THE GUT PILE OF HISTORY

Cost of the Van Nest Family funeral: Burial- $6.90, Shrouds- $3.00, Three coffins- $25.00, Tombstones- $40.00

Journal entry October 13, 2016:

    It was a cool, rainy fall day, as I leafed through the horrific accounts of the murders of the Van Nest family in the old Auburn papers, at the Fenimore library in Cooperstown. My mind wandering, I looked out the library’s windows upon calm Otsego Lake. Not only were these the same waters where James Fenimore Cooper would pen his Leatherstocking series and General James Clinton would damn up and unleash on the unsuspecting Iroquois tribes downstream, during the Sullivan Expedition, it was here so many years ago, a wounded deer was chased across three mile point by a man in a boat—me. 

True story:

     I followed the blood drops in the fresh snow, for at least a mile, through woods, behind houses, across backyards, under those Cooperstown McMansion picture windows and swing sets, until I found myself in a motel parking lot above Otsego Lake. This was the lake Buddy Key had warned me against going towards on the drive. The snow had melted on the macadam and for a moment I lost the tracks. I just stood there, turning in circles. I was about to give up and follow my foot steps back into the woods, when I spotted a nice set of antlers, barely visible through the blowing snow, swimming in the open water across Otsego Lake. I had two shells left in my gun…. to be continued.

      Early in the summer of 1827, Ansel Eddy had been recommended the old “negro sailor” who’d killed a white man down state, by Rev. Jared Curtis, as a perfect example of a “reformed” convict.The prison chaplain felt Jack was low hanging fruit, ripe for exploitation by a budding author. Curtis also had a vested interest in Jack Hodges. Rev. Jared Curtis needed inmate examples of atonement in order to keep his new job at the prison. Revs. Eddy and Curtis both “adopted” Jack Hodges as their example of reformative “grace.” The problem was, BLACK JACOB, A Monument of Grace, The Life of Jacob Hodges an American Negro, (1842) tells you way more about Rev. Ansel D. Eddy than it does about Jack Hodges.

     I’m not the only one to make these observations implicating the clergy in their complicity in prison practices and their dubious inmate spokesperson Jack Hodges. In Jennifer Graber’s FURNACE OF AFFLICTION- Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America, chapter three begins with Jack’s conversion at the “milk white hand” of Rev. Dwight. Jack Hodges was, unwittingly or not, on the cutting edge of the Protestant prison reform movement and their complicity with the state in perpetuating repressive practices within the penal system. Jack was an active participant, along with Dwight, Stanley, Eddy, and Curtis, in creating the new “reformative theology,” from inside of prison walls. The debate on whether this was a good or bad development in the two hundred years war continues—with no expiration in sight. 

    The claims in Eddy’s book of Jack being a “sinner” and “entirely ignorant of the rudiments of Christianity,” echo the same language that was published in The Report of the Trials of the Murderers of Richard Jennings, a decade earlier in Orange County. Somehow Jack’s old trial press is either unknown, or ignored by Auburn’s chaplains, never presented to refute his claim of theological naïveté. Again the old sailor convinces the chaplains he is completely “irreligious,” a drunkard, and a “profane swearer.” He is given a bible he can’t read and Jack miraculously “reads” it. Has Jack actually learned to read or is this just a parlor trick? Coming in the midst of the “burned over” revivalist movement, the timing is obviously ripe for Jack Hodges (and Eddy) to cash in and for Jack to try to get out of his imprisonment. So play along he does, comfortable in his new role as parroting “literate” convert, hoping for an early release from his twenty-one years at hard labor.

     In regard to Jack Hodges’ epiphany, it may well be attributed to an innate sense of survival on the part of any prisoner confined for so many years, or possibly—clinical insanity. According to Black Jacob, Jack was regularly talking to God, reading the bible without knowing how to read and testifying to all who would listen that he “loved every stone” of Auburn State Prison. If we are to believe Ansel Eddy, unlike William Freeman, or Austin Reed, Jack was calm and content in his “furnace of affliction,” a smiling, compliant old man, teeth filed down, no danger to himself or others. Sin and crime fused in the minds of many and Jack’s epistolary from his monastic cell reflects the church’s earliest incursions into ecclesiastical justice, through both torture and confinement. Remember the Inquisition? The system worked! Just look at old Black Jacob. Or, it all could’ve been a con on Jack’s part from the very beginning. Just ask Dave Dunning.