Part One
William B. Regan was born in 1855 in a log cabin, one of Robinson Regan and Elizabeth Brown's many grandchildren. From his parents he inherited fifty acres of land and an almost unbearably stubborn nature, and from this inheritance little Bill Regan built an empire.
First he gained even more acres of family territory by marrying his cousin, Julia Regan. They had nine children, all slim and small and stubborn, marked by a double dose of Regan genes - and then Julia died. So since his cousin had worked out the first time, Bill went ahead and married his dead wife's younger sister, but soon she died, too. Those days women's work was hard, and childbirth was harder, and women often died young. So Bill married a third wife, a 17-year-old girl - unrelated - who bore him five more children. While his wives were birthing and raising that small army of Regans, Bill was very, very busy.
Over eighty years, Bill Regan turned those first fifty acres into well over two thousand acres of Georgia farmland and forest. Like his grandfather, he knew how to handle a herd, and he had sheep and cattle grazing all across the county. Every year when the local farmers got together to round up those free-roaming animals, read their markings, and divide them up, he'd sell mountains of sheep's wool and fine beef, awakening envy in his neighbors. He cut down some of the forest on his land and turned it into farmland, where he grew corn, cotton, and sugarcane. Other acres he kept as valuable virgin timber, and in these woods he hid a still and turned out gallons of whiskey. He had barns full of meat, cane syrup, moonshine, and hay, and pretty soon he had a serious fortune saved up in the bank in town.
Little Bill Regan truly was a little man, short and slight, even by Regan standards. But he was a proud man, and when he rode on his horse with his back ramrod-straight, he looked as tall as he seemed to feel. He was a smart man, for all he'd had no education, and a determined and hard-working man. But Bill Regan had a problem. Some men have a drinking problem, some men have a womanizing problem, some men have a gambling problem, but Bill Regan didn't have any of these - he had a money problem. See, he loved money too damn much. He loved money more than he loved his wives, more than he loved his children. He may have loved money even more than he loved his prize horse. He almost loved money more than he loved his life.
In 1929, Bill Regan had $35,000 saved up in the banks, and when the banks started to crash, he pulled that money out and stored it all in a giant safe in the corner of his house. By then he was an old man, living alone with his grown son, Tony. And at that time, during the Depression, when folks were desperate for money and there were no jobs to be had, land - good farmland, good timberland - could sell for fifty cents an acre. If Bill Regan had only spent his money, his children would have grown up to live like kings. They could have lived like the old plantation owners, like the men who ran the sawmills; they could have entered the legislature.
But Bill Regan wouldn't spend his money for anything. He wouldn't spend it on his house, wouldn't spend it on his clothes, wouldn't spend it on a car, and certainly not on helping anybody else. By the time he was an old man, he wouldn't even spend money on land anymore. He was so tight with his money that when the winter grew hard and one of his sons came asking for a little bit of syrup, for his hungry children - William's grandchildren - William said no. He had hundreds of gallons of cane syrup stored away, but he would not unlock that barn. He was a tight man, a stingy man. And everybody knew it. Everybody knew that William Regan's money rotted away in his safes, that it grew stale and never circulated, that he never shared it when others were in need.
One day in 1930 some strangers came in to town, and started talking to some of Bill Regan's neighbors, and pretty soon they heard that the old man had land and cattle and sheep and was tight-fisted with the money he earned off them. And his neighbors whispered that the money was "dead money," that "Uncle Bill" never used it for a damn thing, and it was a damn shame he kept it stuck up in that safe, and these strangers pricked their ears up at that.
"What safe?"
And one neighbor, whom Bill had always counted as a friend, narrowed his eyes. He thought of all of William's wealth, his beautiful horse, his endless acres; thought how if he'd had that wealth, he'd have treated a neighbor with generosity. And his eyes turned an ill shade of green. He looked at these strangers, who were all but licking their lips, and he said, "That safe he keeps in his house. That house, right up the road."
And the men decided to pay old Uncle Bill a visit...
