Lunenburg’s WWI vet survives century without a scratch

So many fat acorns crunched on the frozen ground, I had to look up to their source when I visited C.J. Hurt, Lunenburg’s most recent centenarian.

From Courier-Record: Ed Conley

In summer, his small bungalow on Nutbush Road would be completely shaded by this huge front-yard oak. But now, in winter, the gnarled limbs of the 100 year-old tree could only sketch their summer glory in the grey sky. If only this great tree could speak, I wished, as I stepped onto the porch and knocked.

Inside, a gnarled bent trunk of a man greeted me, and for a moment I thought my idle wish had been granted.

Almost bent in half when he walked back to his breakfast, which he had been eating on a TV tray, Hurt’s 100 year-old body was knotted and stiff, yet his long boy fingers could still bend around his fork and cup. The oak tree and this old man were to have much in common, I would discover.

Born across the road in a tenant farmer’s log house, Hurt had been rooted on this spot of earth for 81 years. “When I bought this place in 1913, that oak tree out there was waist high. I had a log house right here. After the war, I tore it down and built this house,” Hurt said with a remarkably clear voice. This was no senile mind, I thought.

In the window’s soft light his face seemed to dance with time, turning first ins side of an old, old man with death’s hand on his shoulder; then, without losing a s tep, he would laugh with the smile of a groom dancing with his bride. His eyes would hit you like a sun eam breaking through a tree’s dark canopy.

When asked about his parents, he surprised me by having roots still too sensitive to expose. “Old Dr. Hurt in Nottoway, that’s where we Hurts came from…You see, I don’t like to talk about things like that, but if it was so, it’s sol We didn’t have no names. We come from Africa and we had our master’s name.”

Later, he revealed how touched he was by the television series “Roots,” which brought back a lot of memories he wanted to forget.

And he didn’t want to talk about his wives, either—but he could laugh about them. “I was married five times and had two funerals. The rest I had to get rid of! But I don’t like to talk about things like that.”

But he laughed from the joy he still had in these memories. Then the subject closed with a silence that seemed to soak up his thought. I would have to shake this tree a little to get an interview, I thought.

Asked about WWI, Hurt said he had gone to Baltimore to work in a steel mill, was drafted into the army supply service, and sent to France for a year. While he didn’t see combat, he was struck by the sight of French farmers living in the same house with their stock. Not even poor black tenant farmers did that!

Had it not been for WWI, Hurt might never have grown old beside his oak tree. His soldier’s bonus enabled him to build the house he now lives in and return from the blast furnaces of the north to farm and help build the roads that were to open up Lunenburg County.

In those days it took five mules to pull the road equipment, which could throw you over the top of it when it hit a root or rock. A man could break his leg and not see it set for two days. But Hurt just laughed: “I never got a scratch,” he said.

He didn’t say why he left the blast furnaces, where “molten iron came out like water.” He had left the poverty of 50 cents a day as a tenant farmer for the 17 cents an hour, 12-hour day, for the steel mill. He still smiled from the improvement the mill brought to his life because he had escaped the sun-up to sun-down life of the tenant farmer. Though the blast furnace felt like hell, it had been heaven to him.

Life as a tenant farmer was worse than a mule’s life. During the hot summer you got an hour break because the boss wanted the mule to reset. “If you couldn’t do what the boss wanted you to, you had to move. That’s why I always wanted something of my own,” Hurt said as he described tenant farming as if existed up until the 1940s.

“All the people lived in huts. When Christmas came, you’d go down in the white man’s cellar, and he’d get that book. All the stuff that you’ve bought during the year, he’d have in that book. He’d tally up and tell you that you didn’t come out. You’d start the new year in debt. They’d own you…I hate to think about it.”

Hurt still didn’t want to talk about his family, mainly his father, I thought. He praised his mother as being the one who grew him straight. “My mother trained me. “I’ve never been arrested. Only stabbed once.” He laughed again at having escaped life with barely a scratch.

Then he dug somewhere in the soil of his life and pulled up an image of a black woman pulling a huge bag of cotton burrs, but working to feed her children and longing for death s her only hope of escaping; “Steal away to Jesus,” she sings. Hurt picked up her song and sang.