Money - My Roots

The human condition, as I’ve read in historical accounts, religious writings, fiction (sometimes as true as “history”) and observed personally (including what others have told me) is harshly controlled by money. Children know this early. When Daddy made $10,000 off his cotton crop in 1948, it became a legend in the family. When Tennico bought a lease on the eighty acres in 1953, Daddy bought a new Pontiac, finished off the house (a bathroom) and we took a vacation. And the negatives were to come later.

Mostly negatives controlled the lives of my grandparents. My grandfather Forest Henry Hudson, born during the last days of the US Civil War, was carried soon after by his parents from Mississippi to Texas. Less than a year later his father died while serving as a physician in a typhoid epidemic in the Nacogdoches area. That left his mother, with four small children, to manage during reconstruction and other financial lows that followed in East Texas. Though his mother had tasted luxury growing up and in her early marriage in Alabama (her close family produced a governor and later a Secretary of the Navy – also Truman Capote was a not-distant cousin), they remained in poverty for several years. However, Forest (called “Dad” by everyone) was in a lot of ways “up and coming” when he reached marrying age. He married well (from the perspective of money) but by the end of the century, and a couple of recessions, including the 1890s panic, he was widowed, broke and wondering what life held for him.

Dad emerged into the twentieth century as a socialist/utopianist. He saw financial institutions and governments as primarily corrupt and the society structured around agricultural production as upside down. Here is my interpretation of that structure (sort of a pyramid) as influenced by my father’s and my own mid-twentieth century observations, stories like Places in the Heart and John Grissom’s Painted House, and a few history books – to mention a few sources: 1) primo was the bank and its share holders 2) next were the doctors, lawyers, insurance brokers and other “service professionals” 3) following was the ginner and the storage middlemen 4) then came the retailers 5) finally were the land holding producers – the farmers (all of those above improved their position by being bank share holders) 6) after these were those who worked for the above, including such as school teachers and road workers, etc. 7) on bottom were the share croppers, producing for those who held some position above and scratching a slight living 8) people justa passing through. Dad dreamed of and preached about ways of altering this structure to the benefit of the producers and his whole family suffered because of it. After physical mishap and ruinous financial decisions, he wound up in south Texas, dry farming on 40 acres that Daddy worked for him (with Dad’s, Granny’s and his siblings help). He died about the end of WW2, somehow thinking maybe the Russians had it right.

There is less to say about Granddaddy Hick’s economic thinking. He was converted from his worldly ways at about age 21, quit smoking, drinking and gambling and then quit the Lodge and the Klan. He would serve the Lord. Making a living was an afterthought. He wasn’t a preacher or visionary, but looked at money as primarily a nuisance, perhaps like he thought Jesus must have. They always made do and Mama’s older brother seemed to skim what extra they ever had. He lived to be ninety-nine and on his birthday quipped: “ninety-nine, never paid a fine.” I could add: never cheated, never lied very much, never lusted out loud, never strived for gain, never worried much about more than how he would feed his chickens if his corn ran out and if a killing frost would come in November and take away his fall garden. He did fast and pray – saw a doctor for the first time when he was seventy-five and had had a wreck that knocked the stuffings out of his head. He probably never saw a doctor again, ‘til he died. He and Granny and Mama saw money as a highly negative influence, “like the Bible says,” they said.