Stories about my Father 7

Growing up in Rustburg, my father had two friends: Buster Trent, who lived across the road and was black, and Woodrow Wilkerson whose father owned a mill just down the road, who was white. He played with each of them separately because Woodrow’s parents wouldn’t let him play with a black kid.

Albery Sidney Hester II - Rustburg, VA c.1926

Having lived through the same thing at much the same very young age that he was, my guess is that he accepted the situation as it was. As a kid in Grahamstown, South Africa, we played with our black friends at home and our white friends at school or over at their houses. I may have asked why at the time, but I can’t have questioned it too much. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized how messed up it all was. It didn’t help matters, that when we moved back to the States that we ended up living in an area of New Jersey so white it might as well have been back in South Africa.

Buster and his family lived in a nice house with a wide porch set back behind a field directly across the road from the Hester’s house. Buster had two older brothers who were already teenagers and a sister named Ursula who was about 10 or 11 at the time. Andrew Trent, his dad, was a carpenter but also farmed. They kept pigs and had a cow. There was a churn on the back porch for making butter. Mrs. Trent took care of their home.

Behind their house was an old, abandoned Studebaker car and a rusted-out tractor that Buster and my dad would play on. Inside the house, they had a player piano that worked by threading a long spool of paper with holes punched into it at the proper intervals to activate the keys and make music. A few weeks ago, in St. Louis, I went to a house where Scott Joplin had lived. There was a player piano there and spools that played his ragtime music. To make the spool in the first place, somebody had to play the piano while a mechanism punched the holes into the paper. Amazingly, the music I heard that day had been played by Joplin, himself, over a century before.

Not every black family in that area of Virginia lived as well as the Trents. My father remembers visiting some sharecropper cabins with my grandmother which were each one room with a dirt floor. Pictures cut from magazines like the Saturday Evening Post covered the windowless walls as decoration. Again, this is much like what I experienced as a kid, too. The people who worked for my grandfather in Grahamstown lived in what were called kayas across a small patch of grass from the main house. The kayas were windowless and without electricity or running water. They had kerosene heaters that doubled as hotplates. I remember them as being very hot inside and, of course, the smell of kerosene was overpowering because there was no ventilation. With the doors open to catch the breeze in the cool of the evening, anybody inside would be looking out at my grandfather’s house about 20 yards away, ablaze with electric light, clearly visible through its many windows.

Woodrow’s father owned a three-story wooden mill that sat close to the main road but with space enough in the front to park trucks and wagons. A loading dock ran the whole length of its front. My father described the inside of the mill as being, “unfinished, with broad unpainted plank floors. Everything, including Mr. Wilkerson, seemed to be covered with a thin layer of white flour. Throughout the building were big belts on pulleys that carried power to the machinery from the diesel engine out back. There was a constant whapping noise when they operated. Upstairs were big bins and a section of the floor separate from the rest with walls higher than my head filled with grain. Sometimes Woodrow and I would play in the wheat, which we were not supposed to do. We would sink into it up to our knees.”

My grandfather was friendly with Mr. Wilkerson, but my grandmother couldn’t stand him. She thought he had a foul mouth and he leered at her. One day there was a minor flood and one of the Wilkerson’s pigs escaped and started rooting around in my grandparents’ garden. Eunice ended up running and slipping through the mud trying to catch it while Mr. Wilkerson sat on his porch and laughed. As my father said, “It’s a wonder he escaped with his life.”

My father was always interested in everybody. He wanted to know where people were from, what their families had done there, what it was like living there - he wanted their full stories. I can’t remember him ever making a negative generalization about somebody because of what color they were or what country they had been born in. We aren’t allowed to ask anyone where they’re from these days because it is deemed to be racist, but my father genuinely wanted to know. Clearly, his parents encouraged him. They thought it was fine for him to play with his friend Buster which sets them apart from Woodrow’s who refused to allow it.

When Dad was older and the family had moved to Lynchburg, they became friendly with an older couple named the Mosses who lived nearby. He had been a minister but had been gassed in World War I and lived off a disability pension. His daughter had gone to school with my grandmother and, along with her husband, had moved in with her parents. My father played with their son who was named John William Jones. He remembers sitting on their front porch and listening to Mr. Moss tell stories about their travels to Europe. They had a stereopticon, which was a thing with a handle and an eyepiece that you could put a double photograph of something in and it would appear to be three-dimensional.  

Later John William Jones went to Europe, himself, with his parents which fascinated my father no end. He was green with envy about the boat trip. When they got back, he pumped him for stories. John William brought back all sorts of new toys with him including some German model soldiers. Some of them had brown uniforms and swastika armbands. Mrs. Jones told my father that the man in charge of those soldiers was now head of the German government.

Throughout his life, whenever he met someone new, he’d find out where they were from and then dive in for more information. Again, there was never any judgment that I could tell, just genuine deep-seated interest. Whenever he told me stories about the people he’d met, he always included where they were from as an essential part of the story. It wasn’t until he went to college that he started meeting people that weren’t from the same area he was.

These days, if you are an actor, you can’t stray very far from playing the person you are. There is a huge outcry if someone straight plays someone gay. Neil Patrick Harris, though, was celebrated for going the other way. Playing anyone from a culture other than your own is being called out as appropriation. Nobody is clear on where the boundaries are. People of color are being encouraged to play traditionally white roles, but should a white person play a character of color they would be immediately canceled.

When we did Jersey Boys in the Netherlands, the script was translated into Dutch. During auditions, we were hearing people auditioning in Dutch. We settled on four great performers for the leads but then we were told that it wouldn’t work because two of them spoke Dutch with Belgian accents. We, of course, could not hear the difference at all, but there is apparently a very strong cultural bias against the Belgians by the Dutch. We fought for the two performers and won, but those poor guys had to endure daily vocal training to erase their accents.

There’s a line that nobody seems to be able to identify but most seem to agree when it’s been crossed. It’s an ever-moving boundary. Rosie O’Donnell in Fiddler on the Roof is OK, or maybe was OK and isn’t now? A friend of mine just posted a quote by Meryl Streep, “Acting is not about being someone different. It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.”

When Eunice died, Buster Trent’s sister Ursula called to say how sorry she was. She had left Rustburg after high school and gone north because there was almost nothing open to her in Virginia. She worked for a while as a sales clerk in a high-end department store called Wannamaker’s in Philadelphia before moving to New Jersey. When she retired, she moved back down to the family home in Rustburg. My father asked her if she remembered the player piano. “It is now my most prized possession,” was her reply. Buster spent his working life as a custodian at the Rustburg High School. Dad met up with him and introduced him to my mother when they went back for a visit right after they got married.

My dad was not only fascinated by the people he met, but he also rarely forgot them. His accounts of World War II are full of all the people he met and, yes, where all of them were from. For the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, my parents went to a reunion of the 87th Infantry Division in Europe where the battle had been fought. My father had kept up with many people and, of course, remembered many more. At some point, they even met some of the now elderly German veterans that they’d been fighting against. My father grilled them as he would have anybody else and was enthralled.

Whether or not he was born interested in people, my grandparents certainly encouraged him. Eunice and Morris were, I’m coming to believe, pretty progressive for their time and place in history. While we may start with a blank slate, it gets drawn on right as we are being born. We inherit our parents’ genes, but we also pick up much, much more. One of the guys in The Karate Kid, the musical I just did in St. Louis, was from Colombia. I didn’t ask him, so don’t cancel me, it just came up as we were talking one day. Once it came up, though, my dad and I wanted to hear all about it.

“It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.”