Part Two
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Chillin' in George Bush
(the airport, that is)
So while the trains were a total wash (HA!) the planes ain't looking so hot either. I was supposed to be on a plane that was leaving Houston for Denver over an hour and a half late and was also oversold by THIRTY people. That means they had thirty more people than seats - and that's people confirmed for seats, checked in, seat assignments, everything, NOT including standby. Thirty! Evidently they wound up with a smaller plane than they were supposed to have. As you can surely imagine, there were a whole slew of really, really unhappy people. I volunteered to get bumped (three hundred bucks and it looked like I would miss my connection anyway) which meant I was at the front of that line of really unhappy people. I actually felt guilty - not just because I was so much less miserable than everybody else, but also because I think my net impact was negative. I mean, one person got a seat on that plane because I volunteered, but it took the dude rescheduling me so long to do it that I felt like I was holding up the whole line. I think I ended up inspiring more fury than relief.
Next plane's delayed, too. Who knows when I'll get to Montana? If I had taken the train then I'd - hopefully - be somewhere between Chicago and Minneapolis right now, but I'd be on my own after Minneapolis. Currently in Houston... well, we'll see. I have 45 minutes of wifi, which is better than OH SPEAKING OF HAVING TO PAY FOR THINGS, Continental's got this "upgrade" where you can watch live DirecTV during the flight. Which sounds great, except the tv shows were all utter crap while I was going to be on the plane, and of course you had to pay for it, AND that was the ONLY entertainment option - no free movies and NOT EVEN ANY RADIO!!!
I just took it for granted there would be a movie on a three-hour flight, so I didn't pull my book or crossword puzzles out of my big bag. And then I saw they were running a preview for that one where the world tries to convince Liam Neeson he's crazy, and I was like, "sweet!" And then they told me I would have to pay $8 for it!!! I'm sorry, your screen is about five inches across. And you want to charge big-screen prices? And tell me it's for "DirecTV" and automatically that is awesome? NO I don't want to watch ESPN or crappy HGTV shows, I just want to watch a freaking movie while I'm stuck in your rattly metal tube for hours. And if you don't have movies, at least give me some radio! Okay, I'm done complaining about it. I am. I prom - but seriously, what will they do next, charge you for oxygen?? - I promise.
So while the trains were a total wash (HA!) the planes ain't looking so hot either. I was supposed to be on a plane that was leaving Houston for Denver over an hour and a half late and was also oversold by THIRTY people. That means they had thirty more people than seats - and that's people confirmed for seats, checked in, seat assignments, everything, NOT including standby. Thirty! Evidently they wound up with a smaller plane than they were supposed to have. As you can surely imagine, there were a whole slew of really, really unhappy people. I volunteered to get bumped (three hundred bucks and it looked like I would miss my connection anyway) which meant I was at the front of that line of really unhappy people. I actually felt guilty - not just because I was so much less miserable than everybody else, but also because I think my net impact was negative. I mean, one person got a seat on that plane because I volunteered, but it took the dude rescheduling me so long to do it that I felt like I was holding up the whole line. I think I ended up inspiring more fury than relief.
Next plane's delayed, too. Who knows when I'll get to Montana? If I had taken the train then I'd - hopefully - be somewhere between Chicago and Minneapolis right now, but I'd be on my own after Minneapolis. Currently in Houston... well, we'll see. I have 45 minutes of wifi, which is better than OH SPEAKING OF HAVING TO PAY FOR THINGS, Continental's got this "upgrade" where you can watch live DirecTV during the flight. Which sounds great, except the tv shows were all utter crap while I was going to be on the plane, and of course you had to pay for it, AND that was the ONLY entertainment option - no free movies and NOT EVEN ANY RADIO!!!
