Beyond

the  Archives
Research as a Lived Process
Edited By Gesa E. Kirsch And Liz Rohan
Foreword By Lucille M. Schultz
"EYONDTHE!RCHIVES
 "EYOND
THE!RCHIVES
Research as a Lived Process

Edited by Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan

With a Foreword by Lucille M. Schultz

Southern Illinois University Press

Carbondale
Copyright © 2008 by the Board of Trustees,
Southern Illinois University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

11 10 09 08 4 3 2 1

Chapter 1 copyright © 2008 by David Gold. Chapter 10 copyright © 2008 by Gail Y. Okawa.
Chapter 11 copyright © 2008 by W. Ralph Eubanks. Chapter 12 copyright © 2008 by Malea
Powell. Chapter 16 copyright © 2008 by Anca Vlasopolos. An earlier version of chapter 2,
by Gesa E. Kirsch, was published in Peitho: Newsletter of the Coalition of Women Scholars in
the History of Rhetoric and Composition. The poem “It Is Raining Today,” by Sandra María
Esteves, reprinted in chapter 9, is copyright © 1984 by Sandra María Esteves, from Tropical
Rain: A Bilingual Downpour by Sandra María Esteves (New York: African Caribbean Poetry
Theater, 1984; 30 pp). The poem by Muin Ozaki reprinted in chapter 10 is from Poets behind
Barbed Wire, ed. and trans. Jiro Nakano and Kay Nakano (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press,
1983, 18); used with permission from Kay Kyoko Yokoyama. Quotations from Cynthia Carr
and from Deb Margolin in chapter 13 are used with permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beyond the archives : research as a lived process / edited by Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan ;
with a foreword by Lucille M. Schultz.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-2840-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8093-2840-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. English language—Rhetoric—Research 2. History—Methodology. 3. History—Archival
resources. 4. Archives—Research—Case studies. I. Kirsch, Gesa. II. Rohan, Liz, 1967–
PE1404.B49 2008
001.4—dc22 2007027459

Printed on recycled paper.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ansi z39.48-1992. ∞
Contents

Foreword vii
Lucille M. Schultz
Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: The Role of Serendipity, Family Connections,

and Cultural Memory in Historical Research 1
Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan
part one. when serendipity, creativity, and place
come into play
1. The Accidental Archivist: Embracing Chance and
Confusion in Historical Scholarship 13
David Gold
2. Being on Location: Serendipity, Place, and
Archival Research 20
Gesa E. Kirsch
3. Getting to Know Them: Concerning Research into
Four Early Women Writers 28
Christine Mason Sutherland
4. Making Connections 37
Alicia Nitecki
part two. when personal experience, family history,
and research subjects intersect
5. Traces of the Familiar: Family Archives as Primary
Source Material 47
Wendy B. Sharer
6. The Biography of a Graveyard 56
Ronald R. Stockton
7. In a Treeless Landscape: A Research Narrative 66
Kathleen Wider

v
Contents

8. My Grandfather’s Trunk 73
Barry Rohan
part three. when personal, cultural, and historical
memory shape the politics of the archives
9. Colonial Memory, Colonial Research: A Preamble to a
Case Study 83
Victor Villanueva
10. Unbundling: Archival Research and Japanese American
Communal Memory of U.S. Justice Department
Internment, 1941–45 93
Gail Y. Okawa
11. Mississippi on My Mind 107
W. Ralph Eubanks
12. Dreaming Charles Eastman: Cultural Memory,
Autobiography, and Geography in Indigenous
Rhetorical Histories 115
Malea Powell
13. Cultural Memory and the Lesbian Archive 128
Kate Davy
part four. when the lives of our research subjects
parallel our own
14. “I See Dead People”: Archive, Crypt, and an Argument
for the Researcher’s Sixth Sense 139
Elizabeth (Betsy) Birmingham
15. Stitching and Writing a Life 147
Liz Rohan
16. When Two Stories Collide, They Catch Fire 154
Anca Vlasopolos
17. Stumbling in the Archives: A Tale of Two Novices 161
Lisa Mastrangelo and Barbara L’Eplattenier

Contributors 171

vi
Foreword
Lucille M. Schultz

Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process marks the change from read-
ing an archive not just as a source but also as a subject. That is, the authors of
these interdisciplinary research narratives understand archives, in the words
of anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler, not as “things” but as “epistemological
experiments”; not as sites of “knowledge retrieval” but as sites of “knowledge
production” (87, 90). And thus the essays in this collection instantiate the
archival turn that scholars have theorized in recent years. With graceful
accounts, the authors invite readers to accompany them on their research
journeys, revealing for us the ways in which the paths they travel are marked
by twists and turns, with forward steps and backward steps, with detours and
side trips—all this as part of their research as a lived process, all this as part
of the collection’s significant intellectual work.
Individually and as a collection, the essays here demonstrate the difference
between “history as event” and “history as account.” When an event has taken
place, what we know of it comes from various accounts constructed as rhetorical
acts in a theoretical space by writers who, while engaged in historical research,
assume the subject positions of rhetorician. No longer, for example, do we argue
about whether writers are affected by what Kenneth Burke called terministic
screens; we know we are. A particularly strong feature of these first-person nar-
ratives is that the writers name the subjectivities with which they intentionally
and unavoidably approach the print materials, the ephemera, and the physical
sites they interrogate. Writers also shed light on the institutional interests and
the subjectivities that are served by an established archive, and not only by
records in the archive but even by buildings that house the records. Working
with the letters of Native American elder Charles Eastman at the Newberry
Library in Chicago, Malea Powell recalls in her essay that the Newberry and
its records of imperialism were built and collected on land where the Miami
tribes once harvested garlic. In Gesa E. Kirsch’s essay, a project that explores
the life, work, and rhetorical agency of Dr. Mary Bennett Ritter, Kirsch re-
minds us that whether reading or constructing an archive, a researcher is also

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Lucille M. Schultz

interpreting: archival records are never simply transparent. Just as a collection

of records is established from an interested perspective, it is also read from an
interested perspective.
Also in this collection, the writers demonstrate the complexities of con-
structing an archive for a particular audience and purpose, recognizing that
just as the histories we construct are contingent and limited, so, too, are the re-
positories in which we work. As our kitchen counters, refrigerator doors, desks,
filing cabinets, photo albums, junk drawers, and electronic files remind us,
we interact with records, many and varied, on a daily basis. And we routinely
make decisions—sometimes deliberately, sometimes randomly—about which
records to keep and which to toss; we see the results of these decisions in every
family’s personal papers. Barbara Slater Smith, my husband David Smith’s
mother, was an elementary teacher in a public school in Columbus, Ohio; I
was not lucky enough to know her, but in one of the schoolbooks she used, a
book called Fundamentals of German, is tucked a yellowed, handwritten note: a
March 1937 report of a supervisor who had observed her sixth grade class. Did
Barbara Smith keep that note because of its praise and encouragement? And
what of the other reports that she didn’t keep? Here, in Barry Rohan’s essay
“My Grandfather’s Trunk,” we learn of the miscellaneous, unsystematically
saved documents that Rohan found in that trunk, documents that led him to
other documents and thus allowed him to write the story of a career.
So, too, professional archivists make decisions about those records that will
be available to future generations as part of a collective cultural memory. Their
criteria include not only those specific to an institution’s mission but also those
that might affect an institution’s holdings at a given moment; something as
simple as “available space,” for example, could be a factor in decision-making.
And an archivist is always committed to the key principles that govern the
establishment of an archival collection: provenance (respect des fonds), which
entails avoiding any intermingling of records from various collections, and
the sanctity of the original order (respect pour l’ordre primitif ), which requires
faithfulness to the creator’s sequence. The effect of these many processing
decisions, both big and small, is that for a particular project, a writer is not
likely to find all of the records he or she needs in a single collection, in a single
location. It’s in this circumstance, working outside of an established, searchable
collection, that we compose what rhetoric scholar Shirley Rose calls a “physi-
cally dispersed but intellectually integrated archive.” Alicia Nitecki, in her essay
“Making Connections,” offers a stunning example of how her purposeful and
accidental finds of books, letters, essays, phone books, and personal contacts
allowed her to uncover a long-suppressed Polish work on the Holocaust. Victor
Villanueva pulls together family stories, biography, FBI reports, photos, and a

viii
 Foreword

gag order to understand how Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos, a graduate of Harvard
Law School, a veteran of the U.S. military, and a Christian Democrat “who
believed that Puerto Rico and its people should be free,” spent most of his life
in prison because he wrote twelve speeches—speeches that never sparked a
revolution but were considered “dangerously revolutionary.”
The authors here model for us the ways in which cultural theorists extend
the definition of archive beyond print records or ephemera. Kate Davy finds
that the cultural memory that she sought was archived in performances of
Women’s One World theater and festivals. Ronald R. Stockton works with the
inscriptions on grave markers in a cemetery that dates back to 1840, exploring
how monuments as well as landscape history can be read as part of an archive.
And Liz Rohan points to the ways that Avery Street in Detroit, a street where
writer Janette Miller lived, became for Rohan an historic, architectural, and
geographic “text.”
Finally to say, the authors of these narratives articulate their methodologies,
both planned and unplanned, and the emotions that accompany their work.
As a scholar who has worked for almost two decades in more than a dozen
archives, ranging from the Library of Congress and Harvard’s many libraries to
the New Harmony Workingmen’s Institute in New Harmony, Indiana, and the
archive of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, I found
myself, as I read, identifying more than once with a writer’s disappointment
at not finding a much sought-after record, with a writer’s joy at an unexpected
find, with a writer’s nagging sense that there must be something else out there,
and, perhaps above all, with the passion for research that is embedded in each
of these accounts. Archival research can be a lonely enterprise. By naming the
ways in which their work touches their lives, and the ways in which their lives
touch their work, the writers of these narratives help those of us who do his-
torical research become part of a collective enterprise, encouraged by knowing
that when the research trail takes an unexpected turn or meets a dead end, or
even veers off the road into a ditch, we are in good company.
The major contribution of this work, in sum, is not just that the writers
construct new histories, though they do that persuasively. More powerfully,
these authors present their work to readers not as a fait accompli but rather as a
lived process. In no other cultural memory work that I know of do the writers
articulate their methodologies with as much inflection and nuance—and thus
with self-awareness and reflection—as the writers do here. Not only, therefore,
do these writers make an archival turn with their work, they also make a writerly
turn in the ways they present it to us—and readers are the richer for that. Ac-
complished editors and scholars Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan bring forward
a collection of narratives grounded in records of human needs and activities,

ix
Lucille M. Schultz

a collection that becomes its own double as it earns a well-deserved place as a

first-rate record of groundbreaking scholarship. Viva.

Works Cited
Rose, Shirley. E-mail to the author. February 19, 2007.
Stoler, Ann Laura. “Colonial Archives and the Art of Governance.” Archival
Science 2 (2002): 87–109.

x
Acknowledgments

Together, Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan would like to thank the contributors
for sharing their stories of discovery, serendipity, and inspiration; for their care
and thoughtfulness revising their work; and for their graciousness and patience
with the editing and publishing process. We are also indebted to Catherine
Hobbs and Lucille M. Schultz for their helpful feedback and suggestions and
to Karl Kageff, editor-in-chief at Southern Illinois University Press, for his
support, enthusiasm, and leadership.

Gesa Kirsch would like to thank the archivists who have inspired her work, sup-
ported her many requests, and led her to unexpected discoveries. In particular,
I would like to thank Deborah Day at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography,
University of California, San Diego; Patty French at the Lane Medical Library,
Stanford University; and David Kessler at the Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley.
I am grateful to Bentley College for summer support and travel grants to
conduct archival research. Many thanks go to my colleagues in the English
department, especially George Ellenbogen, Maureen Goldman, and Barbara
Paul-Emile, who followed my archival adventures with interest, support, and
enthusiasm.
Friends and family members were close during the years of working on this
book. Warm thanks to Ann Bonner for making time to visit often; to Marlowe
Miller and David Keevil for years of friendship; and to Pauline Donnelly and
Joe Selvaggi for sharing training runs and martinis and for helping us find
our new home.
I am grateful to members of my family who traveled far and visited often
during the last few years: Werner Kirsch and Christa Möllers; Gunder Brotchie;
Karl Kirsch and Mall Koiv; Thomas Müller; and Dorothea Herreiner. A special
thanks goes to my dad, Hans Otto Kirsch, for his support and encouragement
from afar.
Two new and unexpected friends deserve special mention. Jim Fraser—seren-
dipity once again—has been most wonderful in getting me on the road to a new
adventure, and Steven M. Greenberg at Vilna Shul: The Boston Center for Jewish
Heritage has been a great neighbor and enthusiastic supporter of my work.

xi
Acknowledgments

With deep gratitude, I express thanks to those who came before me and
still make their presence felt in my life—Elisabeth Wernich Kirsch, always
close in spirit; Ingeborg Thoeming Kirsch, whom I have gotten to know only
lately through family stories; Katharina Kirsch, dearly missed and beloved;
and Dr. Mary Bennett Ritter, whom I have met only vicariously, on the page
and in the archives, but who remains a great source of inspiration.
Finally, and most especially, I would like to thank Tony Schreiner for many
years of friendship, love, and laughter.

Liz Rohan would like to thank the staff at the Bentley Historical Library at the
University of Michigan for their wonderful resources, including the Bordin/
Gillette Researcher Travel fellowship. Thanks also to Joan Duffy at the Yale
Divinity Library, who was a continual source of information during my research
trip to the library and thereafter, when I had questions regarding citations.
The University of Michigan–Dearborn supported conference trips that
led to my conversations with Gesa about this project. My mentors at the
University of Illinois—Gail Hawisher, Peter Mortensen, Paul Prior, and Bill
Kelleher—also helped me when a graduate student and now in spirit, as also
do my fellow graduate students: Joyce Walker, Karen Lunsford, Mary Sheri-
dan-Rabideau, Renee Thomas Pyrtel, and Amanda Shepard.
Thanks to other friends who supported my scholarly endeavors and have
read my works in progress: Liz Gonzalez, Beth Burmester, Cindy Rawson,
and David Gold. Thanks especially to my friend/cousin Cathy Kenny, who
always knows I can do it.
Janette Miller, although deceased, somehow still helped me get home—a place
I wouldn’t know I needed to be otherwise, which I’m grateful for every day.
Finally, and especially, I thank my parents, Kathy and Barry, and my brother,
Brendan, for their spiritual and material support over the long haul.

xii
"EYONDTHE!RCHIVES
Introduction
The Role of Serendipity, Family Connections,
and Cultural Memory in Historical Research
Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan

In her memoir French Lessons, Duke professor Alice Kaplan writes that liter-
ary critic and Yale professor Paul de Man “would have been a better teacher
if he had given more of his game away” because she believes “the root of [his]
intellectual questions was his own experience and pain” (172, 173). A former
student of his at Yale, Kaplan points out that de Man’s interest in nationalism
and his prized method of text interpretation, deconstruction, can be traced
to his experience living in German-occupied Belgium and his authorship of
fascist, pro-Nazi texts. Although Kaplan had been writing her dissertation
about fascism when a student with him, de Man maintained the illusion that
his scholarly projects were disinterested, not, as she would discover upon his
death, arguably linked to his intriguing, checkered, and likely tortured past. In
French Lessons, Kaplan gives her game away by describing how the memory of
her lawyer father, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials who died when Kaplan
was eight, led Kaplan to French, France itself, and eventually to academe,
where she is a successful scholar. Kaplan’s experience suggests, then, that how
a researcher chooses a subject is a subject unto itself.
The occasion for putting together this collection has illustrated for us the
many more stories like Kaplan’s and the value of researchers “giving their game
away.” Once we invited contributions on the process of finding and sustain-
ing a research project, we learned about the connections woven through so
many of our scholarly and personal lives that remain largely unarticulated.
The essays in this collection demonstrate how virtual, historical, and lived
experiences intersect, particularly as researchers extract meaning from sources
in locations most associated with isolation and loneliness—the archives. They
show that research does not just take place in the library archives but also
when researchers pursue supplementary information and additional perspec-

1
Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan

tives about their data from existing people and places. The focus of many of
the essays in the book is on archival and historical research, but all tell tales
of fascinating discoveries, unexpected leads, and early hunches leading to a
scholarly project.
Beyond the Archives illustrates the range of research methods and strategies
available to scholars, such as using space and location as a way to understand
the sites where a historical subject lived; using oral histories and interviews
with local informants or relatives to better understand the actors involved in
shaping the politics, culture, and history of the times; and being attentive to
unexpected leads or chance encounters that can enrich a research project as well
as change its direction and scope. Second, this collection enriches our notion
of what constitutes an archive. Contributors use materials from regional and
local sources, family records and artifacts, even FBI and other government
documents. By doing so, they highlight how using these less frequently con-
sulted resources can enrich our understanding of history, culture, and rhetoric.
Finally, we see this book contributing to a sense of excitement, discovery, and
inspiration in doing research, a facet of research that we consider crucial to
sustaining the long-term interest and passion of scholars. This, in turn, is nec-
essary to produce the most thorough, complete, and engaged scholarly work.
The collection on the whole addresses what inspires our work, what attracts
us to our research subjects, how they attract us, and the role of serendipity,
place, and cultural memory in making knowledge.
Most contributors are scholars in the field of composition and rhetoric,
but others work in fields like philosophy, Holocaust studies, creative writing,
theater studies, political science, and freelance journalism. Overall, writers
in this volume unpack their thinking in process and help readers see how
they have mined their lives for meaningful patterns when shaping analysis
and casting impressions of their research subjects. Thus, these writers indeed
teach, as Kaplan suggests, by making the research process more transparent
by describing it. Most important, they show why anyone would embark on
research in the first place. For these writers, research is a meaningful collection
process that has helped them better understand their own historically situated
experience. It can even become an identity-forming, life-changing activity.
Therefore, this book can be a guide for composition and rhetoric students who
are beginning archival work and may also bring depth and comprehension
for seasoned scholars in the field who are not historians by training but use
archives for their work. The essays can also be useful for teachers across the
humanities because these short, jargon-free pieces make comprehensible the
interpretive skills that researchers bring to their projects.

2
 Introduction

Expanded Notions of the Archive: Including Family,

Local, and Genealogical History
Linda Ferreira-Buckley points out that in the late twentieth century, attitudes
shifted about what “counts” as archival material worthy of academic study.
She argues that research methods should parallel these developments. The
research described in this volume shows the results of an expanded concep-
tion of archives. Many of these researchers have used regional and familial
archives for their data collection and analysis. Their work teaches the value of
attending to how our family, social, and cultural history is intertwined with
more traditional notions of history and culture. It helps us understand and
explore the fissures of historical narratives, the places at the margins where
voices have been suppressed, silenced, or ignored. Furthermore, these essays
show that researching family archives and local stories can and does lead to
sustained scholarly work and contributes to new knowledge, both in and
outside of academe.
For instance, W. Ralph Eubanks discovered that his parents were placed on
a secret watch list by the state of Mississippi. That this placement constituted
a significant threat to his family’s safety, well-being, and survival led Eubanks
to engage in serious, scholarly research and the publication of his book, Ever Is
a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past. This topic, which came to
light only with the release of the Sovereignty Commission files in the late 1990s,
adds a personal dimension to Eubanks’s research and, we argue, highlights the
historical impact, seriousness, and threat that was experienced by Eubanks’s
family and hundreds of others like it. Eubanks’s research also suggests that
family history cannot be extricated from public history because individual lives
shape and are shaped by the times—as in the segregated American South of
Eubanks’s childhood. As a consequence, writers who discuss family members
in our collection create and report interpretations not just about their families
and themselves but about the larger world as well.
The intersection of the personal, cultural, and scholarly aspects of our
lives emerged as an important new site for original scholarship among our
contributors. Personal archives, relatives’ scrapbooks, and papers discovered
under a grandmother’s bed or in the attic led these researchers to see their
own relatives as actors shaping and shaped by a larger history, History with
a capital H, while they learn more about their own histories. For contributor
Wendy B. Sharer, for example, one small box of family memories she found in
her grandmother’s closet led her to write a book about post-suffrage clubs and,
in the meantime, helped Sharer better appreciate her grandmother’s life as a
member of such clubs. A similar discovery, a trunk found in the basement of his

3
Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan

mother’s apartment building, led Barry Rohan to the papers of his grandfather,
a Hollywood scriptwriter, whom he had been named after but never met. For
Victor Villanueva, his father’s death inspired, in part, his curiosity about his
Puerto Rican heritage and the speeches of Puerto Rican revolutionary Pedro
Albizu Campos, who had once dated his father’s sister. Similarly, the death
of Ronald R. Stockton’s father precipitated an interest in the local cemetery
of his southern Illinois hometown, which led to a scholarly article about this
cemetery. For each of these researchers, like several others in this collection,
families supplied key sources or became sources themselves for research.

Curiosity and Serendipity: Moving from a

Chance Encounter to Scholarly Research
In addition to expanding a narrow conception of archives, the experiences nar-
rated in this volume teach the importance of attending to facets of the research
process that might easily be marginalized and rarely mentioned because they
seem merely intuitive, coincidental, or serendipitous. These authors illustrate
the mostly undocumented phenomenon that a commitment to a research
subject might begin with a simple clue. Authors show how they moved from
a hunch, a chance encounter, or a newly discovered family artifact to schol-
arly research. For instance, contributor David Gold’s current research on the
history of rhetorical education at non-elite American colleges, which led to
his forthcoming book, Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing
Instruction in American Colleges, 1873–1947, grew from a happy accident. He was
reading an article in the local paper about a ceremony honoring a graduate of
historically black Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, Texas. This clue led him
to a trail of archival material about non-elite college composition programs,
his doctoral dissertation topic, and his book project.
If Gold’s curiosity had not been sparked by reading that article, or if he
had considered this story “merely” a local one and therefore uninteresting or
unimportant to the academic community, he would not have conducted his
extensive research on rhetorical education in non-elite colleges, a topic that has
made an important contribution to our understanding of the history of rhetoric
and writing studies. Experiences like Gold’s instruct us that unless we pay seri-
ous attention to aspects of our lived experience that connect us with insight,
intuition, and creativity, we might lose out on many leads that can enrich our
understanding of past and present, virtual and historical experiences. And if
new researchers censor this very real and useful aspect of the research process,
they might not learn to trust or recognize their own hunches.
That is not to say that serendipity is necessary for identifying a good research

4
 Introduction

topic; in fact, coincidence, chance, or luck may not come into play at all. We
consider genuine curiosity, a willingness to follow all possible leads, an open-
ness to what one may encounter, and flexibility in revising research questions
and the scope of a project to be key factors for conducting successful historical
work. Gold’s research illustrates this process: he pursued an interest sparked
by reading the local newspaper and then began the hard work of sustained
research—visiting archives, refocusing and expanding the topic as he learned
more, reading in the field to see what kinds of histories of writing instruction
already existed, and figuring out how the new information he was gathering
could enrich our understanding of rhetorical education.
Serendipity and genuine curiosity nevertheless also had a part in Gesa
E. Kirsch’s research about the life and writings of Dr. Mary Bennett Ritter,
a nineteenth-century physician, women’s rights advocate, and civic leader.
Kirsch’s visit to Ritter’s stomping grounds in Berkeley, California, included a
stay at a hotel that had once housed the women’s club where Ritter had done
work with a women’s honor society. Kirsch’s discovery of Ritter’s portrait in
the hotel’s sitting room, along with a study of Ritter’s papers “on location,”
deepened Kirsch’s intellectual attachment to Ritter.
Engaging with family resources as well as studying “place” have been
methods Kathleen Wider found useful when writing her book In a Treeless
Landscape, which describes her grandmother’s unusual role as a speaker on the
national lecture circuit on such topics as art, beauty, and the development of
individuals and citizens. Wider’s research shows that nontraditional research
methods—such as looking up old court records, walking the section line of her
grandmother’s family homestead in South Dakota, and interviewing people
who knew her grandmother or her family or who knew the land—gave her a
depth of understanding of her grandmother’s life that she could not have gotten
if she had relied solely on traditional academic research methods.
Thus, place as archive is another major lesson of research promoted by
these contributors and their research experiences. When Christine Mason
Sutherland, for example, writes about going to locations in England—Lan-
cashire, London, and Norwich—to research the lives and writing of four early
women writers, she argues that exploring the places of deceased or historical
subjects helps researchers avoid “presentism” in historical research. Kirsch’s,
Sutherland’s, and Wider’s research exemplifies how visiting the geographical
location where a historical subject lived and worked is another important, if
undertheorized, research method. Exploring a place and re-seeing a place as
an archive teach the hands-on nature of research. This method of research is
intricately linked with living, being present both mindfully and physically.

5
Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan

Cultural Memory and Identity: Speaking Back to the Archives

Gail Y. Okawa, like Kirsch, Wider, and Sutherland, used living places—New
Mexico and Hawaii—as archives for making meaning when researching the
conditions of her Japanese American grandfather’s internment during World
War II. Okawa’s research, like several of the stories collected here, also teaches
that not all research experiences are “happy” ones. Archives can re-inscribe
power structures and imperialist discourse, particularly when the researcher is
both the object and the subject of research. For instance, when Malea Powell,
a Native American scholar, visited the archives—the St. Louis Law Library’s
Native American Reference Collection—she found herself and her heritage the
object of imperialist, colonial discourse. She had to work hard to maintain her
sense of dignity in light of the demeaning discourse and records of injustices
she encountered in the archives. This was also true for Victor Villanueva,
whose research, mentioned previously, about Puerto Rican revolutionary Al-
bizu Campos resulted in recovering forgotten contexts for both personal and
cultural memories. In each case, these researchers had to find ways to “speak
back” to the archives, to resist the imperialist discourse they encountered,
and to connect to communities and cultural memory that reside outside of
the traditional archives.
Okawa’s, Powell’s, and Villanueva’s work teaches furthermore that research
can resurrect the memory of historical actors to the extent that researchers
bring previously repressed or hidden pasts to life. Hence, historical lives can
shape the present as researchers work with and publish their data. When, for
example, Kate Davy researched the performance rituals of 1970s New York
City lesbian theater groups, she also recovered parts of the groups’ cultural
memory as the context of the erotically charged performances became lost
with a new generation. In this case, the process of research itself creates new
knowledge, not just published results. That is, researchers change and change
others when they engage and make meaning of data, as they encounter people
and places, and as they interpret and make meaning from archival data over
the long course of a research project.

Virtual, Historical, and Lived Experiences:

Connecting the Past and Present
Jacqueline Jones Royster theorizes that research subjects might serve as
“teachers, mentors, [and] guides” aiding in a researcher’s unrealized quest for
“transformations” when confronting contemporary issues (278). In this sense,
the resurrection of historical actors via research who are not family members
can be as meaningful and transformative as learning more about family his-
tory. Several essays in this volume make visible this phenomenon of research

6
 Introduction

theorized by Royster. Elizabeth (Betsy) Birmingham, for example, was one

of the first scholars to write about female architect Marion Mahony Griffin,
a contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose contributions to architectural
design and architectural history had been repressed. Although Griffin died
shortly before Birmingham was born, Birmingham feels she has a relationship
with her and that she owes it to Griffin to tell her story. When authors like
Birmingham disclose their engagement with their subjects whom they often
“meet” only on paper, they admit the joyful human connections they have with
their data, a phenomenon of research rarely articulated or made public.
Historical actors and contexts act on the culture now—and again—as
researchers themselves grow and change over time when learning about their
subjects and in turn act in their contemporary worlds. Birmingham, for ex-
ample, was discouraged from writing about Griffin several years ago because
Griffin was not interesting to Birmingham’s male mentors. This contemporary
experience with sexist attitudes eventually helped Birmingham to better imag-
ine the sexism affecting Griffin’s historical experience as a woman working
in a male profession decades earlier. Likewise, Lisa Mastrangelo and Barbara
L’Eplattenier’s research on Progressive Era female writing program adminis-
trators seemed to both parallel and inform their contemporary collaborative
work about these historical actors. Hence, the process of discovering and
writing about research subjects helps researchers better imagine the struggles
and experiences of these research subjects who were—like all of us—shaped
by and constrained by their respective cultures.
Birmingham’s experience further illustrates that researchers—particularly
those working with marginalized archives or topics—may have to wait years
for an audience to develop for their research. Birmingham’s work on Griffin
began nearly a decade ago, when she was an undergraduate student, but only
now is there an emerging interest among architectural historians about Grif-
fin in particular or women architects in general. Liz Rohan, similarly, found
her research subject, missionary to Africa Janette Miller, when she was an
undergraduate student over fifteen years ago. Rohan returned to this work over
time in order to write about it and understand it. Only recently have feminists
become interested in the historical women’s missionary movement in America,
allowing Rohan an audience for her data. Birmingham’s and Rohan’s stories,
like all of the essays in this volume, further teach the value of research as a
lived process. Doing research helps us understand our subjects, of course, but
it guides us to see—for better or worse—how the world works.
Birmingham’s and Rohan’s experiences also point to the challenging,
demanding, and at times slow nature of archival work. All researchers, and
most especially novice researchers, need to set clear parameters in order to

7
Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan

limit the scope of their projects. They need to be mindful of deadlines for
degrees, publications, and tenure; further, they need to be realistic about travel
expenses and the time, effort, and energy it takes to pursue archival research.
In this book, we do not offer explicit guidelines about best archival research
practices. For that kind of information, we suggest that readers consult Peitho:
Newsletter of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and
Composition (which publishes occasional commentaries about practical aspects
of archival research) and an edited collection in the works that promises to
focus on the pragmatic aspects of archival work (L’Eplattenier, Mastrangelo,
Sharer, and Ramsey).
That being said, we want to reiterate that archival research can be exciting,
inspiring, even life-changing. We are convinced—and our chapters bear this
out—that the most serious, committed, excellent historical research comes
from choosing a subject to which we are personally drawn, whether through
family artifacts, a chance encounter, a local news story, or some other fascina-
tion that sets us on a trail of discovery, curiosity, and intrigue. That personal
connection can make all the difference in our scholarly pursuit: it brings the
subject to life and makes us more likely to pursue hunches, follow leads, and
spend extra time combing through archival materials than we would without
a “personal attachment.”

Untold Stories, Untapped Resources: Giving Our Game Away

Collectively, these essays promote themes of serendipity, chance discoveries, and
personal connections as key ingredients for sustained research when working
with archival documents. Much of the research described in this volume was
inspired by a familial connection. Place, too, has been an important archive
for almost all of these researchers. But we have organized the chapters to draw
attention to important subthemes among the essays.
Essays in part 1 of the book feature the role of serendipity, creativity, and
location as researchers like Gold and Kirsch discuss the clues outside of the
archives they have pursued to make meaning of archives, including physical
journeys, and literary scholar Alicia Nitecki traces the many connections she
was able to make among living and deceased editors, writers, and graphic art-
ists as she uncovered and translated the history of Polish Holocaust literature.
Essays in part 2 highlight how the intersection of personal, cultural, and histori-
cal memory shapes research projects, particularly when a research subject is a
relative, as it was for researchers like Wider, Sharer, and Barry Rohan. Essays
in part 3 confront the politics of the archives, the charged experience when a
researcher is both the object and subject of research, like it has been for writ-
ers Eubanks, Powell, and Okawa. Like many of the researchers in part 2, the

8
 Introduction

subjects for some of these writers are relatives, or their experience was inspired
by family memories or family archives. Essays in the final section of the book
highlight the phenomenon whereby research subjects become guides and men-
tors as researchers’ lived experiences seemingly parallel those of their deceased
subjects—or when their research leads them to living people with whom they
form a real relationship. This was the case for Anca Vlasopolos, who made a
lifelong friend in Japan when pursuing the research for her historical novel.
As a collection, Beyond the Archives illustrates the importance of tapping
into our passions, pursuing research subjects that attract our attention, and
allowing creativity and intuition to enter the scholarly research process while
broadening what “counts” as an archive. These essays outline where to start
with a research project, how to keep going with a research project, and, most
important, why research might be rewarding beyond the obvious rewards of
getting a grant, getting a grade, or getting to know Grandpa. We hope this
volume fosters the openness of heart and mind required for the very best
scholarly work. We envision that readers will come away with glimpses into
the individualized, fascinating windows each writer has shared in the chapters
that follow. Each of these narratives shows that the best scholarly research
is vital, exciting, done for its own sake, and—most often—results in more
meaningful and reflective lives.

Works Cited
Ferreira-Buckley, Linda. “Rescuing the Archives from Foucault.” College
English 61.5 (1999): 577–83.
“Interview with Alice Kaplan, Author of The Collaborator, An: The Trial and
Execution of Robert Brasillach.” University of Chicago Press. 2000. <http://
www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/424146in.html>.
Kaplan, Alice. French Lessons: A Memoir. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among
African American Women. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2000.

9
0ART/NE

When Serendipity,
Creativity, and Place
Come into Play
 
The Accidental Archivist
Embracing Chance and Confusion in
Historical Scholarship
David Gold

I have a confession to make: I didn’t plan on being a historian of rhetoric when

I grew up. Instead, my research career began, like many of my colleagues’, I
suspect, with a happy accident—or rather a series of them.
I was not one of those frighteningly precocious graduate students who arrive
on campus with their dissertation seemingly written but for the footnotes. I
had little sense of English, my chosen field, as a discipline or of academia as a
profession. Not surprisingly, my first year of graduate school did not go well.
Though I was successful in my courses, I was having trouble connecting them
to a scholarly path or even to my life outside of school. I had always loved the
liberal arts and held a strong belief in education for its own sake. At the same
time, I came from a working-class background that valued the practical, and
a graduate degree in English, on the face of it, does not seem very practical. I
had no idea how to mix these competing drives.
And then came my first happy accident: I discovered rhetoric. When I de-
cided to attend the University of Texas at Austin, I did not realize that it was
home to one of the strongest rhetoric and composition programs in the country.
I didn’t even know rhetoric was a discipline that could be studied. But after
taking a course on the relationship among readers, writers, and texts, I was
hooked. Rhetoric appealed both to my interest in education for its own sake
and to my practical desire to be immersed in the world of experience beyond
the academy. One of the oldest liberal arts, rhetoric has pragmatic roots—it
originated as a means to help lay citizens participate in public discourse.
Now committed to the study of rhetoric, if still unsure what to do with it, I
took a frustrating course in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rhetoric. The
course was frustrating for two reasons. First, this time period was an arguably
bleak one for my field. Once the center of the liberal arts curriculum, rhetoric,
by the late nineteenth century, had been reduced in the American academy to
a single freshman course in composition, and not a very inspiring one at that.

13
David Gold

Second, I was frustrated with the narrow focus of the historiography I was
reading. Nearly every available text seemed to focus on events at the same few
Ivy League institutions. I wasn’t attending—or teaching in—an Ivy League
institution, and yet we had an innovative rhetoric program. Surely other schools
existed in the past where the rhetoric and composition curriculum was not so
stifling, where students did not receive papers dripping with red ink, graded
not for content but for form? And even if that were not the case, perhaps some
first-generation college student at a state university might have welcomed
the chance to study the finer points of prescriptive grammar if it meant an
opportunity for socio-economic advancement? Not only did these histories
narrowly represent the wide range of institutional experiences of American
students, but they presumed that curricular innovation begins in elite colleges
and thereafter filters down to less prestigious institutions.
Clearly, this is not always the case. Rensselaer, for example, was training
engineers at a time when Harvard barely recognized science as a fit subject
for a university. Teacher training in America began over sixty years before the
establishment of Columbia’s Teachers College. And Scottish public universities
had as much or more influence on the shape of contemporary English studies
in the American academy as did Oxford and Cambridge (Crawford; Horner;
Miller). Unfortunately, at the time, I had no way to test my suspicions about
the rhetorical tradition in American colleges; little research existed that even
addressed, much less answered, my questions.
Then came the next happy accident.
One morning in the coffee shop, I picked up a copy of the local newspaper,
which I infrequently read. In the local section was an article on a ceremony
honoring Ilah Wright, 106 years old, a 1915 graduate of the city’s historically
black Huston-Tillotson College. Her daughter, Etta Robinson, in her seven-
ties herself, recalled how her mother, upon her return to her home of Tyler,
a small rural town in east Texas, acted as an informal community literacy
liaison, reading and writing letters, checking contracts, and filling out gov-
ernment documents for neighbors: “Anything anybody had to do, any papers
that needed to be filled out, they would come to my mother. . . . She was very
happy that she went to school there” (qtd. in Thatcher).
I was awed by Ilah Wright and embarrassed by my ignorance. Here was
an institution in my own community—just a ten-minute drive away—with
a history as long and rich as that of my own university, and I knew almost
nothing about it. How could I complain about the myopia of other scholars
when I was guilty of the same thing myself? I decided to hit the archives.
Unfortunately, my first visit to Huston-Tillotson did not go well. Used
to the free access and casual atmosphere of a large public institution, I was

14
 The Accidental Archivist

unprepared to do research in a small private one. When I called the library,

I was told that the school had no archives and that old course catalogues, if
they existed, would be housed in the registrar’s office. Moreover, I would
have to get permission from the registrar, the librarian told me doubtfully. So
I called the registrar, who, after a pointed interrogation, allowed me to visit.
Under her watchful eye, I made photocopies of crumbling catalogues on the
office’s old and noisy copy machine, surreptitiously scooping the book dust
into my pocket lest she decide the material too fragile for me to work with.
Every time I asked for another catalogue, I expected her to throw me out, but
she merely frowned, took the old one out of my hand, and went into a back
room to exchange it.
I felt clueless, a feeling I have since come to learn is at the heart of the
scholarly process. In academia, one is in a perpetual liminal space. As soon as
you answer a research question, you ask another, your growing body of exper-
tise simply marking the expanding edge of your ignorance. Archival research
especially exacerbates this condition. It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle,
except that you don’t have a picture on the box for reference, there’s more than
one puzzle in the box, the picture keeps changing depending on how you fit
the pieces together, and the pieces themselves change shape when your back is
turned. Only slowly do the pieces begin to form a pattern. A 1927 report by a
white observer lamenting the large number of African American high school
students taking Latin and Greek instead of more “appropriate” vocational
subjects illuminates the self-determination and courage in those educational
choices; a few more such public critiques by other scholars and educational
officials, and that choice of a classical curriculum begins to read more and more
as an overt political act. The diary of the rural student at a women’s college
in the early 1920s recounting in detail the sweets the school served gives a hu-
man face to the simple demographic fact that most of the students came from
families of modest means. The turn-of-the-twentieth-century normal school
president who boxed his unruly students about the ears appears at first glance
extreme and excessive until a contemporary master’s thesis on education in the
county recounts the ubiquity of corporal punishment without comment, and
other archival sources suggest that professors in the region routinely packed
pistols, such was the casual violence of the times.
Linda Ferreira-Buckley calls the process immersion, by which she means
researchers must loose—and lose—themselves in the era they are studying.
Not merely direct archival material but newspapers, textbooks, magazines,
journals, encyclopedias, and other contemporary sources are essential because
they provide historical context for the materials we work with.
So I immersed myself.

