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| We, the war babies of the second World War, may be the first generation in which quite ordinary people find themselves surrounded by personal archives. Royal and semi-royal families have always had to cope with complicated heaps of written and graphic material, but peasants never had much paper, or much of anything else, to leave behind to mark their passing. We do, now, as I notice every Sunday afternoon when I devote myself to Working In the Archives, otherwise known as cleaning out the closets.
Around the turn of the century, our family started keeping things in a big way, and I am sure they were not unique among American families. I find myself meditating on this cultural change as I try to think just where to put a box containing several copies of the 1927 wedding portrait of Great-Aunt Blanche and her first husband, Burrell, who died of tuberculosis only sixteen months after the photograph was taken. Maybe some other woman just my age, but in Burrell's family, is looking at the same faces. Or perhaps these photographs of a smiling young man are the only record of his existence. I have no way of knowing, and no one left who could tell me. In the same box as Burrell's picture are papers indicating that his brother-in-law, my great-uncle Tom, acted as executor for the estate. None of his relatives are named in the papers. Perhaps Burrell was an orphan. My sister says that she once saw his grave and that he is buried all by himself. Though Aunt Blanche wrote an account of her life, she never mentioned Burrell and in all of the pictures of him, there are no other people, just Aunt Blanche dressed as rather a flapper and her pleasant, doomed young man. In the same box as the pictures is a leather-bound folders "Our Bridal Chimes", a record of their wedding. There are no guests, or family, or bridesmaids or best man, only two witnesses' unfamiliar names. Tucked into the folder is a brittle copy of the front page of the Dayton Herald for October 26, 1927. A hundred souls were rescued from a Brazilian ship disaster, Ruth Elder's flight was delayed, and President Coolidge appointed Henry H. Bond assistant secretary of the treasury. A mother of five ran away with the man her daughter had planned to marry. The paper refers to the runaways as 'elopers' and includes a rather placid comment from the eighteen-year-old daughter that her mother would be more than welcome if she cared to come home. Aunt Blanche saved the paper because it carried her wedding notice in tiny type on Page 2. He was 29. She was 30. There are probably other documents about their union somewhere in my house. I have plenty of documents. I have a fifty-year old Army Song Book. I have death certificates. Wills. Marriage licenses. Fishing Licenses. Driver's Licenses. Letters. Newspaper clippings. Locks of hair. And it isn't just Aunt Blanche and the frail Burrell. It is Uncle Luther going off to World War II in his beautiful new uniform. It is anguished love letters between my father's mother, Goldie, and her handsome cad of a first husband, my grandfather, who ran away shortly after my father was born. It is the formal family photograph with my grandfather's face cut out.
I have gotten custody of this incomplete, tantalizing, and fascinating archive through the deaths of the people who carefully put the papers into briefcases, suitcases, albums, folder and into boxes which eventually floated into my house. I got the job of family curator because I cannot bear the thought of all this cherished paper, all these smiling photographs, all this commentary and narrative being lost. My house has begun to take on the faint crackling scent of disintegrating newsprint, but I do not care. Whenever my other pursuits drop me into a blank week, I begin again to sort through the archives. Newspapers crumble under my searching fingers as unknown relatives gaze shyly and mysteriously from sepia-toned and tintype and Polaroid surfaces. I cannot imagine selling these faces, but at every flea market and at antique shops at Savage Mills and Reisterstown, other peoples' relatives gaze into the middle distance, without names or dates. At one time, I was moved to acquire such lost souls. I bought pictures of handsome civil war soldiers and melancholy, shy women and button-eyed babies for a dime apiece but since the archives of my own family descended into my closets and filled every spare corner, I have easily resisted the urge to buy any purely aesthetic objects, even for a dime each. I don't have the room or the energy to entertain other peoples' abandoned relatives any more. I have promised my sister that I will clearly mark the non-family photographs I bought at flea markets, to avoid confusion after I die, but I have owned their images for so long that they have assumed the irresistible charm of family faces, and I feel responsible for them. It is hard for me to brand them as outsiders, but I am a conscientious curator and have marked them. NOT OURS, I say, although sometimes I wonder if I might have accidentally mixed some family pictures into the flea-market crowd. I suspect that there could be some strangers in the family archives, too. The muddy, skinny little boys and the grumpy baby, the mules and the demented-looking woman in a torn dress, maybe they aren't our relatives, though they certainly might be. The woman in the very elaborate 1930's wedding dress with train and veil is definitely not ours, but someone in the family must have treasured her. I have no way of knowing who kept her picture or why, but I will keep it, too, along with the raggedy urchins. There are so many anonymous people in those shoeboxes that I am thrilled when I discover a name and date written on the back of a photo. Most of the names and dates are in my mother's handwriting, and some are in my father's, and some in spidery, careful hands I do not recognize. Whole boxes of undated, unnamed photographs have gotten so mixed together over the years that they do not have any context. I am particularly fond of a solitary snapshot of a bend in some ordinary road, signless, nameless, fading. But it has a palm tree beside it, which is reason enough to preserve it. I have recently spent many hours in contemplation of the practical problem of identifying adequate reasons for preservation of stuff. Nostalgia is all very well, but when does a Christmas card from someone you do not remember turn into trash? When does a tender letter from your ex-lover deserve to be thrown out? How many drafts of your book should you keep, how many should you throw away? How many pressed flowers? Postcards? Expired passports? Do they deserve to sit at the curb, inside a trash bag, waiting to be hauled away on Monday morning? The answer which came to me, finally, was that the things in the archives are worth preserving only if they have meaning. I have discovered that, as curator, it is my task to find the meaning and if it is too small, bear the guilt of discarding the artifact; if it is too large, bear the pain of sadness and loss, shed the tears and pack it up again. But in the welter of paper, along with distressing pangs of grief, there are also lovesongs and jokes, unique ideas and sharp little comments, and when I encounter them, then I feel the curator's joy of reading these messages from the past and hearing these dead voices speak. And I imagine the small museums, the arrowheads and dolls, the Life magazines and military uniforms, the baby shoes, the baseball cards and diaries occupying closet space all over the country, tended by people my age, who spend long Sunday afternoons sorting and remembering, weeping and filing and wondering what to keep and what to throw away, wondering what our children will think about our own archives. What will posterity make of the love letters that escaped our intention to shred, the twenty-five years of cancelled checks, the poems in six different versions, the notebooks with hundreds of blank pages, the Phi Beta Kappa key? My daughter will know what these things mean but what will subsequent daughters think of the little pile of worthless lottery tickets and tear-stained rejection notices? Of the sightseeing brochures provided by the States of Virginia, Maryland and Delaware? Of the Carter/Mondale buttons and the publicity folder for Don Juan de Marco? Of the marked-up maps of London and Edinburgh and Athens? Will anyone remember Burrell and Aunt Blanche? Will anyone remember me? Our personal archives invite us to ask ourselves those big questions of meaning and memory. Those questions are the same ones that speak from the National Archives, from every small town library, from the Smithsonian, and from the terrible anonymity of the flea market table with its burden of lost souls. And those of us working in our archives can answer that yes, we do remember, and we will remember, as long as we can bear it, as long as there is a single closet shelf left in our houses, we will keep the memories and the papers. We may have to get rid of some comic books, though. And some clothes that don't fit any more. And some National Geographics. And some instruction books for small appliances which drifted trashward a long time ago. Or maybe not, not yet. Maybe next Sunday. |
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