I just took it for granted there would be a movie on a three-hour flight, so I didn't pull my book or crossword puzzles out of my big bag. And then I saw they were running a preview for that one where the world tries to convince Liam Neeson he's crazy, and I was like, "sweet!" And then they told me I would have to pay $8 for it!!! I'm sorry, your screen is about five inches across. And you want to charge big-screen prices? And tell me it's for "DirecTV" and automatically that is awesome? NO I don't want to watch ESPN or crappy HGTV shows, I just want to watch a freaking movie while I'm stuck in your rattly metal tube for hours. And if you don't have movies, at least give me some radio! Okay, I'm done complaining about it. I am. I prom - but seriously, what will they do next, charge you for oxygen?? - I promise.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
A tour of downtown Jakin
On the left: the Jakin fire department.
On the right: the Jakin courthouse.
The Jakin City Clerk's office. Open at least two afternoons a week.
On the left side of the road, the old Mosely storefront. No longer a store. On the right... a shed?
The Jakin library and museum.
The original Mosely storefront.
And that, my friends, concludes this tour.
How the Regans Came to America
"So... what are you actually DOING?"
Well, here's an example. In 4 parts, here is the central story of the Regan family's collective memory - the one that pops up most often and is remembered most vividly. The first part of the story comes from records and family legend, the last from living memory and observation - the middle two from an ambiguous blur of memory and second- or third-hand tales. Sometimes different storytellers contradicted each other, or explained they were fuzzy on details. And then I added a bit... I think this all happened. But I wouldn't call it nonfiction, or history. Call it what it is: a story.
How the Regans Came to America
Once upon a time there was a man named Richard Regan, who lived in the green hills of Ireland, and decided it was time to cross the ocean and start his life anew. He moved to the new colonies in America to settle down on a patch of land he could call his own, in the area they called North Carolina, arriving to the New World just in time to take up arms and fight in the Revolutionary War. Soon after the war was over, just as the Constitution was being written up by important men a little farther north, Richard and his wife, Catherine, had a son, Robinson, and a daughter, Olive.
Fourteen years after Robinson was born, Richard packed the family up to move to Georgia, where new lands had just been carved out from the Seminole Indians and split up into lots of red-clay soil and acres of virgin timber. He'd brought from Ireland the inherited knowledge of a long tradition of sheepherding, and started building up a herd of free-roaming sheep, grazing beneath the pine trees. His wool production, plus the food he and Catherine raised on their small patch of land, was enough to support their small family. Of course, every now and again they had to run into the swamps to hide from the last remaining Seminoles, who rode around seeking vengeance for the theft of all their lands, but hey, that was a typical occupational hazard.
Robinson Regan grew up into a man in Georgia, and met a young woman about his age, by the name of Elizabeth Brown. She was the daughter of Jesse Brown, who had moved from England and who, like Robinson's father, had fought in the Revolutionary War. Jesse Brown and his wife, Delilah, were a prosperous couple, and when Jesse died he owned land, cattle, a house, and several slaves. Jesse had done well for himself in his new life, and his children's children would later be prominent landowners and businessmen; the Regans owned half of Early and Miller counties, and the Mosely name can still be found across southern Georgia on storefronts and doctor's offices. But while the Brown sisters, as much as Mr. Mosely and Mr. Regan, helped found these twin dynasties, and while Jesse Brown's wealth may well have been the kernel of these countless fortunes, the Brown name was lost to family history - save for some Mosely and Regan boys named "Brown," out of a family tradition whose origins nobody remembers. Such is the misfortune of having daughters.
Jesse Brown left a third of his cattle herd to his daughter, and another third to his son-in-law, but although Robinson Regan had married well and inherited much, his family was not rich. Maybe he just had too many children. While their parents each had only two, Robinson and Elizabeth had ten children, and that's ten children that survived into adulthood, mind you. When theiur land and money was divided up - in true Irish tradition, split up among all the children, instead of just passed to the oldest son - there wasn't quite enough to go around. So the Regan children carried on as subsistence farmers - prosperous some years, not-so-prosperous other years. They were landowners but never plantation-founders, usually poor but rarely impoverished, occasionally well-off but never rich.
Never rich, that is, until William Brown Regan came along.
