Living Jackson Magazine :: Books - Alone Among the Living

Alone Among the Living

A review by Caine Campbell

“I’ll miss Jefferson.”

This piquant expression was uttered by a soda jerk, a high school student who appears early in the book and is not a major player. So why quote him to open this review? The author writes with rare surcease about his desperation to leave the place, so missing Jefferson is not the theme of the tale. And yet…

I would expect every home in Jackson County to be home to this

volume, because readers will witness the action occurring in places once familiar and others still present along paths frequently taken. Look there at the large frame house on Lee Street where the Solicitor General of the Piedmont Judicial District had his

offices. That worthy was Floyd Hoard, horribly and dramatically murdered in the driveway of his home.

The narrative takes you back to the time of the sights and smells of the drug store soda fountain, to shared eats and drinks and good company at Marlowe’s Café, to the sight of the Crawford Long Inn and to the still-existing old stone Methodist Church on the corner.

The reader’s familiarity with ground covered in the narrative will include the square in downtown Jefferson and the Jefferson Dragons’ sporting arenas.

Some, but not all, will recall Jackson County’s wide-open bootleg operations whose villainous profiteer, Cliff Park, killed the District Attorney, known then as the Solicitor General. They are central to the story, but the main character is Dickey Hoard, 14-year-old son of the D.A.

To the ordinary struggles of one that age is added the trauma of the murder of Dickey’s father, his automobile exploding in early morning as he turns on the ignition. Dickey is awakened by reverberations from the blast that shook the house. As his mother calls for an ambulance, the boy and his sister make alternate attempts at mouth-to-nose resuscitation of their already-dead father. His struggles with self-esteem, prowess and lack of it in sports, romantic fantasies and realities are all told with astounding candor.

Besides the young man’s own story, the reader learns of what was the most shocking of crimes in the history of Jackson County. The murder case was solved with relative ease and speed. Park had four accomplices, two of whom turned state’s evidence, thus avoiding trial but not sentencing, which meant life terms for each of them.

Trial details, including the rather pathetic testimony of the villain himself, claiming not just innocence but a longtime good relationship with his victim, are reported fully but succinctly.

In a startling revelation, Hoard tells of talking with the murderer, much later, when Hoard was at the University of Georgia majoring in journalism. Park was taken from the prison to a hospital for a hernia operation, making the interview convenient. Hoard learned little, really nothing, directly from the dying man, but gained a significant insight with respect to his own feelings. A far more dazzling epiphany would come to him before story’s end, but your reviewer is determined to leave something for you to discover between the book’s covers.

There along your bookshelves, which volume would you expect to remain relevant? Which book may be read again and again, perhaps by readers of different generations as they come along? What would you say makes a book a book of lasting value? That line of praise has been extended by critic Philip Lee Williams to Alone among the Living.

I linger with the book as you do with a book you like. I read again the words of one of the author’s insights: “The October air was brisk but not cold and despite receiving the accolades that had followed [the game], I felt a familiar restlessness as I walked alone toward the house. It was a pivotal moment in that I realized that the elation of achieving a dream doesn’t last long—five or ten minutes at the most. There aren’t enough people in the world who can say they love you often enough to make you start loving yourself, if you don’t love yourself to begin with.”

Published by the University of Georgia Press in 1994, this work of non-fiction by G. Richard Hoard is available at www.amazon.com and locally at Downtown Interiors in Jefferson. Hoard is a graduate of the University of Georgia’s Henry W. Grady School of Journalism and the Asbury Theological Seminary.