Stories about my Father - 35
In the 1860 census in Greene County, Alabama, my great-great-grandfather, John Chesley “Chess” Hester’s occupation was listed as ‘overseer’. In the 1870 census, his occupation had changed to ‘farmer’.
Why the change? The Civil War and the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. When the enslaved population of the United States was finally freed, it wasn’t as if they all suddenly had somewhere to go. Very few of them were educated or possessed marketable skills. There were also no jobs to be had. The Civil War wiped out the fortunes of many southern white families, so they were not in any position to be able to hire their newly freed workers. Their decision not to abolish slavery beforehand doomed them to destruction.
What happened in many cases is that the Africans ended up with no real choice other than to remain where they were and become sharecroppers. Black and white people started working the fields together and began to share the proceeds of what they produced.
The 1860 census only counted Free Inhabitants. By 1870, that wording was gone. In the later census, two of Chess’s sons Samuel Berry (aged 14) and William (aged 12) are listed as farm workers while the five younger children (aged 1-10) are listed as “at home.” Among those younger kids was my great-grandfather Albert Sidney who was five. One other person is listed in with the household as a farm worker, a 21-year-old white man named Jasper James.
I don’t know (yet) what happened to the enslaved family who worked the farm before the war. Back in North Carolina where Chess and his father Roling had been born on William “Buck” Hester’s farm, an 1820 census lists 10 enslaved people on the property. When I was looking for information about them online at the Person County Historical Society, I came upon this:
“Judy Henry lived on the Hester farm in Person County in the 1850s. A seamstress by trade, Judy found herself primarily working in the main house sewing garments and doing housework. Her family – mother, father, and brothers – had been shackled and sold to neighboring farms or traded for goods in states like South Carolina or Georgia. Her kids worked the tobacco fields with her husband and attended school in a makeshift barn separated from the white children.
Judy had only one possession, a small trunk, which contained her sewing materials, glasses, and a bible. She was treated well enough by the Hester family, but she was still considered property and not a person. Her original bill of sale, like cattle or horses, contained her physical description, no name, and a value for tax purposes.
It’s thought that Person County served as a stop on the Underground Railway as escaped slaves made their way North to freedom. But it would be another century before Judy’s family and friends would be allowed in public schools, voting booths, or local stores.”
I find the complete lack of emotion with which all of that is described to be bone-chilling. Trading a human being for, say, tobacco seed and ripping them apart from their family, and sending them far enough away that they may never see each other again is something that you never recover from. It is a trauma that cannot help but become generational – it gets passed down.
Chess must have done well on his farm because starting in 1882 he begins expanding. I have eight different deeds that span the following twenty years. I have a hand-written receipt dated December 13, 1886, for the sum of $35.00 for the purchase of “160 sixty acres more or less.”
As his farm got larger, so did his family. Five more children were born to Chess and Mary Ann after 1870 bringing the total up to twelve although one girl died just three weeks after she was born.
My grandfather’s twin sister Mary remembers going to visit them when she was a kid. The house was in two sections that connected on the second floor leaving a space underneath between them. The open design allowed the air to circulate which helped cool things down in the summer and left a protected space where wagons and farm machinery could be parked out of the weather. Mary’s memory of her time there was that the house was overcrowded with visitors and family. She had to sleep on a rough mattress stuffed with straw. She said that her grandmother was mean and ignorant. Apparently, great-grandfather Albert felt the same way.
In 1922, after both Chess and Mary Ann had passed, four children of one of the siblings sued the family to get their share of the farm. They wanted the land to be divided up and given to each person with a claim to it. Each sibling was entitled to 1/11th of the property and each of the children of the eleven surviving siblings would then stand to inherit 1/77th of the property. By now, my great-grandfather Albert was already a lawyer practicing in Lynchburg, so he tried to oversee all of this. In the correspondence I have, his recommendation was that the entire farm should be sold, and the proceeds then divided. He maintained that parceling out the land in such small increments was clearly impossible.
While I have a lot of paperwork around the suit, the one thing I don’t have is an indication of how it was settled. My guess is that the farm was sold.
There was another farm in this branch of the tree that belonged to the family of my great-grandfather Albert’s first wife Ormond Hamlet. This one was in Charlotte County in Virginia which is about forty miles away from Lynchburg. In its heyday, the farm grew tobacco and encompassed between 900 and 1000 acres.