Part Two
Well, here's an example. In 4 parts, here is the central story of the Regan family's collective memory - the one that pops up most often and is remembered most vividly. The first part of the story comes from records and family legend, the last from living memory and observation - the middle two from an ambiguous blur of memory and second- or third-hand tales. Sometimes different storytellers contradicted each other, or explained they were fuzzy on details. And then I added a bit... I think this all happened. But I wouldn't call it nonfiction, or history. Call it what it is: a story.
How the Regans Came to America
Once upon a time there was a man named Richard Regan, who lived in the green hills of Ireland, and decided it was time to cross the ocean and start his life anew. He moved to the new colonies in America to settle down on a patch of land he could call his own, in the area they called North Carolina, arriving to the New World just in time to take up arms and fight in the Revolutionary War. Soon after the war was over, just as the Constitution was being written up by important men a little farther north, Richard and his wife, Catherine, had a son, Robinson, and a daughter, Olive.
Fourteen years after Robinson was born, Richard packed the family up to move to Georgia, where new lands had just been carved out from the Seminole Indians and split up into lots of red-clay soil and acres of virgin timber. He'd brought from Ireland the inherited knowledge of a long tradition of sheepherding, and started building up a herd of free-roaming sheep, grazing beneath the pine trees. His wool production, plus the food he and Catherine raised on their small patch of land, was enough to support their small family. Of course, every now and again they had to run into the swamps to hide from the last remaining Seminoles, who rode around seeking vengeance for the theft of all their lands, but hey, that was a typical occupational hazard.
Robinson Regan grew up into a man in Georgia, and met a young woman about his age, by the name of Elizabeth Brown. She was the daughter of Jesse Brown, who had moved from England and who, like Robinson's father, had fought in the Revolutionary War. Jesse Brown and his wife, Delilah, were a prosperous couple, and when Jesse died he owned land, cattle, a house, and several slaves. Jesse had done well for himself in his new life, and his children's children would later be prominent landowners and businessmen; the Regans owned half of Early and Miller counties, and the Mosely name can still be found across southern Georgia on storefronts and doctor's offices. But while the Brown sisters, as much as Mr. Mosely and Mr. Regan, helped found these twin dynasties, and while Jesse Brown's wealth may well have been the kernel of these countless fortunes, the Brown name was lost to family history - save for some Mosely and Regan boys named "Brown," out of a family tradition whose origins nobody remembers. Such is the misfortune of having daughters.
Jesse Brown left a third of his cattle herd to his daughter, and another third to his son-in-law, but although Robinson Regan had married well and inherited much, his family was not rich. Maybe he just had too many children. While their parents each had only two, Robinson and Elizabeth had ten children, and that's ten children that survived into adulthood, mind you. When theiur land and money was divided up - in true Irish tradition, split up among all the children, instead of just passed to the oldest son - there wasn't quite enough to go around. So the Regan children carried on as subsistence farmers - prosperous some years, not-so-prosperous other years. They were landowners but never plantation-founders, usually poor but rarely impoverished, occasionally well-off but never rich.
Never rich, that is, until William Brown Regan came along.
A little rain never hurt anybody...
(Probably what Noah's neighbors all told each other)
So my TransAmerican Train Trip is undergoing a little revision, thanks to the weather in Montana. A phone call around noon informed me that there was no way - not by the power of heaven or hell, let alone earthly forces - that Amtrak would be dropping me off in Wolf Point, Montana. Flooding has devastated a few parts of Montana, and put Amtrak's tracks underwater, which - who knew? - is apparently bad news for trains.
People coming east can get from Seattle to Havre, Montana (though they have to take them by bus for part of it), and people going west can get from Chicago to Minneapolis - but between Minneapolis and Havre, YOU SHALL NOT PASS, says Conductor Gandalf. I looked up a few options and all the buses would have got me to Montana later than I wanted (and that's IF the trains ran on time to get me to the bus stops, which, given that the schedule is now all messed up, is highly doubtful) and among the flights it was cheapest to go from NY.
