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R. V. Waldrep Alabama 1 AL-83 Life story of Jack Hodge, Red Bay, Ala. From interview.
JACK HODGE
He was not a big man, just sturdy; but his movements and walk were the movements and roll of an enormous log beginning its tumble down a hill into the creek.
It was awkward at first; we leaned against the brick wall of Johnny McKenny's grocery store. "You have been away?" I nodded.
Then I asked, "You are still in the clearing?"
"Nah."
I've known Jack Hodge for ten years. But I went away sometime ago, and stayed away for five years.
As a strip of a boy I went to see him where he lived in the woods; it must have been the summer of 1933. He was living deep in the woods, then, off the road, and over and through several hills and valleys. We found him there in his shack, built by his hands, built there in the acres of cleared land. He was sitting on a log, and his dog in the brush. He was romantic looking. All the boys in town knew that; Joe James, the old school teacher's nephew, stayed all night with him several times, as did other kids.
Jack Hodge sat there on the log, walked with us to the corn he had planted, which was now two feet high. His shack was on top of a hill, and we had to walk down and climb fences and jump logs to see his garden, his peas, and potatoes.
Then we strolled, as the dog shot ahead, sniffing, looking, hunting, ever alert. He told us lies then, as he says now. He says he told lies.
I told him the tales he told us, and the mouth in the dark, jug-head smiled, and he shifted on his feet. But he was pleased to know that I 777
Jack Hodge 2 remembered the things he had said. Jack told us then that he often thought he might die there in the shack, lie there for days without anyone knowing he was dead. "That," he said, very sadly, "is all that I am afraid of." The boys looked at the cot and dirty quilts, and shuddered. We could see the dark, immobile face disintegrating and smell the pervading stench.
I met him on the street in Red Bay, but first I drove into the woods by the Gum Creek road. I had an idea where to stop and start walking the sawmill road to the hill, the shack, and the clearing. But it had been long, and I asked at the doors of several tenant houses. Some shook their heads. They talked about Jack, but they didn't know. "Last I heard of him he was working for Lowry."
We drove back to town, and after sundown I met Hodge on the streets. He came toward me slowly, dressed in overalls and blue workshirt, of denim, too. His hair was coal black, his face was not only dark, it was black in hue. His lips were full, teeth hid behind his lips. I thought "Hodge has gone country." But he had come to Red Bay much this way, and had remained the slow-moving, ox-brained man.
Hodge looked across the street to the hardware, and it was impossible to read his thoughts; yet one knew he was brooding. One knew that he was worrying. He had always been that way, I remembered. "That land was give me to clear and tend. I was to git it for half the crop for two years. It ain't worth over a dollar a acre. It wasn't no 'count for making money. I thought I could git something or other out of it..." He seemed to be leaving something unsaid, something that would clear up the mystery of his going to the woods.
"I ain't been as low in all my life. There ain't been a time I couldn't git a hundred dollars from the bank, or somebody. When I left town--you remember me selling papers here--I thought I'd git a better start by clearing 778
Jack Hodge 3 some of them hills and have something of mine. I thought my wife..." He was embarrassed by a reference to a "wife." I was startled.
Jack was at a point, as anyone could see, that he talked of his misery. He was conscious of his lot, and resented it in his ox-like way.
"I was in good shape back in '33. I could git money then, and I had some in the bank. I was the only one that ever made any money out of papers. I sold that Birmingham Post," he said with stubborn pride, as if grasping for a hold on something firm. I smiled to cheet him, remembering well his paper, his trudging on the streets of the town, papers under arms; and later he had several boys working for him. One of the boys was named Tim.
"I didn't know you were married," I told Hodge. None of the town people suspected he had a wife. He was not the type one would expect to find with a wife. He belonged to that group of men who seemed set apart from women. He seemed, as I looked at him in the gathering darkness, free from passion and desire. He seemed lonely and made for his loneliness.
