Finding the truth, telling the story

Woman (with face scratched out)  sitting with dog and puppies on stoop.

What is the message of this picture?

The damage here seems too specific, too direct, to be accidental. It brings to mind the phrase “I’d like to scratch her eyes out.”  But it might be the result of a photo project or the mischief of a child. If there is a message, it was probably never meant to be shared. And yet, our photographer did not throw this negative away. Instead it was slipped in with the others and kept one hundred years.

And so, we wonder. We speculate.

I’ve given a lot of thought over the last few months to what we tell and what we keep hidden in both family and public history.

“I can’t put all this into the history,” a Japanese historian told me of his research. “This would shame his family.”

“I’ve had to sit and listen to people tell stories about my grandmother all my life” said another lady.  “She made a lot of wrong decisions, but I loved her.”

A cousin commented, after we had been analyzing (and over analyzing) our older generation, slightly defensively – “I think they were Good people” -- and indeed, they were good people. But most of all they were people, shaped by time and place and history, by the fears and expectations of their generation, by their own families and their own faults and virtues.

Perhaps it is because I live in Appalachia where story is “key” and the eccentricities and quirks are told and retold, enjoyed, not just after someone is dead but while they are living, and usually while they are present, that I expect people to enjoy and even embrace the larger story.

Should we memorialize the people of the past, choosing to remember only the surface and the good?  I am reminded of my grandmother-in-law who chose her own cemetery stone with the epitaph “She was the Sunshine of our home.”  30 years gone, the present family still remembers and tells how she saved her own hair for months and then went to the Sheriff and swore out a warrant on her husband for “pulling her hair out”.  How she was “dying every Friday” – forcing her eldest daughter to return every weekend and take care of her pa. How she would take the receiver off the phone and hide it under a pillow to keep her neighbors from being able to use their party line.  “What was she thinking?” asks the family when they look at that epitaph.

We do ourselves no service by forgetting the faults of our ancestors, by protecting their reputations, by taking offense when their larger story is told. We make history more bland and both the past and the present less understandable with almost every deletion.

Now it is true, that not all of our views even of the present and the close past are completely accurate. Or perhaps I should say they are never completely accurate. I helped sort out the events in a court case for a lawyer one time, and she told me that people weren’t necessarily lying. “People remember things differently” she told me.  And as I listened and helped people sort through the story to find a core of truth, I realized that she was right. It is often belief that shapes memory, not truth.  

It is important to remember that both in relating and in listening to each story. For instance, how we remember a left behind childhood community may be suspect. When people leave home at a young age, they may never put their childhood memories into a more adult context. Would you want to be memorialized by your 15 year old? Parents of teenagers are often not people at their best. Even when parents are at their best, most are not seen clearly by their children. 

And there is the role of stereotypes and assumptions in how we listen to the story that we hear. This is a dilemma for me telling stories of Appalachia. I’ve found I have to be careful when I talk about my husband’s family to my own because my stories often feed stereotypes that they already have. And that can be true for any story – how urban dwellers see the rural, Northerners see the South, and vice versa. Perhaps that is part of what makes these pictures and this story powerful. So far, the pictures have mostly come from the rural South. But you will see that this family was sometimes rural, sometimes urban, sometimes Southern, sometimes Northern. The pictures sometimes support and sometimes challenge our assumptions about the past, our stereotypes.

There is a complex and wonderful story to be told here, one of triumphs and losses. In reading Rolvaag’s “Giants in the Earth” – I’ve come to see the past as a folk tale, a tale of struggle and change. There is a hugeness to this story of how people came from distant places to form communities and became transformed by and in those places. How they became the people they were and formed the people that we are. And to understand this history, this story, we need to remember the people they were, each one full of faults and virtues. Not “good” and “bad” people, but people who acted well in some context and ill in others.

And to help us to see this past more clearly, we have these pictures and these stories.

Identifiers:

Negative: Paulson016 (This picture was scanned as a 1200 bpi tiff and downsized to a 400 bpi jpeg for this post.)

Related negatives: Paulson268, Paulson351.

Place: Olivia Area, Calhoun County, Texas, circa 1900