Absurd, isn't it? Three separate flights, totally almost 3,000 miles, and it's CHEAPER than a tiny little puddle-jumper out of Minneapolis. Oh airline pricing.
So now, instead of sitting on a train headed for Chicago, I'm hanging out in NYC for a little longer - crashing with the BEST ROOMMATE FROM NYC* EVER, thanks Natasha!!!- and flying out of La Guardia in the morning. And I won't be able to say that I looped the country by train... but I tried! Rain, man. Whatcha gonna do.
Incidentally, I can't remember if I mentioned this before, but the two stations I was going to visit in Montana were Wolf Point and West Glacier. I think that pretty well sums up what you can find in Montana - things that want to eat you and giant blocks of ice. Doesn't it make you want to build a tiny little house in the middle of an empty field and live throughsome -40 degree winters?
Me neither!!!
Which really makes me wonder... just how awful was life in Prussia? Must've been pretty much terrible if frontier Montana seemed like a good deal. But then again, maybe they just didn't know what they were getting into...
I'm super behind on blog posts. Let's see what I can do.
*see, Emily, no insult!
So my TransAmerican Train Trip is undergoing a little revision, thanks to the weather in Montana. A phone call around noon informed me that there was no way - not by the power of heaven or hell, let alone earthly forces - that Amtrak would be dropping me off in Wolf Point, Montana. Flooding has devastated a few parts of Montana, and put Amtrak's tracks underwater, which - who knew? - is apparently bad news for trains.
People coming east can get from Seattle to Havre, Montana (though they have to take them by bus for part of it), and people going west can get from Chicago to Minneapolis - but between Minneapolis and Havre, YOU SHALL NOT PASS, says Conductor Gandalf. I looked up a few options and all the buses would have got me to Montana later than I wanted (and that's IF the trains ran on time to get me to the bus stops, which, given that the schedule is now all messed up, is highly doubtful) and among the flights it was cheapest to go from NY.
Absurd, isn't it? Three separate flights, totally almost 3,000 miles, and it's CHEAPER than a tiny little puddle-jumper out of Minneapolis. Oh airline pricing.
So now, instead of sitting on a train headed for Chicago, I'm hanging out in NYC for a little longer - crashing with the BEST ROOMMATE FROM NYC* EVER, thanks Natasha!!!- and flying out of La Guardia in the morning. And I won't be able to say that I looped the country by train... but I tried! Rain, man. Whatcha gonna do.
Incidentally, I can't remember if I mentioned this before, but the two stations I was going to visit in Montana were Wolf Point and West Glacier. I think that pretty well sums up what you can find in Montana - things that want to eat you and giant blocks of ice. Doesn't it make you want to build a tiny little house in the middle of an empty field and live throughsome -40 degree winters?
Me neither!!!
Which really makes me wonder... just how awful was life in Prussia? Must've been pretty much terrible if frontier Montana seemed like a good deal. But then again, maybe they just didn't know what they were getting into...
I'm super behind on blog posts. Let's see what I can do.
*see, Emily, no insult!
Sunday, June 19, 2011
the journey part one: Into the South
Riding a train down south, from Charlottesville to Atlanta, I didn't do an awful lot of thinking. Mostly I slept - from mid Virginia to the bottom edge of South Carolina I stayed fast asleep, lulled by the rocking of the train. And when I woke up, to a South Carolina landscape of fields and kudzu-covered forests, all coated in the golden light of a sunrise, I stared out the window in sleepy admiration. And promptly fell back asleep.
But when I woke up again, well and truly in the deep South, I did start thinking, train-centered thoughts, about three things: cotton, textiles, and Petersburg. Trains traveling from the South loaded down with raw cotton, trains traveling to the South bearing freshly-milled textiles, trains at the center of a bitter Civil War seige.
Then I chided myself for riding into the South and thinking like I was traveling into the past. Such a stereotype, to associate a lower latitude with an earlier era. Of course the South is not a time machine, no more than any other place with a history - off the train, driving through seemingly endless stacks of interstates, it was easy to remember. But now, as I go deeper and deeper into the country, I realize I might have had it all wrong. It's not that the South is a time machine, not that I'm traveling into the past. It's that no matter where you are, the past can be a slippery thing, and it doesn't always know to stay put. I wasn't driving back in time so much as driving into a place where the past lingers on like a mule-stubborn ghost.