15
David Gold

I was amazed to discover that Texas had eleven private black colleges before
1915 teaching a predominantly liberal arts curriculum. Moreover, these schools
challenged what I had learned about the history of rhetoric. At a time when
classical languages and oratory were moving to the periphery in Ivy League
institutions, black colleges and high schools commonly offered four years
of Latin and Greek and made oratory a central part of the curriculum. At a
time when the flagship University of Texas was promoting current traditional
rhetoric in its composition courses, Samuel Huston, Wiley, and other black
colleges in Texas were using what was arguably the most progressive rhetoric
textbook of the day. And not only did black colleges differ markedly from
white institutions, but there was an enormous range of pedagogical diversity
among black schools. There was a story here to be told.
When one of our department’s senior scholars heard of my project, however,
he pointedly let my advisor know that it would be “career suicide” for me to
embark on it. This was also a fortunate event, though it did not seem so at
the time. At first, I was angry. I felt like I was being asked to compromise
my research for the sake of market realities. But I understood his point. At a
composition conference one year, one of my colleagues, knowing of my work,
kindly invited me to a session of the black caucus he was attending. When he
introduced me to his mentor, she eyed me carefully.
“How do you identify yourself?”
“How do I—”
“Identify yourself.”
“Um, Italian Jew raised in Miami?”
“Well, then, you can’t come.”
Certainly it would be difficult to market myself as a white African Ameri-
canist. And certainly doing research as an outsider to any community is a chal-
lenge. But I do believe that in the end, it is the work that matters. I know that
my own fears about my status as an outsider to the communities I study have
diminished in proportion to the research and writing that I have done. Subject
position and identity are important, but they do not define us entirely.
But I did grudgingly consider that advice, and to my surprise it actually
opened up my research project and, I think, my research career. Instead of look-
ing at black institutions exclusively, I decided to look at a range of alternative
sites of rhetorical education, institutions that had been marginalized by previous
histories. I discovered a variety of schools that also spoke to many of the same
issues I hoped to address through my initial conception of the project.
For example, in addition to its variety of black colleges, Texas was home
to the nation’s largest residential women’s college, Texas Woman’s University,
founded primarily through the efforts of public-minded Texas clubwomen

16
 The Accidental Archivist

who fought successfully for a companion school to the state’s male-only Texas
A&M. Though these women were often indifferent to suffrage and in many
ways supported activities that may not appear sufficiently feminist to our con-
temporary eyes, they actively engaged in civic activities and promoted women’s
rights and expected women students to do so as well. Texas also had numerous
vocational and teacher training colleges set up to serve first-generation college
students in both white and black agricultural communities.
As I learned of these histories, I could not help but feel a kinship with the
students at these schools. As a second-generation American and the first in
my family to attend college, I have been steeped in the immigrant tropes of
socio-economic advancement through education and familial pride in such
achievement. I became determined to write histories that would not merely
expand the body of historical knowledge in my field but also do justice to
the diverse experiences of students and educators at previously marginalized
institutional settings. Their histories are, after all, our own.
This project became my dissertation and, in its next incarnation, my first
book, Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in
American Colleges, 1873–1947. In that work, I chose three colleges underrepre-
sented by traditional histories: Texas Woman’s University; East Texas Normal
College, an independent teacher training school set up in explicit ideological
opposition to elite liberal arts colleges; and Wiley College, a black liberal arts
college in rural Marshall, Texas. I discovered that these schools, by emphasizing
community uplift and civic responsibility and by validating local institutional
and demographic realities, created contexts in which otherwise moribund cur-
ricular features of the era took on new possibilities, thereby fostering an ethos
of public participation among their students.
At Wiley, poet and professor Melvin Tolson combined African American
and classical rhetoric to produce a critical pedagogy that honored students’
diverse voices and fostered progressive political action. At TWU, gender-based
vocational education served progressive ends; unlike their peers at many con-
temporary women’s colleges, students were encouraged to participate in public
discourse, professional life, and politics. At East Texas, founder William Mayo
held that each student had a sacred dignity that schools must honor and that
practical universal education was the basis for a democratic society.
Moreover, each school’s pedagogical approach was developed with local
needs in mind, creating important differences and demonstrating once again
the importance of taking local cultural and historical circumstances into
context when developing pedagogies—and writing histories. For African
American students and the emerging black middle class, for example, a classical
education was seen as liberatory, the sine qua non of educational attainment.

17
David Gold

As Tolson told his students, “Question everything. You are competing with
students from Harvard and Yale” (qtd. in Flasch 19). In contrast, white women
in Texas and in the South often had a much more conflicted relationship to
the liberal arts, which they frequently saw not as liberatory but as limiting and
belonging to an outdated antebellum finishing-school tradition, whose chief
purpose, wrote one college president in 1874, “seem[ed] to be that of furnishing
intelligent playthings for men possessing exhaustless wealth” (Kansas State
Agricultural College 31). Each visit to an archive enriched my work, as each
school illuminated the other.
Of course, I had no idea it would turn out this way at the start. The process
of doing archival research is largely organic. Though we may apply a critical
lens or favor a particular theoretical approach, the basic methodology of ar-
chival research remains the same: read absolutely everything and try to make
sense of what happened. It is a bottom-up process and messy as hell—and,
more to the point, scary, requiring faith that something will be found, even if
it’s not what you first went looking for.
With each of my institutional sites, the available material shaped the course
of my research. Thus, with Wiley College, Tolson became the lens through
which I examined African American rhetorical education. Though Wiley had
little archival information available at the school, the enormous amount of
biographical information I found on Tolson at the Library of Congress allowed
me to focus on the question of individual teacher authority in the classroom;
furthermore, his blending of rhetorical traditions allowed me to examine the
question of how local, embodied pedagogies played against larger trends in
African American and college education.
At TWU, the situation was reversed. I had very little instructional material
from teachers, but I had a good record of institutional self-characterization
through university publications and a wonderful record of student writing,
with a near-complete collection of the student newspaper, yearbook, and liter-
ary journal. This source material allowed me to work backward from student
writing to see what was institutionally valued and to examine how students
themselves negotiated their identities as rhetors and public writers.
Discovering stories such as these are perhaps the happiest accidents of all.
That these accidents come about only through painstaking research makes
them no less miraculous. Chance may favored the prepared mind, but it is
still chance. We never know where an archive will lead.
When I first began seriously digging into the archives, a senior scholar
casually told me that I wouldn’t understand what my dissertation was about
until about three years after I had written it. I take the sentiment to suggest
that scholarship is an ongoing process. One is never really finished. The work

18
 The Accidental Archivist

always leaves unanswered questions, which is actually a blessing. Unanswered

questions are the fuel of the scholarly process.
Indeed, I have found that the questions that I couldn’t answer in my dis-
sertation have become the basis for my current research. The glaring limits
of my ignorance have become the starting points for future knowledge. For
example, I have been asked about the exceptionality of TWU: were other
women’s colleges similar, or did its particular historical and geographic cir-
cumstances make it unique? Yes, probably, to both. But this question has
led me to a joint research project with another colleague on public women’s
universities throughout the South.
In researching Wiley College, I discovered that Tolson led a groundbreak-
ing debate team that had a nearly uninterrupted string of victories against
white colleges. His work with his team has led me to what I hope will be a
book-length project examining the rhetorical and pedagogical role of debate
and oratory in black colleges. Without intending to, I have come back to a
variation on the project that began my research career. This time, however, I
am prepared to do it.
And that’s no accident.

Works Cited
Crawford, Robert, ed. The Scottish Invention of English Literature. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1998.
Flasch, Joy. “Melvin Beaunoris Tolson—The Man.” Paper delivered during
Black Heritage Week. Oklahoma State University, Stillwater. April 1967.
Tolson Papers, Library of Congress.
Horner, Winifred Bryan. Nineteenth-Century Scottish Rhetoric: The American
Connection. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993.
Kansas State Agricultural College. Catalogue. 1874.
Miller, Thomas P. The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
in the British Cultural Provinces. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997.
Thatcher, Rebecca. “106-Year-Old Huston-Tillotson Alumna Honored.” Austin
American-Statesman, July 29, 1999. LexisNexis.

19
 
Being on Location
Serendipity, Place, and Archival Research
Gesa E. Kirsch

For several years now, I have been studying the life and work of Dr. Mary
Bennett Ritter (1860–1949), a physician, women’s rights advocate, and civic
leader active in California at the turn of the twentieth century.1 During one
of my trips to the Bancroft Library Archives at the University of California,
Berkeley, I learned that being there physically, both in the archives as well as at
the actual location where the historical subject lived, is invaluable. There were
many things I would not have been able to explore virtually or on-line. It also
helps to have serendipity on one’s side, but that, of course, is not something
one can arrange purposefully, although I am convinced one can be open to the
possibility. In what follows, I briefly sketch the origin of my research project
and describe what it means to walk in the footsteps of a historical subject.
History nearly always begins as a simple curiosity about how we got here.
—Robert Connors, “Dreams and Play”

I became interested in Ritter’s life and work more than a decade ago when the
archivist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in La Jolla suggested
I read her autobiography, More Than Gold in California.2 In this well-written,
lively volume, Ritter describes her quest for a medical education, her experi-
ences running her own medical practice in Berkeley, her collaboration with
other women physicians, her support of women students at the University of
California, her contributions to the SIO during its founding years, her family’s
migration to California during the gold rush years, and the California scen-
ery (which I have come to know and love during my twelve years of living
in the state). After finishing the book, I was intrigued: What motivated this
unusual woman? How was she able to move into the male-dominated world of
medicine (being one of only two female students in her medical class)? What
sparked her activism on behalf of women? How did she use persuasive and
other rhetorical strategies to bring about changes she fought for so relentlessly
(for example, she worked to improve minimum health and safety standards

20
 Being on Location

for boarding houses and implemented sanitation guidelines for local dairies)?
Thus, I began my research to better understand the life, work, and rhetorical
agency of Ritter.
The archival materials I have been working with are limited. Some were lost
during Ritter’s lifetime, a fact she recorded with regret in one of her diaries;
others are scattered across various archives because they are filed with her
correspondents, such as Phoebe Apperson Hearst, Ellen Browning Scripps,
and William E. Ritter, all of whom have collections in their own name. It is
interesting to observe that a single decision made by archivists—whose papers
are worth collecting under his or her own name—can greatly influence acces-
sibility and coherence of materials as well as the recognition accorded to an
individual’s achievements and contributions to public life. As far as I can tell,
the main reason that any of Ritter’s papers survive is because she eventually
married William Ritter, the first director of the SIO. Yet she lived an interesting
life in her own right, one worth restoring to the public record. The goal of my
project is to recover the contributions made by Ritter to public life, medical
history, and women’s history by republishing her autobiography and several
articles that detail her strategies for advocating social change.
Archival reading is . . . a kind of directed ramble, something like an
August mushroom hunt.
—Robert Connors, “Dream and Play”

My “mushroom hunt” began as soon as I arrived in Berkeley. Upon checking

in at the Bancroft Hotel (which I had chosen for its convenient location at
the edge of campus and its reasonable rates), I was surprised and delighted to
discover that the hotel’s sitting room featured a small black-and-white picture
and brief mention of Ritter as part of a plaque commemorating the centennial
celebration of the University of California Prytanean Women’s Honor Society,
of which Ritter was a founding member. It turned out that the hotel had been
the former women’s club. Reading through several volumes of the Prytanean
Society oral history in the archives the next day, I learned that several early
club meetings had taken place at the hotel, where now biscotti and brandy
are served in the early evening. Staying at the Bancroft Hotel certainly was a
serendipitous choice and brought history back to life.
Upon discovering Ritter’s portrait, I asked the hotel proprietor about the
plaque, its origin, and information about the Prytanean Society. He responded
with a phone number. This number led to an interesting series of phone calls,
whereby each member of the Prytanean Society I contacted suggested another
one with whom I might want to speak. During my stay in Berkeley, I spoke with
five different women, each of whom had new nuggets of information for me.

21
Gesa E. Kirsch

I learned about a speech given at the centennial celebration of the Prytanean

Society that mentions Ritter prominently, and I was able to receive a printed
copy of the remarks from the speaker. I was told about an article featuring
the Prytanean Society’s history that had been published in the Chronicle of
the University of California, a journal devoted to the history of UC, in which
Ritter was featured. I heard about the Prytanean Society’s fund-raising efforts
on behalf of the first university infirmary (and Ritter’s involvement) and its
continued support of medical facilities on campus. One Prytanean Society
member suggested I check out the new Tang Center, which houses the Uni-
versity Health Services. There, on an early morning ramble, I located a confer-
ence room named in honor of both Ritter and Prytanean Society members. I
would have neither suspected nor located this piece of living history without
my “mushroom hunt” in Berkeley.
Once in the archives, I decided that my first order of business was to read
through the Prytanean Society oral history volumes so that I would better
understand the background of the women I had contacted. This choice was
a good one; I got a clearer sense of university life for women students during
the turn of the last century, the period during which Ritter had worked closely
with students. My gaze thus shifted to the time period when Ritter had lived
and worked in Berkeley. This new focus was helpful, particularly since the
manuscripts I tackled next, the correspondence between Phoebe Hearst and
Ritter, dealt with university life. Some UC women had demanded changes
in student life and the curriculum during the 1890s, and they had solicited
Ritter’s help in implementing them. Women students had asked for greater
access to the gymnasium, which required medical exams; Ritter had volun-
teered to provide these exams gratis. The students had also proposed setting
up cooperative housing “clubs” to reduce costs and improve living conditions;
Ritter had helped raise funds as well as solicited Phoebe Hearst’s support for
establishing these clubs.
The simple fact of being there, in Berkeley, walking across campus many
times, jogging on the local trails, joining a campus tour, reading street and
building names—all these activities made it much easier for me to read the
handwritten correspondence and diary entries that prominently featured local
places and events. Suddenly I understood what it had meant when a fire swept
down Strawberry Canyon (I was able to decipher the name of the location and
to comprehend the vastness of the disaster that had struck Berkeley), and I
could picture the events organized by women students, such as a fund-raiser
held in the “Faculty Glade” (a eucalyptus tree grove on campus that doubled
as amphitheatre on special occasions), social gatherings in the Hearst Women’s
Gymnasium (which was financed by Phoebe Hearst and rebuilt by her son

22
 Being on Location

after it was destroyed by fire), or recitals held in the Greek Theatre (a big per-
formance space that happened to celebrate its hundred-year history during my
visit and was featured in a library exhibit, complete with pictures of women’s
performances). History came to life as I walked the streets of Berkeley.
Back in the archives, I had the great pleasure of meeting a man with whom
I had corresponded for the last two years in preparation for my trip to Berkeley.
He had been kind enough to look up sources and arrange for the microfilming
and mailing of some material; he notified me of library hours and closings;
and he understood the scope of my project. Now that I had arrived in person,
he greeted me as an old friend and made sure I got the assistance I needed.
For instance, when I inquired about photos and pictures of Ritter, he walked
me over to the card catalogue (yes, the physical object, the wooden cabinet
with drawers, still exists in the Bancroft Library), where original photos and
portraits were catalogued (not all of them on-line yet); this search yielded a
large charcoal portrait of Ritter I had not known about. I also learned that
asking the archive staff about additional materials, sources, or suggestions was
very helpful; their on-line search skills and knowledge of archival holdings
were immense.
When I asked about a special issue of the Chronicle of the University of
California, I was told that the journal editor’s office, where I might be able to
purchase a copy of the special issue, was several flights up in the same build-
ing. I met the journal editor and had a long, informative conversation about
women’s history at UC. I learned about Lucy Sprague, the first official Dean
of Women at UC, who had followed closely on the heels of Ritter; about an-
other book on UC women’s roles as educators, schoolteachers, and curriculum
developers (a copy of which I received gratis from the editor); and about the
next issues planned for the journal, which included an invitation to contribute
an article on Ritter. Climbing up a set of stairs that afternoon set me on a trail
of materials I would not have expected nor been able to pursue virtually.
Reading the special issue of the Chronicle later that evening led me to
further references that I could look up the next morning in the archives; for
instance, I became acquainted with the early editions of the UC Registrar, a
version of today’s course catalogue, listing instructors, courses, and require-
ments. Here I could verify the years in which Ritter had served as the official
medical examiner for women students and note changes in the curriculum,
some of which were brought about by Ritter’s work.
Feminist archival research demands that we not only find lost women of
the past but also become conscious of our positionality in relation to their
positionality.
—Jane Donawerth and Lisa Zimmerelli, “Dialoguing with Rhetorica”

23
Gesa E. Kirsch

I became aware of my own “positionality” when I came across an interview

(part of the Prytanean Society oral history) conducted in the 1960s with a
woman who had attended UC Berkeley in the second decade of the twenti-
eth century. I was struck by how both interviewer and interviewee reflected
the cultural values of their times when they discussed the topic of smoking
among women: the older woman recalled the taboo about women smokers
(only in private spaces); the younger woman spoke about how common it was
to see women smoking in public places (during the 1960s). As a reader of the
oral history in the new millennium, I could not help but observe how in our
current day, smoking is neither very common nor very public among men or
women.3 This change in smoking habits, etiquette, and public policy during
a one-hundred-year period served as a vivid reminder for me that cultural
norms can change quickly and will always color the researcher’s interpretation
of archival materials.
In “X-Files in the Archive,” Susan Miller notes that the premise, question,
or hypothesis with which we start our research will ultimately determine what
leads we pursue, what details we notice, and what claims we make about a
person, historical phenomenon, or rhetorical problem. In setting out to do my
archival research, my primary goal has been to find out more about Ritter’s
work, life, and accomplishments, but I also have to admit that I am fascinated
by the things I first noticed when reading Ritter’s autobiography—her deter-
mination to succeed, her “I-shall-keep-going-until-I-drop” attitude, and her
feminist activism. At the same time, I try to resist too romantic a notion of
this particular historical figure. I keep asking, What were Dr. Ritter’s blind
spots, prejudices, and preconceptions? What are mine? What were her racial,
religious, and class politics? What are mine? How are these dynamics reflected
in my reading of material and rendering of her life story? As Janet Eldred
and Peter Mortensen remind us, archival research is, to some degree, always
a nostalgic enterprise, a fact we need to acknowledge in our work. Liz Rohan
further notes that we tend to select subjects we admire or with whom we
identify over subjects we dislike or despise, and she recounts the ambivalence
she experienced when studying a historical figure whose missionary goals were
at odds with her own values.
One special challenge facing scholars working with historical materials,
then, is how to create a space in which they can be respectful as well as critical
of historical figures. That is, how do scholars present research subjects with
respect and dignity when they may disagree with their values, attitudes, and
actions? Anne Ruggles Gere cautions that historical figures—those who can
no longer speak back—depend on the researcher’s ethical treatment of their
work. They have left behind many kinds of written artifacts, but it is the

24
 Being on Location

researcher’s job to put these documents into a meaningful context. During

her archival work on women’s clubs, Gere “realized that these now dead and
defenseless women depended upon [her] ethical choices in textualizing their
interior lives” (214). Making appropriate ethical choices in representing Ritter’s
life is one of my most serious challenges.
Perhaps it is that intensity and a return to childhood present-opening—
the joyful moment of happy surprise—that makes me and others who
work in the archives recall this process with a dreamy look.
—Susan Miller, “X-Files in the Archive”

Two more stories of serendipity complete this narrative—“joyful moment[s] of

happy surprise.” Upon returning from my trip and catching up with e-mail, I
received a message with the heading “Mary Bennett Ritter.” I assumed it was
from someone at the Bancroft Library following up on my many photocopy
requests. But no, it was a message—out of the blue—from a great-great-niece
of Ritter’s. During that very week in which I was walking in the footsteps of
my subject in Berkeley, she had done a Google search on Mary Bennett Rit-
ter and found that I had given a talk at one of the Feminism and Rhetoric
conferences. She told me that she had read “Aunt Mary’s” autobiography and
wanted to know about my scholarly interest in her relative. She is too young
to remember Ritter herself but promised to look for any letters or photos her
grandparents may have left behind. I cannot think of a more vivid example
than this of bringing history back to life. It serves as a powerful reminder of a
point Jacqueline Jones Royster raises: as scholars, we have an ethical respon-
sibility to members of the community we study and, in the case of historical
subjects, to their descendants, who have a right to the respectful and dignified
treatment of their ancestors (272–78).
The shortest route to discovery is lunch with an expert and telephone
conversations with everyone you know in the field.
—Jane Donawerth and Lisa Zimmerelli, “Dialoguing with Rhetorica”

Connecting with other scholars interested in Ritter herself or in the time period
during which she lived has been very productive for me. Such connections have
been made possible through papers I have delivered at national conferences,
through informal professional networks, and through working closely with
archivists. Each time I go to an archive or historical society, I ask the archivists
I meet to share my interest (and e-mail address) with other scholars who might
visit the archives. I find that networking and exchanging information about a
common topic invigorates my work and leads to further insights. As I began
composing these reflections on archival work—and here is my last story of

25
Gesa E. Kirsch

serendipity—I received another unexpected e-mail, this one from a scholar who
is planning to write a biography of Ritter’s husband; we have already begun
to exchange archival leads and plans for future work.

Notes
1. A version of this essay first appeared in Peitho: Newsletter of the Coalition of
Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, 9.1 (Fall 2004): 1–5.
I would like to thank the editors of Peitho, Susan Jarratt and Susan Romano,
for encouraging me to write this essay and for granting permission to use this
material here. Many thanks also go to Jabari Mahiri for hosting me during visits
to Berkeley and for listening to my tales of archival adventures. I am especially
grateful to Deborah Day, archivist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography,
University of California, San Diego, for introducing me to Ritter’s autobiog-
raphy, and to David Kessler, archivist at the Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley, for providing me with many archival leads.
2. My first trip to the SIO archives came out of curiosity about another
woman, Ellen Browning Scripps, a major philanthropist in San Diego. Unable
to find a biography of Scripps in local bookstores, I made my way to the SIO
archives, where I met the archivist who shares an interest in women’s lives and
history and brought Ritter to my attention.
3. Massachusetts, the state in which I reside, passed a statewide smoking
ban for all public places.

Works Cited
Connors, Robert J. “Dreams and Play: Historical Method and Methodology.”
Methods and Methodology in Composition Research. Ed. Gesa E. Kirsch and
Patricia Sullivan. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. 15–36.
Donawerth, Jane, and Lisa Zimmerelli. “Dialoguing with Rhetorica.” Peitho:
Newsletter of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and
Composition 8.1 (Fall 2003): 4–6.
Eldred, Janet Cary, and Peter Mortensen. “Linking Reminiscence and ‘Real-
ity’: Digital Possibilities in the Study of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women’s
Rhetoric.” Paper delivered at the Rhetoric Society of America. Austin, TX.
May 31, 2004.
Gere, Anne Ruggles. “Revealing Silence: Rethinking Personal Writing.” Col-
lege Composition and Communication 53 (2001): 203–23.
Miller, Susan. “X-Files in the Archive.” Peitho: Newsletter of the Coalition of
Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition 8.1 (Fall 2003):
1–4.

26
 Being on Location

Rohan, Liz. “Sisters of a Common Cause: Evangelical Rhetoric in Two Turn-of-

the-Century Female Authored Periodicals.” Paper delivered at the Rhetoric
Society of America. Austin, TX. May 30, 2004.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among
African American Women. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2000.

27
 
Getting to Know Them
Concerning Research into Four Early
Women Writers
Christine Mason Sutherland

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” (Hartley 3).
Those of us who engage in rhetorical criticism of works of the past can testify
to the truth of those words. We are strangers in the past: we have to find our
way about, learn the language, understand the culture, and sometimes come
to terms with a very different set of values. In making sense of the texts of
the past, we face the constant danger of “presentism,” a form of anachronism
that treats our own contemporary values as normative.1 There are a number of
ways of dealing with this problem, or at least of minimizing its effects: these
include studying the history of the period in some detail and reading as many
works of that time as we possibly can.
But such rational means can be complemented by bringing to bear an
alternative strategy, that of entering as far as possible into the physical world
of our subject. This kind of holistic approach is consistent with the rhetorical
method, which traditionally has looked beyond the rational to the emotional
and the spiritual as means of persuasion. These elements are important not
only in constructing discourse but also in understanding and evaluating it,
and they are fundamentally bound up with the experience of the material and
social world familiar to the writers we study. In thus attempting to experience
the world of the past, we are in fact working with a different kind of meaning.
Wes Folkerth makes the distinction: “[M]onothetic meaning is a function of
the semantic component of sign systems such a natural language. . . . Poly-
thetic meaning, on the other hand, is a ‘time-immanent’ mode of experiential
meaning, meaning that is embodied in experience in time” (21).2 Polythetic
meaning, then, is derived from experience, in this case that shared experience
that can bring us closer to the person whose writings we study, informing and
illuminating our research. Closeness of this kind is especially associated with
feminist practices, in which there is “a link between researcher and researched”
(Bowles and Klein 17).

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 Getting to Know Them

Getting in touch—as much as possible—with the physical context in which

women writers of the past worked involves visiting the places where they lived.
Much has changed, of course, since they were alive. But, as I hope to show,
in some sense many of these women are still present in significant ways, even
hundreds of years after their own lifetimes. In what follows, I discuss some of
my own research into the physical, emotional, and spiritual contexts of four
women writers—Lady Anne Clifford, Margaret Fell Fox, Mary Astell, and
Dame Julian of Norwich—as a way of getting into closer touch with them
and of attempting to experience, not merely read about, the worlds in which
they worked. In the course of the discussion, I shall have occasion to refer to
instances of another of the themes of this collection of essays: serendipity, the
experience of which, though inexplicable (like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”),
seems to be common among scholars.
Indeed, my research into the first of these women provides a particularly
vivid example of it. In 1993, I was directing an honours student in her re-
search into the autobiographies of seventeenth-century women. Our interest
was particularly aroused by Lady Anne Clifford.3 Lady Anne (1590–1676) is
remarkable for the battle she sustained against her family in defence of her
right to inherit the property of her father, a battle that continued for more than
forty years. She had to contend not only with her uncles and her first husband
(who wanted to reach a settlement allowing him to gain access to her money)
but also with various legal advisors and even King James I himself. She defied
them all. The diary she kept records her struggles—her distress, but also her
determination not to give in. Eventually, the last remaining uncle died without
heirs, and she did indeed receive the property she had all along considered to
be rightfully hers. She saw this success as a vindication of her own resistance
to the persuasion brought to bear upon her.
My student and I had been working on Lady Anne’s diary throughout the
year, but she was far from my thoughts when I took a holiday with friends in
the Lake District.4 One day we decided to drive into the charming little town
of Appleby. As we walked up the steep main street, I suddenly caught sight of
a bright garden full of flowers, just glimpsed through an archway. Now I, like
Alice, cannot resist a garden,5 so I plunged in, with no thought as to whether
or not this might be a private residence. I found myself in a garden courtyard
surrounded by little cottages. And out from one of them in the far corner
came an old lady, leaning on a stick. I thought I was going to be warned off,
told that I was trespassing. But instead she said, “Would you like me to show
you ’round?” Quite by chance, I had happened upon the almshouse for elderly
women founded by Lady Anne Clifford in 1651 in memory of her mother. The
estate had been sold in 1961, except for one farm, whose income still supports

29
Christine Mason Sutherland

the almshouse. And so the old lady showed us around the place, taking us
into the chapel and explaining the various little rules, most of them laid down
(so our guide said) by Lady Anne herself and still faithfully observed. They
are read aloud to each incoming resident. One of them concerns laundry: the
ladies are asked not to hang out their washing on Sundays, or on Wednesdays,
when a communion service is celebrated. What I remember most clearly is
the way our elderly guide talked about Lady Anne Clifford as if she had only
recently died. “Lady Anne provided for . . .” “Lady Anne arranged that . . .”
Obviously, the spirit of Lady Anne Clifford is still a living presence, and her
work of charity goes on.
Another instance of experiencing the physical context—and one that again
illustrates serendipity—I have already discussed in an earlier essay.6 I summa-
rize it here. It was 1999, and I was working in the archival library of Durham
Cathedral, which holds a considerable number of the writings of Margaret Fell
Fox (1614–1702). She is usually referred to by contemporary scholars simply
as Margaret Fell because she is known to them almost exclusively as the au-
thor of Women’s Speaking Justified, which she wrote while she was the widow
of Judge Fell. However, much of her most important work, particularly her
letters, was done after her marriage to George Fox, one of the founders of the
Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers. After my stint in Durham,
I went on to visit two sets of friends in Lancashire—friends I had not seen
for thirty years. They knew I had been in Durham, but they did not know
what I had been doing there. To my surprise and delight, each set of friends
took me to places that were highly significant in the life of Margaret Fell Fox.
First I visited Lancaster castle, where she had been imprisoned between 1664
and 1668. During her imprisonment, she wrote Women’s Speaking Justified.
Then I was taken high up on the fells7 to “Fox’s Pulpit,” which is merely a
large rock on which George Fox used to stand to preach. The remote venue
was necessary because his preaching was at that time illegal. Later in the same
week, another set of friends took me to a Quaker meetinghouse, built in 1673
and actually visited by Margaret Fell Fox herself in 1675. The building is sur-
rounded by a peaceful cottage garden. There is no custodian, but a notice on
the door welcomes visitors and invites them to use the small library and the
kitchen (supplies provided) attached to the meetinghouse. Here, the virtues
of the Society of Friends are palpable: hospitality, trust, gentleness, faith in
both God and humankind.
I come now to the writer who is for me the most important of all the
women I have studied: Mary Astell (1666–1731). A superb writer, famous for
her eloquence in her own time, she is best known for her work in promoting
women’s education. However, as well as being an early feminist, she was also

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 Getting to Know Them

a philosopher and a political thinker, and in the early years of the eighteenth
century, she engaged most successfully in political pamphleteering. I first dis-
covered Astell by reading Ruth Perry’s important biography of her, published
in 1986. For some months I had been looking for a new research project, and
on reading Perry’s life of Astell, I realized I had found it. Astell’s work ap-
pealed to me in a number of different ways: she was born in the seventeenth
century, a period I had studied in some detail; she wrote from a Christian
perspective, which I understood and valued; she was celebrated as a writer and
recognized as a fine stylist, so my interest as a rhetorician was engaged; and
she was significantly under-researched, so that I could foresee an opportunity
of contributing something new to our understanding of the importance of
early women writers. Accordingly, I applied for and received a research grant
to study the works of Astell in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, since at that
time—1988—hardly any of her works were available in modern editions.
(Incidentally, on the topic of the physical, I think it is important to read early
works in editions that would have been familiar to the authors. This physi-
cal contact with the books of the period is part of sharing their experience.)
My particular project at this time was to make a study of Astell’s style; but
totally unexpectedly, I found myself reading rhetorical theory.8 This was for
me a major breakthrough. I proceeded to publish essays on her theory and
practice and incorporated her into the curriculum of my course in the history
of rhetoric. Then I moved on to other studies. But Astell haunted me: I kept
coming back to her again and again.
My decision to write not just a few essays but a book about her was stimu-
lated and encouraged during visits to London in 1999. During one of these
visits, I took a boat trip on the river Thames. Mary Astell lived in Chelsea,
close to the river, and must have known it well. Much, of course, has changed
on the banks of the river during the intervening centuries, but much remains
the same, for example, the Tower of London, with its Traitors’ Gate opening
on to the river, and the Chelsea Hospital and Greenwich Hospital (which
I visited), both built by Christopher Wren in Astell’s lifetime. Ruth Perry
records one important historic occasion involving the river at which Astell
may well have been present (298–99). It was July 1717, and a treat had been
arranged for King George I. He was to proceed in the royal barge to Chelsea,
where he would be entertained at a supper provided by none other than Lady
Catherine Jones, the close friend and patron of Mary Astell. The occasion
was a huge success. The king’s barge was accompanied by another carrying
musicians who played a set of pieces especially composed for the occasion by
George Frideric Handel: the Water Music. The king was so delighted with
the music that he had it played three times during that evening. It is quite

31
Christine Mason Sutherland

likely that Mary Astell was a guest of Lady Catherine’s on that occasion. At
the very least, she would have been aware of what was going on and would
almost certainly have heard the music, which was played on the river. Astell
was a great lover of music and recommended it as recreation for the ladies in
her proposed “Protestant Monastery” (Serious Proposal, Part I, 26). My trip
on the river brought a strong sense of Astell, her interests, and her experience,
and whenever I hear Handel’s Water Music—which is often—I think of her
as being present at its premiere.
A visit to a London church, St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, close by the National
Gallery, provided a further insight into Astell’s life. Every Sunday, Astell used
to walk from Chelsea to hear a sermon preached there. The church itself, whose
architect, James Gibbs, was influenced by Christopher Wren, provides a good
metaphor for Astell’s spirituality. It had been recently built in Astell’s time
and has none of the soaring quality of medieval churches. Rather, its balanced
form strongly suggests all the best characteristics of the Enlightenment. Astell
was a devout Christian who particularly valued reason; she saw no conflict
between faith and reason, and much of her work is devoted to making clear the
relationship between them. The very form of the church where she worshiped,
then, bears witness to this partnership, and to meditate in the church, as I have
done, is to bring oneself close to her in spirit.
The last person I shall discuss was the first woman to write a book in
English: Dame Julian of Norwich (1352–1429?). Julian was an anchoress—an
urban hermit. There were many such hermits at the time, perhaps as many
as forty in Norwich alone. These were holy men and women who withdrew
from the world to give themselves to prayer and meditation but also to serve
the community by giving advice, especially on spiritual matters.9 Julian herself
is known to have given counsel to Margery Kempe of Bishop’s (now King’s)
Lynn, another woman writer of the period. Typically, the anchoress (or ancho-
rite, if a man) lived in a small cell with two or three windows. One window
gave on to a room inhabited by a servant who would supply the daily needs.
Another gave on to the street; through this the hermit could converse with
those seeking advice. Julian’s cell was built against the church of St. Julian
and had a third window, this one giving on to the church itself, and through
it she could participate in the services. Julian would have lived alone—except
possibly for a cat, the only animal allowed to anchorites. Since her cell lay
close to the river Wensum and the port of Norwich, she would have had to
protect herself against rats, so it is quite likely that she had a cat, though she
does not refer to one.
Little is known about Julian’s life, not even her birth name: she took her
name in religion from the church to which her cell was attached. But her book,

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a record of her visions, is one of the treasures of English literature. On May

8, 1373, Julian was gravely ill and thought to be dying. A priest brought in a
cross, which he set at the end of her bed, and while contemplating this cross
she received a series of sixteen “showings.” When she recovered, she wrote them
down and for the next twenty years reflected upon them. Then she wrote a
second and much longer version, explaining what the visions meant: “Love
was his meaning.” Her Book of Showings, often referred to as Revelations of
Divine Love, is a spiritual classic whose value has come to be recognized only
during the last century.
Though most remote from me in time, Julian is the closest to me in sensi-
bility and place, for I was born in Norwich. My father was born within half a
mile of St. Julian’s church and less than a mile from the site of Carrow Abbey,
whose Benedictine nuns were responsible for Julian’s cell. Some scholars think
that she may at one time have been a nun there herself. The house built on
the site of Carrow Abbey, and still known by that name, was later owned by
the Colman family, for whom two of my great-grandfathers worked. When I
was growing up, it could be hired for social events. We had a family reunion
there, and one of my cousins used it for his wedding reception. We belong,
in fact, to Julian territory, and she is part of the fabric of our lives. One of my
school friends was named Julian after her (a spelling usually reserved for boys).
Another wrote a play about her.10
But Julian is significant more broadly in the city where once she lived,
and her influence still pervades Norwich and its people. Dead for nearly six
centuries, she is now present again in Norwich in a new way. It happened like
this: Julian’s cell was pulled down at the Reformation, but the church survived
until the Second World War, when, like many other Norwich churches, it was
badly bombed and reduced to ruins. In the early 1950s, when the church was
rebuilt, it was decided also to rebuild Julian’s cell. The cell and the center close
by now serve visitors from all over the world. It is staffed by Sisters from the
Anglican Convent of All Hallows, Ditchingham, who have resumed Julian’s
work of providing spiritual support for all who visit there. I frequently visited
the cell and the Julian Centre and library in the course of my research during
my last sabbatical leave. Here in the simple cell, so like the one where she lived,
it is possible to meditate and reflect, to reach out to her spirit and share her
experience—an appropriate preparation for the study of her work I am about
to undertake. The value of studying Julian in Norwich is underlined by Brant
Pelphrey, who testifies to the difficulty of writing about her “far away from
the unique atmosphere of spirituality and medieval history which are typical
of Julian’s Norwich even today” (11). And not only the history but also the
artwork contribute to an understanding of Julian: there were several famous

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Christine Mason Sutherland

scriptoria in Norfolk at the time, and the fourteenth century is known as the
East Anglian period of English painting (Lasko and Morgan 7). The artwork
of the period is acknowledged to have influenced her style. Elizabeth Jennings
believes that “she is in many ways more like a painter than a writer; she sees
pictures and communicates them by means of language” (qtd. in Sister Eileen
Mary, SLG, 7). At the very beginning of the Short Text of her Revelations,
Julian refers to paintings of the crucifixion (125), and as Grace M. Jantzen
suggests, her descriptions of biblical figures such as the Virgin Mary and Mary
Magdalene may have been influenced by “portrayals of them in the painting
and sculpture of the many churches and the cathedral in Norwich” (98).
Many of these works of art are still to be seen in Norwich today, and part of
my research involved the study of them.
What is interesting about these four women is that the work of three of
them still continues: Lady Anne Clifford’s almshouse survives, the Quaker
movement bears witness to the labours of Margaret Fell Fox, and, as we have
seen, Julian’s work in Norwich has been revived. But what of Mary Astell? For
over two hundred years, Astell was forgotten, but she is at last coming into
her own. Since Ruth Perry published her biography in 1986, more and more
scholars have become aware of her importance. Nearly all her works are now
available in modern editions. My own book, The Eloquence of Mary Astell, was
published in 2005, and a collection of essays on her work, Mary Astell: Reason,
Gender, Faith, came out in March 2007. Her thought has great relevance for
our own time, and I hope that she too will soon become a living presence again
in our contemporary world.

Notes
1. Black rightly reminds us of the dangers of losing “historical perspective”
(21). However, it seems to me that such loss is far less common than are the
dangers of “presentism.”
2. Folkerth gives credit for making this distinction to Alfred Schutz (Folk-
erth 21).
3. Excerpts from Lady Anne’s diary and information about her are to be
found in Her Own Life, edited by Graham, Hinds, Hobby, and Wilcox.
4. This is a particularly beautiful part of northwest England associated with
the romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge.
5. Alice is continually frustrated in her attempts to get into the garden she
glimpses through a tiny door. See Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, 15.
6. See Sutherland, “Feminist Historiography.”
7. “Fell” is the term used of stretches of hills or moorlands in the north of
England.

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8. Mary Astell’s rhetorical theory is to be found in her Serious Proposal to

the Ladies, Part II, 117–52.
9. The best edition of the Middle English text of Julian’s book is by Colledge
and Walsh. Modern translations of the Revelations are also readily available.
10. Upjohn, Mind Out of Time.

Works Cited
Astell, Mary. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II. Ed. Patricia
Springborg. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997.
Black, Edwin. Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. Madison: U of Wis-
consin P, 1978.
Bowles, Gloria, and Renate Duelli Klein, eds. Theories of Women’s Studies.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. New York: Peter Pauper, n.d.
Clifford, Lady Anne. “Diary.” Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by
Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen. Ed. Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds,
Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox. London: Routledge, 1989. 35–53.
Eileen Mary, Sister, SLG. “The Place of Lady Julian of Norwich in English
Literature.” Julian of Norwich: Four Studies to Commemorate the Sixth
Centenary of the Revelations of Divine Love. Ed. A. M. Allchin. Fairacres,
Oxford: SLG, 1973.
Fell, Margaret. “Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved, and Allowed by the
Scriptures.” The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the
Present. 2nd ed. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St
Martin’s, 2001. 748–60.
Folkerth, Wes. The Sound of Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 2002.
Hartley, L. P. The Go-Between. New York: Stein and Day, 1984.
Jantzen, Grace M. Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian. Trowbridge:
Cromwell, 2000.
Julian of Norwich. A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich.
Ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, 1978.
Kolbrener, William, and Michal Michelson, eds. Mary Astell: Reason, Gender,
Faith. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.
Lasko, P., and N. J. Morgan. Medieval Art in East Anglia, 1300–1520. Norwich:
Jarrold, 1973.
Pelphrey, Brant. Christ Our Mother: Julian of Norwich. London: Darton,
Longman and Todd, 1989.
Perry, Ruth. The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1986.

