No one really knew where Hill Wallace came from. Some said he made his way to Texas from Arkansas. Others said he never traveled more than 40 miles from his birthplace. But that tidbit was inconsequential when, just around his 20th birthday, he appeared at the backdoor of Roscoe and Rachel McClure’s Victorian farmhouse, about 15 miles East of Paris, Texas. Roscoe, my grandfather was a cotton ginner with a reputation for never turning down anyone who needed a job, and race was no factor in his decision-making. His heart was bigger than his business sense, although God looked after him in all his doings.
His youngest son, Sam – my dad – was always mystified by Roscoe’s good fortune. It was no mystery to me. He was a righteous man, and the old adage that nice guys finish last can be found in my favorite apocryphal biblical collection of inaccurate quotes – II Stupidians. That chapter includes such infamous mythical familiarities as “God helps those who help themselves”.
The best I can tell, the year was 1912 when Hill was hired. My grandfather had a keen eye for a good hand – a must in the land of King Cotton – and Hill Wallace was the best. He wasted little time in making him the foreman over all his farming and ginning operations – a move that stuck firmly in the crawl of his many white employees. But Roscoe was something of a real-life Atticus Finch – the remarkable centerpiece of the classic novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Not everyone was so enthused with Roscoe’s selection of management. His mother, my great-grandmother, was none-too-pleased. She was the wife of a Civil War veteran and literally slept on a mattress stuffed with money as a print of Robert E. Lee and his Generals kept guard over her headboard. She was a good, old-fashioned bigot, in the best deep-Southern sense of the word. If dynamite comes in small packages, she fit the bill. At four foot, nine inches tall, she had a temper that remains the stuff of legend in that neck of the woods. She never called Hill by his first or last name. She used the same six letter slur she conjured for every person of color. You can fill in the blanks.
But Roscoe was not a man to be easily moved, and Hill was his best hand. And whatever his initial prejudices were growing up, in time, Hill become his closest confident, and arguably his best friend. That relationship would change Roscoe’s racial views, turning him into the rarest of all creatures of his time – a Southern cotton farmer who disdained bigotry in all its ugly faces and hideous forms.
Now, before we canonize Roscoe, lets reveal his most prominent character flaw. He was, by all accounts, a distant father to my dad and his older brother. Both lived in mortal fear of his heavy-handed ways. Yet the bigger sin was that he was too busy being a saint to everyone other than his two boys to pay any real attention to them. It was a different time. Men didn’t get in touch with their feelings. When my dad was born in 1924, nobody gave a damn about your inner child, whatever on earth that was.
By time the Great Depression reared its ugly head, it was pretty apparent that my dad was a sickly, asthmatic kid. Useless to a cotton farmer. In those days, more kids meant more hands. So Dad found himself largely ignored – by everyone except Hill Wallace, who by that time had taken the former Bee Spoon as his wife. At the time, they had no children, except, of course, Sam. Hill took Dad everywhere he ever went and always called him “Cowboy”. It wasn’t lost on anyone that Hill and Bee had fallen in love with the little hellion that was my Pop. Such a hellion was he that he earned the nickname “Black Dog”, partially for his rebellious attitude, and partially for his choice of friends. The rural South of the 1930s was not very accepting of inter-racial friendships.
Hill and Sam were inseparable, and Roscoe was too busy to care. There were mouths to feed, and Granddaddy was busy making sure there was food to eat. Not everyone during the Depression was so fortunate.
Hill Wallace taught little Sam to fish, track, hunt – and most importantly – play baseball. Every Saturday afternoon, blacks from all over the region would gather at my grandfather’s baseball diamond for a friendly game. Now, there might be some truth to the rumor that a friendly wager or two might have found its way around this field of dreams. This really was a family affair. Everyone, including Roscoe, loved baseball. And there was my Dad, the mascot for Hill’s semi-pro Negro League baseball team, The Black Dogs – named for you-know-who.