Until ten years ago, the houses on these country lanes didn't have numbers. Letters were sent to a name on "Route 1" or "Route 4," and the mailmen knew everybody's name. The recently-invented addresses - "911 numbers," they call them, since they put them in for the ambulances - don't show up on my GPS, and I have to rely on an older kind of directions:
"Go down the road aways until you see a red brick church on the right - that's the church where your Aunt Judith's family is buried, you know, they were Baptists - and then the highway turns to the left, but you want to make sure you keep going straight. Go about three miles, and look for the sign that says "Hay for sale..."
It's not that Jakin looks like a scrap of the past. Sure, there are tiny old buildings on a quaint, ghosttown-like main street, but shiny cars and giant combines roll down that asphalt. The more I learn about this place's history, the farther away the past looks. Then, these roads were lined with tiny subsistence farms - now, farming is a multimillion dollar business. Homemade wooden kitchens have been replaced with granite countertops, dirt floors with smooth-paved roads, and seemingly endless forests of longleaf pine with massive fields of cash crops.
But even if the houses and the landscape look very different than they once did, sometimes it feels like the past hangs thick and heavy in the air, so close I can almost smell it, sour and stale. It smells like old smokehouses, hickory-scented, with a tinge of rancid meat. It smells like lye soap and sweat. Like pone bread straight out of a wood stove, fresh fish sizzling on a skillet, homemade sausages and just-picked corn on the cob. Like mule shit, and houses burning down in the night, and bodies rotting on ropes.
And at dinner, as the farmer comes in from the fields and his wife pulls pone bread from the oven, and talks about how awful she thought it was of their neighbor to bulldoze that old slave graveyard into the ground, the past feels like it's right behind my shoulder, ducking away when I turn my head, leaving only the ghost of a smell to remind us it has never really left.
But when I woke up again, well and truly in the deep South, I did start thinking, train-centered thoughts, about three things: cotton, textiles, and Petersburg. Trains traveling from the South loaded down with raw cotton, trains traveling to the South bearing freshly-milled textiles, trains at the center of a bitter Civil War seige.
Then I chided myself for riding into the South and thinking like I was traveling into the past. Such a stereotype, to associate a lower latitude with an earlier era. Of course the South is not a time machine, no more than any other place with a history - off the train, driving through seemingly endless stacks of interstates, it was easy to remember. But now, as I go deeper and deeper into the country, I realize I might have had it all wrong. It's not that the South is a time machine, not that I'm traveling into the past. It's that no matter where you are, the past can be a slippery thing, and it doesn't always know to stay put. I wasn't driving back in time so much as driving into a place where the past lingers on like a mule-stubborn ghost.
Until ten years ago, the houses on these country lanes didn't have numbers. Letters were sent to a name on "Route 1" or "Route 4," and the mailmen knew everybody's name. The recently-invented addresses - "911 numbers," they call them, since they put them in for the ambulances - don't show up on my GPS, and I have to rely on an older kind of directions:
"Go down the road aways until you see a red brick church on the right - that's the church where your Aunt Judith's family is buried, you know, they were Baptists - and then the highway turns to the left, but you want to make sure you keep going straight. Go about three miles, and look for the sign that says "Hay for sale..."
It's not that Jakin looks like a scrap of the past. Sure, there are tiny old buildings on a quaint, ghosttown-like main street, but shiny cars and giant combines roll down that asphalt. The more I learn about this place's history, the farther away the past looks. Then, these roads were lined with tiny subsistence farms - now, farming is a multimillion dollar business. Homemade wooden kitchens have been replaced with granite countertops, dirt floors with smooth-paved roads, and seemingly endless forests of longleaf pine with massive fields of cash crops.