35
Christine Mason Sutherland

Sutherland, Christine Mason. The Eloquence of Mary Astell. Calgary: U of

Calgary P, 2005.
———. “Feminist Historiography: Research Methods in Rhetoric.” Rhetoric
Society Quarterly 32.1 (Winter 2002): 108–22.
Upjohn, Sheila. Mind Out of Time: A View of Julian of Norwich. Norwich:
Julian Shrine, 1979.

36
 
Making Connections
Alicia Nitecki

On the wall of my study at home hangs a head-and-shoulders photograph of

a dark-haired, handsome man in his mid-forties wearing an army jacket and
sitting in a car, leaning on his elbow. Wherever I am in the room, he appears to
be looking directly at me and smiling. The photograph was taken in Munich
in 1946, and the man in it is the preeminent prewar Polish graphic artist and
publisher Anatol Girs.
I had first encountered the name Girs when, just as I was starting to write
about Flossenbürg concentration camp where my grandfather had been in-
carcerated, a book with concentration camp stripes on its cover fell at my feet
out of a box of old Polish books we had received from my husband’s family. I
noticed that the book, entitled Byliśmy w Oswięcimiu (We Were in Auschwitz)
and dedicated to the Seventh American Army, had been published by one
Anatol Girs under the imprimatur Oficyna Warszawska na obczyżnie (War-
saw Publishing House Abroad) in Munich in 1946 and had been written, as
its publisher says, by three former concentration camp prisoners, Janusz Nel
Siedlecki, Krystyn Olszewski, and Tadeusz Borowski, “shortly after camp
Dachau-Allach was liberated by the 7th American Army.”
This last name, Tadeusz Borowski, caught my attention because he is the
author of the highly acclaimed—and highly controversial—stories about
Auschwitz published by Penguin in English translation under the title This
Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. I had never read his work in Polish,
nor had I had much serious scholarly interest in him. On reading We Were in
Auschwitz closely, I realized that Borowski’s famous stories in This Way for the
Gas were not his later prose, as the Penguin edition and various critics give one
to suppose, but his first and that Borowski’s ideological stance on concentra-
tion camp existence, which has been repudiated or attributed to his “nihilism,”
was shared by his fellow authors and their publisher. I decided that the book
as a whole, written so soon after the war and based, as Anatol Girs says in his
preface, “on what the authors themselves experienced there and what they saw
with their own eyes” and that reveals, as he puts it, “the pathological changes

37
Alicia Nitecki

in the soul of these Europeans,” should be made available in English and that
I should translate it.
That decision led me down a scholarly road along which I discovered the
actual reasons why Borowski was compelled to write his Auschwitz stories,
stumbled upon a long-suppressed Polish work on the Holocaust, and recon-
nected with a person from my early childhood.

In order to translate We Were in Auschwitz and have it published, I needed to

find the authors and publisher of the work to get their permission to do so. I
did some research. I discovered that the first author, Siedlecki, had published
an autobiography in English in 1994 and from it discovered that he was still
alive and living in Yorkshire. I called him. He said he would be happy for me
to translate their work. He had known Krystyn Olszewski from secondary
school days in Warsaw, and they had met again in Auschwitz, but he had
long lost touch with him, and he had had no contact with Anatol Girs for
many years.
I deduced from reading a later short story of Borowski’s, “The January
Offensive” (included in the Penguin This Way for the Gas), that in it he is
describing the actual circumstances under which he and his co-authors wrote
their book. Because I had noticed some major discrepancies between the
original Polish versions and the English translations of his stories, I tracked
down the Polish language version of “The January Offensive” and concluded
that the man whom he refers to in it as their “leader,” whom he describes as
“possessing an almost mystical flair for business . . . a holy man of capitalism,
member of an influential and wealthy American sect spreading faith in the
reincarnation of the soul, the self-destruction of evil, and the metaphysical
influence of human thought on the actions of the living and the dead,” and
who, he says, had gone from Munich “to another continent . . . to Boston, the
capital of his sect,” was Anatol Girs.
I called the Mother Church of Christ the Scientist in Boston and was told
that the last address they had for Girs was in New Hampshire. I found the
name in the telephone book and called. Girs’s daughter, Barbara, told me that
her father had died in 1991, that in Munich after the war he had founded, and
headed, the Family Tracing Service for Families, and that Borowski, Siedlecki,
and Olszewski had worked for him there. Her father had brought some 9,000
copies of We Were in Auschwitz with him to the United States, but unable to
sell many or to afford the cost of storage, he’d been obliged to destroy the
whole run. She showed me the 1958 Warsaw re-issue of the book, inscribed by
Olszewski “To you, Anatol, who are the father of this book,” and Borowski’s
Farewell to Maria and The World of Stone, inscribed “To Anatol—the stories

38
 Making Connections

you made me write.” Olszewski, she told me, was living in Warsaw, and she
gave me his telephone number.
Barbara Girs also gave me letters Borowski had written to her father; in
them, the formative role Anatol Girs played in Borowski’s becoming a prose
writer becomes clear. In one of them, the young man tells Girs about his plans
and achievements in postwar Poland; gleefully reports that the translations of
Hemingway and Saroyan that he had made for Girs in Munich were still the
only ones of those writers in Poland; and says that Girs will be pleased with
some stories he had been working on because “they express . . . your philoso-
phy.” In a postscript to one letter of October 1947, Borowski’s wife, Maria,
writes, “I am fully aware how much Tadeusz owes to you, and how much he
developed both morally and intellectually under your care in Munich.”
From reading the Polish biographies of Borowski and Girs, I learned that
it had indeed been at Girs’s suggestion that his three young friends spent
their evenings in a “post-Hitlerite” Munich apartment in the summer of
1945 writing the stories for We Were in Auschwitz—in Borowski’s case most
reluctantly—and that their use of the first-person and their own names, for
which Borowski has been both praised and lambasted by critics, had also
been at Girs’s insistence. “‘They,’” Girs explained to his biographer, “is always
someone else, not us.”
My interest in writing an essay about Girs as the guiding light behind
Borowski’s prose and about the circumstances under which Girs had pub-
lished the book led me to contact a woman living in the United States who
had worked for him in Munich and had remained friends with his family. She
told me that Girs had shared his bread with her husband in the camp, thereby
helping to save his life, and that he had had a childish sense of humor—he
called her “Pigówna” (Miss Piggy) until the day he died because, when she
had first come to the Family Tracing Service, she had been so hungry she’d
eaten sugar by the bowlful. I read the memoir she’d written about her family
and, to my amazement, saw on the last page, among a list of names of her
aristocratic relatives, the name “Count Żółtowski,” a name familiar to me
from my childhood.

As a Polish child growing up in England after the war, I found the language
of Shakespeare more engaging than that of our own great poet Mickiewicz.
I owe my ability to read Polish to a man whose life my stepfather had saved
when they were being marched from a prisoner-of-war camp for Polish officers
in German-occupied Poland to Lübeck in Germany and who, after the war,
remained his closest friend. As a child, I considered this man the epitome of
sophistication. Once when he was visiting us, he asked me, “Alicia, do you read

39
Alicia Nitecki

Polish?” Truthful nine-year-old that I was, I admitted I didn’t. Every morning

thereafter, for weeks on end, I sat on the kitchen counter laboriously reading
out loud passages from the Dziennik Polski (The Polish Daily) to my mother as
she bustled about her work. The man I so admired was married to a Mariola,
Countess Żó łtowska, I had spent many summers with them in London!
When I gleefully reported this coincidence to an older friend in Boston,
she immediately responded that Żółtowska was the maiden name of a woman
I’d once met at somebody’s house and who had looked strangely familiar but
whom I hadn’t been able to place. I called the woman up. I had indeed seen
her—one sunny morning in Mariola’s house in London, many, many years
ago. She is my Mariola’s first cousin. We have since stayed in touch.

From Girs’s biography, I discovered that during the Warsaw Uprising in

mid-August 1944—the same time that my family and I had been taken from
Warsaw to a labor camp in Schramberg-am-Rottweil in the Black Forest region
of Germany—Anatol Girs had been taken to Auschwitz, from where, a week
later, he was transported to the camp of Dautmergen, and it was there that he
had first met Borowski.
Not being able to find Dautmergen on any map, I telephoned to ask
Borowski’s co-author, Olszewski, where it was. “I can tell you exactly—near
Rottweil,” he told me. Dautmergen—one of the seven so-called Unternehmen
Wüste camps, established in mid-1944 to produce oil from oil shale—was
situated at a distance of a very few miles from Schramberg, where I had been
with my family. It was one of the camps my mother had in mind when she
once told me not to be angry with the Germans in Schramberg; we had not
been so badly treated. “The camps on the other side of Rottweil, however,”
she said, “were absolutely dreadful.” And on reading one of Borowski’s poems
about Dautmergen, I realized, too, that those “divisions of Lancasters” flying
across the sky and “writing freedom in smoke,” to which he had “raised his
head” and which he’d “greeted with his hand,” were the very same ones that
had made me as a three-year-old child in Schramberg bury my head and cover
my ears with my hands out of fear. “What a small world!” I thought.
I did not yet know how small.

After my translation of We Were in Auschwitz was published, another translation

project presented itself. A young woman with a scholarly interest in Borowski
but no knowledge of Polish contacted me, asking if we could meet. She came
bearing a large book, Niedyskrecje pocztowe, with a picture of Borowski on the
cover wearing an army jacket, his hands raised in the air and a triumphant
smile on his face—the same picture that Barbara Girs had given me, taken by

40
 Making Connections

her father in the English Gardens in Munich when Borowski was reciting one
of his poems to him; it now also hangs on my wall beneath her father’s picture.
The young scholar asked me what the title meant. “‘Postal Indiscretions,’” I
translated, “‘The Correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski.’” The volume was a
collection of letters written by and to him from the time he was imprisoned
in Pawiak and Auschwitz to 1951, when an unsigned telegram was sent to his
parents after he committed suicide. The book included a number of letters from
Girs, among them one in which he thanks Borowski for sending him Farewell
to Maria and The World of Stone but disclaims Borowski’s inscription, “The
stories you made me write.” “The stories I would have projected would have
certainly been written differently,” Girs states, adding in a fatherly-mentoring
way, “Some of this gossip was not worth writing about,” and, out of concern
for Borowski’s mental state, advising him to stay away from the camp theme
for a while.
The book offered a compelling portrait of Borowski and of his relationship
with Girs and an even more compelling picture of the Polish literary scene
in the immediate postwar period. I began translating it for Northwestern
University Press.
During the course of doing so, I was interested by a remark made by one of
Borowski’s co-authors in a letter to him written from Munich in September
1946. “Right now I’m reading Morcinek’s Listy spod morwy (Letters from under
a Mulberry Tree). The thing is written from a retrospective point of view, in
the form of memories arising as a result of various experiences during a rest
cure in the French Alps. . . . It equals in horrors, same ideological stance as
ours . . .” Since that ideological stance has been seen by scholars of Holocaust
literature as being peculiar to Borowski, I tracked the book down.
Letters from under a Mulberry Tree is a collection of twelve epistolary re-
flective essays in which the color of the Alpine sky and the bells of a French
country church lead Morcinek back in one direction to the innocence of his
childhood and the simplicity of his mother’s faith and, in another, to the horrors
of Sachsenhausen and Dachau. In its disavowal of any claims to “heroism” or
“martyrdom” and in its unflinching portrayal of what existence in the camp
revealed about human nature—“a psychologist would have wonderful material
here to study and to deepen his knowledge of man,” Morcinek writes—the
work is indeed close in spirit to that of We Were in Auschwitz, as the letter I
had read said.
Gustaw Morcinek, a forty-eight-year-old Polish Silesian Catholic, rural
schoolteacher, and established prewar novelist and children’s writer, had written
Letters from under a Mulberry Tree in the summer of 1945 in Biviers, France. He
had been arrested at the beginning of October 1939, taken to Sachsenhausen

41
Alicia Nitecki

in December of that year, and then in March 1940 transported to Dachau,

where he remained for the duration of the war. The work, one of the earliest
on the Holocaust, had been published in the fall of 1945 in Paris and the fol-
lowing year re-issued in Rome and then in Poland. My research on it revealed
that it is practically unknown today in Poland, having been suppressed after
1948 under Stalinism.
I decided to look for an American publisher for it, but first I needed to
find the name of the copyright holder. The owner of the rights to Morcinek’s
works, I discovered to my amazement, is the son of a man who, like Girs, was
a renowned prewar Polish master printer. I had read in Girs’s biography his
own amusingly sardonic account of a visit he’d paid to his estimable, older
professional rival! The world, I thought, was small indeed.

I began to translate a few passages of Letters from under a Mulberry Tree to use
in an essay about it and We Were in Auschwitz. As I did so, a Polish woman
whom I barely know but who is familiar with my writing and translations
called me saying that a friend of hers who had been in Dachau was trying to
get compensation from the Germans, and she wondered if I knew anyone who
had received it. On the spur of the moment at the end of the conversation, I
said, “If your friend was in Dachau, ask him if he knew the writer Morcinek.”
An hour later, she called me back saying that his parents had, and she put her
friend, Christopher Gabriel-Lacki, on the phone.
He and his father, he told me, had been taken to Dachau during the Warsaw
Uprising. He had been fourteen years old at the time. His parents had been
with Morcinek in the French Alps immediately after the war, and he had let-
ters from him to them that he would bring to show me the next time he was
in Boston. By way of conversation, and since I knew no one who shared my
early childhood past, I said that I, too, had been in France after the war, in
La Courtine and then in Nice. So had he.
A few days later, I remembered that once, when I had been looking through
our family photographs from Nice, I had asked my mother who the other
people in some of them were. “That boy,” she’d said, pointing to a youth
dressed in black swimming trunks and with a summer army jacket over his
shoulders standing next to her, smiling and looking shyly down at the beach,
“used to give you piggyback rides on the beach.” I brought the box down
from the attic.
When he next came to Boston, Christopher Gabriel-Lacki recognized my
mother in the photograph immediately and identified her by name; my fa-
ther, too, he said, looked very familiar to him. We had both lived on a street
perpendicular to the Promenade des Anglais, both of us in the same house

42
 Making Connections

not far up it, on the left, the one with a brown door. He remembered hanging
around with Polish children on the beach.
Neither one of us remembers it, but we both went on a pilgrimage to a
miraculous painting of the Virgin Mary in the mountains somewhere not far
from Nice. In the photo taken on that occasion, I am squatting on the ground
at the front; Christopher is standing next to his mother, who is standing next
to mine. The priest who is down on one knee at the lower left of the photo is
the one I remember as having visited us in our apartment in Nice and whom
Christopher identifies as being his parents’ friend—the same priest, I learned
from the letters Christopher brought me, with whom Gustaw Morcinek trav-
eled through the French Alps and with whom he’d wandered around Nice for
a few days at the end of 1945 before going on to Rome.

Christopher Gabriel-Lacki is now a graphic artist and professor of art. As a

child, he had lived at 38 Smolna Street in Warsaw. At number 40 on that same
street, Anatol Girs had had his art studio.
If the copyright holder gives his permission, an American publisher is in-
terested in issuing Morcinek’s book. I am going to translate it, and the man
who, as a teenager, gave me piggyback rides on the beach at Nice is going to
design the cover.
Anatol Girs is smiling.

43
0ART4WO

When Personal Experience,

Family History, and
Research Subjects Intersect
 
Traces of the Familiar
Family Archives as Primary Source Material
Wendy B. Sharer

In the last year of my master’s program, my maternal grandmother suffered

a severe heart attack—the beginning of a rapid decline that would ultimately
lead to her death during my first year as a Ph.D. student. Only after my
grandmother’s death did I realize that her life experiences dovetailed with
my interest in the critical reading and writing practices of politically active
women. As Ronald Stockton suggests elsewhere in this volume, it is often a
realization of mortality—a coming to awareness of the limits of life—that
motivates scholarly research. My grandmother had participated during her
lifetime in exactly the kinds of political literacy practices that fascinated me
as a scholar, and yet I had missed the opportunity to learn from her about her
participation in those activities.

What I Found in Grandma’s Closet

Among the many scrapbooks, postcards, and photos that my family and I
found in my grandmother’s house after she passed away were programs, let-
ters, and yearbooks from a variety of women’s organizations in which she had
participated. The materials included records of meetings and collaborative
projects that were devoted to, among other things, reforming international
affairs, studying political history, and advancing career opportunities for
women. There were also programs from social outings, but these excursions
were not, as I had mistakenly believed, the organizations’ exclusive purpose.
I knew that Grandma had been active within the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,
chapter of the Y-Dames (an affiliate of the YWCA), but I associated the orga-
nization with the rather mundane activities she participated in during her later
years—activities such as preparing bags of roasted nuts for an annual Christ-
mas fund-raiser. The Y-Dames were the “nut ladies” to me—I knew nothing
of the international relations study groups or the letter-writing campaigns to
improve local schools, both of which I found traces of in the cardboard boxes
beneath Grandma’s bed.

47
Wendy B. Sharer

My surprise upon discovering these materials was followed by sharp disap-

pointment. I had not learned about these or similar organizations in my many
years of education, and I had missed the chance to talk with my grandmother
about how she and so many other women used critical reading and writing
practices to participate in active citizenship. The lessons I’d learned about the
women’s movement in American history had presented the period between
1920 and 1960 as a low spot or a lull—a time of stillness between two “waves”
of women’s activism. The documents from my grandmother’s personal archives
suggested something else.
I wanted to explore more traces of the practices I had stumbled across in
my grandmother’s house, in large part because I suspected that these practices
were formative in her strong character, in the strong character she fostered
in my mother, and—ultimately—in the strong character I credit my mother
for instilling in me. Looking into the historical milieu that surrounded my
grandmother’s post-suffrage political activism, in other words, was a way to
explore the origins of my own scholarly location. Through my mother, I had
learned to study and critique assumptions about what was appropriate for me,
as a woman, to do. Mom raised me by herself: my father succumbed to cancer
when he was thirty years old, and my mother never remarried because she never
met someone she thought would make a good father for my brother and me.
As I grew up in a midsized northeastern city, I watched my mother combat
the expectation that she would remarry quickly and the assumption that re-
marrying would be the only responsible thing for her to do for her children.
When she did not remarry, she faced questions from co-workers, community
members, church families, and even the people she considered close friends.
She was able to resist these expectations thanks largely to my grandmother’s
assistance in raising my brother and me. Grandma provided childcare so that
my mother could work the multiple jobs she needed to support us and, later,
pay for our college tuitions.
I also believe that my mother’s ability to resist the powerful expectation that
she would remarry derived from the self-assertive attitude she had witnessed in
my grandmother, an attitude cultivated through Grandma’s participation in
women’s organizations. A poem I found among my grandmother’s belongings
illustrates how work in women’s organizations—such as the Y-Dames—fos-
tered independence:

Boyfriend’s Lament
(To the Tune of—“The Man on the Flying Trapeze”)
Once I was happy but now I’m forlorn
O how I wish I had never been born

48
 Traces of the Familiar

Left all alone for to weep and to mourn

Betrayed by the girl that I love,

I plead for her love and I beg her to wed,

She joins a new club down at central instead.
They call her a leader, I call her misled,
Alas and alack—and alas
Now some weekends are sacred to cupid, say some
But not to this viper in skirts.
She goes to a conference stupid and dumb
And when I protest she says “nerts”—O—
She floats through the “Y” with the greatest of ease
She helps raise the budget because they say “please”
She won’t give me dates though I beg her on my knees
That “Y” has blighted her love.
—Song from the Volunteer Training Program,
YWCA Y-Dames, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Much to the chagrin of their significant others, who were forced to take a back-
seat to the work of “the ‘Y,’” women like my grandmother found in women’s
groups a channel through which to act independently in public matters. As
this poem reflects, the Y-Dames were fully aware of the agitation they caused
“their men,” and they were bold enough to mock that agitation.

Where Grandma’s Archives Led Me

Not long before my grandmother became ill, I had taken a graduate course on
the New York Intellectuals in my master’s program. The course focused on a
group of avant-garde thinkers and writers in Greenwich Village in the 1920s
and 1930s. In one of my weekly reading responses for that course, I expressed
frustration with the overwhelmingly male construction of “the Intellectual.”
What, I wondered, were women doing at the time to address the political,
ethical, and social issues facing the nation while these predominantly male
“Intellectuals” and artists were debating politics and literature in Greenwich
Village? Discovering my grandmother’s materials brought this issue back to
the forefront of my thinking, and I determined that my dissertation research
would focus on this question.
The National League of Women Voters made perfect sense as a choice for
the study of women’s political rhetoric in the decades immediately after suf-
frage. When the Tennessee legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in
August of 1920, American women who had long labored for suffrage quickly
discovered that although they could now cast their votes, the opportunity to

49
Wendy B. Sharer

do so existed in a restrictively structured, male-dominated partisan system.

Women had waited on party politicians for decades—observing, agitating,
protesting, and petitioning—while officially powerful literate practices (includ-
ing the act of signing the Nineteenth Amendment into law) rested solely in
the hands of male partisans. As a result, Carrie Chapman Catt, president of
the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, explained, “Many of
us have deep and abiding distrust of all political parties” (18–19). Anticipating
the difficulty of integrating former suffragists and their concerns into partisan
American politics, Catt called for a successor organization to the NAWSA that
would train new women voters in electoral procedures and further the interests
of women within the platforms and administrative structures of political par-
ties. This successor organization, proposed first by Catt in 1919 at the annual
meeting of the NAWSA, became known as the League of Women Voters. The
organization’s goal, in addition to getting newly enfranchised women to vote,
was to train women in the rhetorical tactics of American political influence.
The second organization I selected for research, the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom, enabled me to study the rhetorical efforts of
politically active women in the diplomatic arena. When Dutch suffragist Aletta
Jacobs learned of the cancellation of the annual International Woman Suffrage
Association convention due to the difficulty of travel in wartime, she sum-
moned various international women, including prominent American suffragists
Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch, to The Hague to discuss possibilities
for ending male-run wars that interrupted progress toward international,
universal suffrage. The women who gathered at The Hague in 1915 as the In-
ternational Congress of Women for Permanent Peace—renamed the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919—expressed dismay about
the antagonistic atmosphere of male-dominated international relations. Wars
created by statesmen, Jacobs asserted, not only disrupted economic and social
life but also halted the progress of women’s rights by shutting down channels
of international communication. Beginning with their first meeting in 1915,
the founders of the WILPF sought to correct what they saw as fundamental
flaws in traditional methods of international communication—flaws that led
to militant nationalism, antagonistic diplomacy, and violence.
While I was able to discover some very useful overviews of the goals pursued
by the LWV and the WILPF through published histories, I wanted to discover
the specific practices and techniques by which both groups furthered their
political efforts. I knew from published materials what the desired end results
were, but I knew little about the means used to reach those ends. To find out
more about these practices, I headed to the archives. While it would have been,
practically speaking, impossible for me to go to all relevant archives, I decided

50
 Traces of the Familiar

that I could find the most relevant materials by visiting three particular col-
lections: the Library of Congress (which houses the papers of the National
League of Women Voters), the Swarthmore College Peace Collection (which
houses the papers of the U.S. WILPF), and the Schlesinger Library at the
Radcliffe Institute in Boston (which holds the papers of several key leaders in
both organizations).
All three archives presented challenges and immense benefits. My visit to
the Library of Congress challenged my patience—not because their staff was
not helpful but because so often the materials I requested had to be transported
from another storage building and, on several occasions, the boxes of materials
were not fully processed. I requested box after box of educational and publicity
materials and regularly had to wait for them to be delivered from an off-site
facility. But the waiting proved worthwhile. I discovered, for instance, an
impressive collection of educational skits and plays designed by the LWV to,
among other things, demonstrate the correct way to mark a ballot; illustrate
the most effective ways of testifying before a legislative committee; and comi-
cally highlight what not to do when speaking with a public official about his
stance on an issue of importance to women.
At the Schlesinger Library, I did not need to wait to get materials—indeed,
everything I needed was stored on-site. Much of the material, however, had
been microfilmed, and researchers, except in very rare instances, were asked to
use microfilmed records for their work. Anyone who has tried to locate specific
bits of information on a minimally indexed reel of microfilm knows how tax-
ing this process can be. And yet, when I came across class notes prepared by
Grace Johnson, a leader of the Boston-area LWV and an English/composition
instructor at two junior colleges, I forgot about my stiff neck and the headache
I had developed while squinting at the microfilm images as they whizzed by
on the projection screen. I was elated to discover how clearly Johnson’s class
notes reflect attempts to integrate political activism into an introductory level
English class. While her courses covered techniques of writing and speak-
ing that could be applied to a variety of rhetorical occasions, Johnson was
particularly interested in training her students to perform as politically active
citizens. Her lecture notes on research writing, for instance, indicate her belief
that research involves discovering a topic with current political implications.
In a lesson on choosing and investigating a topic, Johnson recommended that
students consult government sources, such as state house records, congressional
reports, publications of government departments, and the U.S. census. Timely
and important topics, she advised, cannot be accurately identified from reading
popular media; rather, they can be found only in the primary documents of the
political process. Finding Johnson’s class notes marked a watershed moment

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Wendy B. Sharer

in my research because they suggested that the historical recovery work I was
engaged in was highly relevant to teaching practices in today’s classrooms.
In the archives at Swarthmore, I found more ways to link the past and
the present, particularly within the study and teaching of rhetoric. Perhaps
the most awe-inspiring discovery for me was the records I found relating to
U.S. WILPF founding member Julia Grace Wales. Wales, who was also an
instructor of English at the University of Wisconsin, composed a booklet for
the WILPF entitled Continuous Mediation without Armistice. The “Wales Plan,”
as the booklet came to be known, articulated the theory and groundwork
for the kind of rhetorical machinery the WILPF sought to establish in the
international arena. The proposal argued for the creation of a conference of
non-governmental experts to discuss economic, social, and scientific aspects
of international relations. More specifically, Wales called for the development
of a conference of neutral nations to engage in a process of collaborative writ-
ing—to “come together in conference and endeavor to frame a reasonable
proposition” that might resolve conflicts among belligerent nations. Leading
experts from neutral nations would initiate the mediation process by circulat-
ing the proposition to belligerents, asking for feedback. With feedback from
belligerents, the conference of neutrals would revise the proposition and resub-
mit it to the belligerents: “If the first effort fails, [the conference of neutrals]
should consult and deliberate, revise their original propositions or offer new
ones, coming back again and again if necessary, in the unalterable conviction
that some proposal will ultimately be found that will afford a practical basis
for actual peace negotiation” (“Appendix” 167–68). For Wales and the WILPF,
“continuous mediation” meant “continuous revision.”
Wales not only proposes the methods of collaborative writing for interna-
tional mediation but also provides suggestions for what the new diplomatic
genres produced through that writing might look like. For the document to
be effective and convincing, she stresses, the writers of the proposition for
peace should “append to it all conceivable arguments for its adoption, every
possible appeal to the self-interest of every warring nation” (Continuous 4).
The document must include rebuttals to anticipated objections and must be
suitably geared toward the interests of the audiences it addresses. Additionally,
a written request for feedback should be part of the genre so it appears not
as an order but as an attempt to negotiate. Wales’s instructions for rhetorical
diplomacy mirror what rhetorical scholars today call “invitational rhetoric,”
or methods of communication that actively invite response.
I did, of course, hit some dead ends in my research. At one point while I
was revising my dissertation and working toward its publication as a book, I
traveled to the University of Wisconsin to see if I could locate any evidence

52
 Traces of the Familiar

that Julia Grace Wales had integrated some of the rhetorical ideas at the heart
of the “Wales Plan” into the English courses that she taught. Much to my
dismay, there were very few records from the English department at that time.
I was able to find only a few course catalogues that mention Wales and an
oral history collection tape in which the person being interviewed mentions
Wales as a colleague in the English department. I had better success locating
information about Wales when I consulted her papers at the National Archives
of Canada shortly after my visit to Wisconsin, but still I could not find much
that specifically related to her teaching career. Perhaps those records weren’t
seen as important enough to preserve. An archival researcher, however, cannot
realistically expect the historical figure she is investigating to have kept every-
thing, much less can she expect that everything her research subject preserved
will make its way into official archival collections.

Why Grandma’s Story Matters

A shortened version of this story about my discovery of an archival research
project appears in the introduction to my book Vote and Voice: Women’s
Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915–1930. I included the story in the
book because, at the time I was writing, I felt a scholarly obligation to do so.
As I explain in that introduction, many historians have argued that writing
history is not merely an exercise in the objective recording of factual infor-
mation. Rather, it entails the careful selection and arrangement of historical
traces from among an infinite number of possibilities. JoAnn Campbell has
remarked that the writer of a historical account “is never a disinterested, ob-
jective observer of fact but always a selector of objects and interpreter of tales,
[and so] the writing of history requires recognizing the location of the teller,
the impetus of her investigation, and her vested interest in the tale” (305). The
“vested interest” that propels historical investigation often involves feelings of
admiration: “There is love here between writer, reader, and historical subject,
and that love fuels the search for historical predecessors. As we articulate our
individual relationships with the dead, we challenge writing conventions that
would compartmentalize the history and historian, the text, and the love that
produced and discovered the text” (308).
These points about the relationship between research and lived experience
certainly resonate with me, and yet in my book I presented only a limited
discussion of the vested interests and admirations that propelled my research.
Quite honestly, I am extremely hesitant to mention these feelings and vested
interests here. Isn’t this, after all, a rather melodramatic story, the kind that
might win an essay contest sponsored by Lifetime television—an idealistic
young woman, raised by a single mother, earns a Ph.D. thanks largely to the

53
Wendy B. Sharer

traces of a politically active life left behind by her beloved grandmother? How
can I turn this tale of my research as lived process into something “intellectual”
and something “significant” for other scholars to read?
This dilemma is itself worthy of critical examination, and the process of
interrogating the dilemma is, in my thinking, a useful endeavor for other re-
searchers, especially researchers who are just beginning to consider archival or
other historical research projects. Patricia Bizzell has suggested that scholars in
rhetoric and composition “perhaps need more discussion of the part played in
the setting of scholarly agendas and the constructing of scholarly arguments by
our emotions about research topics” (12). I agree. In fact, I suggest that we seek
out and celebrate the role that our emotions play in our selection of research
projects. In the process of writing my dissertation, my book, and, most recently,
this article, I’ve been focusing on “acknowledging” the part my emotions and
experiences played in the construction of my research agenda. The focus, in
other words, has been on making sure that I’ve responsibly revealed my biases
and my locatedness as a researcher. This business dispensed with, I’ve tried
to move on to “scholarly” analysis. As a graduate student formulating a dis-
sertation project, I spent a great deal of mental energy debating the validity of
my ideas—thinking, as I did before writing this piece, that the details of the
origins of my project are best suited for a “nonscholarly” arena. How I came
to this project, I thought, is too “smarmy” (read: affective and serendipitous)
to make that journey respectable to or instructive for other researchers.
Yet my most significant (to date) research project originated within the
emotion-laden family and life experiences that preceded that research. Don’t
these origins, then, deserve celebration rather than brief, and somewhat
apologetic, acknowledgment? I want to suggest that, rather than turning
away from or hesitating to reveal how research is connected with lived, and
often affective, experiences, researchers should seek out these experiences and
make them known in a spirit of enthusiasm. I hope that, as someone who
now advises doctoral students, I can encourage new scholars to find topics via
their lived experiences, because those experiences help us to recognize what
is significant, even if we are not able to articulate a rational, “neutral” reason
for that significance.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that we omit the process of thinking critically
about what we select and what we omit in our setting of research agendas. I’m
simply suggesting that we look favorably on and in fact encourage affective
connections to our research projects. I urge researchers not to dismiss the in-
spirations that they cannot fully articulate as part of a rational effort to locate
themselves as researchers. I hope that, by presenting my story, I can foster a
desire in future scholars to explore the rhetorical practices of family members

54
 Traces of the Familiar

and friends and, at the same time, to counteract the restrictions and assump-
tions that place family and friends—“personal relationships” and the affective
domains that surround them—beyond the boundaries of valid research.
An added benefit of raising the scholarly standing of the affective domain
in research might be the expansion of archival resources for the field. As I
have argued elsewhere, what gets preserved in archival repositories is often
that which is already deemed significant. The materials hidden under the beds
and in the attics of friends and family might not, thus, seem appropriate for
these collections. Yet these records—produced and contained within the lived
experiences of our friends and family—are valid, and potentially enormously
influential, sources for historical and archival scholarship. I encourage other
scholars to seek out records like the ones I stumbled upon. I assumed that no
such records existed, and it did not cross my mind to look for them, because
this was, after all, “just” my grandmother. My relationship with her was part
of my “private” life. Now I wonder what more I might have learned if I hadn’t
been blind to the possibilities for research in that life.

Works Cited
Addams, Jane, Emily G. Balch, and Alice Hamilton. Women at The Hague:
The International Congress of Women and Its Results. New York: Macmil-
lan, 1916.
Bizzell, Patricia. “Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric:
What Differences Do They Make?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (Fall
2000): 5–18.
Campbell, JoAnn. “Afterword: Revealing the Ties That Bind.” Nineteenth-
Century Women Learn to Write. Ed. Catherine Hobbs. Charlottesville: UP
of Virginia, 1995. 303–9.
Catt, Carrie Chapman. An Address to the Congress of the United States. New
York: National Woman Suffrage, 1917.
Sharer, Wendy B. “Disintegrating Bodies of Knowledge.” Rhetorical Bodies.
Ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1999.
120–43.
———. Vote and Voice: Women’s Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915–1930.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004.
Wales, Julia Grace. “Appendix A: International Place for Continuous Media-
tion without Armistice.” Addams, Balch, and Hamilton 167–71.
———. Continuous Mediation without Armistice. Geneva: WILPF Interna-
tional Office, 1916.

55
 
The Biography of a Graveyard
Ronald R. Stockton

There is a small town deep in the hills of southern Illinois with the odd name
of Sesser. Tradition says it was named after the government official who filled
out the incorporation papers a century ago. The area was first settled in the
1820s by people mostly from Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee. (The
Native American population was concentrated along the Mississippi and Ohio
rivers, not in this inland county.) Almost all of these early settlers were white
and Protestant, mostly some form of Baptist. For the first few decades of the
century, burials were on farms. It was not until 1840 that anyone created a
formal graveyard. It was called Horse Prairie, named after the area where it
was located, and lay just next to the Baptist church of the same name. It was
the burial place of choice in the township for the next seventy years, until the
city was incorporated and produced a public graveyard. By that time, the coal
mines had opened and workers had begun to pour in. Many of the new arrivals
were from Italy and Poland and brought their Catholic religion with them, so
the public cemetery became their preferred burial place.1
How I came to be the biographer of Horse Prairie Cemetery is a surprise even
to me. By profession I am a political scientist, trained empirically. Graveyards
are not something that political scientists ordinarily study. The fact that my
specialization is nonwestern political systems puts me even further from the
topic. Maybe it has something to do with a generational process. A colleague
who studies these things says that when we reach a certain age, we often begin
to sense our own mortality and to reflect upon our heritage and what we will
leave behind. Somewhere in my fifties, I got interested in genealogy. At that
point in my career, I had published two books, had been department chair
for two terms, had won the Distinguished Teaching Award, had fought the
obligatory academic wars, and was very comfortable in my skin. I had headed
some professional associations and felt that in my career—which was far from
over—I had achieved everything I had hoped to achieve. In 2000, when my
second book came out and I had nothing on my To Do list, I discovered the
Mormons’ genealogy list on the Internet and suddenly realized there was a
wealth of information out there for people like me to find.

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 The Biography of a Graveyard

But let’s step back for a minute. Not everything begins when a person hits
fifty. When I was nineteen and a student at Southern Illinois University, a
professor—Dr. Ridgeway—stopped me after my class in Illinois government
and asked if I knew anything about my family history. I said I knew little except
that we had come to southern Illinois from Kentucky a century before. The
professor told me she had been doing research on her own family and had run
into relatives named Stockton. She said if I could find the names of my family
four generations back, she might be able to tell me some things about them.
Ridgeway thought we might have been Quakers at one point, something I
had never considered. I made a few efforts to find out some names but never
really followed up on that offer. Still, I was intrigued with the idea that it
was possible to learn about ancestors whose names I had never heard. What
an idea to put into the head of a nineteen-year-old! We who are faculty often
don’t realize the impact we can have on students outside of the classroom. A
kind word or a subtle suggestion can sometimes germinate for years and then
bloom. Dr. Ridgeway has been gone for decades, but that seed she planted
has continued to germinate.
I had always been interested in my family history but had never been able
to get much information out of my parents or grandparents. Partially it was
the culture. Many people who went to the interior of the country in the 1800s
left behind their past and the stories that past contained. They were starting
anew in a new land and often had memories they wanted to forget. They
were also poor. Some could not read or write, and those who could did not
sit around writing diaries after a long day in the fields. They lived their lives,
bore their young, buried their dead, and marched through history without
leaving much of a footprint.
Partially the problem was me. Like so many young people, I never took the
time to find out about the past. Like so many other people with gray hair, I
wish now that I could have just an hour with those people I knew as a child so
I could ask them the questions that will remain forever unanswered. I would
ask my maternal grandmother why our family left France and how it felt to a
young girl to set off for a new country. I would ask my maternal grandfather
to tell me about his father, who had fought in the Civil War and been involved
in the siege of Atlanta. Did my great-grandfather ever say what he thought of
General Sherman or how he felt when he heard that Lincoln had been shot? On
the paternal side, I would ask my grandmother to tell me what she remembered
about her Lewis grandparents and whether it is true that we are descended
from that famous Virginia family. And I would ask my great-uncle to tell me
about his parents, my great-grandparents. Unfortunately, these are questions
that can never be asked. But fortunately, some questions can be answered with

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Ronald R. Stockton

genealogical research. In just three years I was able to find Civil War records,
early land records, shipping records, and family histories that other branches
of the family had compiled.

The Search for Ancestors

My first big discovery was of my great-grandfather who had participated in the
Civil War. I knew Nathan was from Indiana but did not know much more.
My grandfather was the last of Nathan’s children, and both men died without
leaving much by way of family stories. The Indiana census records of 1850 were
a windfall, since all names were indexed. It is hard to say how exciting it was
to find my great-grandfather as a little boy with his parents and baby sister
on a small piece of land in the middle of the state, then to find the marriage
record of his parents and realize that there had been a brothers-sisters double
marriage in which Henry had married Nancy at the same time that Henry’s
brother had married Nancy’s sister. What was less thrilling was to read about
how that county was freed up for white settlement by the evacuation of Na-
tive peoples from central Indiana (Cayton). To me, my family was made up of
frontier people who broke the land and created a state. But every heroic event
in history has an asterisk.
Much later, I found Nathan in the 1860 census, just a year before he joined
the Union army. He had been misidentified in the index and I found him by
accident, a farm laborer living next to a Miss Bradford, several years younger.
That dignified lady in the family photograph that we had known as Catharine
Henretta was here listed as “Kate.” That simple discovery was one of the thrill-
ing moments of my genealogical quest, to realize that my great-grandfather
had called my great-grandmother Kate.
Somehow, each of these details linked me with those who had gone before
and let me know something about their lives and, in a sense, about my own,
who I was, and where I originated. Not everything was to my liking. A fact
of my antebellum Kentucky ancestors was quite disturbing. I was not so na-
ive as to think that my paternal family had been spared the poison of racial
thinking, but I knew they had been poor farmers and had not likely owned
slaves. I also knew that they had supported the Union and that some had been
persecuted in that dangerous border area for their loyalty. It was an unsettling
surprise, then, to find in an 1840 census record that one of those ancestors
had in fact owned four slaves. I could not even imagine why someone with
so little land would have four slaves. If finding my great-grandmother Kate
was a high, finding my great-great-great-grandfather John with four slaves
was a definite low.

