CHAPTER FOUR- THE SEED OF ANAK

“In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate Secretary of State W. H. Seward. Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell, where he was waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy…”- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida 

     Another way of looking at all of this could be through the sex/death lens. Why the hell had I not read “Camera Lucida” before this? Both sides of my family, the Osterhout family studio portrait by James VanDerZee, and the handsome, aspiring assassin, Lewis Payne (aka Powell), are represented in Barthes’ book. Roland Barthes knows that the conspirator Payne is condemned to die, just like we know the Sugar Loaf conspirators share the same fate. But that’s not what fascinates Barthes….nor I. It’s the obvious “handsomeness” of Payne that gets Barthes, and “the native dignity and nobel carriage,” of Hodges that pricks me. 

     In the photo of the black Osterhout family, Barthes waxes poetic—and a bit racist; fetishizing, of all things, the belt and shoes on Estelle Osterhout. ”….in order to assume the White Man’s attributes (an effort touching by reason of its naïveté).” Barthes speculates, ”The spectacle interests me but does not prick me. What does, strange to say, is the belt worn low by the sister (or daughter) -the “solacing Mammy”- whose arms are crossed behind her back like a schoolgirl, and above all her strapped pumps….”

   Barthes cares not for the victim (the future incarnation of young cousin William Henry Seward), only the impending death and morbid beauty of Payne. With Jack Hodges and me, it’s a similar dance between the descriptively hopeful; “strikingly African features….… fitted for a higher character,” and the clinical diagnosis; “He was a murderer!” I don’t know which Jack to sashay with.

    Jack eventually accepted that “The groans of his aged victim would not die from his ear! That gory head he could not forget! The broken and pallid countenance continually followed him!” Then, and only then, did the haunted sailor repent. It was too late. Dick was already dead, and the Jennings ghost would never leave Jack Hodges..…until….. he “went forth, from whence he came.” The seed of Anak was about to bear fruit. 

      

    While Hanna tried to push Jack out the door, 17 year old William H. Seward was just a few miles down the road from the Teed house, home from school for the Christmas holidays. Here I want to tread lightly with “Lincoln’s man,” Secretary of State W.H. Seward. Let me just say, that the very same New Year’s Day that Richard Jennings was to close on that property (a day Dick would not live to see), was also momentous for young Henry Seward. Instead of recovering from a joyous New Year’s Eve at home, Henry Seward was on a stage headed for New York City, right behind Jack Hodges.   

     

    James Teed, and David Conklin were so completely absorbed in their mutual hatred for Dick Jennings, and obsession over this particular property, there was little air for anyone else in the room. All the others were ancillary characters; crucial yes to the plot, but left to their own devices, none had the desire, nor the inclination for murder. They had to be carefully enlisted, cajoled, and prodded into the mayhem. No one, particularly James Teed, was paying any attention to what Jack and Hannah were up to. Conklin and Teed barely acknowledged Dunning’s existence, and the horse wrangler was beginning to detest them all.

       Jack Hodges arrived in Hannah’s life during the freeze of 1816, about the time things were beginning to sour in her marriage. The two bonded over a mutual taste for the sauce; the backdrop to their “tryst” being the persistent red sky, and the plot to kill Dick Jennings. The stage was electric. This could also explain Jack’s eventual resignation to kill Dick after resisting for so long. As Sam Wilken testified to Martin Van Buren, they overpersuaded Jack.