But even if the houses and the landscape look very different than they once did, sometimes it feels like the past hangs thick and heavy in the air, so close I can almost smell it, sour and stale. It smells like old smokehouses, hickory-scented, with a tinge of rancid meat. It smells like lye soap and sweat. Like pone bread straight out of a wood stove, fresh fish sizzling on a skillet, homemade sausages and just-picked corn on the cob. Like mule shit, and houses burning down in the night, and bodies rotting on ropes.
And at dinner, as the farmer comes in from the fields and his wife pulls pone bread from the oven, and talks about how awful she thought it was of their neighbor to bulldoze that old slave graveyard into the ground, the past feels like it's right behind my shoulder, ducking away when I turn my head, leaving only the ghost of a smell to remind us it has never really left.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Chasing places, chasing the past
In my senior year of high school, for my pick-yer-topic college application essay, I wrote about Home - how I'd long felt like I didn't have a Home, a Hometown, a Homeplace, a Back Home. I hadn't moved all that often, relatively speaking - I wasn't a military kid or anything like that - but often enough that where I was born, and where I was a little kid, and where I grew up, and where I started to feel grown-up, were all different places. Where were my roots?
A woman asked me once where I was from, and I started to cry. That's the story I told in my essay, except then I added an ending to the story, saying I'd found a home in Harrisonburg. Which is true, but that doesn't make it an ending. Personal essays need endings, but stories don't always.
I don't know if our thoughts move in circles, or just the same straight line over and over again, but here I am again, back wondering about roots and homes and places. This time I'm not thinking about one place I can claim as my own, though. I'm looking back a little farther, to the deeper roots laid by people born five generations before me, and here's what I'm thinking, in case you were curious:
My grandfather, and his parents, and their parents, and theirs, and theirs, were born in the Philippines. We say that makes me 1/4 Filipino. We have a long and disturbing tradition of applying such mathematics to race. Is it equally as problematic to quantify our cultural heritage like that? Am I Filipino at all, or can I only fairly say that my grandfather was?
My grandmother, and her parents, and their parents, and theirs, were born in rural Georgia. Does that make me 1/4 Southern? Or does that make me 1/4 Irish, because my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was born in Ireland? Or English, because another great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was born in England? Or French, because etc.? More to the point, do I have roots in Georgia, or am I as much a stranger there as anywhere else - Ireland, say, or England, or France?
My grandfather, and his parents, and their parents, were born in the frozen stretches of Montana. Does that make me 1/4 Montanan? Or 1/4 Polish, because my great-great-great-great-grandfather spoke Polish, and because of that I carry a Polish last name? If I moved to Montana today - oh god, the winters, I can't even finish that thought.
My grandmother was born in Southern California. Her parents were born in Tennessee. But go back far enough and there I'm Irish, too. So I'm 1/4... Californian? Southern? Irish? Something?
If you're sitting there asking what's the point of all this, well, that's the question I'm asking, too. Maybe there's not much point to any of this. Or maybe there is a point, in that our history and our heritages are somehow inescapable.
Or maybe, as a third option, the truths behind these lists of people and places and dates - marriages, christenings, deaths, burials, the tiny scraps of lives that stay behind on paper after everyone who remembers a person has died - maybe the data doesn't matter a whit, but family history does. Not the facts, but the stories we tell about ourselves and our inheritances.
Maybe it matters less whether Richard Regan immigrated from Ireland in 1752, and more that the family says the Regans are Irish, a tiny bit of history passed down long after the name of that first immigrant was forgotten. Maybe it doesn't matter that the Domonoskes and the Huffmans moved to Montana from Canada and North Dakota, but matters a lot that the family takes pride in being descended from hardy frontier homesteaders.
But then again, maybe the facts do matter, if only because facts can reveal which stories are more legendary than others, and because knowing what's untrue can be illuminating. Oh, but maybe not. If I knew all the answers, I'd be sleeping in my bed at home right now, so since I'm typing on a netbook in north Atlanta, you can tell that I'm clueless.