Ormond’s father William Morris Hamlet owned people who did all the work on the farm. He was quoted as saying that each year they ate more and produced less. He also, for what it was worth, would never sell someone if it would break up a family. Perhaps that rationalization allowed him to ignore the enormous injustice that allowed his venture to thrive. My grandfather said that one of the enslaved women there had been born in Africa and never learned to speak English very well. He said that she had been smuggled out of Africa after the slave trade had been outlawed.
Most of the enslaved people stayed on the farm after emancipation to work with the family in the fields. One day the house caught on fire and an older freed man rushed inside and put it out, risking his life and making himself ill from inhaling all the smoke. Ormond’s mother nursed him back to health. The man told Ormond’s parents that had he not put out the fire they would have lost everything, so they owed him the right to live on the farm for the rest of his life. To their credit, they agreed.
This man, whose name, I am sorry to say, I don’t know (again, yet), ran the farm his way. Back in the day, it was customary for young men to come a-courtin’ on horseback. He had very strict ideas about which of them were suitable and which weren’t. If someone drove up that he didn’t like he would grab their reins and turn them around yelling, “Stay away from here you po white trash!”
After the death of her father, Ormond inherited a third of the farm. When she and then my great-grandfather died, it, in turn, passed down to my grandfather, his twin Mary, and their younger sister Elizabeth. I always knew Elizabeth as Great Aunt Pudge. My sister and I spent seemingly endless hours writing thank you notes to Great Aunt Pudge who never failed to send the two of us money for Christmas.
The saga of the Family Farm was an ongoing drama in my life from the time I was born up until I was in my thirties. As the older generation ultimately passed on, Ormond’s share finally ended up being co-owned by my father, my Aunt Helen, and Aunt Pudge’s daughter Char. While my grandparents were alive, no visit to Lynchburg was complete without a heated discussion about the flipping Farm. I was so curious about it that on one trip, I convinced my father and my grandfather to take me out to see it.
At that point, it had been leased out to a local man who used the land to grow timber. Every few years, the trees would be cut down and we would get a little bit of money from the proceeds. The farmhouse, by then, was in ruins and it was far too dangerous to go inside it. We got up near it, though, pushing our way through brambles and undergrowth. Not being able to go in was agony. I was sure that there were all sorts of treasures to be discovered inside. In addition to that, during the Civil War, many families buried their valuable silver for fear of the Yankees looting it. There were vague stories about Ormond’s family having hidden some of theirs, but, if so, it’s all still in the ground.
Char had grandiose plans for building the land up into a resort location or trying to get a developer to build a shopping mall or a housing development there, but it was truly in the middle of nowhere. There was no electricity or plumbing anywhere near it. My father and Aunt Helen wanted absolutely nothing to do with it at all. Char’s refusal to let it go drove them crazy.
Char worked as a real estate agent in Connecticut. Right after college, when I still thought I wanted to be an actor, Char hired me as a model for a photoshoot in a fancy house she was trying to sell. To this day, it is the one and only modeling job I have ever had. At the time I was very grateful for the work, but my father was convinced that she’d hired me to somehow get me on her side in the Farm fight.
Somehow the whole thing got resolved and the land was eventually sold to the man who had been renting it. My memory is that it went for less than $100 an acre, but I may be wrong. Nobody, at any rate, got rich from it.
My family’s history of slave ownership is far from unique. If you go back far enough almost everybody who came here from Europe was a farmer. How different would the planet be if all those early settlers simply planted and harvested their own crops?
There’s an Irish comedian who has a very funny bit about the fact that he has no white guilt at all. In Ireland, he says, they have potatoes in the ground but rather than bringing people in from Africa to dig them up, they just dug them up themselves.
From the early fifteen hundreds until 1866, over twelve million Africans were taken from their villages and shipped across the ocean to the New World. Hundreds of thousands of them did not survive the brutal passage. The last known slave ship arrived in Cuba in 1867. Enslaved people worked in plantations but also in the cities. The United States Capitol and the White House, two of the most visible symbols of freedom and democracy in this country, were built with the help of enslaved labor. As those monuments endure so does the wealth and success of many American families – mine included.
Some of that has been passed down to me. Some of William Morris Hamlet’s name passed down to his grandson Morris Hamlet Hester. Some of Morris’s name passed down to his grandson, me - Richard Morris Hester. There’s a continuum there and it isn’t just with our names.
There’s a Mary Chapin Carpenter song lyric that I often quote. “We’ve got two lives. One we’re given and the other one we make.” The problem is, of course, is that the life we make uses some of the life we’ve been given. Not using it would squander what so many bled and suffered for. The trick, therefore, is to use it in a way that helps to repair the damage done. That’s the trick.
As always, a fascinating look back.