Alta

Alta

Most people from the Deep South imagine the old south as something out of “Gone With the Wind” and think of themselves as part of the aristocracy with the good life. That was true of 5 percent of the population. Ninety five percent lived poor hard life that no one would want today. But the Hodges were truly part of that five percent. They were a wealthy, prominent family with a lot of property and big beautiful houses. Alta Hodges was born in 1888, and her story sounds like something from a romance novel, but by all accounts it is true. Alta grew up as a real life early chapters Scarlet O’Hare. She was beautiful, charming, rich and well educated for a woman of her time. Everyone who knew her spoke very highly of Alta and considered her to be a good and kind person. Of course her family expected their very popular daughter would marry into another family of their own social standing and continue the tradition.

But Alta met Herman and they fell in love. Herman’s family could not have been more different from Alta's. They were all poor uneducated subsistence farmers. Herman had no money, no education and no prospects. The Hodges considered him no where good enough for Alta and strongly objected to the relationship. But they were so in love and they went off and got married against the wishes of Alta's family. In the romance novel, they would have lived happily ever after. But this was real life. One year later, at age 20, Alter died giving birth to my father. Alta was my grandmother, the year was 1908. The reaction of the Hodges was unfortunate but maybe to be expected. I sometimes wonder how I would have reacted if I had been Alta's father. I don’t know, but in the eyes of Alta's family this despicable man, they had so strongly objected to, had caused the death of their wonderful daughter. They refused to have any contact with Herman and denied him any of the benefits of Alta's wealth. One could wonder what Alta would have, or maybe did, who knows, think about the way her family treated her beloved Herman and by extension, her son and worst of all, her grandson.

At my age, I don’t think about grandmothers much. Alta died 37 years before I was born, so obviously never knew her. But I did know my maternal grandmother, a very disagreeable old woman named Carrie, much better than I wanted to. She lived until my early teen years, so I knew her throughout my childhood. I am not sure Carrie was as bad a person as I thought she was. Carrie’s life was very different from Alta's. She grew up hard and poor. She gave birth to 11 children. Her husband died before most of them were raised and Carry managed on her own with whatever help she could get from friends and older family members , in a time long before any one every heard of tax payer supported welfare. All this left Carrie a bitter old woman. And as she got older she developed some sort of dementia. The family said the local doctor called it hardening of the arteries. I am not sure what that was but she was surely demented. Considering all this, if Carrie was alive today, I would cut her some slack, but as a kid, I just knew I didn’t like the old bat.

I can remember growing up, my mother’s family had a reunion every summer after the cotton was laid by. This was the usual social affair in the rural south. Tables made by placing planks on sawhorses outside. As there were 11 children in that family, and all of them had families, there were a lot of people there. Everybody brought a covered dish, most of them brought more than one, so there was always a lot of food. Cousins playing and fighting with each other, brothers and brothers-in-law lying to each other about the size of the catfish he caught last week and all the talk about the weather, the expected price of cotton and some cotton field theologian’s take on some obscure Bible passage.

Carrie’s oldest son, Andy, was a fundamentalist preacher. When at long last the sisters and sisters-in-law had the mountain of food ready, Andy would seize the opportunity to say grace. Now for Andy, saying grace at a meal was a drawn out affair consisting of loud exhortations mingled with sweat and tears. He would always devote several minutes of his prayer time to talking about how much we all loved the Wicked Witch of the West and how grateful we were to have her with us for one more year. Now I always stayed well clear of Andy at these times. I expected the sky to open and hell fire and brim stone to pore down on him from Heaven, Sodom and Gomorrah style. Who could guess what the penalty for lying to God like that might be.

                                               Alta as I have the old photo looking now

Anyway, that’s my take on grandmothers. I don’t know anything firsthand about Alta and I don’t want to remember Carrie. But a few weeks ago I was going through some old things and came across an old black and white photo of Alta. I don’t know how old it is but as she died in 1908, it must be well over 100 years old. The picture is dirty, faded, scratched and cracked, but I decided to see what twenty first century technology can do for early 20st century family history. I made a digital copy of the old photo and copied into my computer and started working on it in software. Because of the condition of the original, I spent some hours working on this thing. As I kept looking at the image taking shape on my computer screen, I begin to feel some sort of emotional connection with Alta. Real or imaginary, I don’t know but I somehow wanted to know my long dead grandmother. It’s a bit of a stretch for a 65 year old man to think of this beautiful young woman as his grandmother but there she was and I wanted to know her. And of course, I could not help contrasting Alta and Carrie. This is unfair. Alta had everything going for her, Carrie had everything going against her. I only know Alta from what the older family members said about her when I was growing up, and in those days, most people felt an obligation to speak well of the dead, while I knew Carrie through the eyes of a kid. And everybody is attracted to physical beauty. And grandmother or not, I am a man and, yes, I prefer this southern beauty to someone who looked like the first runner up in a hatchet fight. You just can’t help some things. But I have enough trouble being fair to the living so I wont worry about my unfair opinions on dead grandmothers. All this bonding with Alta made me want to do something I almost never do. I very rarely visit cemeteries but I somehow thought I wanted to see Alta's grave. It turns out that both my grandmothers are buried in the same cemetery. So as I navigated my way through the sea of marble to Alta's head stone. I was careful in choosing a path that kept me well away from Carrie’s last resting place. That’s just the way it is with grandmothers and high technology.