I find it best to start a trip by doing two very important things. The first is to prepare really, really well. After you've done that, the second thing is to acknowledge that you're still utterly unprepared. So yep, I'm almost entirely unsure about how I feel about the role of family history and heritage in my own life. And here I am, trying to figure it out.
I'm traveling around the country tracking down the places my family is from, staring at the horizons, smelling the air, stepping in the dirt. And I'm interviewing the older family that's left, and asking for stories about the lost generations, and digging a little into genealogies and old photo albums. And along the way I'm starting to come up with - if not clear answers - at least more questions to ask.
And that's at least 1/4 of a start.
A woman asked me once where I was from, and I started to cry. That's the story I told in my essay, except then I added an ending to the story, saying I'd found a home in Harrisonburg. Which is true, but that doesn't make it an ending. Personal essays need endings, but stories don't always.
I don't know if our thoughts move in circles, or just the same straight line over and over again, but here I am again, back wondering about roots and homes and places. This time I'm not thinking about one place I can claim as my own, though. I'm looking back a little farther, to the deeper roots laid by people born five generations before me, and here's what I'm thinking, in case you were curious:
My grandfather, and his parents, and their parents, and theirs, and theirs, were born in the Philippines. We say that makes me 1/4 Filipino. We have a long and disturbing tradition of applying such mathematics to race. Is it equally as problematic to quantify our cultural heritage like that? Am I Filipino at all, or can I only fairly say that my grandfather was?
My grandmother, and her parents, and their parents, and theirs, were born in rural Georgia. Does that make me 1/4 Southern? Or does that make me 1/4 Irish, because my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was born in Ireland? Or English, because another great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was born in England? Or French, because etc.? More to the point, do I have roots in Georgia, or am I as much a stranger there as anywhere else - Ireland, say, or England, or France?
My grandfather, and his parents, and their parents, were born in the frozen stretches of Montana. Does that make me 1/4 Montanan? Or 1/4 Polish, because my great-great-great-great-grandfather spoke Polish, and because of that I carry a Polish last name? If I moved to Montana today - oh god, the winters, I can't even finish that thought.
My grandmother was born in Southern California. Her parents were born in Tennessee. But go back far enough and there I'm Irish, too. So I'm 1/4... Californian? Southern? Irish? Something?
If you're sitting there asking what's the point of all this, well, that's the question I'm asking, too. Maybe there's not much point to any of this. Or maybe there is a point, in that our history and our heritages are somehow inescapable.
Or maybe, as a third option, the truths behind these lists of people and places and dates - marriages, christenings, deaths, burials, the tiny scraps of lives that stay behind on paper after everyone who remembers a person has died - maybe the data doesn't matter a whit, but family history does. Not the facts, but the stories we tell about ourselves and our inheritances.
Maybe it matters less whether Richard Regan immigrated from Ireland in 1752, and more that the family says the Regans are Irish, a tiny bit of history passed down long after the name of that first immigrant was forgotten. Maybe it doesn't matter that the Domonoskes and the Huffmans moved to Montana from Canada and North Dakota, but matters a lot that the family takes pride in being descended from hardy frontier homesteaders.
But then again, maybe the facts do matter, if only because facts can reveal which stories are more legendary than others, and because knowing what's untrue can be illuminating. Oh, but maybe not. If I knew all the answers, I'd be sleeping in my bed at home right now, so since I'm typing on a netbook in north Atlanta, you can tell that I'm clueless.
I find it best to start a trip by doing two very important things. The first is to prepare really, really well. After you've done that, the second thing is to acknowledge that you're still utterly unprepared. So yep, I'm almost entirely unsure about how I feel about the role of family history and heritage in my own life. And here I am, trying to figure it out.
I'm traveling around the country tracking down the places my family is from, staring at the horizons, smelling the air, stepping in the dirt. And I'm interviewing the older family that's left, and asking for stories about the lost generations, and digging a little into genealogies and old photo albums. And along the way I'm starting to come up with - if not clear answers - at least more questions to ask.
And that's at least 1/4 of a start.
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