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 The Biography of a Graveyard

The Graveyard Project

The graveyard project was a natural outgrowth of these interests. As I discov-
ered information about each ancestor, I wrote it up in a short “Family News
Note” and sent it out to relatives. They were pleased to get these missives, but in
a sense this information was of interest only to those in the family. Genealogists
tend to be self-involved by nature and are not often interested in what other
genealogists are finding unless it relates to their own family. Facts accumulate,
but there is no history in a sense of learning what had happened and why.
My own approach is somewhat different. I realized early on that the amount
of factual information I would learn about ancestors would be relatively little:
the names of forgotten ancestors, where they were born, how much land
they owned, where they lived in a given census year. I decided that the way
to learn about my family was to learn of the times in which they lived and
of the historical processes underway in their age and place. If they moved,
what other people were moving at the same time, and why? If they were in a
given place at a given time, what do we know about that place at that time?
When I learned that my French immigrant great-grandfather had served in
the French army in Madagascar, that set me off on a search for French co-
lonial and military history. Why were the French in Madagascar, and what
would my great-grandfather’s life have been like? Again, there were those
disturbing asterisks.
In 2001, I had a sabbatical and decided to spend part of it in genealogical
research. My parents were in their upper eighties at the time, so I wanted to
do something in their honor. That hometown graveyard came to mind. Ge-
nealogists often make lists of people in graveyards for the historical record.
These can be published in small booklets or even put on the Internet. Often
they include names, dates, gravestone inscriptions, and sometimes even pho-
tographs of gravestones.
Horse Prairie Cemetery had 829 graves at the time. In my youth, I had
visited it every Decoration Day (as Memorial Day was then called). We would
put flowers on the graves of our relatives and visit with others who were doing
the same thing. In a town of 1,500, everyone seemed to know everyone else,
and many of us were related. My grandparents were buried there, as were my
great-grandparents and other relatives. My dad’s baby brother was there, who
died when he was four, and my dad’s uncle, our town’s only fatality in World
War I. That place would always be filled on Decoration Day, with people from
the town coming to pay homage to their families and their memories. My dad
regularly made a donation to the graveyard association for the maintenance
of the grounds.

59
Ronald R. Stockton

In typical southern Illinois style, my parents, while in their sixties, had

purchased their own gravestone and left it sitting in the cemetery expectantly
with their names and birth dates; only the closing dates were left empty. It was
a bit odd to see the gravestone of my living parents, but it was the custom of
those provident people to prepare for the inevitable. It is rather healthy when
you think of it, acknowledging that which we all know will come.
My plan was to drive the five hundred miles south from Detroit to Sesser
and to make a list of the graves. My first step was to make sure that the minister
of Horse Prairie Baptist Church (fifty-nine members) would be comfortable
with the project. We met, and he liked the idea. He even volunteered a couple
of older members who could fill in some details about the history of the place.
He did note that although the graveyard abutted his church property, it was
not controlled by the congregation but had its own board of trustees.
One very hot week in May, I spent three grueling days in the graveyard
making a list of all the names on the stones. I also recorded all the poems,
scriptures, laments, and other stone writings that I could read. When it was
over, I went back to Detroit with burned skin and an aching back to enter the
information into a Word program that could be turned into a pamphlet at
some point. In a couple of months, when my wife, Jane, had a break, we went
back to the graveyard together to check the accuracy of my entries and to fill
in the missing details. Fortunately, Jane had an uncanny ability to read faded
poems and inscriptions, so this produced a much-improved list. A second
development then arose. When I showed the draft list to my aunt, she asked,
“Have you shown this to Clara Brown?” She explained that Clara had earlier
published a list of people buried in the public cemetery and might have some
information on Horse Prairie Cemetery as well. The next day, Jane and I met
Clara, a delightful farm lady in her eighties. Not only had she made a list
of Horse Prairie graves about two decades earlier, but she had used her rich
connections in the town to fill in missing details and to locate genealogical
and family information on many of the persons buried there. She had also
gone to city records and graveyard records and had identified graves without
gravestones or that were otherwise unknown. Her diligent research had added
scores of graves to the list I had compiled.
As I looked over her list, I realized that this was a document of some histori-
cal significance, at least to those people whose families were in this place. Clara
had been able to locate family historical records (parents, spouses, children,
siblings, circumstances of death) for nearly seven hundred persons. Many of
these details would be lost within a generation if they were not somehow put
into the historical record. I suggested that we combine our efforts. Clara had
circulated her list in a small genealogical newsletter but had not otherwise

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 The Biography of a Graveyard

made it available to genealogists and local historians. I offered to take her

working draft, update it with the additional names I had recorded from the
past twenty years, and add in the poems and inscriptions I had recorded. I
said I would produce a book of the result with her as first author. Amazingly,
she agreed on the spot and turned her complete file over to me.
Producing the book took three years and a lot of work.2 The manuscript
was in rough form and had to be polished. I also decided to transform it from
a simple list of genealogical and family records into a more comprehensive
book by adding supplements and aides for the reader: a schematic map of
the graveyard, a list of terms and phrases to help understand the graveyard
and its culture, an index of names with the location of the graves, and several
nostalgic poems about graveyards, death, and reflection (such as Abraham
Lincoln’s haunting poem of his return to his hometown after twenty years). I
also put in an academic article I had written for the Journal of the Illinois State
Historical Society. The preparation of this article, “Death on the Frontier,” is a
tale of its own. I was very apprehensive about submitting an article to a history
journal. Historians are very serious about their craft, and it did not seem wise
for someone not trained in their methodology or their sources to think his
findings would be worthy of a professional journal. Fortunately, two colleagues
(Gerald Moran and Marty Hershock) proved very supportive of my efforts,
offering suggestions and sources that only historians would have known. They
transformed my effort into an article of interest to professional historians.

Death on the Frontier

When I first got back to Detroit with my initial list, I noted that 683 of the
names had both birth and death dates. I decided to enter that information
into an Excel database to create an index of names and also to see how death
patterns changed across time and whether there was a gender effect. Viewing
these 683 people as individuals did honor to them as persons and was of great
interest to their families and will be to future generations, but it would be of
little interest to anyone outside of that small circle. Reconceptualizing those
obscure individuals as a sample of frontier people whose community had
evolved over time put them into a historic context of broader interest. In a sense,
individual stories, taken in aggregate, became history with a capital H.
I broke the burials into decades starting in 1840 and stretching until 2000,
sixteen decades in all. My primary interest was in the 365 burials in the nineteenth
century. This was the time that most corresponded to the “frontier” period of
Illinois history. Most of those people had either settled the land themselves or
were the children of those who had. Using their death records to compare their
lives with the lives of those who came after them could be interesting.

61
Ronald R. Stockton

My research produced four major findings, all of which had to be checked

against other data to confirm their reliability. My first finding was the most
shocking: of those graves of the nineteenth century, a full half were for chil-
dren under ten, a majority of whom died within a day of birth. In the last half
of the twentieth century, by contrast, it was very rare for a child to die (only
one infant burial of 176 after 1965, for example). Everyone knows that life in
those days was dangerous, but these figures were stunning. When I checked
standard histories of that era, I found that the Horse Prairie data were only
a little higher than average. These figures were clearly within a confirmable
range of frontier life and death.
But not everything is numbers. At the root of these statistics are human
beings. When I reflected upon the numbers in terms of human experience, I
realized how different a funeral is today from what it had been in the 1800s.
For us today, a funeral is often of a venerated elder, someone who had a long
and fruitful life. Often the ceremony is an occasion of celebration with grand-
children and great-grandchildren in attendance. But that was not true in the
nineteenth century. Most funerals were for young children who had not even
had a chance to establish themselves or define who they were or what they
would be. When I talked to Clara about this finding, she noted that almost all
of the unidentified graves were probably infants who died soon after birth.
In honor of those who died young and of those who had to give them up,
I included in the poetry chapter the moving “Prayer for a Very New Angel”
by Violet Alleyn Storey. In it, a mother briefs God on how she cared for her
daughter: she wet the brush to curl her hair, kissed her on the left cheek in the
morning, and left a light on at night. In a prayer that sounds hokey today but
would have resonated with mothers a century ago, the mother in the poem
asks, “Just, just tomorrow morning, God, I pray, / when she wakes up, do
things for her my way” (Brown and Stockton 109).
On the opposite end of the age scale, I discovered that very few of those
buried in the nineteenth century were in the older age brackets. Of all burials
in the 1800s in Horse Prairie Cemetery, only seven were of people seventy years
old or more. By contrast, in the last fifty years of the twentieth century, over
60 percent were seventy or more. Since the reality of child death did not stop
survivors from reaching a ripe old age, something else must explain the small
number of elders. When I turned to the census records, I found the answer.
There were just not many elders around. In 1840, to take one example, only
11 percent of the county population was forty or older, and in the whole state,
only 2 percent were above forty-five. Today we forget how new our country
really is and how unique the frontier experience was. In 1840, Illinois was “the
West,” the place where young people went to start a new life.3 Older people

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 The Biography of a Graveyard

are not in that graveyard because there were so few older people “out west.”
Living in Illinois was something young people did, not their elders. As some-
one whose small grandchildren consider Camp Grandma and Grandpa their
favorite place, I felt a sense of loss for those children.
Regarding gender, it turns out that there are 17 percent more men than
women in the Horse Prairie graveyard. In the early decades, this may have
been partially due to the fact that the “frontier” simply had more men than
women. (In 1840, there were 117 males for every female in the state.) But when
I looked at infant deaths, I saw the pattern confirmed. Among infants under
one year of age, there are thirty-one boys and twenty girls, a ratio of 1.55. From
ages one through five, the numbers are fifty-two and thirty-nine, or a 1.33 ratio.
Since small children would have been born in Illinois and would have had a
“normal” gender distribution, there was clearly some risk in being born male.
I could find no explanation for this pattern other than to note that even today,
childhood is more risky for boys than for girls.
Finally, I confronted a puzzle. In a cemetery with a disproportionate number
of males, females dominate among those between sixteen and thirty-nine years
old. There are fifty-two females and thirty-eight males in this category, a ratio
of 1.37. I immediately assumed that this pattern was linked to the dangers of
childbearing, but there was no such easy answer. For example, the balance
shifts back toward males for those in their forties, where women might have
had an even higher risk in pregnancy. Likewise, the county’s census mortality
schedules for 1850 and 1860 (listing those who had died in the previous year,
158 in all) contradict the pregnancy hypothesis. Most people died from the big
killers of the age: various fevers (scarlet and typhoid being most common),
whooping cough and croup, dehydrating conditions such as diarrhea and
cholera, and lung conditions such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. Only three
women died from conditions obviously linked to childbirth or pregnancy. How
do we explain these contradictory data?
One factor may have been the rapid decline in fertility (the number of
children born per female). Carl Degler, who has written the definitive work on
this subject, found that for white women, this decline was 50 percent between
1800 and 1900. He calls this “the single most important fact about women and
the family in American history.” He also found that the decline was steeper for
rural areas (including “newly settled regions”) than for urban or small town
areas (181–82). As to why this occurred, he suggests that the shortage of land
and the “close-knit family, held together by ties of affection,” caused parents
to have smaller families so that their children would not have to move away as
they had done. Obviously, a woman bearing five children would have less risk
than one bearing ten. Put simply, affectionate families saved women’s lives.

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Ronald R. Stockton

Of course, there are other possibilities. One is that the high number of
female burials balanced out the high rate of boy deaths and there was no fe-
male spike at all. It is also possible that a postpartum mother would be more
at risk in the event of an attack of croup or some other debilitating condition
so that pregnancy-related deaths are concealed under other categories. Like-
wise, women—as the primary caregivers—might have been more exposed to
contagious conditions such as whooping cough than males. But none of these
possibilities is definitive. In the end, we are left with more questions than an-
swers but also with a profound awareness that explanations are more complex
than we anticipate and that what we expect is not always true.

Final Thoughts
We scholars, with our models and theories and data, often fail to acknowledge
that research is a very personal activity. Many of us are reclusive by nature,
going off alone to do our research and write our books and articles. But the
costs of an academic life are considerable. To set off on a two- or three-year
project requires a serious commitment of time and psychic energy. Without
passion, it would be hard to do what we do. A colleague once asked if I had
ever written anything of a personal nature, and I said, only half in jest, “Ev-
erything I write is autobiographical.” This may seem a strange comment for a
person who writes on public opinion and comparative politics, but in a sense
we are driven by our passions. We often choose topics because they interest
us, because we are excited about the subject and what we might find. At the
same time, passion and personal interest are not enough. Without the tools of
our trade—our methodological skills, our scientific training, the theories and
models that help us shape our research and analyze our findings, the rules of
validation and confirmation that constrain our preferences and discipline our
conclusions with science—we would not be able to make the contributions
we make. Without the personal impulse, much that is achieved would not be
achieved, but without the science, much that is achieved would be of limited
value and would not enter the realm of scientific knowledge. I was able to turn
a family genealogy project into something of interest to the broader scholarly
community because I subjected my analysis to academic discipline.
Three comments on this project gave me exceptional pleasure. In combi-
nation, they capture what I am trying to say. An anonymous historian who
reviewed “Death on the Frontier” for the Journal of the Illinois State Historical
Society commented that the article showed a good use of historical data to
contextualize the Horse Prairie graveyard and as such makes “an important
contribution to the study of frontier history.” Second, a retired historian from
Southern Illinois University who was professionally active in the study of the

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 The Biography of a Graveyard

region’s history noted that the footnotes were very informative and the statisti-
cal patterns very revealing so that the article could easily have been published
by a national rather than a state journal. That was high praise. Finally, when
Clara Brown was interviewed by the local newspaper after the book came out,
she said, “I thought he would just produce a list of names. This is a real book.”
That was the best of all.

Notes
1. There was, and is, no Catholic graveyard in Sesser.
2. Books such as this are of no interest to commercial publishing houses. I
was able to find a private publisher who would produce 150 hardbound copies
on acid-free archival paper. After giving copies to my relatives, I sent copies to
major genealogical and local history research libraries and donated others to
the Genealogical Society of Southern Illinois, a local history society with an
extensive publication list, and to the Goode-Barren Historical Society in my
hometown. They will sell them to finance their projects and activities.
3. Historians organize panels on “the first west,” meaning places such as
Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania.
Cincinnati is nicknamed the Queen City of the West because of its early-
nineteenth-century prominence, and the 1890s-vintage University of Michi-
gan fight song praises “the champions of the West,” a reference to the old
Western Conference.

Works Cited
Brown, Clara A. Crocker, and Ronald R. Stockton. Horse Prairie Cemetery,
Sesser, Illinois: Tombstone Inscriptions and Family Records. 2004. Available
from the Genealogy Society of Southern Illinois, <http://www.rootsweb.
com/~ilgssi/counties.html>.
Cayton, Andrew R. I. Frontier Indiana. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.
Degler, Carl N. At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution
to the Present. New York: Oxford UP, 1980.
Stockton, Ronald R. “Death on the Frontier: Mortality Patterns in Horse
Prairie Cemetery, Franklin County, Illinois, 1840–2002.” Journal of the
Illinois State Historical Society 92.2 (Summer 2003): 146–60.

65
 
In a Treeless Landscape
A Research Narrative
Kathleen Wider

Because I am a philosopher by trade and training, most of my research begins in

my head, first with an intuition and then with the development of rudimentary
arguments to support that intuition. My reading of scholarly books and journal
articles related to the issue I’m addressing follows these initial steps. Finally, I
land back in my head using these sources as support or as counterarguments to
whatever position I’m defending. It’s a closed circle from head to printed word
to head and back to the printed page. This style of research suits me, as it is
similar both to finding the puzzle pieces and figuring out how they go together,
all this done in the abstract. Great intellectual exercise, and I love it!
However, when my non-philosopher friends and relatives who bought my
1997 book The Bodily Nature of Consciousness complained that they could
not understand a word of it, I decided that (even though their complaints
were at least slightly overstated!) I did need to respond to them. I wanted to
write a book that would be both philosophical and literary, one that would
reach a broad, general audience. That is when I began a very different kind of
research project. Since early in my philosophical career, I had been thinking
about the nature of the self, the relationship of the self to the body and to
the world, including other people, and the question of self-identity through
time. Although I have a graduate degree in English, all my publications were
in philosophy and addressed to a small, scholarly audience. That fact didn’t
extinguish my growing desire to try my hand at literary writing. I didn’t have
any luck with this when I threw a bit of it into my philosophical essays; the
editors or reviewers almost always nixed it. So, given my training, my long-
standing intentions, and the complaints, this seemed the moment of truth. I
would bring my two areas of interest into equal partnership.
I would explore the philosophical issues about the self that have always
intrigued me, but this time I would do so within the context of a specific life,
grounding my ideas and discoveries in the concrete details of that life. I chose
the life of my paternal grandmother, Augusta Mercedes Maguire Wider, both

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because it spanned a century and because it was an interesting life. She was
part of a homesteading family that moved from a farm in Illinois to Dakota
Territory to homestead. In 1882, her parents, Francis and Maggie Maguire,
moved their family of two boys and five girls to a 360-acre homestead, nine
miles northeast of Plankinton, in what would become the state of South Dakota
seven years after their arrival. When Augusta was a teenager, the family left the
farm and moved to the small city of Mitchell, forty miles east of Plankinton.
She lived there until her death.
From that small prairie town, Augusta created for herself a career as a
speaker on the national lecture circuit. She lectured at teachers’ institutes,
women’s clubs, and high school graduations. In small rural schoolhouses and
in large university lecture halls, Augusta was at ease. She loved an audience,
and the relationship was mutual. The subject of most of her talks was art and
beauty and their relationship to the development of a person as an individual
and as a citizen. When she died, she left behind several notebooks with outlines
of her speeches, lists of hundreds of poems she knew by heart, and brochures
she had developed as promotional material to secure speaking engagements
across the country. The most important record she left for me to explore was
a scrapbook filled with program notes, articles from newspapers reviewing her
speeches, and, scattered throughout it, bits and pieces of her family’s life. My
father had given this scrapbook to his mother when she was in her fifties, and
she had noted in it that it should be returned to him after she died. That is
how I first came into contact with it. The scrapbook was seductive, drawing
me into a world of the past that each page brought alive again. Hearing about
my interest in Augusta’s life, my aunt Virginia sent me the rest of the material
related to her mother’s career. So I had found a fascinating life lived through
times of radical change in America, including its transformation from a rural
to an urban society. I had found a life well documented, with plenty of primary
sources to study. I was off and running, although I didn’t realize until much
later how literal the motion would be.
In 1998, I began this project as many researchers do now: with the Internet.
I wanted to find the land my great-grandparents had homesteaded. Augusta’s
only surviving child, my aunt Virginia, who had actually visited the farm sev-
eral times as a child, could only remember that the land was west of Mitchell.
So I typed into the search window “Aurora County,” the name of the county
just west of the one Mitchell is in. To my surprise, a list of all the county’s
original homesteaders appeared on the screen. I remember my excitement as I
scanned the list and halfway down found my great-grandfather’s name: Francis
Maguire. I never suspected at that moment how close I would become, over
the next several years, to Francis and Maggie Maguire and their eight children.

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Kathleen Wider

As a philosopher, I had spent a great deal of my time among the dead: Plato,
Descartes, Kant, Marx, and so on. My relationship to the Maguires, many
of whom had died before I was born, was to be as intense and life-changing
as my relation to the philosophers I studied. That initial journey into virtual
reality taken via the Internet set me off on another journey that took several
years and resulted in a style of research and writing far different from any I
had used before.
I came to realize quite soon that to fully understand Augusta’s life, I would
need to know the social and political history within which her life was embed-
ded. I began with the Great Dakota Boom of the 1880s, during which hundreds
of thousands came to homestead on the treeless prairie. To understand this
mass migration to the plains that had swept my ancestors from the fertile and
rolling land of northwest Illinois to the dry, flat landscape of Dakota Terri-
tory, I had to research a variety of topics, from the people, animals, and plants
that the settlers displaced or destroyed to the reasons for 80 percent of them
abandoning their land within twenty years. Many families simply walked away,
leaving the barren land that year after year had been stripped of crops and soil
by long periods of drought, wind and dust storms, locust invasions, and prairie
fires. Driving across the Dakotas, one can still see these farm buildings, stand-
ing empty and unused for over a hundred years. I needed to become familiar
as well with the congressional debates, which lasted from the 1780s until the
1880s, over what to do with the public lands, whether to sell them to the high-
est bidder or give them, for a minimal fee, to individual citizens to homestead.
This investigation led me to study the impact of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase,
which, in doubling the size of the country, added millions of acres to the public
domain, out of which were carved all or part of thirteen states, the Dakotas
among them. In addition, I needed to acquaint myself with the Lewis and
Clark expedition, whose purpose was to map that land. This research led me
to sources describing the decision about how to survey this land so it could be
offered for a modest fee to new settlers. From the beginning, the government
wanted a method of surveying that was objective and permanent, one that
would conform to the ideal figures of geometry rather than to the constantly
changing shapes of the earth. So they chose the rectangular survey, which
described land in numerical terms. A journal entry from my first research trip
to South Dakota reflects my experience of this historical fact.
March 2, 2001
Flying over the midsection of the country, with a snow cover below light as
air, the earth appears to have been cut to pieces by the roads that follow the
section lines of the rectangular survey. In reality, however, the marks are but

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scorings on the land whose depth is beyond reach. I hadn’t realized before
that those neat and orderly lines I could see from the sky were the imprint
of ideas upon the earth.
The historical research, although it wasn’t the kind of research I usually
engaged in, was still conventional academic research. But I wanted more than
just knowledge of the facts of the history that surrounded my grandmother’s
family as they came to cultivate the Dakota land. So I set out for South Dakota
to experience firsthand the land and its people. After a morning searching
through the Aurora County land records, I found the legal description of the
homestead and located it on a county map. I was more than ready to experi-
ence the land itself. Walking on what had once been the Maguire home farm,
I felt at peace, as if I had come home. I was moving closer to the Maguires. In
writing this book, at times I felt as though people long gone surrounded me, as
alive as those with whom I lived and worked. Not only would I search for the
details of Augusta’s life and its historical context, I would also need to use my
imagination, fueled by sense experience, to dwell within that life. Only then
would I be able to offer even partial answers to my philosophical questions.
I thought of Kierkegaard’s insight, “Life can only be understood backwards,
but it must be lived forwards.” I would need to look at a life already closed to
see if I could discover its significance and in doing so understand something
about the significance and the construction of a self-identity for any human
life. This project cut closer to the bone than any other ever had. I had to go
far beyond an abstract and logical analysis of the questions and their possible
answers. I had to go out into the world and deep into myself.
Early evening, July 1998
I am standing on a section line, a gravel road, that in the 1880s divided
the Maguire homestead from that of their nearest neighbor. Behind me is
a homestead house in ruins. It is gray and sagging. A foreigner to the rural
plains, it looks as beautiful to me as any Roman ruin. In front of me are
acres of pasture land. As I stand there, the cows in the far distance begin to
turn toward me and moo loudly. I’m the one they think has come to give
them an early dinner. I imagine that it is this scene, with the sun setting in
an open Dakota sky across the flat land of the prairie, with animals hungry
for dinner and with the day’s work almost behind them, that Francis and
Maggie and their children looked out upon over a hundred years earlier.
So began years of varied research, including trips to South Dakota and
Elizabeth, Illinois, a town near Augusta’s birthplace. I searched land records,
haunted cemeteries, dug through the state archives, and met people with

69
Kathleen Wider

various connections to Augusta and the Maguire family. One such encounter
was with the present owner of the Maguire homestead land, James Fraser,
grandson of the man who homesteaded across from my great-grandparents.
He could tell me stories his grandfather had told him about the Maguires:
how they lost their cattle herd on the back forty during the blizzard of 1888;
how Francis, a man with a wild Irish temper and a love of politics, engaged
in heated conversation with whoever came along. He remembered meeting
Augusta when he was a teenager and she came to collect the rent for the land
his family later bought. She was always the center of attention, he said, as she
recounted stories of her latest travels. How much is contained within the span
of memory, I thought. In a way, Augusta, Francis, and the other Maguires
lived inside the minds of so many people.
Reviewing the hundreds of items in Augusta’s scrapbook gave me that same
sense of the continuation of a life into others’ lives. I read descriptions of her
speeches by local news reporters, letters from members of her audiences, pro-
grams of the events at which she spoke. I was handling paper she had handled,
valuing the same items she had valued, even chronicling her career just as she
had done. I came to know her, to a large degree, by examining what she had
saved from her lecturing career of more than fifty years.
That fit with my memory of my last visit with Augusta, when she was ninety
years old and in a nursing home, in and out of touch with reality. Although I
had to tell her repeatedly who I was and who her own children were, she could
tell me that she had been a famous lecturer in her day and had traveled widely.
She had lost so much by this point, but she had not lost her hold on the career
through which she largely formed her identity. To the end of her life a decade
later, she could recite an entire poem from memory if given the first line. I’m
sure she did it with the same melodious voice I remember when, as a child,
I had listened to Augusta reciting poetry to my mother’s bridge friends. She
was a performance artist, and her voice was her instrument.
I went through her scrapbook numerous times to determine the locations,
the dates, and the content of her speeches in order to get some sense of this
career and how it co-existed with her life as a mother of four children. When
her first three children were small, she confined her lecture career to local
venues, often walking to where she would speak, with her two oldest pulling
the small wagon that carried the reproductions of artworks she discussed in
her lectures. Later, when the oldest boys went off to college, she began to give
lectures far from home. She was fortunate in having a husband who was will-
ing to take over for her in her absence. He was a storekeeper, and since the
store was right next to their home, he could keep an eye on the two younger
children. He’d bring a steak home from the store and cook that for his dinner.

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He would give groceries to those too poor to pay cash for them in exchange
for their doing the family’s laundry. Her daughter, although still in grade
school when Augusta’s career broadened beyond South Dakota, took care of
her younger brother much of the time.
There were days when I would spend hours examining the material in the
scrapbook. By evening, my study floor would be littered with bits of yellowed
paper, and I would return to the present as though waking from a dream. I
came to realize I was a spectator of her life, although not an objective, disin-
terested, or even innocent one. My narration of her life would be as biased and
subjective as her own narration in her scrapbook and letters. How could it be
otherwise? I had spent enough years attempting to understand the nature of
selfhood in strictly logical terms. This time, however, I got my hands dirty
from the labor of detection and in occupying the seat of judgment.
Ultimately I learned, through the perusal of so many rich and diverse re-
search sources, that to understand a life, one must understand the social and
political context within which it’s lived, the familial history of the person as
far backward and forward as possible, the dreams and accomplishments of
the person, the other lives that connected and supported the life examined,
and so much more. Every thread I pulled from her life led me to another and
another. This was the case, for example, when I tried to come to terms with
a political speech Augusta had given early in her career. In it, she argued for
eugenics, advocating the sterilization of the “unfit” and their (nonvoluntary)
placement on “pleasant” farms (a euphemism for prison-like farms). I was
appalled. Grandma, I thought, how could you? However, after exploring the
history of eugenics in the United States and abroad at the turn of the last
century, I understood that her position was inseparable from the ideas of her
time. What was important was to understand how she and others, including
Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, could have held such views. This
made me realize again how much knowledge is necessary to see the object at
which one is looking. Although the topic of this speech was far different from
the majority of her speeches, which were on art and education, as her grand-
daughter I wanted to hide it from public view. I came to accept, however, that
to reach even a semblance of understanding of a life, I had to acknowledge
both its light and dark dimensions.
Making sense of a person’s life is always a work in progress, since each life is
embedded within the complex web of connections that constitutes reality. To
come to a complete understanding of any one life requires understanding the
entire complex. Since it is impossible for humans to attain such understanding,
we must settle for a partial and ongoing modification of our understanding. In
reflecting on the story of Augusta’s life, as told by herself and many others, I

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Kathleen Wider

understood selfhood in ways that had eluded me when I approached it in the

purely analytic mode of philosophy. This doesn’t mean that I thought any less
of the philosophical approach but that I saw the advantage of blending the les-
sons learned from the philosophers with the details of Augusta’s life as she lived
it and as I imagined it. It was this approach that led me to see that there are no
final answers to the questions with which I began: What is the significance of
any one human life? Out of what do people construct their identity and very
personhood? How do time and place contribute to this self-identity? The fact
that my understanding of Augusta’s life or my own will never be complete
frustrates me, but it is also a source of comfort to know that one belongs to
more than oneself even in one’s own self-identity and beyond the confines of
one’s lifespan. We are alone neither here nor in the grave.

72
 
My Grandfather’s Trunk
Barry Rohan

His name was Barry Conners. He was an actor who wrote half a dozen plays
that ran on Broadway in its golden era, the 1920s. His words launched the
Broadway acting careers of Shirley Booth and Humphrey Bogart. He invented
the role of a madcap heroine that Marion Davies catapulted to fame in a movie
that eighty years later is still shown on Turner Classic Movies. He was among
the first playwrights to successfully make the jump from Broadway to the
talking movies during the Great Depression. He wrote scripts for the likes
of Will Rogers, Spencer Tracy, and Ginger Rogers and helped to put Charlie
Chan on the road to success in film.
Yet nothing he wrote for the stage or screen equaled the drama of his own
life. In his earliest career as an actor, he was a nationally prominent activist in
a pioneer actors’ union called the “White Rats” (“Star” spelled backwards). In
that real-life role, he staged one of the great comebacks in show business his-
tory. After he was blacklisted as an actor following a failed strike, he supported
himself for five years as a freelance writer and wilderness guide. Eventually, he
emerged in triumph from the woods, becoming a red-hot playwright who at
his peak staged three plays on Broadway in a single year, 1925.
Conners also was my maternal grandfather. The fact I know best about
him is that he died an untimely death, in 1933, at the age of fifty, three years
before I was born. Other than my mother’s scattered recollections and a few
pictures, I knew little about his life and career.
Then an old theatrical trunk emerged one day and became a passion that
took over my life for months. Over that time, I experienced the unique plea-
sures of research: the joy of discovery, the ability to restore a missing piece
of history and to resurrect a life all-but-dead to living memory. The trunk,
which I came to think of almost as a living thing, came into my life as an
astonishing surprise.
My elderly mother, Renee, was making a bad recovery from a major opera-
tion in a hospital in Appleton, Wisconsin. As she lay in what might have been
her deathbed, she mentioned her father’s theatrical trunk for the first time. This
was a trunk my mother had inherited when she was twenty. Somehow she had

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Barry Rohan

managed to move it, along with our other possessions, through several apart-
ments and houses in which she raised her four children. Nobody noticed.
The trunk was in a corner of the dimly lighted basement of her apartment
building. She said, “You’ll need a flashlight to find it. It has his papers.”
“His papers?” I was amazed.
“I went through it all at the time of his death,” she said. “Afterwards, nobody
seemed all that interested.”

How could I have missed it all those years? Even in the dim yellow light of the
basement of my mother’s apartment building, the huge black trunk quickly
emerged as one of the largest objects in the room. It was unlocked. I lifted
the heavy lid, played a flashlight around the dark insides, and felt my way to
the bottom. The trunk was filled with papers; they lay there from corner to
corner, over a foot deep, reverently layered.
On top, a book of newspaper clippings, then a huge ledger of neatly scripted
notes—apparently bits of business for vaudeville acts. At the bottom, thick,
folded manuscripts, dozens of them. I couldn’t resist a quick look.
As copies of the turn-of-the-century theater playbills fell under the flash-
light, I made the first of many discoveries: my grandfather had experimented
with his name. In the earliest playbill, he is “William F. Conners,” his real
name (which, I later learned, even my mother didn’t know). In later playbills,
he appears as “Billy Conners” and then “Barry Conners.” Was “William F.”
too formal, “Billy” too undignified?
As I headed to the brighter light upstairs with an armload of paper, I had
an insight: “Maybe his whole life is here?”
Then something more disturbing.
“Lord, my mother has given me a stage name!”
And so I was hooked. From that moment, the contents of the trunk belonged
to me, and in a strange way, I belonged to the trunk. Now I was responsible
for preserving the contents . . . but how? Easy enough to save it from a land-
lord, but an old trunk filled with paper—one day someone certainly would
throw it out.
Right then I decided to read to the bottom of the pile and try to make a
story out of what I found. Those scattered pieces of paper would then have
new coherence and new dignity as “supporting documents.” Who’s going to
discard supporting documents?

In the weeks that followed, my mother staved off death, which she had irrever-
ently taken to calling The Iceman. As she recovered, she added what informa-
tion she could about the papers retrieved from the basement. She led me to a

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dozen letters and other documents from her father that she had stashed away
in old books around her apartment and also had mentioned to nobody.
I read histories of vaudeville and the New York theater. I made sorties into
everybody’s twenty-first-century trunk, the Internet, where I found reviews
and copyright information about Grandpa Conners’s best-known play, The
Patsy. A trip to the National Archives in Washington turned up a complete
list of his plays on Broadway and, even better, how long they had run, which
is more difficult to learn. Someone thoughtfully recorded his movie credits at
Twentieth Century Fox. Otherwise, it was pretty lean pickings. Ultimately,
it was the trunk and its photos, news clips, and manuscripts saved apparently
at random that offered the fuller picture of my grandfather’s life.
As I explored Conners’s public life, to my surprise a private story-within-the-
story began to emerge, an unusual father-daughter love story. I discovered the
long-distance bond between my mother and her father and why it had become
so important to them both in the last ten years of his life. Both seemed to seek
the normal family life that had eluded them. My mother grew up as a child of
divorce, yearning for her parents. My grandfather lived most of his adult life
on the road in hotel rooms. In a strange way, their bond was commemorated
in my grandfather’s home-away-from-home, the theatrical trunk that the two
of them had forwarded to new addresses for about a hundred years.
Talk about a family tradition.
William F. (Barry) Conners was born in April 1882 in Oil City, Pennsyl-
vania, the son of a country doctor. According to family lore, he earned a law
degree but quickly got bored with legal work and joined the theater as an actor.
About two dozen of Conners’s old playbills show up in the trunk. All seem
to have been saved at random, from 1907 to 1913, when a seat at the theater in
the smaller cities sold from fifteen to fifty cents, a pair of women’s gloves went
for a dollar, and a man could buy a bowler hat for two dollars.
He played about everything: romantic leads and stable boys, a farmer, a
factory worker, an army officer. He also did standup comedy between the acts.
A news clip emerged from much later on, a 1926 interview with the Christian
Science Monitor, after he had been successful as a Broadway playwright. In
it, I heard him speak for the first time other than through my mother as he
discusses his acting career. “I was some 15 or 16 years ‘trouping’ in second- and
third-class companies,” he told the interviewer. “Never a member of a first-class
company such as you have here in New York. The companies I was with were
of the ‘wildcat’ or ‘fly-by-night’ variety.”
My grandfather met my grandmother, Ruby Blackburn, an actress, when
both were members of such a theatrical group touring the South. A newspaper
clipping—no city indicated—describes the couple’s marriage onstage in 1911

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Barry Rohan

after the closing performance. The couple continued to travel the theatrical
circuit, and on June 7, 1912, a blazing hot day, my mother, Renee, was born
in a hotel room in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where her parents had arrived for a
one-night show. It was a difficult birth. For a time, the doctor summoned to
the hotel was concerned that Ruby and the baby, weakened by a long labor,
might die. Mother and daughter eventually recovered. After leaving the new
baby daughter with Ruby’s parents in Milwaukee, the couple continued their
careers on the road.
The marriage lasted about four years. Ruby apparently had not married
Barry for better or worse venues. After she ascended to better roles in bigger
cities, their careers diverged, and they parted. You could see this in the playbills.
Hers were printed on glossy paper and had venues in Chicago, Detroit, and
other big cities. His were published on pulp paper. He got his gigs in places
like Waco, Texas, and Duluth, Minnesota.
Actually, his career had taken a disastrous turn. In the years before World
War I, Conners traveled the country as a popular speaker in support of a
fledgling actors’ union, the White Rats. In December 1916, some members
staged a spontaneous strike in Oklahoma City that quickly spread to Boston
and New York and then nationally. The strike lasted for two months. In the
end, the Rats were beaten, their union emasculated.
Besides notices of his union speaking appearances, the trunk contained
blank union contracts, a long poem he wrote lamenting the failed strike, and
a personal letter of condolence from Harry Mountford, who headed the union.
During a subsequent Federal Trade Commission investigation of the theater
owners’ tactics during the strike, a theater attorney claimed that only a dozen
people were blacklisted afterward. Whatever the number, my grandfather was
one of them.
By the summer of 1917, Conners had hit rock bottom. At the age of thirty-
five, he was banned from making a living in the job to which he had devoted
most of his adult life. After failing to find new work, he left for the West Coast.
Conners ended up living in a rooming house in the northern California wilder-
ness near Central City. He was able to scratch out a living there for five years
by writing vaudeville routines for his old friends and working as a hunting
and fishing guide. Some of his writings, including a long, humorous account
of a wilderness camping trip, were in the trunk.
My interviews with my mother led to an important paper carefully folded
away in another of her old books. It documented an unusual legal agreement
with Edward Esmonde, a New York theatrical agent and longtime friend of my
grandfather’s. In return for half of Conners’s income from his creative work,

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 My Grandfather’s Trunk

Esmonde agreed to establish him in an apartment in New York City and pay
all expenses while he wrote plays.
And so Conners left the California wilderness behind. After a joyous reunion
with his eleven-year-old daughter, still living with her maternal grandparents in
Milwaukee, he went on to New York. He set up shop in an apartment building
overlooking 58th Street, near Central Park, where Esmonde lived with his wife
and daughter, and began working on several plays.
Shortly thereafter, he fired off a letter to daughter Renee in which he could
hardly contain his excitement: “On Monday I have a conference with the two
men who are going to do the play [Mad Honeymoon]. I saw them yesterday and
they were both wonderful to me—told me how delighted they were with the
play. . . . And on top of that they talked of doing some of the other plays.”
Renee sent a return letter in which she shyly asked for advice about which
picture of him she ought to wear in the gold locket he had given her. It was
the first exchange in a long correspondence between the two as Barry moved
to reinforce the new relationship and reestablish himself as a real father. From
August 1922 through the summer of 1923, Conners wrote her regularly chatty
and affectionate letters, which my mother carefully saved. He sent pictures and
playbills, reports on the status of his plays, and offered tourist-like impressions
of New York. The letters also slowly assumed the burden of repairing a grow-
ing rift between Renee and her absent mother. Actress Ruby, also working in
New York, was rarely home. Worse, she didn’t write and returned some of her
daughter’s letters with punctuation and spelling corrected. Renee seemed to
have pretty well given up on her.
Over the next eight years, Conners wrote seven comedies produced on
Broadway. One of these was Hell’s Bells, in which Shirley Booth and Humphrey
Bogart made their Broadway debuts as young lovers. Both their careers got a
boost from the critics. An undated and unidentified review in the trunk noted
simply, “Miss Booth is charming and handles her proposal scene beautifully.
Mr. Bogart was the best actor in the company.”
My grandfather saved scores of reviews of his plays but neglected to date
many of them or, sometimes, even to note the name of the newspaper. As time
went on, he got ever more careless about that. He also saved various drafts of
The Patsy, his most enduring play. After its nine-month run on Broadway, in
1925–26, it lived on for many years in new amateur and professional produc-
tions. (There are references in the trunk to productions in London, Prague,
and Budapest.)
The play still has legs. A movie version of the play, starring Marion Davies,
has been shown several times in recent years. A new, glowing review of the

77
Barry Rohan

refurbished movie is also on-line. The story, characters, and much of the lan-
guage of the original play are captured in the movie.
The strength of the play is a romantic leading lady who is not merely beauti-
ful but also clever, sassy, and unpredictable. Many critics fell in love with the
character Patricia Harrington and thought she was a new and refreshing hero-
ine on the American stage. The part substantially boosted the careers of three
actresses who played the role in the 1920s. The play is a twist on Cinderella.
Patricia, a mischievous flapper, is the underdog pitted against her older sister,
Grace, and her socially ambitious mother. Patricia is always in her mother’s
doghouse. Patricia finds a staunch ally in her father, Bill, with whom she has
a warm relationship. But Bill travels a lot on business, and so he fails to save
Patricia and straighten out his shrewish wife until late in the play.
The striking thing about The Patsy is how closely the character of the
mother mimics Conners’s ex-wife, Ruby, who seemed born to play the part of
a woman whose ambition has made her a neglectful, even nasty, mother. Like
Patricia Harrington, Renee felt ignored and needed to be emotionally rescued
by her loving father. Even as his play was running on Broadway, Conners did
his best to achieve that. (But he, too, was hampered by the need to be almost
always out of town on business.) Some of the play’s dialogue between father
and daughter treads the edge of actual words spoken to Renee by her mother
and father on a number of occasions. As in real life, Patsy’s father tries to re-
assure his disbelieving daughter that her mother really loves her, all evidence
to the contrary. And he blames her mother’s inability to show her love on the
trauma of Patricia’s birth.
Alas, life is not fiction; unlike Patsy’s father, my grandfather was never able
to straighten out Ruby. Even in the play, mother and daughter are never exactly
reconciled. In real life, Conners celebrated his newfound success by inviting
Renee and her grandmother Blackburn to join him for summers in the New
York area. He also began providing substantial support to the Blackburn family.
This eventually included a princess-like $100-a-month allowance for Renee
(the equivalent of over $1,000 in today’s currency). By 1925, he moved out of
his New York hotel and into the first permanent home of his adult life, an old
farmhouse in the growing artist colony near Westport, Connecticut.
Beginning in 1926, fourteen-year-old Renee, chaperoned by her grandmoth-
er, began spending her summers in Connecticut with her father. The ritual
continued throughout her teenage years and later included trips to Hollywood.
Conners’s very own Patricia Harrington had been rescued in style.
After the stock market crash in 1929 and the onset of the Depression, New
York theater audiences and money for new productions began to dry up. Con-
ners joined Fox Film Corporation as a screenwriter in 1930. (The company

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 My Grandfather’s Trunk

would become Twentieth Century Fox in a corporate merger five years later.)
Over the next two and a half years, Conners wrote or co-wrote the scripts for
sixteen movies, including comedies, dramas, mysteries, and westerns. Some
were original, some adapted from novels. Among the adaptations were three
of the earliest Charlie Chan movies. The trunk shed no light on this part of
his career, but I found a full list of his screenwriting credits on the Internet
Movie Database Web site (imdb.com).
The record comes to an abrupt end on January 4, 1933, in an event marked
by the shortest article in the trunk’s collection that had so long served as the
family’s only obituary. A two-inch-column story in a Los Angeles newspaper
notes simply that Barry Conners, Fox Film Corp. screenwriter, died of suf-
focation in a fire in his Hollywood apartment building. But now, thanks
to the possibilities of research, the old news clipping has new power. My
grandfather’s memory has been more fully restored to the family, and the
emotional landscape has changed. For the first time, I feel the impact of his
death and the tragedy of such a promising life cut short. I not only know him
better but also better understand a crucial father-daughter relationship in my
mother’s emotional life, which, to my astonishment, has played on Broadway
and late-night TV.
Finally, the project provided the satisfaction of justice achieved. A once-ne-
glected story is now available in perpetuity on the public record. The research
produced a 10,000-word biography, and it and several boxes of Conners’s per-
sonal papers have been accepted into the University of Wisconsin’s collection of
theatrical history. Meanwhile, my mother’s quiet obsession—the trunk—has
moved on, this time to my home in suburban Detroit.
An unusual family tradition continues.

