It seems to me our community has gotten a pretty bum rap," said the Rev.
Charles Davenport, pastor of the First Baptist Church.

He's lived here 29 years and is trying to figure out how a town few outside
of West Texas had heard of until the pre-dawn moments of a fateful summer
morning four years ago became an icon of racial bigotry.

Many here believe Tulia, like Jasper, got blamed for something it didn't do
and are confounded by demands that it "repent" and mend its evil ways.

The small East Texas town of Jasper became a media circus after three white
men dragged a black man to death behind a pickup truck in 1998.

The Tulia history is familiar: Undercover narc hired by a drug task force
based in Amarillo is sent to rid Tulia of drugs; gets job at livestock
auction barn, befriends co-workers and asks them to help him get high.
Eighteen months later, 46 locals (most of them black) are rounded up before
sunrise; 38 eventually are convicted and shipped off to prison for as long
as 99 years.

Within a year, the cop's reputation is questioned and eventually he is
exposed as a liar, a racist and a sloppy investigator. Convictions are
challenged, Legislature and governor enter the fray, judge recommends
verdicts be overturned and sets personal recognizance bonds for those still
in jail.

Through it all, the media -- national and, in some cases, foreign --
depicted Tulia as a racially divided town where blacks were targeted by the
drug sting.

"It almost appears to some of us that the media has said that at some point
the people here got together and said we want to send black people to
jail," Davenport said. "This community didn't invite that sting. No one in
this community knew it was going on until the arrests were made." Davenport
said he has seen little evidence of the kind of racial division that has
been sketched in many news stories.

On Tuesday, he had lunch with a black minister to talk about the "healing
process."

"We never came to a conclusion," he said, suggesting that neither knew
where to begin in soothing a non-existent wound.

"The folks in our community would welcome suggestions," Davenport said.
"What do they expect us to do."

The town's critics have pointed out that it wasn't just the ill-executed
sting, but the harsh sentences meted out by local juries that reeked of
racist injustice.

But Davenport, among others, pointed out that many of those seated to judge
the defendants were not legal sophisticates.

"They had nothing to go on except what was presented to them by law
enforcement and the district attorney, people they believed and trusted,"
he said.

If there has been a positive fallout from the ordeal, according to Gary
Gardner, farmer and sometime-politician, it is that Swisher County juries
have, in his opinion, become more deliberative, cautious and skeptical.

"We're starting to have jury acquittals on things that would have been
convictions before," he said. "This county has been placed under so much
scrutiny ... juries don't want to open up something like this again."

Divisions in the town apparently arose after problems with the sting began
to surface and a movement was started to have the cases reopened and, if
called for, the convictions reversed. But whether it was a racial division
is open to debate.

Gardner received a few threatening phone calls and Alan Bean, who helped
organize Friends for Justice, said his activities even caused estrangement
from family members.

"We haven't been invited to the family reunion for the past two years," he
said. "The matriarch of my wife's family (her great aunt) isn't in favor of
what we are doing."

At social events, those defending the drug convicts "became pariahs," he said.

"You walked into a room and it was like you were in a bubble," he said.

But county residents may have had other than racial reasons to resent their
agitating.

They paid big bucks to try the defendants, paid to settle with one who was
acquitted and ponied up $250,000 to forestall lawsuits by the others. Their
law-and-order leanings may have led them to resent the assault on lawmen
and prosecutors and they certainly resented the unhappy publicity that came
to town.

Paula Wilson, who moved to town two months ago, recently kept an
appointment with a doctor in Amarillo and one of the first questions he
asked was, "What do you do?"

"I'm the new city manager in Tulia," she said.

"Oh gosh," he said. "Bless your heart."

She was city manager in Freona for 11 years before moving here and knew
what she was walking into, but wasn't fully prepared for the emotional wringer.

"I'm mad at the image Tulia now has," she said. "We're getting hate letters
from overseas."

Reporters knocking on doors in Tulia for the past couple of years have
found few willing to talk and Wilson said she also has become leery of the
media.

"People here are angry," she said. "They're afraid to talk to anybody. They
have really closed ranks."

The image problem is more than emotional, she said.

"I've had people tell me, 'Don't even ask for grants or state aid in
Austin. They know where Tulia is and they know it's a racist town.' I
haven't seen any evidence that it's racist."

She believes the negative image would go away, in time, once the media go
away permanently, which isn't likely to happen soon.

Tom Coleman, the undercover narc, has been indicted for perjury and his
trial is certain to revive what has become a frustrating and exhausting
story here.

"We've got all that to go through," Wilson sighed. "Well, Jasper had to go
through it too ... "