"It ain't good for a man to do what I did. You ain't supposed to be away from people that uh way." He sought for a touch of humor, and the dark-hued skin crinkled at the eyes. "You need an old lady in the woods; it'd be fine that-way."
"You went for a month without seeing anybody or even reading the paper, Hodge?"
He denied it with a show of dislike for the thought. "Not more'n a week, but that is too much. You git to thinking. You git tired of yourself." He spoke in that deep-in-the-mud spirit that robbed his utterance of melodrama and picturesqueness. "The town boys would come over to see me, and that was right smart help. And I had my chickens and my dog and that old mule to plow with."
I remembered: "Game roosters?" 779
Jack Hodge 4
"I had 'em trained so they could whoop any rooster. They had spurs."
Each of his chickens had a name, some common name, easy to remember: Jim, Bob, Cora, Gertrude. I reminded him of the names, and his jug-face smiled in its stingy way, but I knew he would not talk as freely and boldly of his eccentricities as he had done to the boys.
"You can't raise no chickens in the woods with the hawks and things to kil 'em. But one of them game roosters fought a hawk all one Sunday."
"You get your pension, Hodge?"
"Nah; they killed it deader than a stuck hawg. I never did get but twelve dollars, but that was a heap, I'm telling you! Some of the fellers got more'n I did that didn't even git to France. I ain't saying that I fought, or anything like that, but I did git over ... They took it away from me all right. I never got it but a couple of years, too."
"You lost the new ground and clearing and all?"
He knew I knew the answer, but I didn't know how. He did not enlighten me at the moment, but hinted at the work he was doing. "I gotta git enough to eat working around. It was just for my wife and kids, I tried to git me something. But they got 'nough without me. Somehow, though, I'd like to have them up from Florida with me. I was thinking kinda like that, when I got old man Hall to let me have the strip of woods. I thought I'd git a little ahead and she---" he stumbled over "she" and the word shook his voice--- "she'd come up. You couldn't ast her and you not having nothing for her. I was down there in Florida with her. I didn't have nothing for her, and I figgered she'd git 'long better without me. So I came up here to Red Bay. When I git enough, I told myself, I'll send for the old lady."
There was a long silence, as he appeared to be reaching out into the past for something, but he seemed to know that he was making futile efforts. He had lost out forever. I looked at his overalls, the denim of his shirt. He was worn and dirty. His mouth was too big, his nose too fleshy, and too 780
Jack Hodge 5 flat. He was pasty with a sickness that does not stride, but seeps in like a slow poison. The sickness had risen like vapor, had penetrated his teeth and his skin.
"What kind or work did you do in Florida?" I got no answer.
"What are you doing now?" I got no answer.
And he let me talk in and around these questions and others, but he told me that he wanted me to know. From somewhere he fetched forth a splinter or a straw; and he punched the snuff-stained teeth, the stubs. His talk was rough and country. He was full of double negatives, aints, and abruptness.
Then: "I was a good-um here in Red Bay. I made money---enough for me alone. You know that," he pleaded. "I wore a blue serge suit all the time." I smiled at the memory of him; for he had worn a suit, a blue serge suit, but I had never marked it as a suit. It couldn't ever have been pressed or cleaned. It molded his frame, and was part of him, not an ornament. In a city he would have been considered a tramp, a hobo, but there he had been just Jack Hodge. People spoke to him, smiled in greeting. He never was very sociable, however, never attended church, not even during revival meetings.
"I'm in a hole. All them years I spent in the words is gone, the clearing of them hills is wasted." He spoke in that slow, full-of-pauses tone. He did not look into my face, but bit his splinter or his straw, and shuffled his heavy shoes on a cigarette butt.
"It gits a feller, when he can't git a dollar, especially when he usta could. I was having a better time of it in the depression than I am now.
"I'd have stayed on that farm," he said, "if it had been any use. I couldn't make no money a-tall. I tried potatoes one year, and it was the only one I got anything out of, and it didn't 'mount to more'n $50 or thereabouts. I didn't do no good on corn. Wasn't no use to raise no cotton. 781