Works Consulted
Guernsey, Otis L. Directory of the American Theater, 1894–1971. New York:
Dodd, Mead, 1971.
Internet Movie Database, <http://us.imdb.com>.
Laurie, Joe. Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Place. New York: Henry
Holt, 1953.
Leither, Samuel L. The Encyclopedia of the New York Stage, 1920–1930. Vols. 1
and 2. New York: Greenwood, 1985.
Lukas, Anthony J. Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a
Struggle for the Soul of America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Maltin, Leonard. Movie and Video Guide, 2000 Edition. New York: Signet,
1999.
Mantle, Burns, ed. Best Plays of 1923–24. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1976.

79
Barry Rohan

———. Best Plays of 1924–25. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1976.

———. Best Plays of 1925–1926. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1976.
———. Best Plays of 1928–29. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1976.
Robertson, David. The History of World Cinema. New York: Stein and Day,
1973.
Rusie, Robert. “Broadway 101: The History of the Great White Way.” Talkin’
Broadway. 1999. <http://www.talkinbroadway.com/bway101/5.html>.
Slide, Anthony. The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville. Westport, CT: Greenwood,
1994.
Snyder, Robert W. Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New
York. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.
Stein, Charles, ed. American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries. New
York: Knopf, 1984.

80
0ART4HREE

When Personal, Cultural,

and Historical Memory
Shape the Politics of the Archives
 
Colonial Memory, Colonial Research
A Preamble to a Case Study
Victor Villanueva

The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves
only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.
—Gabriel García Márquez

A Memory (2003)
His deathbed was an industrial hospital bed in a cold, ascetic, overly lit
room in the hospice wing of the giant VA hospital in Spokane, Washing-
ton. The thick, wavy black hair that he once had been so proud of was
gone, some white wisps left, yet a fine-toothed comb still rested beside him.
He had been in a coma. His wife, his children, his grandchildren spoke
words of love to him, prayers to wing him along. A cough, a clenching of
teeth, and a tightening of muscles that pulled him into a fetal position,
and he was dead. Dad. Dead. So far from home.
This is where the story starts. With Dad.
Dad would speak of the young man who had dated his sister. This young
man had wavy black hair and a good physique (that mattered to Dad, a
good physique), and the young man loved the Island. The U.S. govern-
ment had finally figured out that the men who walked around wearing
black guayaberas, the loose-fitting shirts of the tropics, were revolutionar-
ies, members of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico, led by Dr. Pedro
Albizu Campos, el Maestro, the Teacher.
The young man who had dated Dad’s sister, mi tía Margarita, had
run into the tropical rainforest, el Yunque, where Dad, himself a boy,
would bring him dry clothes and food.
I don’t know the story beyond that.
Dad would always go on to lament that his sister married someone else.

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Victor Villanueva

In Search of Rememory
But I had to know. This might be the postcolonial era, but here remains
the colony, no matter the convolutions and euphemisms. And here remains
this man, this man who had a revolutionary force and no revolution, things
I knew nothing about apart from my father’s nostalgia about the man of el
Yunque, mi tía’s boyfriend. And here were the politics of my father when I was
a child—my father, who seemed to give up talking of politics, to give up the
idea that he would return to the Island, that the Island was there to return to,
the permanence of exile, albeit an exile to a wife who did not desire a return
to the homeland where her memories are of abandonment and being sold as
chattel, an exile in the estrangement of his children from his culture. And
Dad would introduce me as “my son, Fidel,” a matter I took as ridicule when I
was twenty-five and when I was fifty came to wonder if it were intended to be
honorific. And memories of Dad: “Straight ahead, and get Castro!,” laughing
at the obsession against Castro and its failure (Castro having now survived
nine hostile U.S. presidents).
Exile. Alienation. What does one do when one becomes fully conscious of
the alienation that arises from exile, of being racialized, of knowing something
ain’t right and there ain’t no puttin’ it right but can’t be no ignoring the wrong?
Racism, its tie to colonialism, its tie to language and language-in-action, its
corrosive effect, it’s leaving holes in memory, like empty pockets in the brain.
Dad’s son had made it, a professor with minor notoriety, the middle class now,
speaking and writing against racism, trying to understand what allows rac-
ism to continue when biological explanations fall apart, when stereotypes are
stereotypically realized to be mere stereotypes, the son who looks at language,
thinking nothing happens without the word, the son who nevertheless has to
feel the irony of making a prideful claim—I am a Puerto Rican—spoken calmly,
a simple assertion, a matter of fact, yet realizing that this is a Puerto Rican who
knows nothing beyond Dad’s stories of Puerto Rico, a Nuyorican, but one
whose time in New York preceded the word, the identity, “Nuyorican.” Exile
and Alienation: like amnesia, lost memory. It was time to recover the culture,
its past, its connection to who my father was and who our people were.

Serendipity
Research is a funny process. So much of it is serendipity. A student having to
take a Spanish translation exam hands me the piece she’s submitting for the
translation. Its title is “Hostos, Martí y Albizu: Su Critica del Imperialismo.”
Haltingly, I learn of Albizu, of his words, of his anti-imperialist discourse.
I look to archives in English. I find some biographies. A friend and con-
tributor to this volume, Gail Okawa, has been to the National Archives in

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Washington, D.C. She connects me to her contact there. Preparing to go, I

search the Internet. What I find, I find disturbing. Most of it concerns the
assassination of John F. Kennedy; a summary of past assassins and assassina-
tion attempts is all that can be found on Albizu. But he had never assassinated
nor taken part in an assassination. Surely Dad would have mentioned that. I
knew of the Puerto Rican attempt on President Truman but had not heard of
Albizu’s involvement. The language of the FBI reports amounted to pointing
to Albizu as the inspiration of assassination. The United States likes, needs,
ringleaders. Decide I’ll have to take a different tack. That tack has yet to
develop fully. This is a preamble, after all.
Another student, a Puerto Rican doctoral student (now a professor) of soci-
ology, hands me a manuscript, La Palabra Como Delito (The Word as Crime).
And in my less-than-fluent Spanish, I discover that the pictures contained
therein were all taken by the FBI in its long surveillance of Albizu. And I
discover the basis of all that surveillance, the crimes for which he would spend
the majority of his life in prison: speeches. Twelve speeches, in particular, and
a law (Law 53 of a general gag order—la Ley de la Mordaza) that stipulated that
the word was very literally the equivalent of weapons (“Ensayo introductorio”
11). But because I am English dominant, a postcolonial product, I try to find
those twelve speeches in English.
But I find only fragments of the speeches of Dr. Albizu Campos in Eng-
lish. This is the case study I would draw, this man called a terrorist, this man
sentenced to eighty years’ imprisonment for what he said—sedition. My need
to recover something of ancestry becomes deeply tied to rhetoric. His is the
crime of being an effective rhetor.
Yet how effective was he really? It’s hard to see what his danger might have
been. He was a hero followed by few. His was the voice heard by the many but
truly listened to only by the few, the voice whose rhetoric condemned him,
whose rhetoric was a crime. He was called “el Maestro,” a powerful speaker,
with thousands gathering to listen to his deliberative rhetoric for freedom.
He urged the people to reclaim their cultural history and national symbols,
like the national anthem and the monoestrella, the one-star flag. But though
he spoke for the worker and the peasant, his appeal was limited to the middle
class when time came for votes. For all his speaking, for all his attracting of
audiences, ballots told of a remarkably small following.
Research now takes a traditional turn. Books. Discover the history of Puerto
Rico. Find what I can on Albizu. Eventually, thanks to the Internet, I find
the one book written in English that is about Albizu. It dates to 1971. One
must wonder how that can be. From here, I follow the trail. It’s still ahead.
But this much I know:

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Victor Villanueva

Albizu’s Context
Pedro Albizu Campos was—is—seen as a revolutionary. But there was no
revolution; there will be no revolution. Revolution requires unity. Unity means
a clear understanding of one’s status. But Puerto Rico’s status, its identity, is
a discursive whirlwind. A rhetorician reels at the obfuscation. Puerto Rico
is a free nation: that’s the Spanish rendering of a “commonwealth.” It is a
commonwealth, free, except that it’s a protectorate, under the protection of
the U.S. state and military, the military that until recently used an inhabited
island of Puerto Rico for target practice with fully armed heavy weaponry. So
Puerto Rico has a colonial relationship to the United States, with neocolonial
economic dependence on the United States. Its people cannot vote for the
president of the United States, can’t have a president of its own, and can only
provide a non-voting representative to the U.S. Congress. Puerto Rico is a free,
autonomous, dependent, protected, neocolonial, colonial state with postcolo-
nial identity problems. Albizu would have been seven years old when the United
States first bombed Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War.
The United States took Manifest Destiny to a new plane in 1898, at the end
of a century of revolutions throughout the world, including the U.S. South
rebelling against its North. At the same time as the U.S. Civil War, Spain was
dealing with a number of revolutions from her subject nations. By the 1860s,
Spain had acquiesced; the spirit of Simón Bolívar had remained strong. By
1897, Puerto Rico had created its own economic infrastructure. It believed
Spain was about to set it free.
Then, while Puerto Rico seemed to be winning the war of diplomacy with
Spain, the revolution in Cuba seemed more and more likely to end with a
black Cuban victory. The wealthy white Cubans would have none of it. And
the United States, still reeling from the Haitian revolution, would have none
of it. An American ship is mysteriously blown up, the Maine. Spaniards are
blamed. Or was it the Cubans? In a famous story, it is said that when cor-
respondent Frederick Remington wrote William Randolph Hearst to ask to
come back home from a peaceful Cuba in 1898, Hearst wrote back: “Please
remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” And war it was.
And the United States wins the Philippines, Guam, Cuba, and Puerto Rico
(Creelman 177–78).

From Sandra María Esteves:

It Is Raining Today
...
La lluvia contains our history
In the space of each tear Cicique valleys and hills

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 Colonial Memory, Colonial Research

Taíno, Arawak, Carib, Ife, Congo, Angola, Mesa

Mandinko, Dahome, Amer, African priests tribes
Of the past
Murdered ancestors
Today, voices in the mist
Where is our history?
What are the names washed down the sewer
In the septic flood?
I pray to the rain
Give me back my rituals
Give back truth
Return the remnants of my identity. . . .
Speak to me of rain.

Albizu’s Beginnings
Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos was born in Tenerías Village of Ponce in Puerto
Rico. He had been born to Juana Campos and Alejandro Albizu. Doña
Juana’s brother was Juan Morel Campos, a famous Puerto Rican composer
of danzas, the classical music of Puerto Rico. Don Pedro was born of the
Island and its culture.
In 1912, Pedro Albizu Campos is awarded a scholarship to study chemistry
at the University of Vermont. A year later he enters Harvard, where he earns
a law degree. While at Harvard, he studies law, English literature, philoso-
phy, chemical engineering, and military science. He learns English, French,
German, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, and Greek. Then comes the First World
War. Albizu enters the U.S. Army, a second lieutenant, assigned to an African
American regiment. This is his first sustained exposure to U.S. racism. The
United States sees him as black, though given the breadth of racial mixes of
Puerto Rico—and all its labels (from blanco to moreno to amarillo to café-con-
leche to trigueño to others I barely remember)—he would have likely been seen
as mulato. His wife, a Peruvian, thought he was Hindu when they first met
(aided in part by that first meeting having taken place during a lecture by the
famous Hindu intellectual Rabindranath Tagore). Albizu’s exposure to U.S.
racism within the military affects his attitudes toward the United States and its
relation to what he consistently referred to as the motherland, Puerto Rico.
After the war, Albizu returns to Harvard, where he works with world lead-
ers who are seeking independence for their own countries. He works with
the Indian nationalist leader under Gandhi, Sudas Ghandra Gose, and with
Rabindranath Tagore. When don Pedro meets Irish statesman Eamon de Val-
era at Harvard, he helps to draft the constitution for the Irish Free State and

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Victor Villanueva

takes part in establishing several centers in Boston for Irish independence. In

the midst of all of this, he meets the Peruvian scholar and scientist Dr. Laura
Meneses. They marry in 1922. Upon obtaining his law degree, Dr. Albizu
Campos declines a post on the U.S. Supreme Court and another with the U.S.
diplomatic corps, choosing to return to Puerto Rico to take on the causes of
the poor and disaffected.

Albizu the Activist

In 1922, Albizu joins the Puerto Rican Unity Party. When, in 1924, the Party
joins with the Republican Party and decides not to pursue Puerto Rican in-
dependence, Albizu leaves the Unity Party and joins the Nationalist Party of
Puerto Rico, where he is quickly elected vice president. Three years later, he
travels to Santo Domingo, Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela,
seeking solidarity for the Puerto Rican independence movement. By 1930, he is
elected president of the Nationalist Party and forms the first Women’s Nation-
alist Committee. Julia de Burgos is a member. During his presidency, in 1931,
Albizu exposes the conducting of experiments by members of the Rockefeller
Institute. He accuses the Rockefeller Institute of deliberately infecting several
Puerto Rican citizens with cancer, causing the deaths of thirteen. Dr. Corne-
lius Rhoades, the chief pathologist for the study, admits to the charge, stating
the “Porto Ricans [sic] are the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish
race of men ever to inhabit this sphere,” so he had done his “best to further
the process of extermination by killing off eight and transplanting cancer into
several more. . . . All physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the
unfortunate subjects” (Vankin and Whalen 297). Rhoades was later given a
seat on the Atomic Energy Commission and awarded the Legion of Merit by
the U.S. government. For all that, the Nationalist Party loses significantly at
the following year’s election, 1932. In 1933, Albizu represents sugarcane workers
against the U.S. sugar interests in Puerto Rico and wins.
Then the trouble.
In 1935, four Nationalists are killed by police under the command of
Colonel E. Francis Riggs at the University of Río Piedras. The following year,
Nationalists Hiram Rosado and Elias Beauchamp kill Colonel Riggs. They
are arrested and executed without a trial. Albizu publicly declares them mar-
tyrs and heroes. That declaration is sufficient for the San Juan federal court
to order Albizu’s arrest for his rhetoric, for sedition. A jury of seven Puerto
Ricans and five North Americans vote seven to five not guilty. Judge Robert
A. Cooper calls for a new jury, this time with ten North Americans and two
Puerto Ricans seated. Albizu is found guilty (ten to two voting guilty). He is

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sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment at a federal penitentiary in the United

States. The year is 1937.
Nineteen forty-seven. Albizu returns to Puerto Rico, where, according
to the FBI, he is believed to be preparing, along with other members of the
Nationalist Party, for an armed struggle against the proposed plans to change
Puerto Rico’s political status into a commonwealth of the United States. In
1948, the founder of the Popular Democratic Party, José Luis Muñoz Marín,
is elected governor of Puerto Rico by a majority of the people. In 1950, the
U.S. Congress declares Puerto Rico a commonwealth, along the lines of Mas-
sachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky. Yet Puerto Rico is only
statelike in its form of government, not in its relation to the other forty-eight
United States (Alaska and Hawaii not becoming states until 1959). Within
Puerto Rico, “commonwealth” is translated to “Estado Libre Asociado,” liter-
ally “Free Associated State.” Yet it is generally recognized that Puerto Rico’s
association to the United States is neither as a state nor as free. Recognizing the
irony in Puerto Rico’s new status, a group of Puerto Rican Nationalists storms
Governor Muñoz Marín’s mansion, la Fortaleza, on October 30, 1950. As part
of a coordinated effort, Nationalists simultaneously attack the U.S. Capitol
Building and Blair House, where President Truman is in residence while the
White House is under repair. Albizu is charged with masterminding the at-
tacks, or at least inspiring them, Law 53 stating that to advocate overthrow is
the same as taking part in overthrow—words as weapons. Albizu is sentenced
to eighty years’ imprisonment.
Albizu is pardoned in 1953 by Governor Muñoz Marín, but the pardon
is revoked the following year, after the 1954 Nationalist attack on the U.S.
House of Representatives, when four Puerto Rican Nationalists fired into
the gallery of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Some members of
Congress are wounded. The shooters do not resist arrest, claiming the action
was to attract the world’s attention to their cause. The Nationalists claim no
association to Albizu.
While in prison, Albizu repeatedly charges that he is a target of human ra-
diation experiments. U.S. officials and the U.S. and Puerto Rican press dismiss
the allegations as the ravings of a madman. Yet his skin is severely swollen and
cracking. Although Albizu’s allegations are never proven, the U.S. Department
of Energy does disclose in 1995 that human radiation experimentation had
indeed been conducted on prisoners without prisoner consent from the 1950s
through the 1970s. By 1964, don Pedro is partially paralyzed from a stroke and
is dying. In November of that year, Governor Muñoz Marín again pardons
Albizu. The following year, Pedro Albizu Campos dies: April 21, 1965.

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Albizu’s Politics
Although there is common sentiment that Albizu was a communist, like
Cuba’s revolutionary leader, Albizu was politically very conservative. Albizu
believed that Puerto Rico’s cultural ways should remain loyal to the cultural
ideals of Spain and that those ideals are best reflected in Roman Catholicism.
In other words, Albizu was a Christian Democrat, Latin America’s conserva-
tive ideology. He was a Christian Democrat who believed that Puerto Rico
and its people should be free.
Don Pedro argued in court and at the podium that the U.S. occupation
of Puerto Rico had been illegal. He claimed that the Paris Peace Treaty of
1898 should have been nullified by the fact that Spain had previously granted
autonomy to Puerto Rico in 1897. Having granted Puerto Rico independence,
Spain had no rights with which to hand it to the United States. Further, Puerto
Rico had never participated in the treaty, nor had its people been consulted.
Puerto Rico’s right to freedom, Albizu declared, was no less than the United
States’ right, fought for through the subversion of the Boston Tea Party and
the outright rebellion led by George Washington. Yet unlike Washington
against Britain, Albizu had never borne arms against the United States. Albizu
was armed only with words, words of weapons: “The motherland’s right to
independence is not open to discussion. And if it is discussed, it will be with
bullets” (qtd. in Ribes Tovar 190). It would be these words and others like
them that would cause A. Cecil Snyder, the U.S. district attorney for Puerto
Rico from 1933 to 1942, to write to J. Edgar Hoover that Albizu, through the
Nationalist Party, “has conducted throughout the Island a campaign of pub-
lic speeches in favor of Independence which constantly harp on the fact that
the purpose of the United States is to exploit Puerto Rico and Its citizens.”
Albizu had become an irritant who not only claimed exploitation but proved
it, thanks to the sugar industry, thanks to the Rockefeller Institute, thanks
to the everyday experience of Puerto Ricans generally. Yet for all the ire, he
remained a symbolic figure, not one who ever really moved the masses, never
rousing more than 5 percent of Puerto Rico’s voters.
The Spanish-speaking nations of this hemisphere nevertheless remember
him, honor him. Sources in Spanish are plentiful. The twelve speeches that
condemned him remain intact, extant, in print—in Spanish. But here I am, a
postcolonial subject, an English professor, no revolutionary, needing to under-
stand something of my memory, my cultural memory, my ancestral memory,
needing to understand how words that don’t incite people to revolution can
be seen as dangerously revolutionary.

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 Colonial Memory, Colonial Research

A year before he died, Dad and Mom were in my living room after at-
tending my oldest daughter’s wedding. I played the Buena Vista Social
Club for them; watched them dance that Puerto Rican version of the
mambo, what we called “ dirty mambo” when I was a kid, what later
became salsa, Mom and Dad moving hips and rubber knees, the eighty-
year-old man and his seventy-five-year-old sweetie.
I had kindled their memory. And I had kindled my own, of my parents
and how they partied when I was young.
But something else was kindled. I thought of Ry Cooder, this musician
who ventured into Cuba to capture the music of my parents’ youth and
in some sense my own. I didn’t fret over appropriation. I wondered at
his courage.
Courage.
The research will have to take me to Puerto Rico. But I find that I
am afraid to venture to Puerto Rico, a deep-seated shame in having lost
so much, even though it was not my doing, not my shame, not even my
parents’, echoes of Franklin Roosevelt speaking of the Anglicization of the
people of Puerto Rico as a necessary component to Operation Bootstrap.
Teddy to FDR—the Roosevelts—and my ancestry and my status, the
white racialized, proud of my heritage, embarrassed to confront it because
of the postcolonial process of erasure and the substitution of the loss of
memory with myth, the myth that a language, Spanish, is a race.
But Mami and Dad won’t dance again in my living room. Nevermore.
And I will have to face the shame. Alone. To keep their memory alive, and
to keep alive the memory of a people.

Works Cited
Acosta, Ivonne. “Ensayo introductorio: La palabra como delito.” La Palabra
Como Delito: Los discursos por los que condenaron a Pedro Albizu Campos,
1948–1950. San Juan: Editorial Cultural, 1993. 11–24.
Creelman, James. On the Great Highway: The Wanderings and Adventures of
a Special Correspondent. Boston: Lothrop, 1901.
“DOE Openness: Human Radiation Experiments.” U.S. Department of Energy.
May 23, 2006 <http://www.eh.doe.gov/ohre/>.
Esteves, Sandra María, “It Is Raining Today.” Puerto Rican Writers at Home
in the USA: An Anthology. Ed. Faythe Turner. Seattle: Open Hand, 1991.
188.

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Victor Villanueva

García Márquez, Gabriel. “The Solitude of Latin America: Nobel Lecture.”

Nobelprize.org. Dec. 8, 1982. Oct. 29, 2005 <http://nobelprize.org/litera-
ture/laureates/1982/marquez-lecture.html>.
Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 2005.
Laviera, Tato. “Graduation Speech.” Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets
Café. Ed. Miguel Algarin, Bob Holman, and Nicole Blackman. New York:
Owl, 1994. 332.
National Archives. Warren Commission, Appendix 7. Archives.gov. May 23, 2006
<archives.gov/research_room/jfk/warren_commission/warren_commission_
report_appendix7.html>.
Ribes Tovar, Frederico. Albizu Campos: Puerto Rican Revolutionary. New York:
Plus Ultra, 1971.
Rojas Osorio, Carlos. “Hostos, Martí y Albizu: Su Critica del Imperialismo.”
Exégesis: Revista de la Universidad de Puerto Rico en Humacao 15 (2002):
55–58.
Snyder, A. Cecil. Carta al director del FBI Edgar Hoover sobre don Pedro Albizu
Campos y el Partido Nacionalista puertorriqueño. Puerto Rico en breve. May
23, 2006 <http://www.preb.com/FBI /15en1936.htm>.
Vankin, Jonathan, and John Whalen. The Fifty Greatest Conspiracies of All
Time: History’s Biggest Mysteries, Coverups, and Cabals. Sacramento: Cita-
del, 1994.
Wagenheim, Kal, and Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim, eds. The Puerto Ricans:
A Documentary History. Princeton: Markus Weiner, 2002.

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Unbundling
Archival Research and Japanese American
Communal Memory of U.S. Justice
Department Internment, 1941–45
Gail Y. Okawa

“My dear Sumi,” he wrote on pale blue paper

stamped “Detained Alien Enemy Mail EXAMINED.”
Thirty-five letters, formally signed,
“ from your father, Tamasaku Watanabe”
from Lordsburg and Santa Fe, New Mexico,
bundled and tied with a deep red cord.
My mother’s letters to him
at Lordsburg Alien Internment Camp and
Santa Fe Detention Station,
kept long past his death,
bundled and tied with care,
stored in old cardboard boxes.
Each page captures time and feeling,
constructs memory for descendants
who care to read them,
memory so fragile that it can be lost
in an oversight,
in a word.

I was born during a World War II blackout, I’ve been told. My mother was
carried to Queen’s Hospital in an ambulance, probably one of the only vehicles
allowed on the road under those conditions in Honolulu, even a year after Pearl

I dedicate this essay to the memory of my grandfather Reverend Tamasaku Watanabe

(1882–1968) and to the memories of Kazumi Matsumoto (1902–2003) and Reverend
Shingetsu Akahoshi (1907–2007), internee survivors whom I had the privilege of meeting
and interviewing for this study; both lived one hundred years.

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Gail Y. Okawa

Harbor was attacked. As a child, I was shielded completely from the war with
the exception of duck-and-cover exercises in preschool and the wailing sirens
of ambulances that terrified me for years.
I didn’t know that my maternal grandfather, Tamasaku Watanabe, was
absent and don’t remember exactly when he appeared in my life, a tall, quiet,
almost austere man, a Presbyterian minister who was a physical presence once
or twice a year when he came to visit us in Honolulu from the Island of Maui.
My warmest memory of him comes from sometime in my pre-adolescence:
When he was on one of his visits, I had to stay at home from school one day
with a cold and made egg salad and Spam sandwiches for our lunch. A man
of few words, he expressed his enjoyment and approval of the simple meal
by smiling impishly and remarking that I should open a sandwich shop—a
compliment that I’ve never forgotten.
When I was in high school in Honolulu, I first learned from a neighbor
that this grandfather had been imprisoned in an American internment camp
on the mainland during World War II. My family had never talked about
it, and neither did he. I was shaken and ran home to question my parents; I
remember them confirming the fact of his incarceration and saying only that
“he came back a changed man.” It seemed to be a closed subject at that point,
and I don’t remember pursuing it. He died of cancer in 1968 when I was away
from home, teaching in a Virginia women’s college.
Many years later, in the 1990s, my mother shared some letters that her father
had written to her from addresses in Lordsburg and Santa Fe, New Mexico,
mostly on light blue government aerograms printed with the English, Ger-
man, Italian, and Japanese imperatives “Do not write here! Nicht hier
schreiben! Non scrivete qui! Kaku nakare!” and stamped with “Detained
Alien Enemy Mail examined by [censor’s initials] U.S.I.&N.S.”1 In some
cases, “Prisoner of War Mail” had been crossed out and “Internee Mail” writ-
ten in its place, to me an interesting confusion and conflation of terms and
people. In all, there were eight letters from the Lordsburg Internment Camp
and twenty-seven from the Santa Fe Detention Station (later called the Santa
Fe Alien Internment Camp, according to return addresses). Initially, I thought
they would provide some researcher with rich material, hesitating myself due
to the historical and private nature of the documents. Yet later, as I opened
box after cardboard box and found documents carefully bundled and labeled
among my grandfather’s papers, I began to feel that he had left them for us—for
me—to understand what had happened to him during those war years. This
is a story about such bundles, the archival work that brings them back to us,
and the process of constructing a community memory—unbundling and re-
bundling as processes being as intricate as the bundling itself. Eventually, the

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rebundling would evolve into a book-length study on the mainland internment

of Hawai’i’s issei (the immigrant generation).

Gaps
Although Tamasaku Watanabe was a diligent and meticulous record keep-
er—he had pocket-sized notebooks and diaries in his boxes, dating from 1922
through 1967—his notes from December 7, 1941,2 through the war years to
1944 are mysteriously absent. And although he kept many, if not all, of his
important papers (in English and Japanese) from that period, piecing them
together has left gaping holes and raised further questions for me. Why was
he arrested? What was he charged with? Where was he imprisoned, and by
whom? What kind of life did he lead in those facilities that President Franklin
D. Roosevelt referred to as “concentration camps”3 back in 1936? Who were
his friends and associates? What kinds of dilemmas did he face, and how did
he face them? In this research project, I have sought to fill some of those gaps
by locating other pieces of the puzzle.
Now I know that Reverend Watanabe was one of nearly nine hundred
Japanese immigrants in Hawai’i who had a fate still relatively unknown to
the general American public. One of the less-known facts about the World
War II internment is that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), as early as
December 7, 1941—and using previously prepared lists—seized and separately
imprisoned nearly eight thousand Japanese resident aliens (Kashima 125) from
the continent and the then-territories of Hawai’i and Alaska.4 Like Reverend
Watanabe, they were predominantly male immigrants, heads of households,
and community leaders detained, in most cases, for reasons no more substantial
than that they were Japanese. This little-known story is told over and over
again in internment literature and dramatized in films—fathers taken from
their families who often heard nothing about them for weeks or months.
Although many were longtime residents of the United States, as Japanese
immigrants they were designated as “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” based
on their race by discriminatory naturalization laws in the 1920s, and then
labeled “alien enemies” when hostilities broke out between the United States
and their country of origin, based on the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Plans
for their imprisonment were premeditated and covert, related to long and
complex surveillance operations. Paul Clark relates evidence revealing that
some camps were being constructed in New Mexico at Fort Stanton as early
as January 1941, followed by Fort Missoula in Montana and Fort Lincoln in
North Dakota (8). In all, the Justice Department oversaw thirteen camps with
many of the Japanese internees passing through or being incarcerated in Santa
Fe over the course of the war.

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Gail Y. Okawa

The Road to Santa Fe

In one of the ironies of life, I had been drawn to Santa Fe at least four times
earlier—to the Pueblo cultures, the adobe buildings, the museums of Native
cultures and international folk art, the stark surrounding landscape of juniper
trees and tumble weeds, the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Only on the last
two trips, in 1999 and 2000, did I have a vague awareness of my grandfather’s
presence there decades before. At those times, no one I talked to could tell
me where the internment camp had been located; it was as though it had
never existed.
In the fall of 2001, I learned that a group called the Committee for the World
War II Santa Fe Internment Camp Historical Marker was attempting to raise
funds to establish a memorial marker at the Santa Fe Internment Camp site,
and I excitedly contacted Colonel Joe Ando, U.S. Air Force (Retired), the son of
an internee and the co-chair of the committee. Finding this effort in progress,
having the reality of the internment camp confirmed, and learning that there
were others who sought to preserve this nearly forgotten part of history, I was
inspired to compose a sabbatical leave research proposal on “The Politics of
Language and Identity: The Case of Japanese Immigrants in U.S. Justice De-
partment Internment Camps during World War II.” A rather ambitious and,
I now know, naive proposal due to its broad scope, it set the theoretical stage
for me to examine the general Justice Department camp experience through
the lenses of language, literacy, and identity among Japanese internees.
In the midst of this, on the morning of September 11, 2001, as I was driving
to teach my classes at Youngstown State University, I heard words on National
Public Radio that called to mind Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds,” de-
scriptions of massive destruction and chaos as it was occurring in New York
City. This, as we now know, was no fabrication. As the day and its devastating
events unfolded, I met with my students and found myself asking them what
their responses were to the news, what the possible alternatives might be to the
“racial prejudice [and] wartime hysteria”5 that precipitated the internment of
Japanese immigrants and their American-born children after the attack on Pearl
Harbor and that could be unleashed against other groups as a result of 9/11. As I
developed my sabbatical proposal, the parallels and immediate relevance of my
research to contemporary events grew suddenly and increasingly evident.
Although the project itself was clearly outlined, the road to Santa Fe, literally
and figuratively, was hardly a direct one; it epitomized the roles of disappoint-
ment, success, spontaneity, and serendipity in research and the importance of
being open to any encounter. In the winter of 2002, I was focusing on learn-
ing what I could about Reverend Watanabe’s story and traveled to the Island

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of Hawai’i (also called “the Big Island”) to find the Ola’a Japanese Christian
Church, where my grandfather had his ministry at the outbreak of the Pacific
War. It was from here that he had been seized from his parsonage on December
7, 1941. What remained was an empty lot surrounded by an old moss-covered
stone wall. No parsonage. The original building, I learned, had become ter-
mite-ridden beyond cost-effective repair, so the church had been rebuilt on
another site. Now renamed the Puna United Church of Christ, it is no longer
the Japanese Christian church that served primarily issei plantation workers,
and although Reverend Watanabe’s photograph appears on the church’s office
wall on its roll of ministers, no one could tell me anything about him. The
church’s seventy-fifth anniversary history did devote five lines to him, some of
it erroneous, so I shared with the minister and his secretary what little I knew
at that point and later received a ninetieth anniversary bulletin that included
a line acknowledging my grandfather’s experience during the war. I began
to understand on some level the distinction that Pierre Nora makes between
history as a “reconstruction . . . a representation of the past” and memory as
“always a phenomenon of the present,” “in permanent evolution, subject to the
dialectic of remembering and forgetting, . . . and capable of lying dormant for
long periods only to be suddenly reawakened” (3)—the consequential fragil-
ity of that memory. Perhaps my brief visit had inadvertently caused Reverend
Watanabe to take on a different presence from the faded photo on the wall or
the forgotten lines in the previous church history; perhaps I had caused him
to be remembered.
Thanks to friends, I was able to stay at the Kilauea Military Camp, a mili-
tary recreation area on the Big Island prior to and since World War II and the
first facility where, according to my grandfather’s notes, he and others from
the island were imprisoned. During those clear, sunny days in February 2002,
I felt the enormity of the freedom that I assumed I had to come and go as I
pleased, in contrast to the men who had been taken there by force over six
decades before. Of that time, internee Muin Ozaki wrote:
As if to relish
Each step I take
On this great earth,
I walk—to the mess hall.
The only walk allowed.

Leaving the Big Island with little more than a vague sense of the places
where my grandfather had been, I was, of course, disappointed but chose
perseverance over discouragement. In March 2002, I planned a research trip

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Gail Y. Okawa

to Santa Fe devoted to collecting whatever I could on the internment camp

and the experience of the Japanese immigrants imprisoned there. Having
contacted Joe Ando of the Santa Fe historical marker committee, I received
helpful information and encouragement from him and also made plans to
meet with him during that time. This fifth trip to Santa Fe became pivotal to
my project and launched my study.
Staying with a colleague and friend who supported my research, I worked for
days in the New Mexico State Library, getting oriented and searching through
vertical files and microfilms, as well as in the New Mexico State Archives next
door, which produced various files of correspondence from the governors who
had served during the war years. There were many narratives here waiting to
be written. I began to imagine some of the possibilities. A tip from Joe Ando
also led me to seek out Thomas Chávez, former director of the Museum of
New Mexico’s Palace of the Governors, whose 1997 newspaper article drew
attention to the existence of the camp, and to search the files of the Fray An-
gélico Chávez Library at the Palace of the Governors. From an address found
in a file, I contacted Koichiro Okada, who had written a master’s thesis titled
“Forced Acculturation” and who kindly gave me a copy of this unpublished
work that paid rare attention to the issei in the Santa Fe Internment Camp
(SFIC) during World War II. Finally, with Joe’s directions and the help of
strangers, my friend and I were able to find the site of the internment camp,
now a thriving housing development.
The cumulative work, especially reading archival documents, book chap-
ters, and journal and newspaper articles, proved invaluable in establishing a
foundation on which I could begin to construct scenarios of the Santa Fe in-
ternment experience. It also helped me to gain a sense of the past anti-Japanese
attitudes in New Mexico, fueled by the large contingent of New Mexicans
involved in the Bataan Death March as well as by an evolving sense of Santa
Fe’s community history. This was a history apparently plagued by divisions
and conflicts brought to the fore by the SFIC historical marker project and
eventually healed by the courage of a few civic leaders. The only reference to
Reverend Watanabe, however, was his name on a roster of SFIC internees that
I found on microfilm.
As a result of my commitment to this research and because I was a family
member of an internee, Colonel Ando and Dr. Chávez invited me to attend
the dedication of the SFIC historical marker just three weeks later. I felt it
was a monumental privilege for a researcher in the early stages of a project to
be included in an event of such significance. Not only was it to be memorable
historically as something long overdue, but I knew it was also of great social

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and political importance to Santa Feans, having learned of the community

strife that had surrounded the establishment of the marker.
And it was indeed a special day. On April 20, 2002, many on a hill in Santa
Fe saw the coming together of people of different ethnicities, communities, and
generations and their efforts toward a common goal: establishing a stone marker
at Frank S. Ortiz Park to recognize the historical fact that during World War
II, a U.S. Justice Department internment camp existed on the site of the pres-
ent Casa Solana neighborhood; to memorialize the experience of thousands of
Japanese immigrants and American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry unjustly
incarcerated there between 1942 and 1946; and to heal old wounds.
Under an intensely blue and sunny sky, the event was also a baptism of wind
and dust for some 250 participants and onlookers—and the marker itself, a large,
six-ton granite boulder with a bronze plaque engraved with the following:
At this site, due east and below the hill, 4555 men of Japanese ancestry
were incarcerated in a Department of Justice Internment Camp from
March 1942 to April 1946. Most were excluded by law from becoming
United States citizens and were removed primarily from the West Coast
and Hawaii. During World War II, their loyalty to the United States
was questioned. Many of the men held here without due process were
long time resident religious leaders, businessmen, teachers, fishermen,
farmers, and others. No person of Japanese ancestry in the U.S. was
ever charged or convicted of espionage throughout the course of the
war. Many of the internees had relatives who served with distinction in
the American Armed Forces in Europe and in the Pacific. This marker
is placed here as a reminder that history is a valuable teacher only if we
do not forget our past.
With loyalty and patriotism being so critically in question sixty years
before—and with echoes of those questions so prevalent today in post-9/11
America—the Pledge of Allegiance recited at the ceremony conveyed layers
of unspoken meaning. To the crowd of local residents, visitors from places as
distant as Alaska, Hawai’i, and Washington, D.C., and honored guests from
the state and city, Chávez said, “We are here not to celebrate an event about
which none of us is proud; we are here to commemorate an event that hap-
pened; it is our history.”
The biting wind and dust we felt may not have been so different from the
conditions experienced by the men in the SFIC over half a century earlier.
Representing the internee families, Joe Ando commented on the self-censor-
ship among these men: “In many Japanese American families across this

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Gail Y. Okawa

country, our fathers never spoke to their children about their experiences
in the camps. It was a shameful, it was a painful experience.” And because
of the secrecy surrounding the DOJ facilities, such camps as the SFIC were
more misunderstood.
In the late 1990s, due to such historical misunderstandings, some World
War II veterans, who confused Japanese immigrants with the Japanese en-
emy, vehemently protested the proposed marker and caused a significant
controversy in the Santa Fe community. In the end, Santa Fe’s mayor, Larry
Delgado, broke the tie vote of the city council in favor of erecting the marker.
A cooperative effort of citizens of different ethnic and racial backgrounds,
the establishment of the SFIC marker represented a collective rather than a
single ethnic triumph.
I was moved by the attendance of internee families from all over the country
and by the social, political, and spiritual gravity of the event. At the luncheon
reception following the dedication, Colonel Ando asked me to speak to the
crowd, and I surprised myself by overcoming my shyness and addressing
the large audience as an intimate one, bound by the common inheritance of
internment and, among non–Japanese Americans, the desire not to forget.
The attentiveness of this audience brought the gravity of my project home to
me. I began to realize my place and the place of my research in relation to the
Japanese American community and to the American public at large.

