The first and only time I ever saw a squirrel without a tail was at the home of Edmond Decatur Harrison, the county judge of Blanco County, Texas. In the 1950s, before my brother and I were born, my father, fresh out of law school, had been elected county attorney in the thinly populated hills west of Austin. My parents, both natives of Austin, had moved back to the state capital in the sixties when my father got a position on the staff of the attorney general of Texas. But our family frequently visited Judge Harrison and his wife in Blanco. In the sixties and seventies most of the folks in the county and the surrounding Texas Hill Country were descendants of the original German settlers who had arrived in the 1840s and 1850s. Persecuted by the Confederates during the Civil War and Reconstruction because of the antislavery, pro-Union sentiments that many of the immigrants shared, and harassed again during the anti-German hysteria of World War I, these German–Texans were often hostile …