In time, Hill taught my dad a pretty wicked curve that landed him in the St. Louis Browns (now the Baltimore Orioles) farm system for time.
And Hill taught little Black Dog some things Roscoe might not have been too fond of – like the finer art of making “Chalk Liquor”. Yes, my daddy loved his bathtub gin – nearly as much as Roscoe loved his Cotton Gin.
As I said, Roscoe was a remarkable man for his time. He paid everyone on the same wage scale, regardless of race. If you were honest and a hard worker, that was all Roscoe cared about. That would later get him in a heap of trouble with the local chapter off the Ku Klux Klan, which showed up in his front yard one balmy August night in 1944, while Dad was away at war. Roscoe, not a man to take kindly to threats, named off each and every hooded hoodlum, reminded them where their paychecks came from, and they one-by-one turned tail and ran from the scene, lest they faced his wrath – or worse still – lost the generosity of a man who made millions in his lifetime, only to die with less than $1,000 in the bank. He had given it all away. To this day, when I visit my ancestral home, men will stop me, blacks and whites alike, to tell me how my grandfather saved them in one way or another. Gave them a home, a car, paid their bills. Never asked for a penny in return. During the Depression, my grandparents housed up to three additional homeless families in their own home at no charge. It was what you did to help keep body and soul together in hard times. More importantly, it was just the right thing to do.
I’d like to see a little of that in our society today, wouldn’t you?
Like I said, my father loved Hill Wallace. After he returned from World War II, he realized not all was right in a world that would consider his surrogate father as anything less than the man of character he was. Hill, the very essence of humanity, went the extra step, helping to bridge the gap between my father and grandfather. Seems Roscoe mellowed with age (he would become a doting grandfather), and found he related better to his adult son, who had overcome his sickly beginnings to face war and the other trials of life, in no small part thanks to Hill.
I never knew Hill Wallace. He died in 1957, three years before I was born. But his wife, Bee, was the only grandmother I ever knew. And, following in family tradition, I earned a shiner one day in first grade when I insisted my grandmother was black. The eye was permanently damaged and I wear glasses to this day thanks to that right cross. That same kid has learned better, and remains one of my best friends after nearly 40 years.
And I remember the stories my daddy told me about Hill Wallace, his beloved teacher of life. The man who single-handedly broke the racial stereotypes of an old South cotton farming family, steeped in six generations of blindness. The Apostle Paul, Granddaddy, Dad and Hill must have plenty to talk about these days. I can also remember my pop carrying me in a little red wagon at a Civil Rights march during the mid-1960s, where I learned the lesson Hill embodied: That a person should only be judged on the content of character, and not the color of their skin. Those lessons would serve me well later in life while serving as the editor of a newspaper in a racially-divided town in deep East Texas, 50 miles from troubled Jasper. That is yet another story in and of itself.
As for Dad, there would be other windmills to tilt, like the time he took on Rio Grande Valley Czars George and Archer Parr for their habit of loading up minorities at gunpoint to vote, but again, that is another story, for another day.
Rivers flow.
Oceans ebb.
Time marches on.
One day, about two years after Roscoe had died, a dapper-looking African-American gentleman approached me:
“Are you Roscoe’s grandson?” he quizzed.
“Yessir,” I replied.
“During the Depression, the bank tried to repossess my farm, even though I was current on my note. I was the only Negro farm owner in these parts. Without even asking, your grandfather, after catching wind of the scheme (he was on the board of directors), went to the bank and paid the note. He never told me and I kept paying the note, fearing I would lose my property. One day I got all my checks returned by the bank with the deed, saying the note had been paid in full and was in my name. I didn’t know for nearly 20 years what had happened. He was the finest man I ever knew…”
The gentleman was aging and slightly forgetful, and asked again -
“Did you say you were Roscoe’s grandson?”
“Yessir,” I said, tears streaming down my face. “I damn sure am.”