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The Hodgeses I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. Maya Angelou Unlike my sister, Edna, I had no knowledge of my father, Tommie James “T.J.” Hodges, when I was growing up. I was only about three when my mother left Richmond, California, where we lived, to return to Greenwood to help take care of my grandmother. The separation would prove permanent, though that wasn’t my parents’ intention at the time. Thus, at the age of nineteen, when I arrived at the Greyhound bus station in Portland, Oregon, where my father was then living, I had no real idea of the man who would meet me there. My mom had done her best to describe him to me, but this was based on her memory of sixteen years prior. I think she mentioned something about bowed legs, which may explain my own slightly bowed legs. But I needed more than just her description. When I finally got to Portland, I saw a man looking expectantly at the bus, and as we both started walking toward each other, I wondered what all the concern and worry had been about. Arriving at his home, I was quite taken aback when he offered me an alcoholic beverage instead of food. I had been riding that bus for over three days, and I was hungry, dirty, and sleepy—and not even of legal drinking age yet. If The Hodgeses 16 this was how things would be, I was in for a long summer indeed. Apparently, Jessie, my father’s new partner, was a borderline alcoholic, which probably accounted for the presence of liquor bottles throughout the house. Although, technically , Jessie and my father never got married—he hadn’t divorced my mother, you see—they lived together as man and wife and paraded around as such. My mother always seemed to take some satisfaction that she was Samantha hodges, T.J.’s true wife and the mother of his children. That she had moved on and was living with my stepfather struck her as a trivial detail. My father never got to know his own parents. Born in Greenwood, he was around four when his parents and several other close relatives died in the great influenza outbreak in 1918.1 He and his brothers, Oliver and Rayfield, along with their cousin Stone Griffin, went to live with his aunt Jessie and uncle Willie Chandler and their boy, Arthur, who was called Big Son. Jesse and Willie lived near Yazoo City, Mississippi, where they owned land, cattle, and horses. They gave the boys what was, for southern blacks at that time, a life of relative luxury. The boys, including my father, took the name Chandler, which Cousin Stone kept after my father and uncles later changed their names back to Hodges, the surname of their parents. Their father’s Christian name was Oliver. Oliver Junior (or Hodges as he was called) was two years older than my father. Rayfield was the youngest, but sadly, he would die long before his time—the victim of an accident in which a car fell on him while he was working underneath it. He was only in his twenties. My uncle Oliver, my father (who by then had married my mother in Greenwood), and Stone all went to California around 1943 to take jobs in the Kaiser shipyards in the San Francisco Bay area. Big Son stayed behind to see after his parents’ farm. He wasn’t a good custodian, however, and allowed whites to dupe him out of the property. They told him that his parents owed them money, and they frightened him into signing over the deed. He was given a suitcase and told he could leave with his life. I don’t know whether his parents owed anything or not, but if they did, the sum probably didn’t come near the value of the property that was taken. My father vowed he would never return to Greenwood because of the way he had been treated there. California offered advantages—namely better wages and fewer racial tensions—that were not to be had in Mississippi. When he left, my mother, who was pretty far along in her pregnancy with me, stayed behind with my sister, Edna, who had been born in 1936. Oliver’s wife, my aunt [3.138.101.95] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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