The Road Home: Archival Research,

Personal Stories, and Communal Memory
Inspired by the enormity of my charge, I returned to Washington, D.C., where
I was serving as a scholar-in-residence at the Smithsonian Institution. With the
invaluable mentorship of veteran researchers Aiko Yoshinaga Herzig and the
late Jack Herzig, who had assisted the Commission on Wartime Relocation
and Internment of Civilians, and of Franklin Odo, director of the Smithsonian
Institution’s Asian Pacific American Program, months of work at the National
Archives—Archives I in Washington, D.C., and Archives II in College Park,
Maryland—produced five files on Tamasaku Watanabe: one from the Im-
migration and Naturalization Service (INS, RG 85), one from the Military
Government of the Territory of Hawaii (now RG 494), one from the Depart-
ment of Justice (including records from the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
RG 60), and two from the Office of the Provost Marshal General (RG 389).
Day after day, I dragged my computer bag with laptop and scanner over the
rough sidewalks and grassy areas of the National Mall to the historic halls of
Archives I or found a desk in the spacious second floor Researcher Room of the
contemporary Archives II and pored over hundreds of pages of typed memos

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and lists, mimeographed forms, and other reports, mostly carbon copies on
aging onion skin. Since I did not know my grandfather well, in a sense—very
ironically—I began to know him through these files created by his captors.
Although many documents overlapped, reflecting the multiple carbon copies
produced by the army’s bureaucracy, each file came to represent a different
view of the man, a somewhat different personality.
The first time I came across his mug shot in the INS file was especially
chilling for me as I imagined his humiliation. The degradation of knowing
that the authorities would reduce him to two demeaning photographs showed
in his hollow stare and grim expression. As I searched through his records and
other more general files from the Office of the Provost Marshal General and
the State Department, I came across the names of hundreds of others like
him—Fujitani, Ikuma, Izutsu, Kato, Kuniyuki, Maehara, Matsumoto, Mat-
suura, Miho, Ohara, men from Hawai’i, some his friends and acquaintances,
many complete strangers, all locked up as he was. All were given the designa-
tion “HJ” for Hawai’i Japanese in their civilian internee numbers. Eventually
it became clear to me that these men were treated as a discrete group and had
a unique experience, being shipped from the Hawaiian Islands over thousands
of miles of ocean and land to bone-chilling locations in the northern United
States and arid deserts in the Southwest, separated from their families for as
many as four years. Rather than studying the broader DOJ incarceration, which
by now I saw was massive in scope, I would focus on Reverend Watanabe and
the Hawai’i Japanese experience of removal and exile.6
In the last months of my stay in Washington, D.C., several incidents oc-
curred that provided another dimension to my text-based project. During a
presentation that I gave at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American
History, I shared examples of key documents that I had found at the National
Archives, among them a petition signed by about two hundred Hawai’i intern-
ees. As the documents circulated, there was a small commotion in one corner
of the room, and a young woman exclaimed that she had found her great-great-
grandfather’s signature on the petition. Her father and grandfather would be
very interested in speaking with me, she said. This contact eventually led to
my first interview a month later in Hawai’i with Edward Ikuma, a veteran of
the 100th Battalion, renowned in the European theater during World War II,
whose grandfather had been incarcerated with Reverend Watanabe.
Also at the presentation in Washington was Marcia Mau, a grandniece of
George Hoshida, who had been taken from the Big Island and who had illus-
trated people, places, and activities in what seems to be one of the few extant
visual records of the DOJ camp experience. She had found a sketch of my
grandfather in her copy of her granduncle’s memoirs! This was an astounding

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and precious gift, the first visual image I had seen of him beyond the single
photograph of him with his barracks-mates in Santa Fe, found among his
records. Knowing that the sketch existed, I could look for the original a year
later at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.
Marcia also told me about Reiko Odate Matsumoto, who lived in the D.C.
area and whose father had been taken from the Island of Kaua’i. Meeting Reiko
was another gift, for she not only granted me an interview but also shared
her father’s camp writings with me, the writings of a Buddhist minister who
“thought in haiku” and who belonged to the Literary Society of Santa Fe.
Reiko in turn told me about Reverend Shingetsu Akahoshi, also a Buddhist
minister, who, though not a resident of Hawai’i at the time of his arrest, was a
survivor of the internment and was visiting his children in Virginia. She called
me one day to ask if I wanted to accompany her to visit him, and although I
wasn’t at all prepared to conduct an interview in Japanese, I of course said yes.
Reverend Akahoshi, a feisty man in his early nineties, was amazingly clear in
memory and articulate in speech. He not only remembered my grandfather
in Santa Fe but vividly described a brief interaction that he had with him.
Another golden moment, more than I could have hoped for. Personal stories
were surfacing, the unwritten and spontaneous recollections of internee sur-
vivors like Reverend Akahoshi and the memories of the children of internees
like Reiko Matsumoto.
Returning to Hawai’i in January 2003, armed with various lists and files
from the National Archives, I planned to seek out internees who had made
the same journey to the mainland as Tamasaku Watanabe as well as the now-
elderly children of internees who may have had recollections and documents
from their fathers now gone. One way of learning my grandfather’s story was
to learn theirs. The question, of course, was how to find them. Again, the
theoretical plan would be modified by more productive realities.
Housed in the University of Hawai’i’s Center for Biographical Research
through the generosity of Craig Howes, its director, and Stanley Shaub, its
manager, I called George Akita, professor emeritus of history and a mentor
of mine decades before, simply to talk to him about my project and to share
the “good stuff ” that I’d been collecting. As luck would have it, he was in
Honolulu and was duly impressed by my documents and photographs. Things
snowballed from there. He introduced me to Tokiko Bazzell, the UH Library’s
Japan Collection librarian, who coincidentally had begun organizing an ex-
hibit for the sixtieth anniversary of the formation of the 442nd Regimental
Combat Team, the Japanese American unit celebrated for its heroism in the
European theater.7 Seeing my artifacts spurred her to invite me to partici-
pate in this exhibit, and, having had some museum experience in the past, I

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agreed to curate Honoring Our Grandfathers: Japanese Immigrants in U.S.

Department of Justice Internment Camps, 1941–45. Hours of curatorial work
on Reverend Watanabe’s papers and artifacts culminated in the following
message in April 2003:
On this auspicious occasion, as we honor the sons of Japanese immigrants
who served, fought, and died heroically in the U.S. military during World
War II, let us also remember their fathers, grandfathers, and others who
were concurrently incarcerated as “alien enemies” in U.S. Department
of Justice internment camps. The sense of duty and patriotism exhibited
by the sons was often a reflection of the values of their elders.8
It was meant as a reminder—to trigger Nora’s dormant memory, to create or
stimulate a consciousness. Like the memorial in Santa Fe established a year
earlier, it was a physical embodiment of cultural memory.
The exhibit led to an invitation to the reception celebrating the opening of
the sixtieth anniversary festivities and the several-faceted exhibit, an event that
put me in the company of now elderly veterans, some of whose fathers had been
interned. Their names were on one of my lists! On this occasion, I met several
of them, starting with Reverend Yoshiaki Fujitani, a retired Buddhist bishop,
who introduced me to Katsugo Miho, a retired judge, and Akira Otani, a still-
active businessman, all of whom agreed to speak with me about their fathers
and their visits as young soldiers to their fathers in internment camps like Camp
Livingston in Louisiana and SFIC in New Mexico. I was overjoyed at this stroke
of luck, especially because I had become fascinated by the social, political, and
emotional dimensions of the father-son relationships captured in a government
list that I had happened to find. Each interview produced bundles–varying
numbers of photos, letters, and other memorabilia in time-weathered envelopes,
albums, and cardboard boxes—as did subsequent conversations with other
children of internees and surviving elderly internees themselves.
A week later, I gave my first PowerPoint talk at the Center for Biographical
Research titled “More Than a Mug Shot: Reconstructing Lives of Japanese
Civilian Internees in U.S. Justice Department Concentration Camps.” A large
crowd squeezed into the center, and I managed to hold the audience’s interest
with my narrative about Tamasaku Watanabe and the DOJ camp experience.
Most notably, Susan Tokairin, a granddaughter of an internee, had seen my
library exhibit and came forward with photographs of the Santa Fe camp left
by her grandfather. Charlotte Nagoshi, a friend of newfound friends, told me
about Kazumi Matsumoto, a one-hundred-year-old internee survivor living
in her hometown on the Island of Kaua’i. Although a blurb on my project
had appeared in a local community newspaper, yielding two very significant

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Gail Y. Okawa

contacts, this word-of-mouth method understandably worked best in the

Hawai’i Japanese community; it became a pattern at subsequent events in
Honolulu—relatives of internees coming forward or friends telling me about
others. Despite my using a formal protocol of questions, the interviews with
internees and families of internees often settled into informal and comfortable
conversations. I found myself drawn into important relationships and began
to feel that more than being a researcher, I was involved in the recovery of my
own community’s history.
The demonstrated audience interest in my topic led to follow-up events in
2004 and 2005: “Memorials and Memories,” a reception and update for the
participants in my study and their families, and “Accessing Hawai’i Civilian
Internee Files,” a workshop for internee families to promote family research
on internees, to reciprocate in some way their generosity toward me, and
to develop a collective spirit around the project; and two public lectures in
Honolulu, including “From Sand Island to Santa Fe,” delivered to a standing-
room-only crowd held at and co-sponsored by the Japanese Cultural Center of
Hawai’i.9 A dynamic emotional energy seemed to prevail at these events and
in the oral history conversations with internees and internee families, with
talk serving often to “reawaken” memory. Treasured bundles—photographs,
notebooks, letters, journals, plaited bags, paintings, and other forms of mate-
rial culture—as artifacts not only triggered but also contained that memory,
embodied meaning. Some families who had hidden, forgotten, or simply laid
aside these stories began to come forward to tell them and, by seeing artifacts
valued in exhibits and displays, began to appreciate what they still have. Oth-
ers I talked with had no writings, no photographs, no records, no memories
of any sort until I provided them with copies of documents.
In the process of unbundling and rebundling, what originated as a text-
based study of language and literacy has expanded into a multidimensional,
multigenerational, multigenre project composed of faces of young men, now
old, of fathers, now gone, and of voices speaking through oral histories in the
present and material culture of the past. My grandfather’s individual life has
melded into a community of lives. My personal memory has become com-
munal. And the biography of one man has become a composite of the stories
of many of the hundreds of men who, over the course of a sunny morning in
December 1941, became “alien enemies” in their country of residence.

Notes
1. United States Immigration and Naturalization Service.
2. On Sunday, December 7, 1941, the Pearl Harbor Naval Base and other
military installations on the Island of O’ahu were attacked by planes of the

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Imperial Japanese Navy. The United States officially entered World War II on
December 8, 1941, by an act of Congress.
3. On August 10, 1936, President Roosevelt wrote a memo to his “Chief of
Operations” stating that “every Japanese citizen or non-citizen on the Island of
O’ahu who meets these Japanese ships or has any connection with their officers
or men should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed
on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration
camp in the event of trouble.”
4. A total of 17,477 people were interned by the Department of Justice. The
ten more widely known prison camps, such as those at Manzanar and Tule
Lake in California, Minidoka in Idaho, and Amache/Granada in Colorado,
were established and overseen by the War Relocation Authority as a result of
President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 issued on February 19, 1942. The
WRA and DOJ incarcerations differed in their histories, administrations,
prisoners, and treatment of prisoners. See Kashima.
5. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by President Ronald Reagan forty-
three years after the end of the war, offered an apology by the U.S. govern-
ment on behalf of the nation to surviving American-born Japanese and their
immigrant parents who had been incarcerated. The reasons cited were “racial
prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
6. “Exile” describes the banishment of Reverend Watanabe and this spe-
cific group of seven hundred issei from the Hawaiian Islands to the mainland
United States. Although the U.S. government erected an internment camp at
Honouliuli on O’ahu and several hundred internees of Japanese and, in much
smaller numbers, German and Italian heritage were housed there, this group of
issei was shipped to the mainland in ten boatloads and prohibited from return-
ing to the Islands even after numerous petitions were made to the authorities
by individuals and groups and paroles had been granted to some whose sons
were serving in the U.S. military. The majority was disallowed from returning
until November 1945, three months after the war ended.
7. Although American-born men of Japanese ancestry served in the U.S.
armed forces prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War, their status was ques-
tioned after Pearl Harbor was attacked, and those who newly volunteered
for military service were classified as 4-C—enemy aliens—and prohibited
from service. After a “long, arduous, and almost impossible struggle . . . that
had to be overcome before the Nisei was restored the right to fight and die
for [their] country” (Tsukiyama 15), the government formed the segregated
Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Together with their
predecessors in the 100th or “Purple Heart” Battalion, the first segregated
Japanese American unit, the 442nd RCT became the “most decorated mili-

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tary unit in American history for its size and length of service” (Crost qtd.
in Tsukiyama 19).
8. These are the introductory comments I wrote for a placard posted at
the exhibit.
9. I have also presented papers on this topic at several scholarly conferences,
nationally and internationally, and have been invited to give presentations to
community, university, and public school groups in Honolulu; Albuquerque
and Santa Fe; Youngstown, Ohio; and Calgary, Canada, reflecting a wide-
spread interest in the subject.

Works Cited
Clark, Paul F. “Those Other Camps: An Oral History Analysis of Japanese
Alien Enemy Internment during World War II.” M.A. thesis, California
State University, Fullerton, 1980.
Kashima, Tetsuden. Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment
during World War II. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2003.
Nora, Pierre. “General Introduction: Between Memory and History.” Realms
of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman.
New York: Columbia UP, 1996. 1–20.
Ozaki, Muin. Poem. Poets behind Barbed Wire. Ed. and trans. Jiro Nakano
and Kay Nakano. Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge, 1983.
Roosevelt, Franklin D. Memo to Chief of (Naval) Operations. Aug. 10, 1936.
Box 216, Folder A 8-5, RG 80 (General Records of the Navy Department),
National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Tsukiyama, Ted T. Go for Broke, 1943–1993. Honolulu: n.p., 1993.
U.S. Government. Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Civics Online. 1988. <http://
www.civics-online.org/library/formatted/texts/civilact1988.html>.

106
 
Mississippi on My Mind
W. Ralph Eubanks

“Mississippi Reveals Dark Secrets of a Racist Time,” read the headline on the
front page of the New York Times that March morning. It was 1998, and the
files of the once-secret Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission had just been
opened. Up until I began to read the Times that morning and other newspa-
per articles throughout the spring of that year, I had never even heard of this
thing called the “Sovereignty Commission.” Even the name seemed a bit odd,
but not out of character with the racially charged history of Mississippi. One
thing I did remember was that “sovereignty” was often used as a code word
for segregation. It made sense for an organization in Mississippi devoted to
maintaining segregation to make use of the coded speech of the era.
When I gazed at that headline, it had been nearly ten years since I had set
foot in Mississippi. I was comfortably middle-aged and happy with my life in
Washington, D.C., as a southern expatriate. This talk of an organization that
spied on its own citizens for the sake of maintaining a segregated society did
not engender warm thoughts about the land of my birth, only disdain. Yet
the more I read of the Sovereignty Commission, the more intrigued I became
with this organization. The numerous news stories I began to devour revealed
that the Sovereignty Commission was linked to some of the major crimes of
the civil rights era, including the murder of Medgar Evers (it helped with jury
tampering in the first trial) and the murder of three civil rights workers in
Philadelphia, Mississippi (it held information on those three young men that
Neshoba County law enforcement provided to their murderers to track them
down). Although unknown to me during my childhood, this thing called
the Sovereignty Commission had been authorized to keep integration out
of Mississippi at any cost and created a climate of fear and suspicion among
blacks and whites.
In the weeks that followed the opening of the Sovereignty Commission files,
I noticed a great deal of national coverage about the files in several other major
East and West Coast newspapers, in magazines such as Time, Newsweek, the
New Yorker, and the New Republic, and across the South. But like many events
in American life, once the news cycle surrounding the opening of the secret

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files was over, the fanfare died down, and awareness of this archive document-
ing the culture that created massive resistance to integration in Mississippi fell
into the dustbin of cultural amnesia.
Although the Sovereignty Commission was out of the news, I couldn’t get
it out of my mind. I’d largely separated myself from my home state, but the
opening of these secret files that covered most of my life in Mississippi began
to draw me back in. I began to read everything I could possibly find on the
Sovereignty Commission, amassing a large file of newspaper and magazine
articles. And I started to read lots of books about Mississippi: Anne Moody’s
Coming of Age in Mississippi, Willie Morris’s North toward Home, William
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the stories of Eudora Welty. As the books
began to stack up in my living room, I started talking about Mississippi at
the dinner table with my family, trying to engage my children with stories
about my home state.
Then, one night at bedtime, my son Patrick asked me, “Daddy, what’s
Mississippi like?” So I began to tell him about life on my farm, some of my
family’s lore from those days, but nothing about what Mississippi is really
like. Then his brother piped in from the bottom bunk: “Can we go there
sometime?” I told them they could but not until they were older. By then,
I thought, I would have figured out the answers to my questions about the
Sovereignty Commission.
Several months later, I decided to find out if my parents were on the list of
87,000 names I had read about in all those articles on the Sovereignty Commis-
sion that dotted my cluttered desktop. At this point, the editor and publisher
in me began to ponder a book about the organization, but I was still too afraid
to even think about the horrors that might be in the files I had read so much
about. It took me until the fall of 1998 to get up the nerve to see if my parents
were in the files. When I saw their names on my computer screen, on the Web
site of the Mississippi American Civil Liberties Union, I felt like someone had
hit me in the stomach, even physically ill. I called my wife, who was traveling
at the time, to tell her what I found. She calmed me down and told me to “sit
down and write about how you feel right now.” And it was really at that moment
that my journey began, eventually leading me to return to Mississippi after a
ten-year absence with no plans to ever return. It was also at that point that my
book began. The first journal entry I made the night after the discovery of my
parents’ names led me to write the opening line of my book: “The years have
a way of providing what seems to be an infinite distance . . .”
Over the next three years, I spent hours pouring over Sovereignty Commis-
sion documents in Mississippi’s Department of Archives and History as well
as exploring related documents in other Mississippi archives. It was through

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this documentary research that I was able to reconstruct my Mississippi past

and reveal a part of it that I never knew existed. In the process of stitching
together pieces of my past, the idea for my book moved from the idea of a
cultural biography of a segregationist organization into a memoir that wove
that cultural biography into its fabric. But getting started on the research
for my book, Ever Is a Long Time, began in fits and starts and did not go as
smoothly as I thought it would.
Months went by after my initial discovery of my parents’ names in the
Sovereignty Commission files before I could muster up the courage to go and
search through those documents. I was truly afraid of what might be lurking
in their contents. Because I had not visited Mississippi in ten years or lived
there in over twenty, all I had left were cherished recollections of places, people,
and childhood that I had reconstructed to comfort me. Would I dare spoil the
memories by what I might find in the files? I even asked myself how I could
reconcile these two worlds, one I loved and one I looked upon with disgust. I
resolved that I wanted to judge what was true about the past. Only then could
I bring my two views of Mississippi together.
Before I went to Mississippi, I sent away for the documents that bore my
parents’ names. The file that arrived in my mailbox a month later seemed
relatively innocuous, containing lists of names. However, my parents were
not on the same list. Why this happened wasn’t clear to me from the material
I had received, which left me with the same puzzlement and shock I had felt
looking at the ACLU Web site.
Something told me that there was more behind these papers. Exactly how
had my parents landed on separate lists? I had to know. After months of rest-
less contemplation, on a fall morning in 1999 I pulled out of my driveway in
Washington, D.C., and drove straight to Mississippi to find out why. The next
morning, after I walked past the Confederate memorial and up the marble
steps into the reading room of the Mississippi Department of Archives and
History in Jackson, I spent hours looking at page after page of documents on
a computer screen. With blind determination, day after day I searched vigor-
ously to find out why my family was worthy of being watched by the state of
Mississippi. This led to a frustrating series of researcher’s dead ends and wrong
turns. I searched by name, county, town, and even categories such as ‘integra-
tion agitators.” What I discovered during the course of these twists and turns
was that parts of the files are closed for reasons of privacy rights. Within the
vast files, material exists that I might have found to be personally enlightening,
but the main subject of the file has chosen to keep his or her file sealed.
By the end of my first day of research, I was confused, bleary eyed, and
frustrated. The random, categorical rather than chronological organization

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W. Ralph Eubanks

of the Sovereignty Commission files had stretched my researcher’s patience.

The only thing that I found that really helped me was a manuscript file in a
collection on small Mississippi towns marked with the name of my hometown,
Mount Olive. In that file was a story about a house that had been “flattened”
by a tornado in 1992. I knew this was my old house, because a friend had
described its destruction in those very terms. Since my research was going
nowhere, I decided to hop in my car, drive to Mount Olive, and take a walk
around the old home place to clear my head. Maybe, by going back to where I
began, I could start to make some sense out of the barrage of documents that
had been staring at me from a computer screen for six hours.
When I arrived on the streets of Mount Olive and began to reacquaint
myself with my hometown and its environs, it occurred to me that it was
through knowledge of the town that I could begin to make sense of the random
snippets of information I found in the files. After I returned to the archives
the next day, I did not make much more progress in my research. However, I
had come to the realization that I had to combine my sense of place, as well
as my connection to the people and places around my hometown, with my
research in the archives to make sense of those documents. That realization
did not help me on this trip, but it became a guidepost for me on subsequent
research trips to Mississippi.
As a small boy, I had traveled every nook and cranny of my hometown and
the county with my father, who was then called the “Negro County Agent.”
After hours of looking up names, dates, and files on a computer screen, they
began to come into focus once I started conjuring up the memories of the
curious, observant six-year-old boy I had once been. I began to think back to
those trips down country roads I had traveled with my father. After pulling
up those memories, I remembered names and events I’d forgotten. What had
often puzzled me as a child as I wandered through rural Mississippi with a
view from the backseat of a 1962 Chevy Bel Air started to make sense, as best
as one can make sense of that era in Mississippi’s history.
During my research visits, I took more trips down those same country
roads. The outings, which brought back even more childhood memories,
helped me break through the random nature of the files. But even with this
newfound clarity, after a while my research on the computer screens at the
Mississippi Department of Archives and History ran into another series of dead
ends. I understood the events recounted in the documents and remembered
many of the people mentioned in them, yet I had no sense of how the state
government may have used the documents. Because the electronic archive of
the Sovereignty Commission files was based on a loose series of information
categories—for example, names or categories such as integration agitators

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and freedom schools—a great deal of serendipity governed my research. A

conversation with a reporter with extensive knowledge of the files reminded
me that although the files had been sealed, their existence became public
because random documents turned up in other archives. After this discovery,
my search took me to other archives where documents I found, after working
through a box of papers in chronological order, helped make sense of what I
had found randomly on a computer screen.
At this point in my research, I had filled in details behind my childhood
memories from the information on my parents in the files. What I was try-
ing to do now was to find out details from the Sovereignty Commission files
about actual historical events of the times and to tie them with the perceptions
I had experienced as a child of those same events. Specifically, I was trying
to piece together the events of the 1964 Freedom Summer, a summer whose
murders, bombings, and burnings had struck fear inside my mind and whose
imagery sticks with me to this day. My search took me to the family papers
of former Mississippi governor Paul B. Johnson, which contained Sovereignty
Commission reports he had received during his term. As I paged through the
chronology of Johnson’s time as governor from 1964 to 1968, I saw reports
from the Sovereignty Commission that had crossed his desk scattered among
legislative and political issues, including details of the commission’s investiga-
tion of the civil rights movement during the summer of 1964. Throughout
the summer, there were reports from the commission about the disappearance
of the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi: Andrew Good-
man, James Cheney, and Michael Schwerner. By the fall, the commission
had gone county by county to investigate the aftermath of Freedom Sum-
mer, including a visit to the sheriff of Covington County to see if there had
been any voter registration schools in the county or any “trouble” from the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The document
mentioned men who were “working in a quiet way” with the NAACP in and
around my hometown. One of those men was my father. For the first time, I
realized how the documents I had viewed by subject and place on a computer
screen had been actually used by a sitting governor. Now I understood how
a personal letter to the governor could launch a Sovereignty Commission
investigation of an organization, as I had discovered in the case of my father
with the Extension Service, his employer during the period he was placed
in the Sovereignty Commission files. I also saw documents I had not seen
in the main archives of the Sovereignty Commission in Jackson, a sign that
some key pieces of information had probably been destroyed. Much of this
missing material included minutes of Sovereignty Commission meetings,
which could have provided incriminating information on how the commis-

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W. Ralph Eubanks

sion discussed the ways it used or could use the information its agents and
informants had gathered.
Though there was a flurry of investigations during the summer of 1964
and into the fall, the Sovereignty Commission moved into a period of relative
dormancy in its aftermath. The documents I found revealed that Governor
Johnson knew that the Sovereignty Commission bore direct responsibility
for the Freedom Summer murders. The events of that summer and their tie
to Sovereignty Commission investigations even led him by 1965 to proclaim
before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that Mississippians would ac-
cept the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “in a calm, intelligent manner, regardless of
personal conviction.” From what I could see in his papers, as early as the fall
of 1964, Governor Johnson had begun to rethink the role of the Sovereignty
Commission. By no means had the murders of Goodman, Cheney, and Schw-
erner changed the man who “stood tall” against admitting James Meredith
to Ole Miss into a racial moderate. But they had forced Johnson to approach
his stand on segregation with greater caution.
As I paged through the files that contained material on the aftermath of the
murder of the three civil rights workers, another item stood out. It was a one-
sentence letter from January 1965, six months after the murders, from a state
representative and Sovereignty Commission member that read, “Is Mississippi
going to have a Sovereignty Commission?” Governor Johnson replied, “I have
felt the need to delay the matter for this period of time.” Beginning with a
series of recommendations from the director of the Sovereignty Commission,
Erle Johnston, I discovered that the governor had been considering whether the
commission’s investigations were making matters better or worse in Mississippi.
The legislator and Sovereignty Commission member who penned this letter
was Horace Harned of Starkville, Mississippi, who insisted that Mississippi
have a Sovereignty Commission and put forth a resolution demanding the
activation of the watchdog group. His spare choice of words to the governor
intrigued me. This led me to look into who this Horace Harned was, where
he was from, and where he was now. I found out through some digging that
he was the last surviving member of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Com-
mission. That meant that I had to talk with him and get his perception of the
events of the summer of 1964. After a brief exchange of letters between us, I
was soon on my way to Mississippi to meet Harned and get his view of the
work of the Sovereignty Commission.
After interviewing Harned, the shape of my book (and my writing) changed.
I moved out of working in archives and began interviewing other people. One
morning, just two years after my first trip to the archives, I found myself having
breakfast with an ex-Klansman, the former superintendent of education in my

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hometown. His name was Denson Lott, and he was the man who had placed
my mother on the list I’d received from the Sovereignty Commission files. In
the course of our conversation, Lott revealed to me the identity of the black
informants I had read about in the files who had supplied information on civil
rights activities to the commission and its representatives. He also displayed a
human side that I never expected to find when talking with a former Klansman,
who in some ways used our conversation to confess his past sins. He admitted
how tangled his life was with Mississippi’s racist past, even though that was
not the sin he came to me to confess. Again, another piece of the puzzle was
put in place, and I decided to weave this story into my narrative.
Next, to understand the politics of the Sovereignty Commission lawsuit
and the subsequent turmoil it created in Mississippi’s civil rights establish-
ment, I spent hours with Ed King, a former civil rights worker who served as
an advocate to keep parts of the files private. Through our conversations, I
now understood why I ran into dead ends in the files: if someone wanted his
or her file closed, this action closed access to other parts of the files as well. I
also learned firsthand how access to these once-secret files had both opened
Mississippi’s closed society and sown seeds of division among the very people
who had been spied on by the state of Mississippi. Once again, this connec-
tion with a person, combined with additional research, reshaped yet another
piece of my narrative. Each of these people provided a link to a past that I
remembered fleetingly as a child, had become exposed to as an adult through
the Sovereignty Commission files, and was now trying to make relevant to
the present.
In the course of three years, the archives served as only one component of
my journey to find out how my parents ended up in the Sovereignty Com-
mission files. But had it not been for the archives, I would not have been
drawn back into the very soul of Mississippi: its people and places. It was
through rediscovering the people and places I knew and loved as a boy that
my research and writing began to come together. It has also now led me to
dig deeper into my family’s past, particularly the life of my grandparents, who
were an interracial couple in southern Alabama in the 1920s and 1930s. I have
few written records to draw on to reconstruct the life of my grandparents but
have developed skills at gathering oral history through some of my work on my
first book as well as through my involvement in a community “write-a-story”
day encouraging ordinary citizens of Washington, D.C., to write down their
stories and memories.
In the end, this search sharpened my skills as a researcher and led me to
understand that the best stories are often hidden in the places where you least
expect to find them. It also rekindled a love of my home state that had been

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dormant for twenty years. That love began more than forty years ago as I
glanced at the scenery from the backseat as I rambled through dusty country
roads with my father. Fortunately, much of the scenery looks the same on those
country roads as it did when I was a boy. I’m sure that helped my memories
come back stronger. What also helped was suppressing that childhood yearning
to be in the front seat rather than in the back. Once I started to reconnect with
that childhood view from the backseat, my archival research began to make
sense. Sometimes a backseat view can provide a window to the world.

Works Cited
Harned, Horace H., Jr. Letter to Paul B. Johnson Jr. January 25, 1965. Paul B.
Johnson Papers, folder 2, box 137. Archives and Manuscript Department,
William D. McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mis-
sissippi, Hattiesburg.
Johnson, Paul B., Jr. Letter to Horace H. Harned Jr. February 1, 1965. Paul B.
Johnson Papers, folder 2, box 137. Archives and Manuscript Department,
William D. McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mis-
sissippi, Hattiesburg.

114
 
Dreaming Charles Eastman
Cultural Memory, Autobiography,
and Geography in Indigenous
Rhetorical Histories
Malea Powell

This is a story.1
The version of the story you’re reading began as a ghost story told out loud
around kitchen tables, on porches, at powwows, in archives. It’s important to
begin with this bit of knowledge, I think, because when talk turns into text,
something happens to it—something else arises as the words get inscribed,
revised, polished, distressed, and re-presented. Some meanings open and
flower; other meanings die the quiet death of alphabet, of print. So in retell-
ing this story this way, I will struggle with the meaning of things, with what
we would call in our scholarly way the epistemology of the letter, literally, of
the alphabet of the language in which I write, or with what we could also call
the thingness of meaning—the effects of the marks (on computer now but
eventually on paper) made, and their making, on meaning. All of which is, at
best, an odd way to say that this is a text best read out loud.
This story comes, as all stories do, from a much larger, more complicated
accumulation of stories. While some of you, dear readers, may be familiar with
my persistent scholarly desires to listen to late-nineteenth-century American In-
dian intellectuals like Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Northern Paiute), Charles
Alexander Eastman (Santee Dakota), Susan LaFlesche Picotte (Omaha), and
Andrew Blackbird (Harbor Springs Ojibwe/Odawa), what I have been charged
to do here is to look critically at my experiences as archivist and composer of
these rhetorical histories. When I accepted that charge, I promised that I’d
do so by looking through the constellated lenses of cultural memory, auto-
biography, and geography and that I would work through this aporia in the
imagined presence of my own esteemed teachers, mentors, colleagues, and
students. I am going to try to fulfill those promises, then, through a series of
scenes. Each scene arises from the physical space of an archive, a location of

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deliberate institutional cataloging of memory. Each scene is a story, a narrative

strand in the braid of “how to do” indigenous rhetorical history, how to live
with the ghosts of that doing. Each scene is both the beginning and the end
of a methodology, a remembered fragment of a battle in what Gerald Vizenor
has called “the Word Wars.”2
While many scholars in Native studies take for granted the meaning of that
phrase “the Word Wars,” others may have less access to the complexities of
meaning caught in its figurative jaws. What we are talking about is a collusion
of events during colonization—the documents and histories written about Na-
tive peoples by folks who had something to lose if Indians were seen as fully
human, the laws and treaties that authorized brutality and genocide in all of
the Americas, the forced learning of English at the hands of missionaries and
in boarding schools, the continuing devaluement of the oral for the written
(or the virtual), and the continuing ignorance of most U.S. citizens about the
story of colonization and of imperialism and its continuing consequences. We
are still in the midst of this war, still living through a paracolonial occupation,
and the damage done by documents, by words, has been at least as great as that
done by weapons. This is why I have spent many years collecting documents by,
about, for, and from American Indians. My own particular obsession (my, er,
scholarly focus) is with documents from a time period that would convention-
ally be described as beginning with the Civil War until the New Deal (about
1861 until about 1934). For Native peoples, and certainly for Native scholars,
this same time period can be thought of as beginning shortly after Removal,
encompassing much of the spectacular brutality of the nineteenth-century
Indian Wars and the Allotment Era, including the Boarding School Era, and
ending with the Indian Reorganization Act (the Indian New Deal).
But ways of naming/marking “history” aren’t what I want to talk about here
in this story about being an archivist and composer of indigenous rhetorical
histories.3 What it all comes down to is that like many students of history, I’ve
spent time in a lot of libraries, a lot of archives. Besides their participation in
the larger imperial project of “collecting knowledge,” many of these spaces had
some mundane things in common—the way they smelled, the hard wooden
chairs, my own weird disorientation after spending hours at their microfilm
machines, and the general set of writing rituals that scholars were expected to
perform if they wanted access to materials. Access required knowledge of a very
specialized type: how to find and identify the documents within catalogs and
holdings lists and finding guides, and to do so in such a way that your simple
request would pass unimpeded through the system’s many gatekeepers; how
to fill out forms, pay for things, use the physical space of the archive—all of
these an elaborate maze each time I visited someplace new, all designed to keep

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the knowledge safe, protected, away from the prying eyes of the uninitiated
and the uninformed.
But access isn’t what I want to talk about here either—though I will want
to do so someday—and the project of the imperial archive in the Americas is
also something that is simply beyond the scope of my work here in this docu-
ment (though, again, in the discipline of rhetoric and composition, there will
be a time when we will need to talk about that as well). My point here is what
it feels like to be in an archive, not because I think you care how I feel but to
illustrate the ways in which meaning is sometimes held captive by the body and
how we have to then walk through story to make sense of our experiences as
writers, as scholars, and as humans. Some events have to be walked and talked
aloud, moved through, told. As Cherokee scholar and poet Qwo-Li Driskill
has recently pointed out, “The archival project was not created for Indians.
It was created to consolidate knowledge about Indians. And yet, here I am,
an Indian in the archive” (1). And here I am, an Indian talking about what it
means to be an Indian in the archive, what it means to be the object looking
back, the objectified engaged in the process of making knowledge about the
processes that led to my objectification. And, more truthfully, I’m not sure I
can tell you what it means—what I hope these scenes tell you is how it feels,
and how out of that feeling comes both methodology and story.

Scene One
I’m at the Saint Louis University Law Library. It’s summer in St. Louis—July—
damp and hot, deeply uncomfortable to be outside. The library’s cool interior
seems to offer a respite from that discomfort, and I am grateful that my plans
for the day are to spend at least ten hours working with the library’s Native
American Reference Collection. The collection comprises seventy-six microfilm
reels that include approximately 5,500 congressional documents, reports, and
committee hearings supplemented by some 2,500 pamphlets, annual reports,
and other materials published by private and non-congressional government
sources from 1840 to 1948; these documents, collected by agents of the Bureau
of Indian Affairs starting in 1870, were used for the BIA’s in-house research
and cover nearly every aspect of the agents’ surveillance and documentation
of American Indian life as they saw it. I spent four days working my way
through the collection.
On the fourth day, I stood on the steps of the library in dread. My joints
ached with the osteoarthritis-mimicking symptoms of stress; my knees creaked
up the stairs; my shoulders already slumped at the prospect of entering what
now seemed an icy cell in which I was to be tormented by the words on the
microfilm reader’s screen, by the material force that those words recollected,

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represented, produced, and replicated on the bodies of Native peoples—mine

included. Don’t get me wrong—the people I met at the library were exceed-
ingly pleasant and helpful. The librarians were friendly and supportive of my
work; they “held” the best microfilm reader/printer for me every day; they
let me make thousands of pages of microfilm copies for free; they pointed
out good places to eat and have coffee; they prompted me to take a break
periodically. It wasn’t the people in that place that tore at me and filled the
articulated bones in my body with inflammation; it was the words, the writ-
ing, the documents, and their presence in that place that ate at me, pounded
inside my head, and roared through my body like a freight train. I went back
to my hotel room each night, my stomach clenched against the sharp space
that had been carved out of me. I filled that space with other sounds—the
voice of Daryl Baldwin Jr. on a Miami language tape I’d brought with me, the
Twigh Twee Singers singing “Siipioncii,” from the river, the place of life, and
my daughter on the phone wondering when I’d be coming home. I returned
to the library each day to be excavated by the words of people who believed
that me, and mine, were worthless . . . savages . . . lazy . . . violent . . . and,
quite simply, in the way—I returned because I was learning how much those
words mattered, still matter.
Finally, at the end of all of that, I went to stay with my friend Drucilla
Wall, a mixed-blood Muscogee poet and scholar. Lounging lazily on her
sunlight-filled front porch, I listen to Dru’s words; she reminds me of what I
knew-but-had-forgotten in that archive—if you feel written on, write back.
So, this is my first attempt at writing back to that archive. This is a poem, a
bridge, cross it out loud.4

listing
Part One—how they did it
“A Message from the President of the United States
concerning . . .
Citizenship in the Indian Nations
Free Homesteads on Public Lands
Indians Who Served in the Army of the United States
What the Government and the Churches are doing for
the Indian”

“A Letter from the Secretary of the Interior

concerning . . .
the Rules for Governing the Court of Indian Offenses
the Organization of the Territory of Oklahoma

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Blankets for the Indian Service

Indian Depredation Claims”

“In the Senate of the United States: a report

concerning . . .
the Sale of Intoxicants to Indians
the Sale of the Sac & Fox Reservation
the Utah and Northern Railway Company
Correspondence on the Subject of Teaching the Vernacular
in Indian Schools”

This is how they did it.

