Stories about my Father - 36
Had my great-grandfather Albert not mangled his hand in a cotton mill as a kid, my entire branch of the family tree would look very different. The Hesters were farmers. They worked the fields. After his accident, thinking he wouldn’t be able to do that anymore, Albert was sent to school. Of the eleven kids, he was the only one given an education.
I grew up thinking that Hester was a rare name. I didn’t meet anyone who shared my last name until 1996 when I was working on TITANIC, the Broadway musical. Kimberly Hester was in the ensemble. She was African American, and her family was from the same part of the south that mine was. While we never figured out how we were both sure that we were related in some way. We called each other ‘Cuz.’
The truth is, I am just in the wrong part of the country. If you head into parts of North Carolina or Alabama, the family of old Buck Hester is still legion. There are whole cemeteries devoted to just Hesters. We blanket parts of the south. My little northern twig of the tree is the anomaly. We are up here all because of that accident. Albert moved away to go to school and neither he nor anyone who came after him ever went back.
Albert Sidney Hester was born in 1864 during the last year of the Civil War. He grew up during the reconstruction. He remained a staunch democrat his entire life claiming that after the war, the Republicans “took all our money and property away from us.” Up until he was thirteen or fourteen the only education that he and his siblings got was during the summers for about six weeks. During those sessions, they learned the basics of reading and writing but mostly, they learned math.
Transportation being what it was, when the decision was made to educate him, it had to be at boarding school because there was nothing else out in the farmlands where they lived. He was given a placement test to figure out what classes to start him off in. He ended up in a Latin class that was already reading Caesar. He’d never even heard of the language before. It must have been a shock. I’m sure it took a long while for him to catch up with the other students not only in terms of what he knew but how he behaved socially as well.
He went to Law School at Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee. There were big gaps in what he knew and by all accounts my great-grandmother Ormond was merciless in her ridicule when he got something wrong. The effect of that badgering was that while he sometimes made mistakes in life (like pronouncing Japan “JAY-pan,”) he rarely made mistakes in court.
Right after law school, he opened an office in Russellville, Alabama. Ormond, who lived in Virginia, was visiting when she and Albert met. He began courting her which in those days consisted of sitting in a parlor with a chaperone. Wow, would I love to have heard those conversations. When he proposed, she agreed to marry him on the condition that they live in Virginia and not in Alabama. He agreed and in 1889 they got married.
Clearly, I need to go on a road trip to visit all these places. Present-day Russellville has a population of only 10,000 people. I found a picture online of two guys in a cart on what is now the main street from the early 1890s which was the period when they were there. I’m sure my great-grandparents knew who they were.
Albert’s brother Amos, who also lived there, had made some money after iron ore was discovered on some land he owned. He was described by somebody in town as being “the richest, the stubbornest, and the most profane man in Franklin County.” One of his nephews went to visit him one day in the middle of a rainstorm. The nephew knocked on the door and heard a voice inside yell, “Well come in damn ya! What the hell are you standin’ out there for?” Once when a traveling salesman came into town hawking some patent medicine, Amos offered to give a testimonial to the crowd. He jumped up and told the gathered throng that a friend of his had taken a dose. “It made his bowels move twice before he died, and once again afterward!”
In 1894, my grandfather Morris and his twin sister Mary were born in Russellville. In 1896, Albert made good on his promise to Ormond, and he closed his office and opened a new one in Lynchburg, Virginia. At first Ormond and the kids lived out of town on her family’s farm and Albert lived alone in a boarding house. Eventually, when things became more settled, they all moved out to a farm called the Adkin’s Place which, at the time, was in a rural area near the end of the streetcar line. My great-grandfather would ride a horse from the farm to the streetcar stop and tether it to a fence where it could eat grass while he was at the office in town.
Lawyering a hundred years ago seems like it was a bit more entertaining than it is now. My grandfather told a story about a case that he had where one farmer was suing another farmer for killing his pig. The prosecuting attorney was an old-time rural orator who opened his case to the jury by saying, “From the lofty peaks of Long Mountain to the roaring cataract of Falling River, there was no finer hog.”
When he was starting out, Albert would take any case he could get. One day the police raided the home of some poor African Americans and discovered big burlap gunny sacks hidden underneath the floor filled with luxury goods. They accused the family of having lifted the contents from local department stores. My great-grandfather agreed to defend them. During the trial, when the merchants took the stand, he asked them if they could prove that the items in question were from their store. They couldn’t, of course, so the defendants were acquitted. My great-aunt Pudge asked him why he would defend such obviously guilty people and my great-grandfather replied that regardless of whether they were innocent, it was his duty to provide them with the best defense he could.
In another case, an elderly man came into the office and told Albert that he had been accused of statutory rape. He claimed that he wasn’t guilty because the girl was fifteen. When Albert told him that the law had changed and that the new legal age was now sixteen, the man replied, “Well we’ve all been operating under the old law.”
Judge Charles Burks was a local political appointee with limited political experience. My great-grandfather thought he was a fool and the two tangled all the time. He was continually being fined by him for speaking out of turn. After one ruling in a neighboring town, the judge asked him if he needed a ride back into Lynchburg. Albert replied, “I wouldn’t ride in a car with a jackass that handed down a decision like that.” The judge was furious and sentenced him to jail for thirty days for contempt of court. Eventually, he was able to talk the Judge down to one day. On the appointed day, Albert went down to the jail and signed in with the jailer, whom he knew well. They chatted for a while and the jailer told him that he’d served his time and let him go.
When he was working in court, he often looked like he was taking notes but, really, he was doodling. He’d fill up lines and lines of paper with small, squashed ovals with added eyes and noses. Once when a case was going badly a client looked over at him while somebody was testifying against him to see what notes he was taking. He was horrified to see nothing but the little faces. He asked Albert what he was doing. Albert replied, “I draw one every time I see a son-of-a-bitch.”
My father’s memory of his grandfather’s hand was that he got along fine with its limited use. He could milk a cow and tend to the family garden. In every picture I can find of him, he’s hiding his damaged hand behind his back. However much he was ashamed of it, though, that split second when it got caught in the mill radically changed all our lives, and will continue to affect us for generations to come.
In the community of man, education is what separates us, not intelligence. Had he not hurt his hand, my great-grandfather would have continued as a farmer. He wouldn’t have been any more or any less smart, but he would never have continued his schooling. He and my great-grandmother would never have met. My great-grandmother had been to school herself. As a result, their sons and their daughters all went to school. And their sons and daughters. And their sons and daughters. All of us.
None of Albert’s ten brothers and sisters ever went to school. Did their kids? Over the course of the last hundred years, the world has changed. Farming has become a corporate enterprise. I wonder how many Hesters are still working the land. I am sure that there are plenty of the later generations of Buck Hester’s descendants who have now gone to school, but I wonder how long it took.
What if, in the instant before his hand slipped into the workings of that machine, my great-grandfather had pulled it out to scratch an itch? Nothing would be the same. Our lives are the sum of countless little moments of decisions and accidents. Most of them cause tiny little ripples. This one caused a tsunami.
I’m sorry that my great-grandfather hurt his hand, but I know that I would not be sitting here writing this if he hadn’t.