Do Not Go Gentle by Ann Hood

Author:Ann Hood [Hood, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-6687-6
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-12-18T16:45:00+00:00

11

the hoods

THE HOODS ARE PRACTICAL Midwestern Baptists, as far removed from the southern Italian beliefs as possible. Among the mostly dark-haired, dark-eyed, animated, and loud population of Natick, my father stood out. For one thing, he looked different. Tall, blond, blue-eyed. For another, he sounded different. Greensburg, Indiana, where he grew up, is close enough to Kentucky to leave the imprint of a southern drawl on its inhabitants. In a town where everyone had come from somewhere else, my father’s cavalier attitude about ethnic backgrounds could be disarming.

The Hoods had been in America long enough to consider themselves simply American. The only immigration in their history was in 1857—as the French Canadians flooded into the small village of Natick along the Pawtuxet River—when my great-great grandfather James Ralph Hood moved his wife and children two hundred miles north from Flemingsburg, Kentucky, to, Richland, Indiana. His father, also James Ralph Hood, had been born in Virginia in the 1780s and was still alive when his son was run out of town because he freed his slaves. That man became my grandfather’s grandfather.

If you travel around the cemeteries in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, or Richland, Indiana, you will learn the story of my family, because the Hoods do not travel far. They are all buried in these small towns surrounded by rich farmland. James’s son, James Napoleon, was a farmer there when he returned from fighting in the Civil War. A monument erected on the battlefield at Chickamauga has his name on it.

At the age of twenty he was discharged from the army and went home to Richland, Indiana. There he married Nancy Noland, who had been orphaned as a young girl and sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Cincinnati. How they met remains a mystery, but her young parents’ graves are in Fairmount, famous as the hometown of James Dean. On September 21, 1885, an early frost hit Richland. So remarkable was this frost that James Napoleon and Nancy gave their son, born on that day, the name Charles Frost. That’s how my grandfather got his name.

Charlie Hood moved to Greensburg with the train company he worked for and probably stayed because of my grandmother, Bessie Robbins. Her people had lived in this small farming community for as long as they can remember. The Robbins family, it is said, was a notorious clan. It is accepted as common knowledge that they are kin to the Hanks family, and that if anyone bothered to look hard enough they would find that Nancy Hanks, Abraham Lincoln’s mother, is a cousin; but anyone who has investigated this cannot substantiate that link. There are Runyans and Irelands and Mileses, but no Hankses. If disputed to a Greensburg Robbins, however, you would just get a smile. Well, they’d tell you, we are related to President Lincoln on his mother’s side. What everyone does remember is that Bessie’s mother, Cora, was a pipe-smoking bootlegger who often put her grandchildren to work gathering and cleaning old bottles for her moonshine.

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