This is how they filed us down
to words
printed on papers
stamped and signed and kept in steel boxes.

25 reels of microfilm per collection,

hundreds of documents per reel
not just blankets and guns,
disease and lies,
but pages and
pages and
pages.
Part Two—how we undo it
The Physical and Spiritual Realm how the world holds together
kookáni, spoon (physical) maálhsi, knife (physical)
alénia, man (spiritual) mitémhsa, woman (spiritual)
ahpwaakáni, ordinary pipe (physical)
ahpwaakána, ceremonial pipe (spiritual)

Verbs the center of the People

pyaayaáni, I come
pyaayáni, you come
iiyaayaáni, I go
iiyaayáni, you go
pyaayani-nko, are you coming?
ayaayani-nko, are you going?

All Our Relations

nimehshoóma, my grandfather noohkóma, my grandmother

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Malea Powell

noóhsa, my father nínkya, my mother

nihseénsa, my brother nimíhsa, my sister

niihkaána, my friend

paahkinantó ahkwaanteémi, open the door

teépahki neeyólaani, it is good to see you

ceeki neehahki eeweemakiki, all my family is well

iilaataweeyankwi, we speak such a language

weamyaamiki, we miami people

iilaataweeyankwi, iilaataweeyankwi, iilaataweeyankwi, iilaataweeyankwi

weamyaamiki

Scene Two
It is several years later. It is summer in Chicago, and I am at the Newberry
Library. The Newberry is a magnificent Gilded Age romanesque-revival edifice
built nearly on the shores of Lake Michigan on the land that Miamis once
called checagou, the place of wild garlic.5 I am sitting at one of the long, cool
tables in the reserved reading room, feeling letters written by Charles East-
man from Matotee Lodge, Ontario, in September 1930. No, I didn’t make a
mistake with the verb in that last sentence. I’m not reading or looking at these
letters in the traditional sense—I’ve already made my request for copies, so I
take my task as one in which I simply sit and think and feel in relation to the
materials at hand. I admitted to myself a long time ago that part of learning
to listen to scholarly elders like Eastman was also learning to listen to myself,
to my relatives, to the land, and to the marks written on the land. I sat with
those letters for a long time, watching handwriting emerge from the page,
thinking about the Newberry’s hold on these materials, on the way that I’d
been trained to think about archives and the objects they contained, spent a
good deal of time thinking through my ethical relationship to this archive, to
the project of imperial archives, to all the objects stored in all the archives all
over the world. As I sat there and thought about empire, I started to get very
cold—felt myself grow puny and insignificant in the face of imperialism and
shivered at the impossibility of it all—me, an Indian, a mixed-blood, here in
this odd colonial space.
It was the appearance of Eastman himself, stepping from a photograph on

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the table beside me, that broke my intellectual chill.6 He simply appeared,
unfolding from the flat plane of that photograph as I felt myself unfold and
emerge from the singularity of that imperial narrative, the one that is so dis-
tracting, so seductive that it had me momentarily convinced of its power and
speculating on the necessity of abandoning my responsibilities as a human in
this world. Eastman’s appearance convinced me to run, so I packed up my
things and left the building. As I rushed up Clark Street in the bright summer
sun, I kept thinking—What am I supposed to learn from this? Here’s a piece of
what I came up with:
Though the Newberry and other buildings like it are textual spaces designed
to intimidate, I believe they do so as a way to negate their own temporality
and impermanence, and they accomplish that negation through the practice of
history. Michel deCerteau claims that the practice of history is a symbol of a
society capable of managing the space it provides for itself; the power of that
society to manipulate space allows it to appear to manage time by changing
the practices of the past into a blank page on which the textual product of “the
present” can be written. In this same way, these large Gilded Age buildings
like the Newberry manage the physical place upon which the imperial society
they represent has engaged in empire into a space of argument for the value
of Western culture. The land on which the Newberry Library is built is land
where Miamis hunted, gathered, and celebrated long before any city was built
there, so a reciprocity of relations has long existed between that land and my
ancestors. What this means is that the significance of my experiences there
do not begin in colonization; instead, my ancestral obligation to and alliance
with the land are the central practices through which my presence there is
negotiated. So, whether harvesting wild garlic or Eastman’s writings, in that
geographical space, I am engaging in an already established alliance with
the physical and emotional needs of the land, an alliance that requires care,
respect, and gift-giving for the things that I take away. And because the land,
at least, remembers its obligations, I needed to remember, and honor, mine.
One of the things that Eastman’s impossible reappearance made clear is that
neither his letters nor the garlic gathered by my ancestors are simply available
objects; no, they are alive, and their harvest requires the appropriate gestures
of respect, friendship, honor, and goodwill. Just because Eastman’s writings
have been made into objects by a story told about them in imperial discourse
doesn’t mean that we can’t, that I can’t, tell different stories about them, with
them, through them—and the fact of empire doesn’t relieve me of my human
obligation to their continued existence. History isn’t a dead and remembered
object; it is alive and it speaks to us. We are obligated not just to our ancestors
out of whose lives we “make” that history but also to the places and spaces, and

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the living things therein, who remember them and—through them—remem-

ber us. My obligation to the land, my obligation to Eastman, they are both a
part of the same tradition that requests only that I carry the past into the lived
present in a respectful and honorable way. As Driskill puts it:
Cherokees had our own [version of the] Ghost Dance. Like Wovoka’s
Ghost Dance, it had as its vision the hope for protection from European
invasion, the coalitioning of Native nations, and the preservation and
continuance of Indigenous lifeways and traditions. Sitting in the archive,
touching books my ancestors may have touched, feels like a Ghost Dance.
The library throngs with (g)hosts. (1)

But what does that mean for those of us here in this text today?

Scene Three
It is just a few years later. I am in a classroom in a building on the campus
of Michigan State University, founded in 1855 as the prototype for the sixty-
nine subsequent land-grant institutions that would be established through
the Morrill Act of 1862.7 I am teaching a graduate-level seminar in the theory
and methodology of American cultural rhetorics. One of the tasks I’d put
forward for this seminar was to, in fact, define what we might mean when
we say “American cultural rhetorics.” While I won’t spread out the breadth
of that definition here, I will say that questions of “story” and “history” were
central to our meaning-making. And I’ll tell this final story about how we
began to articulate the connections between story-telling and history-telling,
a practice that took recognizable form as we taught each other how to make
theory from LeAnne Howe’s essay “The Story of America: A Tribalography”
alongside Michel deCerteau’s book The Writing of History. In this seminar,
each participant wrote a response to each week’s readings. Chad O’Neill, a
Mexican American student and multimedia designer, opened his response by
commenting on the “differing storied openings of the two readings” (1). He
then went on to situate these stories alongside one another, first with a quote
from Howe:
When the foreigners arrived and attempted to settle in the upper North-
east, they had nothing to eat, nothing to sustain them but their faith in
biblical stories. Indigenous people told them new stories of how to live
in our world. (29)

He follows with a quote from deCerteau that recollects a seventeenth-century

Dutch etching in which Amerigo Vespucci “discovers” the nude Indian body
of “America”:

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 Dreaming Charles Eastman

But what was really initiated here is a colonization of the body by the
discourse of power. This is writing that conquers. It will use the New
World as if it were a blank “savage” page on which Western desire will
be written. (xxv)
O’Neill then writes: “The conflict implied between these two encounters I take
not only as interesting, but also as important to the articulation of possibili-
ties. . . . What is between these two stories? What will, in fact, make these
possibilities ‘thinkable’?” (1–2).
O’Neill shifts the question from “story versus history” to the story in history,
to the articulated nature of imperial and indigenous discourses, from the im-
possibility of sustaining “our story” in the face of “their story” to the possibility
of a shared understanding of story that erupts in various histories. In doing
so, he points to space in which the relationships and encounters that I have
been trying to tell here take place—the space “between” those articulations,
the interstices of emotion, the feeling of what happened. It’s not that O’Neill’s
words tell us something we didn’t know; in fact, it’s precisely the opposite. His
story speaks what we feel, shapes it into a critical question that we could use
to bring those feelings to bear in a way that might “make theory.”
And here I am now, finishing my story with his story in order to respectfully
mark the possibilities that we all can bring to light for one another through
story, to raise the questions that came out of that encounter, which I hope
I’ve begun to answer in these pages: What is thinkable for all of us who “do”
indigenous rhetorical history? How is that different for Native scholars? For
non-Native scholars? What lies between those two spaces of making? What
is possible for scholars of color who engage in the process of decolonization
by immersing ourselves in the ugly trenches dug by the material and textual
shovels of the colonial project? What stories stand between thinkable and pos-
sible? How can we learn to tell them? What academic stories have each of us
learned to let stand between us as borders, as canyons, as bridges, as homes?
How can we learn to tell through them? What are the consequences of “writing
back,” of thinking back, of taking back in all of this telling? And, for me, how
to end this story? I’m clearly not nearly “done” with the scholarly issues here,
haven’t even really begun clearly articulating a methodology. But I am at the
end of this story, a narrative that recounts—that tells—in an effort to mean
affectively. So, I’ll leave with another poem. Another bridge. Cross it, again,
out loud. Let me know what happens when you get to the other side.

real indians
the real indian leans against
the counter at the white castle just off I-65 two miles south of the pow-

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Malea Powell

wow grounds alongside wapaashiiki, the wabash river whose sycamored

banks and water pitted caves whisper the voices of my elders
but we are here now, not there,
and here is next in line staring out at the parking lot piece-quilted with
trucks and cars and campers, the last space surprised by that listing
Winnebago, y’know, that Ho-Chunk guy who still smells like the last
lonely piece of frybread those Santa Clara guys finally got rid of halfway
through the last giveaway
or maybe
here isn’t here at all, but there, at the drive-thru ordering a PakASak of
30 with cheese plus some chicken rings and onion petals to go, to keep us
company on that long drive across I-80—Lake Michigan, the Illinois, the
Mississippi, the Iowa, the Missouri, the Platte
all those rivers, all those miles of hiway on fire, the land twisted black
like winter wind, the sky a smear of pink cotton candy stuffed into the
greedy mouth of a white man whose teeth grind us into the plains
or maybe
what I hear is a mourning song, one that sounds exactly like an orange
tiger cat crying, trying to claw her way out of her lavender-plastic, seat-
belted cage, you know, that song I sing every time we get too far away
from Miami land and Meier stores and French & Indian war monuments
and A & W rootbeer stands open only in the summer and the sound of
the Twigh Twee singers as they warm up before first grand entry and the
way that white castles
never
taste
when you buy them frozen, no peeling away the warm gooey bun from
the steamed meat center to add hot mustard and pickles before you eat
them in three bites and twelve bites later are too drunk with grease to eat
anymore
or maybe
what I hear when i’m here is the sound of us not dying or disappearing,
just eating and talking and laughing and driving,
remembering who we are

Notes
1. I offer my thanks: (1) to Victor Villanueva and Gail Okawa, whose gener-
ous mentorship and intellectual interests prompted the first oral version of this
story at the 2005 Conference on College Composition and Communication
in San Francisco; (2) to the indigenous peoples of central California—the

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numerous tribal nations upon whose lands the cities in that area have been
built—for allowing this story to be told respectfully on their lands; (3) to Gesa
Kirsch and Liz Rohan for their patience and persistence; (4) to Leonora Smith,
Laura Julier, and Julie Lindquist for their careful reading and vital friendship;
and (5) to my elders for their teachings and their encouragement. What I do
well is to their credit; what I do badly belongs only to me.
2. See Vizenor’s Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade for
a further articulation of this term and the theoretical matrix in which it was
originally used.
3. The ways in which historical narratives are characterized by named events
is, of course, one of the results of particular traditions of making history, of
making scholarship. While Native studies scholars participate in those ways of
making, we do so through different named events. These “namings,” of course,
also signify what the history-maker deems to be significant and important for
the narrative. So, while narratives of “American” history often erase Native
peoples (and much of the history of Indian-white relations), the narratives of
“Native” history almost always focus on the intercultural relationships that, in
fact, created the United States as a physically/landed entity and as a mythology.
While this is in itself a fascinating story, it is beyond the scope of this essay.
4. This is a found poem—a rearrangement and reframing of words and
phrases taken from archival sources and from Baldwin’s Miami language
workbook.
5. Before the French arrived in Green Bay in 1634, Native people had lived in
the Chicago area for over ten thousand years. Before that, twenty thousand years
ago, the Chicago area was covered by a continental glacier—nothing is known
about the humans who may have occupied this area before the glacier. The first
artifacts of human occupation from this area after glaciation are worked pieces
of elk antler dating to about 12,000 b.c., which would indicate that humans
were in the area shortly after the glacier began its retreat. The meltwater of its
recession would become Lake Michigan. Archaeologists would tell a story about
Paleo-Indians, Early Woodland, Middle Woodland, and Late Woodland peoples
followed by Mississippians (black-grit potters and tempered shell potters) and
then the beginning of the “historical” period—i.e., the coming of the French
to Green Bay in 1634. They would also say that they can document, through
Marquette and Jolliet’s 1673 explorations, that the Miamis were in the Chicago
area and that they were later joined by Potowatomis, then displaced by Anishi-
naabes and Odawas, all of whom ended up in Michigan and became known
as the People of the Three Fires. Miamis, of course, were spread to the south
and east, all the way to southeastern Ohio. (See Lace.) What Native people will
tell you is that the Chicago area was a popular summer residence, especially for

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Miami and Illinois tribal groups. We planted there (corn, beans, and squash),
gathered there (wild garlic and other herbs and roots), and hunted there (buffalo
especially, who ran the Illinois plains in the summer months). (See also Peter-
son; and Straus, “Found Mothers.”) For more information about precontact
indigenous cultures and geographies in North America, see Kehoe’s America
before the European Invasions. For more information regarding the etymology
of “Chicago,” see Vogel’s Indian Place Names in Illinois and Swenson’s “Chica-
goua/Chicago: The Origin, Meaning and Etymology of a Place Name.”
6. Charles Alexander Eastman was born as Ohiyesa in 1858 on the Santee
Sioux (Dakota) reservation in Minnesota. He fled with some relatives to
Canada after the Great Sioux Uprising of 1862—his father was one of the Da-
kotas who fought in that war and was one of 265 Santees when they converted
to Christianity (38 who refused to convert were hanged for their participation
in the uprising—the largest public hanging in U.S. history). It was as a result
of that experience that Eastman was sent to attend Euro-American schools.
In November 1890, at the age of thirty-two, he was appointed physician at the
Pine Ridge Agency, South Dakota, and by January 1891 was caring for those
who had survived the massacre at Wounded Knee. By 1893, Eastman was
publishing essays in magazines like Nicholas and Harpers, and by the time of
his death from a heart attack in 1939, he had published dozens of essays and
eleven books. His accomplishments are impressive and well beyond the scope
of this essay. For more information about Eastman’s life and writings, see his
own works and Wilson’s Ohiyesa, Charles Eastman, Santee Sioux.
7. Signed by Abraham Lincoln on July 2, 1862, the Morrill Act granted
thirty thousand acres of land for each member of Congress assigned to the
state as of the 1860 census. The land, or proceeds from its sale, was to be used
to establish and fund educational institutions that would teach military tactics,
engineering, and agriculture.

Works Cited
Baldwin, Daryl, Jr. Iilaataweeyankwi, Lesson One. Self-published, 1995.
deCerteau, Michel. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York:
Columbia UP, 1988.
Driskill, Qwo-Li .“Indian in the Archive.” Unpublished paper. Feb. 21, 2005.
Used with permission.
Howe, LeAnne. “The Story of American: A Tribalography.” Clearing a Path:
Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies. Ed. Nancy Shoemaker. New
York: Routledge, 2002. 29–50.
Kehoe, Alice Beck. America before the European Invasions. New York: Long-
man, Pearson Education, 2002.

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 Dreaming Charles Eastman

Lace, Ed. “Native Americans in the Chicago Area.” Strauss 23–27.

O’Neill, Chad. Untitled. Unpublished paper. Feb. 21, 2005. Used with per-
mission.
Peterson, Jacqueline. “The Founding Fathers: The Absorption of French-In-
dian Chicago, 1816–1837.” Strauss 31–66.
Strauss, Terry. “Found Mothers: Indian Women in Early Chicago.” Strauss
67–81.
———, ed. Native Chicago. Chicago: McNaughton and Gunn, 1998.
Swenson, John. “Chicagoua/Chicago: The Origin, Meaning and Etymology
of a Place Name.” Illinois Historic Journal 84 (Winter 1991): 235–48.
Vizenor, Gerald. Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade. Min-
neapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
Vogel, Virgil. Indian Place Names in Illinois. Pamphlet series 4. Springfield:
Illinois State Historical Society, 1963.
Wilson, Raymond. Ohiyesa, Charles Eastman, Santee Sioux. Urbana: U of
Illinois P, 1983.

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Cultural Memory and the Lesbian Archive
Kate Davy

When confronted with the big questions and surprising obstacles of what
it means to be women in the theater, we did what we had to do. We took
off our hats and danced.
—Lois Weaver, “Afterword,” in
The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance

On a winter night in 1984, I encountered the WOW Café Theatre for the first
time in its storefront home on East 11th Street in Manhattan’s East Village.
The show was Alice Forrester’s Heart of the Scorpion, billed as a “romance for
the girls.” On the same evening, I walked a few blocks farther east to catch
the late show at Club Chandalier, a venue that—like WOW (Women’s One
World)—was part of an exciting if short-lived phenomenon known as the East
Village club scene. There, another WOW artist, Alina Troyano, was perform-
ing her ersatz lesbian television talk show billed as Carmelita Tropicana Chats
and featuring yet other WOW performers as guests. What I discovered that
evening was a different kind of “women’s theater,” a theater that had man-
aged to carve out a discursive space in representation for women as subjects in
productions so alternative to mainstream theater that they staged no less than
the (as yet) unimaginable. I had been a student and scholar of avant-garde
performance for many years, awaiting the consciousness-altering experience it
promised. For me, this little women’s theater had blown the lid off this agenda,
productively altering ingrained patterns of thought and emotion without
sacrificing women as autonomous subjects to an avant-garde representational
economy that unconsciously and repeatedly objectified them. At WOW, cut-
ting-edge feminist theory was made flesh. And it was thrilling.
Since then, much has been written by scholars and critics about the work
of WOW artists, and five collections of WOW work have been published
(Hughes; Five Lesbian Brothers; Hart; Troyano; Case). In recent years, I
undertook the project of writing a book about the theater itself on the premise
that its material conditions and ideological context shaped the unique aesthetic
emerging from it. WOW is both a place and a player in the extraordinary

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work made possible by its existence. Because a better understanding of any

enterprise can be gleaned from its origins and early history, I began by return-
ing to WOW’s founding moment—two exceptionally ambitious international
women’s theater festivals.
Shortly after attending WOW’s twentieth anniversary celebration in De-
cember 2000, I set out to learn about events I had not attended—WOW’s
inaugural Women’s One World international festivals presented in the fall of
1980 and 1981. The idea was to explore the ways in which these events mirrored
the period’s feminist theories and aesthetics. I presumed the five hours of short
pieces that made up the anniversary celebration would demonstrate, by com-
parison, how far feminist performance had progressed over the years. Instead,
what I learned about WOW’s origins did not fit a narrative of progress neatly
culminating twenty years later in smarter, more evolved performances. On
the contrary, the cultural memory I sought was archived in the performances
and spirit of that anniversary night, but I had not recognized it. In her review
of the event for the Village Voice, Alisa Solomon describes WOW historically
as a place where “now well-known artists honed their craft, giving birth to a
feminist-and-tinsel-tinged queer aesthetic.” A contemporary example of this
queer aesthetic would be the drag king act performed that evening by an as-
yet-unknown black artist named Dred. It was inconceivable to me then that
any precedent for Dred’s sexy, crossed-dressed striptease could be found two
decades earlier in the context of feminist performance.
While accounts of the festivals vary predictably among the many women
who shared their recollections with me, I was struck by a recurring sentiment.
To a person, those who attended the festivals described them as having exceeded
by far anything they had previously experienced. “I’d never seen anything like it
before; there had never been anything like it before,” was a typical remark. Yet,
nearly everyone was frustrated in her attempt to support claims of unparalleled
status for WOW’s festivals. Most felt the reasons they gave—even as they were
giving them—did not capture what was so astonishing about the experience.
Among the most common reasons were the festivals’ international dimension,
the opportunity to see women’s theater, and the visibility of some identifiably
lesbian work. On the face of it, then, WOW’s festivals were not particularly
unique. Yet women with disparate backgrounds and experiences concur that
there was a felt something that made WOW’s festivals terribly special, something
that cannot be accounted for entirely by the fact of an international women’s
theater festival on an American shore, or even by the presence of some work
with recognizably lesbian content.
C. Carr provides a case in point. If anyone was positioned to consider
WOW’s festivals as part and parcel of the larger sociopolitical and aesthetic

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landscape, it is Carr. She was an active participant in the East Village art,
performance, and punk rock scenes at the end of the 1970s and would go on
to become one of the most well known and respected writers to chronicle East
Village performance. Carr, too, recalls that something about WOW’s festivals
felt extraordinary at the time; and like many others, she has difficulty put-
ting her finger on precisely why this was so. “It seemed so fresh,” she recalls,
“so different, so exciting. There was a sense of energy to it that most feminist
events just didn’t have.” In the absence of specifics, the feeling that produced
this deeply held conviction clearly persists in collective memory.
I turned to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in hopes of finding something
written about the festivals. This effort required traveling to Brooklyn where the
archives fill a brownstone building sandwiched between other brownstones on
a typical neighborhood block. Lacking the resources to properly catalogue its
holdings, the staff could do little but point me in the direction of a few boxes
marked “WOW” or “women’s theater.” Into these boxes had been tossed, in
no particular order, press releases, programs, scripts, copies of opening night
reviews, videotapes of some productions, and a smattering of photographs.
Archival work in my case resembled more of an archaeological dig—mining
memories and boxes of stuff, carefully examining disparate bits and pieces of
a whole, widely scattered and deeply buried. Ironically, the events I was trying
to reconstruct and understand had taken place only twenty years earlier and
the key participants were more than willing to share with me their memories
of events and interpretations of what happened. Ultimately, I found more
than I was looking for—the dynamics of archival work threw into relief the
very nature of cultural memory, revealing painful erasures that ensue from an
inevitable, ongoing process of forgetting.
Rifling through the material was simultaneously pleasurable and dishearten-
ing. Because WOW is essentially “community theater,” that is, nonprofessional
theater, few productions were reviewed by critics over the years. What remains
of them exists in these boxes, in the personal files of their creators, and in the
memories of those who attended. Given the dearth of press coverage, then, I
was amazed to find that a number of local publications covered the festivals,
some extensively. Someone (or a few someones) had the foresight to clip these
articles at the time and subsequently deposit them in the archive. With the
exception of the Village Voice and the Advocate, most of the publications where
these pieces appeared are now defunct, and each exists on a continuum of
relative obscurity—with the Soho Weekly News on one end, Big Apple Dyke
News (b.a.d. News) on the other, and Womanews somewhere in between. Like
lived memory, every source of information was incomplete; taken together,
however, a whole began to take shape.

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Reading descriptions of festival performances written at the time they

were presented was compelling and made clear two things in particular: 1)
an intense, raw enthusiasm for what each reviewer experienced, and 2) a few
performances utterly incongruous with current notions of what constituted
feminist cultural production in the 1970s and 1980s. As I read through pieces
devoted to the festivals, a kind of tape loop began running through my head—I
kept thinking, “This is extraordinary. How could anyone actually there then
forget this?” Those who attended the festivals remember them as astonishing
because they were. Deb Margolin, who at the time of the second festival in
1981 was new to both theater and feminism, described her experience in a
2001 interview with me. She recalled, “It was exhilarating. I’d never been so
alive and in a cultural community where the criterion for great theater was
the passionate desire to speak. And here it was. I watched it roll in like the
storm from the water. It was fantastic.” This sense of a storm rolling in over
the water captures the feeling I had sitting in the archive, up to my elbows
in stuff, as I began to make meaning out of that which eluded me. I sensed
something important but amorphous coming into focus; it was visceral. Like
an archaeologist, I was beginning to unearth pieces of what was so deeply
buried in the memories of participants.
As it turns out, WOW’s festivals were genuinely groundbreaking but for
reasons virtually no one can any longer recall. What cannot be remembered are
those crossed-dressed and sexually explicit performances that were decidedly
out-of-sync with prevailing feminist sensibilities; what cannot be remembered
is a preponderance of festival-goers who showed up dressed to kill, nary a
Birkenstock sandal or flannel shirt among them; what cannot be remembered
is the erotically charged atmosphere that permeated nearly every dimension of
the festivals. What made WOW’s festivals so breathtaking at the time cannot
be recalled because it is counterintuitive; after all, feminists just didn’t do that
kind of thing back then. As we all now know, feminists in 1980 were dour
and prudish; they didn’t think playfully about gender or positively about sex
until the 1990s with the advent of queer culture, third wave feminism, and
girl (or “grrl”) culture. “Memory,” as Joseph Roach reminds us, “is a process
that depends crucially on forgetting” (2).
The archive produced descriptions of an overwhelming number of events
from both festivals representing all kinds of women’s theater, music, dance,
poetry, and standup comedy. Scattered among these were a few anomalies,
specifically the Radical Lesbian Feminist Terrorist Comedy Group, an over-
the-top sketch comedy troupe; The Flamboyant Ladies, a black lesbian theater
company so provocative that one of their performances cost WOW its space;
Jordy Mark’s seductive evening of cabaret called Sex, Drag, and Rock ’n’

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Roles, with its leather-dyke aesthetic; Pamela Camhe’s moody, erotic “Lesbian
Vogue” photographs of cross-dressed women with mustaches and sexy femmes
presented with music in a seamless fade-in-fade-out slide show; the original
production of Split Britches by Deb Margolin, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver,
a play that would be heralded as “a masterpiece of feminist theater” by 1987
(Jenkins 310); and three strippers from a working-class bar in Jersey who talked
about their lives in the business while stripping for an all-women audience.
These performances go a long way toward explaining why participants remem-
ber the festivals as exciting and radically different. Still, as breakers in a sea of
over eighty other performances, they do not explain the charged atmosphere
of the festivals in general. That is attributable in part to the festivals’ rowdy,
most unusual-for-the-times audiences.
The day before the first festival opened, Bethany Haye described the
fund-raising events preceding it: “For those who came along to the ‘Summer
Nights’ performances with impressions of an all-female haunt straight out of
The Killing of Sister George, a great surprise was in store. The audiences were
as boisterous and chummy as a girls’ hockey team, stomping and catcalling
their appreciation . . . shouting alternative punchlines to the comics’ bits. Not
one pair of orthopedic shoes was spotted.” The flier for Mark’s cabaret encour-
aged audience members to “attend as your drag fantasy.” During a lull in the
performance, spectators hit the runway for an impromptu fashion show. In an
article published shortly after the festival closed, Barbara Baracks wrote, “For
two-and-a-half weeks I ducked in and out of the 50 or so events going on. . . .
Witches, nuns and ladies bearded in glitter kept dropping in. The performers
had a hard time not being outdone by the feistiness of the audience” (23).
In retrospect, WOW’s ethos resonates with what emerged in the 1990s under
the compelling and productive rubric “queer.” Queer signals and encompasses
a wide range of identities, theories, and sensibilities, evolving in part as a
reaction against the identity politics and leanings toward assimilation that
characterize Stonewall-era gay and lesbian rights movements. Queer is also a
reaction against particular kinds of feminism. As queer became an ever more
important site for progressive art and thought, feminism came to be viewed
in a peculiarly totalizing way—all feminists tended to be lumped together
and branded as prudes and anti-pornography partisans by queer theorists and
third-generation feminists alike. Stereotypes do not emerge from a vacuum,
and the 1970s certainly produced its share of staid, humorless feminists. But it
was feminists who, at the dawn of the 1980s, produced festivals that included
smart, wildly funny, and erotically charged performances. The project of my
book, then, would be to rediscover feminism’s lost genealogy and resurrect

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those instances of cultural production that reverse a sleight-of-hand that made

of all feminists “the feminists.” Much exciting and important contemporary
work is miscast as antithetical to an aesthetic history that, in fact, at the very
least profoundly informs it and, I would argue, largely produced it.
The inability of those women who actually attended the festivals to re-
member what was so breathtaking about them marks the beginning of a
trajectory in which much is forgotten over time about work of significance
and influence. “Collective memory works selectively, imaginatively, and often
perversely,” according to Roach, and “selective memory requires public enact-
ments of forgetting, either to blur the obvious discontinuities, misalliances,
and ruptures or . . . to exaggerate them in order to mystify a previous Golden
Age, now lapsed” (2–3). Far from mystifying or glorifying a previous period,
the inability to recall some of the festivals’ most salient features is a conse-
quence of maligning a previous age. Vilifying feminists as dour prudes and
feminism as essentialist, assimilationist, and anti-sex had a totalizing effect;
what was in fact a reaction against specific kinds of feminism effectively sealed
off further consideration of other feminisms and their multiple sensibilities.
“Feminists didn’t do that kind of thing back then” is the resulting conviction,
collectively held in cultural memory. In other words, rising up from a sea of
over eighty feminist performance pieces were a handful of performances that
largely account for the overwhelming sense of WOW’s festivals as utterly new
and unique. They can no longer be remembered, however, because a reductive,
simplified version of feminist history dominates the current discourse, seal-
ing off access to these anomalous performances in collective memory. Hence,
a significant dimension of feminist history is lost to a process of forgetting
that ultimately serves to support claims of originality for certain, sex-positive
cultural developments in the 1990s. WOW’s festivals belie this trajectory,
providing evidence of a funny, parodic, eroticized, gender-bending aesthetic
with roots firmly grounded in feminism.
While some 112 women’s theaters were in existence across the United States
at the time of WOW’s festivals, most imploded under the strain of tensions
inherent in early feminist thinking and organizational philosophies. Only a
handful of women’s theaters remain today, and WOW is the only one of its
kind still operating in New York City. As WOW approaches nearly thirty years
of uninterrupted production, it continues to reside in the East Village, where
it operates as a collective in the fourth-floor walk-up space of an abandoned
doll factory in a city-owned building. It functions today on an annual budget
of $17,000 with no artistic director, no staff, and, until recent years, no phone.
At any given moment, some thirty to thirty-five women are actively involved

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in WOW’s collective, but hundreds have participated over time, producing

some of the most significant work to emerge from Manhattan’s downtown
theater scene.
In the context of feminist performance from an earlier historical period,
Sue-Ellen Case has written, “The traditional canon of art, literature and
theatre omits almost entirely any images of lesbian experience or sexuality”
(50). This was certainly true in the 1970s and 1980s as well. The desire to
rectify this erasure was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the
WOW Café. Similarly, a driving force behind my book became the desire to
confirm the sentiments of those who contend that WOW burst on the scene as
something extraordinary and then continued to surprise for over two decades.
Although WOW has received much attention from feminist scholars over the
years, the WOW Café Theatre and much of the significant work produced
there is missing from the annals of both “legitimate theater” and avant-garde
performance. WOW’s accomplishment has not been fully recognized. When
a phenomenon like WOW goes missing, something significant is lost not
only to theater history but to cultural studies in general. When feminism goes
missing, something is lost to queer.
Ten years prior to my work in the archive’s Brooklyn location, I had visited
the Lesbian Herstory Archives when it was the pioneering effort of Joan Nestle
and housed in her apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan. The archive
opened quite literally in her pantry in 1976, and by 1990, boxes, file cabinets,
and piles of material were everywhere—the living room, the bedroom, the
kitchen. I remember sitting on the end of Nestle’s bed watching a videotape of
a WOW weekly Variety Night performance on a screen only a couple of feet
from my face. Nestle was particularly excited that day because she had just
received the writings and photographs of lesbians of color who had defined
and occupied their own subcultural space in Harlem throughout and beyond
the time of the Harlem Renaissance. One of the photographs was a headshot
of a strikingly beautiful, cross-dressed black woman.
Visiting this early version of the archive was emotional in ways I had not
anticipated. The place was jam-packed with the evidence of so many women
never written into history and long lost to memory. If women in general are
absent from the historical record, lesbians are aggressively missing; for reasons
of survival, their history unfolds in acts of hiding from a hostile culture. Nestle
founded an archive where those who followed these women could mine the
evidence of lesbian existence and bring invisible lives and untold stories to light.
Nestle’s crammed and cramped apartment was crushingly sonorous with silent
and silenced voices—the sense of a lost people found was palpable.

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The lesson I learned as an archaeologist in the lesbian archive is the crucial

significance of creating and maintaining evidence of the lives and work of domi-
nant culture’s marginalized groups. In the absence of such preservation, WOW’s
history and its importance to an understanding of feminist history is but one
example of what would be lost to the historical record. The lessons learned in
the Lesbian Herstory Archives changed the direction of my book project in
ways I could not have anticipated. Other lessons await discovery there.

Works Cited
Baracks, Barbara. “Witches, Nuns, and Bearded Ladies.” Soho Weekly News,
Oct. 29, 1980: 23.
Carr, C. Interview. New York. Mar. 29, 2001.
Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminism and Theatre. New York: Methuen, 1988.
———, ed. Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance. London:
Routledge, 1996.
The Five Lesbian Brothers (Theatre Troup). The Five Lesbian Brothers: Four
Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000.
Hart, Lynda, ed. Of All the Nerve: Deb Margolin Solo. New York: Cassell,
1999.
Haye, Bethany. “Performance.” Soho Weekly News, Oct. 1, 1980.
Hughes, Holly. Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler. New York: Grove, 1996.
Jenkins, Linda Walsh. “Split Britches.” Women in American Theatre. Ed. Helen
Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins. Rev. ed. New York: Theatre Com-
munications Group, 1987. 310–14.
Margolin, Deb. Interview. New York. June 6, 2001.
Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York:
Columbia UP, 1996.
Solomon, Alisa. “The Wings of Desire: WOW Café Celebrates 20 Years of
Lesbian Performance.” Village Voice, Jan. 3–9, 2001: 61.
Troyano, Alina. I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing between Cultures. Boston:
Beacon, 2000.
Weaver, Lois. “Afterword. ” The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance.
Ed. Lizbeth Goodman. London: Routledge, 1998. 303–4.

