THE BADGE OF HIS DEGRADATION

“The prisoner at the bar gentlemen is an interesting object. The badge of his degradation covers his body. Born and reared in poverty and ignorance; a friendless stranger, the fortune of war, I believe, threw him upon our shore and a day of misfortune brought him into the employment of David Conklin and through him into intimacy with Mr. and Mrs. Teed.”- Henry G. Wisner to the jury.

       Having been privy as a child to first-hand oral history of my grandfather Wray Osterhout, and grandmother Mary Ethel Jennings, who were children when cattle were still driven down the dirt road from Cochecton to Newburgh, I have a basic perspective on anecdotal local history, but that’s as far as it goes. They didn’t talk much about their past, preferring instead to enjoy a comfortable present, and promising future. I know my grandfather grew up dirt poor and only received a sixth grade formal education. I don’t think my grandmother graduated from high school either. In spite of that, they were two of the smartest, well-adjusted, most loving people I have ever known. That said, they were far from perfect when it came to race. 

     As a boy, Wray Osterhout watched the Ku Klux Klan burn a cross in Skip Chambers' field in Montgomery, telling me with a wink, that the few black families who lived on “Buffalo Hill,” (or as some referred to it, “Nigger Hill”), “jumped right out their windows!” when the cross was lit- in full view of their living rooms. In 1959, I was dragged by my parents to a charity show that the local Lion’s Club was putting on in the high school auditorium. I’m ashamed to admit that I thought the men acting like fools in silly costumes and full minstrel blackface, was hilarious! What did I know? I was a clueless seven year old. My parents had no excuse

     I have a delicately folded letter that my grandfather sent me from his hospital room after stomach surgery in the 1950’s. There’s a little pen and ink self-portrait on the back. He writes of missing his favorite “colored boy,” roommate, who went home the day before; and how he wished, “Mike would tell those old doctors to give Gramp something to eat.” When he was released from the hospital I was his shadow. Sitting with my grandfather on his Boyd St. front porch, three young men would pass like clockwork, (a Holstead, an Osterhout, and a Williams). Even I would join in the unkind, mean spirited fun, mimicking the adults’ dispersions, “There goes the loon, the goon, and the coon,” making my grandfather laugh. Self-reflection is a bitch. 

       After his death, I would learn of my beloved grandfather’s less than savory racist attitudes. I’ve reeled in most of mine. There’s always room for improvement. The fact that my loving grandparents were racist, didn’t share much of their family specifics, nor strayed far from these hills and river bottoms, is not surprising. It gives all us Osterhouts and Jennings the unique position of a “there,” over and above an “us.” We may have been ignorant, or in passive denial, as to “who” we really were (I don’t think we cared), but we had no such doubts as to “where” we were. Stolen or not, racist or not, we were home.

      

    Even Jack Hodges’ own lawyer uses inherently racist language to explain away Jack’s crimes of “intimacy.” Like drink, poverty and ignorance, race could always be used by lawyers as the excuse and reason for malicious acts. This “badge of degradation” is what makes Jack seem less than human to the jury; a wild savage that  is somehow at the mercy of his uncontrollable urges (specifically due to his color). His murderous actions are to be reconciled, his primal instincts considered. Being black….he couldn’t help himself.

    With the increase of abolitionism in the north, color entered the conversation as the one thing the church, temperance movements, Sunday School publications, or a living wage couldn’t change. So instead, both white supremacist ideologues and abolition apologists, promoted the concept of the “black’s” inherent evilness, and dared white society to work around it. To this odd twist of Wisner’s legal strategy, add the “delicate state,” of Hannah Teed also used as an effective defense. The conspirators enlisted a black man and a pregnant woman, both at the mercy of innate elements they had no control over. And now, like William Price had done for Hannah Teed, Henry G. Wisner was asking the jurors to forgive Jack’s susceptibility to his “day of misfortune,” and coercion into the wielding of the assassin’s dagger—because he was black.