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0ART&OUR

When the Lives of

Our Research Subjects
Parallel Our Own
 
“I See Dead People”
Archive, Crypt, and an Argument
for the Researcher’s Sixth Sense
Elizabeth (Betsy) Birmingham

In M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 movie The Sixth Sense, the child-protagonist,

Cole Sear, communicates—against his will and with some horror—with spirits
of the dead. The movie’s plot becomes increasingly complex when the child
whispers to his psychologist, Malcolm Crowe, that the spirits “don’t know
they’re dead.” They don’t haunt us, it seems, out of malevolence; they don’t
even know they haunt. My experience of research as a lived experience has
involved inhabiting the cool archival spaces occupied by spirits, listening to
their stories whispered in historical traces, and having them not just tolerate
my presence but befriend me and shape my research.
Architect Marion Mahony Griffin (1871–1961) doesn’t know that she is dead.
And then again, perhaps she is not—she’s quite hot right now, though I hardly
know what she would think of that. The first monograph devoted solely to her
work, Marion Mahony: Drawing the Form of Nature, was published in 2005;
she had her first solo exhibition (at Northwestern’s Block Museum, on the
shore of Lake Michigan, near where she grew up in Winnetka, Illinois); and I
recently opened the Chronicle of Higher Education to see her architectural work
splashing the whole of the back page. Since 2005, my own published research
is a tiny fraction of the scholarly activity surrounding Mahony Griffin’s life
and work: the Art Institute of Chicago has gone live with a beautiful Web
version of her manuscript “The Magic of America”; a well-known Australian
biographer has a book project under contract; and Australian and American
scholars have begun the early work on a collaborative project concerning
transdisciplinary approaches to understanding the cultural impact of Mahony
Griffin’s work. She is hot.
It is difficult to say a woman like that is dead, as she helps me shape my
tenure case, write this article, teach my graduate research methods class, and
secure funding to work with others, for whom she is equally alive, in Australia.
As scholars who work with historical figures, we always know that we owe

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those figures some sort of debt, as we mine their lives (and deaths) to build our
careers. But sometimes, when we are very lucky, we see dead people—people
whose will won’t be ignored—the relationship becomes reciprocal, and the
work we do together leads to friendship and collaboration. That is the story
that I have to tell.
I first learned of Marion Mahony Griffin in 1989 through my interest in
her husband, Walter Burley Griffin, who was, at that time, the object of my
intellectual longing. He was a turn-of-the-century architect possessed of the
clean-shaven, Hollywood good looks not common during that mustached,
mutton-chopped historical moment. I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis
(for my art history degree) on his midwestern architecture, visiting nearly all
of the thirty-some buildings still standing that he had designed between 1902
and 1913. My work was the traditional work of an architectural historian: I
was studying a body of work, this group of buildings; attempting to determine
contemporary addresses for each; using building records, city phone books, and
architectural magazines to accurately date the buildings; and upon developing
an accurate chronology, making some claims about the aesthetic development
of the architect.
Because I was an undergraduate, much of this work really had been done
some years before; there existed a solid history of secondary scholarship on
the subject of Walter Burley Griffin’s architecture extending back to 1964,
including several references from the 1950s. Nonetheless, I undertook my
charge diligently, revisiting the primary sources: I visited the Cook County
records office and the Chicago Historical Society and dug through hundreds
of mildewed issues of Construction News and Western Architect and ancient
telephone books. My goal, as I understood it, was to suggest that Griffin’s
architectural skills developed in a way that made his work diverge from that
of his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright. I compiled note cards, created chronolo-
gies, and tried to understand what happened after 1910–11 that so changed his
architectural style that he moved from being a follower of Wright to being an
innovator in his own right.
I never met Mahony Griffin in these places, nor in the secondary scholarship
written about her husband as I absorbed that scholarship unquestioningly. I
knew that Walter married, at thirty-four, a woman six years older, who was,
as a contemporary wrote, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s most talented assistant.” I
found traces of her, though much of the information in secondary sources
was contradictory (or wrong): her name was usually misspelled (Marian,
or Mahoney, or both); her dates of birth, death, graduation, and marriage
varied by source. Although many sources mention both Griffins and even
include Mahony Griffin in their indices, she receives mention only because

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of her marriage to Walter. She is characterized as a pupil, a wife, and a drafts-

man—but not as a highly educated and competent architect in her own right.
In all the secondary scholarship I read, written from 1947 to 1989, that one
piece of information remained consistent. Though she may have designed a
few buildings, though she graduated from MIT with a degree in architecture,
though she was the first woman in the country licensed to practice architec-
ture, she wasn’t really an architect. She was a “draftsman,” something lesser
and dismissible. And I believed it, dismissing her. Those telling me so were
scholars, scholars whose published credibility was intoxicating to me because
I wanted to be one of them.
I first met Mahony Griffin herself through her 1,000-page manuscript,
“The Magic of America,” housed in the Burnham Library of Chicago’s Art
Institute. As an undergraduate in 1989, I carried to the archive a note from
my art history professor, who had arranged this meeting, who had vouched
for my integrity. I sat in the fluorescent archives, wearing white cotton gloves,
leafing through Mahony Griffin’s musty typescript, breathing her in, unable
to read more than bits in the two days I had allowed for my research. Her
typescript was a baffling puzzle of things—at my first glance perhaps more
a huge scrapbook than a manuscript. It hid more of her than it revealed to
me, a labyrinthine catacomb of stuff never quite catalogued or described by
an archivist, just artifacts arranged by Mahony Griffin herself: architectural
drawings, newspaper clippings, postcards, letters, lists of the native plants of
Australia, texts of speeches delivered by her and by Walter—all wrapped a
strange story of the entwined lives of two architects, lives that she described
as a series of four “battles.” I found both an unreadable text and a text that
haunted me—by the time I left, I was convinced that the text, described in the
card catalogue only as “a biography of architect Walter Burley Griffin,” was
something other than that. My note cards and chronologies helped me piece
together a story of parallel paths that suddenly crossed, leading to architectural
work such as neither had previously produced: the 1912 winning design for
the international competition to build an entire city, the Australian national
capital at Canberra.
Yet nothing that I had read in the secondary scholarship I obsessively
consumed had described the text, or Mahony Griffin herself, in any but the
most dismissive terms. The top scholars in my field described her variously
as “coldly intellectual” (Birrell 14), “bitter and critical” (132), and lacking
“the imaginative mind to create” (Brooks 164). Her work was easily labeled
“derivative” (Van Zanten 21), and her architecture was “inconsistent, lacked
restraint, and was not architecturally rationalized” (Johnson 12). Her text
was dismissed much more thoroughly by scholars as the ranting of a senile

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Elizabeth (Betsy) Birmingham

and bitter old woman. These traces, the only discussion of her available to
me through secondary sources in 1989, worked to erase any interpretation of
her life or work as interesting or important. It is not surprising that I became
certain that my engagement with and interest in the text and its author sug-
gested something lax about my scholarship—a lack of discernment that would
mark me naive and unsophisticated. Although “The Magic of America” was
the richest document I found in my research, and my guesses about it were
the only original conclusions that came from my research, I did not men-
tion or cite the text in my undergraduate thesis, perhaps out of fear that my
interest in a thing so dismissible would reveal that I really wasn’t a scholar,
that I was easily sidetracked by the unimportant. So I became possessed by a
secret, a secret whispered by a text, written by a dead women, misidentified by
archivists, ignored by scholars. The text was not a biography of one architect
but an autobiography of a joined career and a collaboration, two lives, and a
shared love for architecture.
Architectural theorist Mark Wigley, citing Jacques Derrida, suggests that
the crypt is the secret itself, formed by the not telling, “the act of vomiting to
the inside” constructed of the tension of the “internal resistance of the vault
like pillars, beams, studs, and retaining walls, leaning the powers of intolerable
pain against an ineffable, forbidden pleasure” (qtd. in Bloomer 155). The pain
was the haunting knowledge that in order to become an architectural historian,
I had to give up the work I found interesting, the excavation of texts for those
minute traces that documented the contributions of people long dead, long
dismissed, and thoroughly discredited. The pleasure was of being possessed of
and by a secret knowledge—evidence, clear evidence, I thought, that joined
fortunes led two architects to produce better work than either had been capable
of alone. When I hinted at this knowledge, later, while in my architectural
history master’s program, a professor, a very smart professor, suggested that
to tell such secrets would be “academic suicide.” Historians never speculate,
he offered. I am not the first student to have felt this tension among secret,
crypt, pain, and pleasure, a tension that I would now identify as “discipline.”
But at the time, I knew only that when faced with a difference between what
published scholars knew and what I guessed, I had to follow published schol-
ars—that is how “we” build knowledge, and to do otherwise is “suicide.”
More than fifteen years later, I still cringe at the real secret: that I so wanted
to be an architectural historian that I refused to tell the story I was beginning to
understand, that my note cards and chronologies did add up to something—an
intellectual collaboration that enabled these two minor architects to produce
work that would win an international competition. Discipline instead required
me to tell a sideways story that maintained the fragile architecture of those

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histories I knew, the ones that described a male genius and a talented assistant
whose skill as an artist helped her husband become successful. When I wrote
about Mahony Griffin in 1991, in my aborted attempt to finish my master’s
degree in architectural studies, I even spelled her name Mahoney, as had the
scholars I cited, even though I had seen her name, Mahony, typed by her own
hand on the title page of her typescript when I read it in the archive.
This is my secret. I did not simply succumb to some perceived disciplinary
pressure (I did that when I agreed to write about her husband’s architectural
work rather than about her text as my master’s thesis). I talked myself into
believing (with the help of the many scholars who claimed it) that perhaps
Mahony Griffin herself had been senile, or perverse, or mistaken about many
things. About the spelling of her own name? The weight of discipline made
it seem more reasonable that she be mistaken about the spelling of her own
name than that many scholars, one of whom sat on my thesis committee,
could all be wrong. Mistaken.
If historians don’t even speculate, I assumed they also did not misspell. I
still struggle to understand who I was that I could have been made to doubt
so easily. As a scholar, I had to make up an implausible story so that I could
be wrong in good company. My discipline itself kept me distanced from the
subject of my research, but not so that I might objectively evaluate the in-
formation I had collected. Rather, my discipline sought to narrow potential
interpretations and to enforce, rigidly, the notion that my work must build on
that of other scholars—even those who were mistaken—and that any other
interpretation was speculation. And my professors, who walked me through
this process, were smart and generous and careful scholars, as were the schol-
ars whose work I was reading and parroting and internalizing and rebelling
against, and I wanted to be like them. And I couldn’t.
I wish I could say that Marion compelled me, or enabled me, or inspired
me, or haunted me until I abandoned my dysfunctional relationship with my
first academic love, architectural history. And perhaps she did, but mostly I
just left, not for her but for me, abandoning a degree into which I had invested
thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of research. When I tried to explain
to my thesis director, I could only say, “I can’t do this. I think it’s methodologi-
cal.” And perhaps it always is, but I think that I just didn’t see her—I saw only
the person that my disciplined vision allowed me to see.
If I met Marion Mahony in 1989, I befriended her in 1999, after I became a
rhetorician (and no longer worried about being in the good company of archi-
tectural historians) and felt empowered to tell, finally, the most interesting story
I knew. For the first time, I sat with her text. In that same fluorescent archive,
she emerged as I read her letters. I read them as if they had been written to me,

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Elizabeth (Betsy) Birmingham

as if she were entrusting me with her story, her life, her love, and her career. I
sat and cried. She wrote of falling in love at forty:
But when I encountered W.B.G. I was swept off my feet by my delight
in his achievements in my profession, then through the common bond
of interests in nature and intellectual pursuits and then with the man
himself. It was by no means a case of love at first sight, but it was a mad-
ness when it struck. (“Magic of America” IV 157)
But it was her letter to Walter’s sister and brother-in-law describing her pres-
ence at Walter’s death, so far from home together in India in 1937, that caused
my crying:
Then as his breath began to fail, I talked to him, told him what a
wonderful life I had had with him, how he was beloved by everybody
and suddenly he turned and fastened his eyes wide open and round on
mine, startled and intense as if it had never occurred to him that he
could die and they never left mine till he ceased breathing and I closed
them. (I 305)
She never forgave Walter for dying too young, for leaving her alone for so many
years. She never had another design built. There is no question that for nearly
ten years, I had had a professional relationship with this talented woman—a
relationship that had allowed me to study her life and puzzle about her work.
Why then, on that day, did I first see her? What was it that made me cry, that
made her befriend me?
The researcher’s sixth sense isn’t the ability to see the dead but our poten-
tial to help the dead, who do not know they are dead, finish their stories, and
we do this in the moment in which we realize that their stories are ours. For
many years, I found myself frustrated by those scholarly representations that
subsumed Mahony Griffin’s architectural work within that of her husband’s,
those representations that refused to describe a collaborative, mutually nourish-
ing relationship at the heart of an exceptionally creative architectural practice.
Is this the story that keeps me awake at night? The story my fellow scholars
have told that seems most deeply false, mean-spirited, and unjust to my friend?
No, not even close.
It has taken me more than fifteen years to understand the promise that
has grown from my friendship with a woman who died before I was born.
That promise, which has become my responsibility as a researcher, has led to
my interest not in teasing apart some truth of her life, not in seeing it as a life
that needs me to ride in like the cavalry to recover its importance, but to ask
why it is a life that should need recovering at all. Mahony Griffin’s is a well-

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 “I See Dead People”

documented life. There are buildings, publications, letters, treatises, postcards,

architectural drawings, blueprints, manifestos; a 1,000-page autobiography;
mentions of her work by contemporaries, in manuscript memoirs, and in var-
ied publications; records of her birth, her death, her college graduation, her
senior thesis, her career as a professional, her passion for the theater, her public
speeches, and her parties. These exist, with her name always correctly spelled,
pages and pages and pages of primary records, nearly all unconsulted—in fact,
nearly all dismissed—by a generation of highly trained scholars and historians
who have in turn been almost exclusively consulted by a second generation of
highly trained scholars and historians.
I became a rhetorician, and not a historian, so that my research could span
the questions imposed by discipline. My research shifted from the attempt to
pin down architectural influences, chronologies, and construction histories to
attempting to pin down scholars—to examine our questions, our methods, and
our preoccupations—noting the things we value and how those values shape
the knowledge they claim to benignly reflect. My promise to my friend Marion
has been to make visible the ways in which the language of architectural history
has shaped her rich life into one that is dismissible, and has done so despite
shelves of evidence to the contrary. And this was done so easily, and nearly
accidentally and without malice, to a woman who did everything within her
power to document the life she wanted remembered, a woman whose signature
is everywhere and whose marks and traces cover three continents and shape
major cities. If this can happen to her, not because of some grand conspiracy
or international scholarly plot but rather because of uninterrogated habits of
scholarship ingrained in us through an education of strict discipline, should it
surprise us that we know so little of so few women in art, architecture, music,
science, engineering? My argument for the researcher’s sixth sense is not that it
will enable us to recover and converse with the lost dead, to understand them
in a way that is definitive and true, but that they will help us recover ourselves,
help us discover that we did not know that we were the dead, inhabiting the
crypt, repeating dead histories in dead languages.

Works Cited
Biemiller, Lawrence. “The Artist behind the Architect.” Chronicle of Higher
Education, Dec. 2, 2005.
Birrell, James. Walter Burley Griffin. Brisbane: U of Queensland P, 1964.
Bloomer, Jennifer. Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.
Brooks, H. Allen. The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and His Midwest
Contemporaries. New York: Norton, 1972.

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Elizabeth (Betsy) Birmingham

Griffin, Marion Mahony. “The Magic of America.” Unpublished typescript.

New-York Historical Society, c. 1949.
Johnson, Donald Leslie. The Architecture of Walter Burley Griffin. Melbourne:
Macmillan Co. of Australia, 1977.
Van Zanten, David. “The Early Work of Marion Mahony Griffin.” Prairie
School Review 3.2 (1969): 5–23.
Wood, Debora, ed. Marion Mahony Griffin: Drawing the Form of Nature.
Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2005.

146
 
Stitching and Writing a Life
Liz Rohan

I found my research subject Janette Miller (1879–1969), a librarian, diarist, mis-

sionary, preacher, and poet, and she “found” me about fifteen years ago at the
University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library. A senior at the university,
I was researching the diaries of a man who had owned a home in Ann Arbor
that I was studying for an architecture project. After a cursory glance at the
man’s diaries, I knew I would find nothing about his house from them. But it
got me curious about the library’s other diaries. I zeroed in on the description
in the finding aide for Janette’s diaries: “Interesting in a personal way. Some
dream entries.” Her writing (about a dozen leather-bound diaries plus her
correspondence and photograph collection from her work as a missionary)
is stored at this library. Janette’s brother’s family donated the material to the
library in the 1970s. In 1990, I had been the first to study them.
Intrigued, I returned to read these diaries when I had time a few months
later and spent several days combing over them. Seven years afterward, I
decided I wanted to write about Janette’s work and went back to read her
diaries many times thereafter while also combing over the items documenting
her sixty-year career as a missionary in Angola. Her writing first inspired me
to pursue my Ph.D., eventually became the topic of my dissertation, and is
now the topic of my current book project. The process I have gone through
to gain intimacy with these texts, and by default with Janette Miller the per-
son, has coaxed me into academe, arguably directed my career thus far in it,
and—overall—has helped me to solidify a method for understanding texts and
the lives invariably shaping them. Part of the research method I outline here
shows the benefits of research beyond the obvious; the archives Janette Miller
left behind not only inspired my research methods but helped me mature as
a person and scholar.
Janette began writing in her diaries when she was about fourteen, in 1893,
and stopped writing in them when she left the United States for Angola when
she was thirty, in 1909. At first, she was more inclined to write about the details
of her life and used blank-book diaries. This attention to extensive narrative
tapered off over the years as she used her diary more as a combination account-

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Liz Rohan

ing ledger, photo album, and scrapbook. She also began the habit of pasting in
copies of letters she had sent and received into the pages of her diaries.
Even though almost seven years had elapsed between my first and second
visit to Janette’s diaries, I remained tied to her life and writing. Keeping a
diary was important to Janette, as it had been to me; like her, I began writ-
ing in a diary when I was a teenager. Although I had read published diaries
before, in 1990 Janette’s diaries were the first and only ones I had thus far seen
“in the flesh.” Also, Janette was a prolific dreamer and recorded her dreams
in her diaries; I too use my diaries to record my dreams. Thus, I felt bonded
to Janette due to our shared literate activities. Moreover, in the seven years I
stayed “away” from Janette, I never forgot this quotation she copied into the
back of her diary for 1903 that I read the first time I found the diaries:

Guidelines for Christian Living

Find out what God is doing, [do] not initiate our own work and when
he requires our presence for his own plans use (1) Bible (2) Pure motives
(3) Surrender will (4) Use reason (5) Much prayer (6) Ask for all other
doors be closed (7) Watch for circumstance (8) Try not to be guided by
the whole plan, but the next stitch. We often make the mistake thinking
that God is not guiding us at all because we cannot see far ahead. But
this is not his method. He only undertakes that the steps of a good man
be ordered by the Lord. (emphasis mine)

She wrote underneath them, “Grandma tells of minister who said, ‘God doesn’t
give dying grace to live by.’”
As I graduated from college and embarked upon my journey into the real
world, to work in Chicago (two months after reading Janette’s diaries for the
first time), these “directions” from Janette’s diary remained inspirational, if
implicitly. In my diary, I adopted the metaphor of the “stitch.” The idea of
living as a process and an ever-evolving plan paralleled for me the act of writ-
ing life experiences into a diary or journal. As a diary writer, I had learned to
look at my life as an evolving story of disparate details that eventually come
together, upon reflection, to make a whole. And then, faced with new obstacles
and questions, the cycle would begin again. Also, as I studied Janette’s writ-
ing, our narratives became synthesized (or stitched together) as I shared some
of her experiences.
Later, when I looked through Janette’s diaries again, I ascertained that she
had gotten this quotation from her grandmother during the summer of 1903,
when Janette had visited with her for a time. Her grandmother was a devout
woman who struggled with her faith. During an intimate moment with her
grandmother that summer, Janette probably accessed these Christian Living

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guidelines, which she copied into the Memorandum section of her 1903 diary,
next to directions for eliminating “falling hair.”
When I read Janette’s diaries in college, and when I found the Christian
Living guidelines, I was primarily interested in her dreams (the sleeping kind).
She wrote vividly of one dream in particular. When she was seventeen, she
had a nightmare that a wedding (in which she was the bride) took a forebod-
ing turn when her mother and the groom failed to show up for it. Five years
later, practically to the date of this dream, in 1902, Janette’s mother, Cora,
died. Janette wrote often during her mother’s illness, scribbling Bible verses
at the top of the pages of her diary. Cora lay bedridden for a year, suffering
frequent convulsions; her death was slow and painful. Janette became very
close to her mother when working as her caretaker and also trying to attend
school and work part-time.
When I went back to read the diaries seven years later, I visited them in Ann
Arbor on the way to spend time with my parents in their Detroit-area home
where I grew up. Learning more about Janette, I became interested in why
she chose to become a missionary, which, I’d learn, linked her dreams (but for
the future) to larger historical trends. Armed with this question after a long
January afternoon at the Bentley Historical Library with Janette’s 1908 diary, I
found a telling paragraph alluding to her frustration with her life as a librarian
and her choice to become a missionary, what she called “special service for the
master.” When I better understood Janette’s method for meaning-making in
her diary, I realized that this paragraph was from a letter she had sent to her
former high school teacher Miss Hull, who was also a mentor and friend:
I cannot stand another year of irresolution and miserable sense of failure.
Better attempt something with hope and courage than stand irresolute
on the brink, or settle back to give up. . . . This thought of beginning
life again at age 30 does not daunt me, but to live life useless fills me
with terror. There has been an undercurrent of deep dissatisfaction this
year with merely working to earn a living and living to earn my bread.
Library work is interesting and pleasant and educational—as delightful
work as I could find, it is not doing any special service for the master.
I promised to serve . . . so I ought to have every day work which would
be service.
I had just turned twenty-nine years old when I read this passage, and I ap-
preciated the courage it would have taken to leave friends and family for the
unknown, “beginning life again at age 30.” This paragraph was the “next
stitch” for me to consider as I left Janette’s work again.
When I at last sat down with the notes I had taken from Janette’s diaries,
hoping to create an article about them, I decided to structure the piece by

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Liz Rohan

attempting to find out why Janette might have become frustrated with her
life as a librarian and why she was inspired to become a missionary. As I re-
searched the historical period when Janette wrote in her diaries—from 1893
to 1909—I was also reconsidering my plan to get a Ph.D. in composition and
rhetoric (a plan I had abandoned the year previously). My first official writing
about Janette was in my personal statements to graduate schools. I wrote that
Janette’s decision to begin her life over at thirty was giving me the courage
to do the same.
On top of this “stitch” attaching me to Janette, I was also experiencing some
of her frustrations. Like her, I did not have time to dedicate myself to the work
that made me feel good about myself professionally or vocationally. During
the time I was writing about her, I was working three jobs, not only to make
ends meet and to pay off debts but to feel satisfied. While I held a mentally
taxing but financially unrewarding job in the writing center of a high school,
where I was also the debate coach, I was additionally teaching a writing class
at night. The only time I could get to a library to do research was after school,
when I was tired. Because I was no longer a student at any of the Chicago-area
university libraries I visited, I couldn’t check out books. I had to make it to
the Northwestern University Library before five o’clock, when “visitors” were
no longer admitted. My motivation to write about Janette’s life without the
time or the resources to do so helped me to understand her even more. I too
had become too busy “earning my bread” to dedicate myself to what I loved:
writing and scholarship. My day job held me back from doing my “work.”
Like Janette, I needed to go for it—leave my secure life in Chicago for my
Ph.D. in another city, which I did the following year. The “directions” for my
life had been buried in Janette’s diary for years. Yet until I was ready to read
them, they weren’t mine to find.
In her reflections about her relationship to women’s rhetoric and the method-
ology she adopts when writing about female rhetoricians, contributor Christine
Mason Sutherland recalls her Oxford college teachers who encouraged her to
respond to primary texts with the naïveté of what might be considered a gut
reaction. Secondary sources were to be consulted only after an impression had
been made about the primary source of interest (111). I initially discovered Ja-
nette’s writing—her diaries composed as a young girl and young woman—with
this so-called naive approach. I was simply interested in diaries, and in primary
sources, as a college senior. I hadn’t an agenda or an academic career. Perhaps
unconsciously, as I returned to Janette’s texts as a burgeoning scholar and as
I decided to write about life and texts for my Ph.D. dissertation, I recalled
the value of a so-called naive reaction to another woman’s life and materials
outlining them, the value of “watch[ing] for circumstance[s],” honoring the

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stitch over a plan. I was implicitly dedicated to the analytical approach I had
adopted at the onset of my discovery of Janette’s texts. I was to resist critique;
I was to wait for the “next stitch” each time I brought new clues and contexts
to my research tasks. This was especially important when I began to write
about and research Janette’s lifetime project as missionary. I could relate to her
diary texts set in modern institutions in the relatively familiar environs of the
turn-of-the-twentieth-century Midwestern cities where Janette had spent her
childhood and young womanhood—Chicago, Omaha, and later Detroit. But
when Janette—whose focus was on converting others to Christianity—moved
out of her diary to Angola, where she lived and worked in a colonial context as
a missionary for sixty years, my project and burgeoning affinity with Janette
as a subject became more complicated if strained.
Although alienated by her evangelical impulses, I also noticed that when I
engaged with Janette’s texts, my life became better as I became less judgmental
of others. For the most part, the colonial context in which Janette wrote made
me conscious about any colonizing moves on my part as a researcher. Most
significantly, the challenge of following a stitch and foregoing an understanding
of a pattern, or rather imposing a pattern onto data, was made comprehensive
for me by my several trips to find the house where Janette lived in the early
1900s, on Avery Street in Detroit. The journey was technically tangential to
my research. But I was fairly certain that 221 Avery, a historic, architectural,
and geographic text, was a profoundly important site for Janette. This was
where Janette had nursed her very ill mother for a year and from where her
father had hastily moved the family immediately after Cora’s death.
Thus, my trip to Avery Street was a kind of pilgrimage to a sacred place in
Janette’s life, a kind of nostalgic and reverent errand I did initially “for her.”
Just as the paragraph Janette wrote when she was thirty about her choice to be a
missionary inspired me to get my Ph.D., Janette’s other private texts promoted
action on my part. I was inspired to embark upon this trip when seeing that
on a list of the deaths of her family members in her scrapbook, Janette had
jotted “221 Avery” next to the date of her mother’s death. Although I have still
not located the exact house in which the Millers lived in 1903 because the ad-
dress on the house has changed, during my trips through Detroit to look for
this house, I confronted my own emotional relationship to the space where
Janette once lived—a now socio-economically depressed Detroit whose many
inhabitants are black and poor. My obvious task, according to standard aca-
demic practice, necessitated an interrogation of Janette’s subjectivity as a white
middle-class woman working in a politicized situation, in Africa “converting
natives.” However, my recursive trips to find Janette’s former home resulted
in revelations to my own self about my subjectivity as a white middle-class

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woman who grew up in the racially polarized space of Metro-Detroit. My trip

was at first designed for Janette, the stitch, but then I realized that the trips
benefited me, a greater plan.
The Detroit landscape, a research site obviously outside of the archives, also
helped me to understand Janette’s subjectivity. When exploring the multiracial
Detroit neighborhood of Woodbridge where Janette had once lived on Avery,
whereupon I met its racially diverse twenty-first-century habitants who tried
to help me find 221 Avery, I discovered a more complex racial script than the
one I had been taught to imagine growing up. Janette Miller’s story indeed
depicts a complicated script when it comes to racial politics. At the end of her
life, she was running a mission, the Ebenezer Orphanage, with the help of a
biracial, transnational administration. One of her partners was a Portuguese
woman, the other an African woman. My trips through Detroit to visit 221
Avery made me think about and value Janette’s experience; my trips urged me
not to simplify her situation.
These trips through Detroit also led me to new data and further showcase
the serendipitous discoveries of the research process described by others in
this volume. After I had visited Avery Street one June day, I decided to learn
more about historical Detroit at the Detroit Public Library. In old city phone
directories, I looked up all the Millers who lived in the city in 1905. Though I
didn’t necessarily need this information for my write-up about Janette’s diaries,
it was thrilling to see that these ordinary texts, the phone books, corroborated
what I had learned from Janette’s diaries. The phone books indicated that in
1905, Janette had lived with her brother Frank and near her aunt Kate, whom
I had come to know in the diaries. My curiosity and desultory approach to
archival work paid off that day when I impulsively looked in the card catalogue
for anything by or about Janette Miller and discovered that she had apparently
donated a textbook to the library that she had written in the African language
Umbundu, entitled Ortografia. Published in 1921, it is an important artifact
for me in reconstructing Janette’s experience as a missionary, which I continue
to investigate. The methodological approach that helped me to find Janette
Miller’s papers in the first place—vague curiosity—led me to new clues for
“piecing” the story of her life together.
The process I undertook while building major projects from the data I
found so long ago when a young and novice undergraduate scholar reinforces
an adage I learned from a senior scholar when in graduate school and just be-
ginning my dissertation: “The work will show you how to do it.” One obvious
plan that manifested from “piecing together” Janette’s story with her texts: it
prepared me for the surprising conclusion to my search for an academic job.
One of my three job offers was at the University of Michigan–Dearborn,

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located in the Detroit suburbs, which I took. My spiritual and physical recon-
nection with the Detroit area prepared me for a more intense homecoming,
a real and hopefully permanent one. My research about Janette prepared me
spiritually for this circumstance—it showed me how to get home and, more
than anything, made me appreciate this home. More logically, I was aided
by the project materially because the research provided me the ethos and the
degree to land the job.
The recursive process of leaving home and coming home that I confronted
when writing about Janette parallels also a function of women’s diary writing,
noted by Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia Huff, which they read as a sustained,
if cyclical, attempt by the diarist “self” to assess and renew her commitment to
others (19). Diarists continue through time, writing over time, but constantly
return home to a physical location—the diary itself. Following the stitch, as
a diarist and a student of diaries, has thus far not surprisingly led me on a
circuitous and rewarding journey. My encounter with Janette’s story shaped
my methods for making meaning not only of her life but of other texts and
lives that I have encountered through other research projects—including, of
course, my own.

Works Cited
Bunkers, Suzanne, and Cynthia A. Huff. “Issues in Women’s Diaries: A
Theoretical and Critical Introduction.” Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays
on Women’s Diaries. Ed. Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff. Amherst:
U of Massachusetts P, 1996. 1–20.
Miller, Janette. Papers of Janette Miller, Congregationalist Missionary to
Angola, box 1. Bentley Historical Library, U of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Sutherland, Christine Mason. “Feminist Historiography: Research Methods
in Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly (Winter 2002): 109–22.

153
 
When Two Stories Collide,
They Catch Fire
Anca Vlasopolos

I go back to the summer of 2001. Inveterate insomniac that I am, I must

have dozed off because I awake clutching the sheet so tightly my knuckles
are frozen in fists, and it hurts when I unfurl my hands. A disreputable
old sailor in patchwork clothes has just handed me a sack. He’s pleased
with himself and with me, his grin crinkling up his dry-leather face and
showing gums. It’s a gift, from the heart, he says, spit flying from his
mouth. What have I done to earn it? I open it. No pearls—a cascade of
whole and broken shells and sand pours out. A dried blowfish. A very old
piece of salt cod on its way to fossil. And, last, a bird’s corpse. I recognize
it instantly—the golden head, downy breast, black-barred wing tips and
tail: a short-tailed albatross. The old man winks. He says, “I know you’re
interested in these. I shot one for you.” (Vlasopolos)
In 2001, there were only fourteen hundred of these birds alive in the world.
Each summer, a few die unnatural deaths as they get tangled up in long lines
of fishing vessels and then drown.
How did it begin, this interest leading to the nightmare? The first story
began on Cape Cod. Along Route 28 one summer, my great friend Joseph
Prescott, formerly my professor, then my colleague, told me a charming story.
True intellectual, he made it a point to visit whatever university or college hap-
pened to be in any town where he paused on his travels—or if not a university
or college, at least the public library.
In Fairhaven, Massachusetts, Joe said, there’s a public library with a huge
glass case displaying a kimono, a samurai sword, and other Japanese artifacts.
Intrigued, Joe asked the librarian about the origin of this display, and he was
treated to an unusual bit of local history: in the 1840s, a Japanese boy was
rescued from a deserted island in the Pacific by a whaling ship, whose captain
took to the boy, brought him to Fairhaven, educated him, and helped him make
his way back to Japan. The boy, named Manjiro, became the first professor of
English at what was later to become Tokyo University. Joe and I, professors

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of English, each first in our families to make a home in English, thought it

an apt instance of life’s surprises. At the time, I thought it a bit of local color
and quickly abandoned it to some corner of my mind.
Several years later, the international issue of National Wildlife Magazine
carried a story about the short-tailed, or Steller’s, albatross, one of those half-
empty, half-full tales of extinction’s brink (Steiner). The story told by Rick
Steiner arrived via Hiroshi Hasegawa, the world’s authority on the short-tailed
albatross, and involves Manjiro Nakahama, a nineteenth-century world travel-
er—the very same, it turns out, as the boy who grew to manhood in Fairhaven.
The short-tailed albatross, the bird presented to me in my nightmare, is the
largest and reputedly most beautiful albatross of the Pacific; it nests primarily
on a volcanic island, Torishima (Bird Island), off the coast of Japan. Sometime
after 1863, Steiner recounts, Manjiro (who by now as a samurai was allowed to
choose a last name—Nakahama, based on his birthplace) went on a whaling
mission for the Japanese government; he told an acquaintance, Nakaemon
Tamaoiki, of the unbridled appetite for exotic feathers in the West. Manjiro’s
knowledge about industrial-scale exploitation of animals had been acquired
during his sojourn in the United States after his rescue from Torishima by an
American whaling ship. As I read these paragraphs describing the rescued and
repatriated Japanese and his role in the eventual demise of the albatross, my
heart started pounding. Joe’s story—of the saved boy educated in Fairhaven
and then returned to Japan—stirred, broke through the dust and filaments
of disuse, and galvanized me. I read on . . .
Manjiro’s acquaintance Tamaoiki took Manjiro’s advice and set up a
feather-and-skin factory on Torishima.1 The workers decimated the albatross
population as they processed the long feathers for fashion export and the pure
down for stuffing thousands of quilts and pillows. From the clouds of birds,
estimated at about five million, that livened the skies and linked through flight
California, Alaska, Japan, and even China, only three thousand remained by
1932. The human population of “harvesters” did not fare well, either. In 1902,
a volcanic eruption buried the entire village, killing all 129 inhabitants. But
by then the albatross had become famous enough as sources of revenue, and
another colony of hunters came to make a life of death.
In 1932, the Japanese government, influenced, after decades, by the inter-
national conservation impetus that had led to the formation of preservationist
societies such as the Audubon, recognized the value of the short-tailed albatross
and decided to make Torishima a sanctuary to protect the birds. However, the
impoverished men on the island, still eking out a living from the few remaining
birds, became enraged and proceeded to kill all the albatross that were left, so
as to make a last profit from them. Not for nothing are albatross called goonies,

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Anca Vlasopolos

boobies, ahodori—fool birds. After centuries of misuse by humans, they still

think they belong. They cling tenaciously to their nesting grounds and refuse
to be frightened into flight. As if the loving and vengeful spirit of Coleridge’s
poem watched over the slaughter, the volcano erupted again in 1939, burying
the settlements; the humans this time were rescued. The island became, as
Manjiro had known it, desolate for humans, for a time.
During World War II, a garrison was stationed on Torishima. After the
war, in 1947, when a new meteorological station was built, a meteorologist who
climbed the height of the volcanic cliffs saw large birds with white breasts; he
counted three albatross. Yet the species was declared extinct in 1949, when an
expedition from the Audubon Society circled Torishima and saw no trace of
the birds. In 1951, ten albatross were sighted. These were descendants of thirty
juveniles who had taken to sea for their three years of wandering the oceans,
without alighting on land, before returning to nest where they were born; they
had thus escaped the carnage of the 1930s. In 1951, Japan began protecting the
short-tailed albatross. In 1962, they were declared a national monument.
From 1976 to the present, the man responsible for the precarious and still
uncertain survival of this species is Hiroshi Hasegawa, a Japanese ornithologist
at Toho University, recognized universally as the guardian of the short-tailed
albatross.2 That I would meet Dr. Hasegawa, that he would befriend me and
be my guide through the complicated research I eventually undertook, part
of it in a country whose language I do not know, was not something I would
have been able to predict from that fortuitous first connection between my
friend’s story, woven to entertain during a seaside drive, and Rick Steiner’s
moving essay, in which the returning, U.S.-acculturated Manjiro brought
with him more than a knowledge of English—he brought the knowledge of
the profits to be made from killing wild animals. During the year following
the serendipitous conjunction of the two narratives regarding Manjiro, I was
also working on a new course on animal rights and wrongs. I did extensive
research on the industrial-scale hunting of whales and birds in the nineteenth
century, and the life of Manjiro seemed a natural thread to follow toward my
sense that globalization entails unforeseen dangers as well as the often-touted
benefits. I began the research for what became my historical novel.
Early in the composition, I decided that I needed to travel to an island where
albatross abound, in the way that they used to crowd the slopes of Torishima
before the island even had a name. I wanted to experience for myself what Man-
jiro had felt, amid birds in the millions—the sounds, the smell, the movement.
The only albatross island to which I could travel without special permission
was Midway Island, which has a very healthy population of both Laysan and
black-footed albatross. I was ready to make reservations for the trip, but, to

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ensure that I would be on Midway at the right season, when the birds nest, and
that I would be allowed to walk among them, I wrote Beth Flint, U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Refuge manager for Midway, about my plans. She replied that if
I wanted to see the short-tailed albatross, I should get in touch with Hiroshi
Hasegawa in Japan. She kindly included his e-mail address, which turned out
to be a great boon. The unforeseen horror to come—the September 11, 2001,
attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—had the effect of halting
and then reducing travel worldwide, so that by November 2001, there were no
commercial flights to Midway. From then on, only scientists and army and
U.S. Fish and Wildlife personnel would go to Midway.
Using the e-mail address Flint gave me, in the fall of 2001 I wrote Profes-
sor Hasegawa, not without great trepidation. Why would a biologist, and a
world-renowned one, bother with a relatively unknown U.S. writer-academic
who didn’t even know Japanese? Yet the reply to my query was immediate.
Hiroshi Hasegawa invited me to come to Japan and accompany him on a field
trip to Torishima in December 2001 to see the albatross. He also referred me
to a chapter in Dianne Ackerman’s Rarest of the Rare, in which she recounts
her trip to Torishima, also at Hasegawa’s invitation. Ackerman’s essay describes
the climb up volcanic slopes from the encampment on one side of the island
to the nesting grounds of the short-tailed albatross and includes her account
of swinging by rope into volcanic rock and breaking two ribs, being taken by
emergency ship to Tokyo, and enduring pain for the next two years. Far less
brave than she, I wrote Professor Hasegawa that I was a fifty-three-year-old
woman with two daughters, and that much as I wanted to see the albatross, I
didn’t have the stamina required to accompany him on his fieldwork, nor was
I able to take off for three weeks during a teaching semester. He kindly offered
me another alternative, a cruise on a Japanese ocean liner that takes three days
and circles Torishima with the express purpose of giving the passengers a look
at the birds, but only from onboard ship. Another fortuitous coincidence was
that the cruise schedule fell precisely within my spring break at the university,
so I jumped at the chance to take the trip.
What I did not initially know about Hiroshi Hasegawa was that he was a
devotee of the Manjiro story. He possesses probably the largest collection of
Manjiro books: juvenile fiction, comic-book renditions, adult novels, biogra-
phies, and academic treatments. He told me that he felt serendipity guiding
his footsteps as well; every time he visits a used book or an antiquarian shop,
some book or other will draw him to it, and he will find himself the owner of
yet another version of Manjiro’s life and times. During my trip to Japan, I thus
had the good fortune to peruse the Hasegawa collection, which he lugged from
his office to the faculty lounge of the biology department at Toho University;

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Anca Vlasopolos

I was absorbed in the books when I found a much-needed cup of tea by my

elbow. The biology graduate students noticed me and courteously made me
tea without in the least obtruding on my studies.
But to begin with the beginning of the journey: In an e-mail preparatory
to my visit, Hiroshi asked me what I thought I needed to see and do in Japan.
I told him that it would be immensely useful for me to see Manjiro’s birth-
place, the village of Nakanohama at the southwestern-most point of Shikoku;
to visit a museum with artifacts from the nineteenth century, both before
and after the Meiji Restoration; and to speak with Manjiro’s great-grandson.
Of course, I said, I was aware that in the eight days I had in Japan, a visit to
Shikoku was impossible (it takes at least eighteen hours by train from Tokyo
to the eastern shore of Shikoku), and interviewing Dr. Nakahama, Manjiro’s
descendant, would be equally unlikely since I didn’t speak Japanese and had
no introduction to the family. But within a week, Hiroshi e-mailed me an
itinerary that included not only a visit to the Sapporo Historical Museum but
also a three-day trip to Shikoku, specifically to Tosashimizu (the amalgamated
villages including Nakanohama), and a day trip to Nagoya to interview Dr.
Nakahama. Among all these activities were the three days onboard the ocean
liner that would take us around Torishima to see the albatross. That Hiroshi
would arrange for me to take the cruise to Torishima on which he himself
served as guide for the avid birders who form the volunteer group for the pres-
ervation of the short-tailed albatross was not perhaps so surprising, although
I felt it to be a piece of great goodwill on his part, making arrangements for
me and securing passage. But Hiroshi acted as my guide in every aspect of my
voyage, taking charge of me from the moment I came out of the airport gates:
he reserved a hotel in Chiba for me, introduced me to his friends, took me to
the museum and to his office to look at his Manjiro book collection, guided
me to Yokohama and the cruise ship, attended to me during the cruise, and
flew with me to Kochi, the capital of the southwestern prefecture of Shikoku,
where he put me in the care of a former graduate student of his, Tamayo Masui
(now Izumi). Together with Tamayo and her fiancé, Jun, I went from Kochi to
Tosashimizu, where Hiroshi had arranged for a translator for me, as we were
to be guided by the Manjiro Society president, Mr. Myazaki, who spoke no
English. Mr. Myazaki took us on a tour of the Manjiro museum, the village,
and Ashizuri Cape, where he had us walk along the path of the pilgrims who
worship at the twenty-eight temples along the shores of Shikoku. Because of
Hiroshi’s influence and that of his former student, who works in the public rela-
tions office of the prefecture, I met a number of people, journalists and writers,
who all helped me with research into the story of Manjiro. In Tosashimizu, Mr.

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 When Two Stories Collide

Myazaki took me to the cemetery where Manjiro’s mother had placed a very
modest stone on his premature grave; since he had been gone for ten years, she
was sure he had died at sea. Another acquaintance, Junya Nagakuni, himself
an author of distinguished texts about Manjiro, ushered me into a Buddhist
temple and showed me the records of Manjiro and his companions’ arrival
upon their repatriation, as well as the recording of their presumed deaths that
preceded the documented return. My young guides, Tamayo and Jun, together
with my translator, Arthur Davis, took me to see the huge statue of Manjiro
in a public park at Ashizuri Cape.
Finally, after my return to Tokyo, Hiroshi escorted me to Nagoya to see
Dr. Nakahama, the great-grandson of my protagonist, himself a well-traveled
man. For the better part of an afternoon, Dr. Nakahama, who is an elderly
man and was recovering from an operation, graciously showed me docu-
ments and responded to my questions.3 That was my last full day in Japan.
The next day, Hiroshi came to the hotel to take me to the airport and part
from me, Japanese-style for this last time, telling me “Sayonara” and taking
a short bow. We have continued our e-mail exchange, and I expect that we
will remain faithful friends and correspondents for the rest of our lives. Each
spring, Hiroshi lets me know of the increase in the birds’ population. In the
summer of 2002, he wrote me about the volcanic eruption on Torishima,
which fortunately occurred while the birds were at sea. In the fall of 2004, he
let me know that representatives of several governments of countries around
the Pacific rim, including the United States, met in Tokyo and actually took
steps to work out a plan of relocating the short-tailed albatross not only to the
less dangerous slopes of Torishima but to other nesting sites on other islands,
such as the Senkaku and the Ogasawara Gunto archipelagos. Aided until now
solely by an artist friend who made decoys of the birds in mating poses, Hiroshi
has long worked toward such relocations, which would provide greater safety
for the imperiled species. My novel about Manjiro is dedicated to him, the
man who has spent his career righting the balance of the world so often tilted
by human greed and ignorance.
If the short-tailed albatross makes it through the perils of its minute genetic
pool, the threatened eruptions on Torishima that might bury the nesting
grounds in ash, and our present craving for deep-sea fish that result in long-line
fishing ships trapping endangered animals and drowning them, then perhaps
we should rename the Steller’s species. I await a dream in which a traveler
from the future shows me an ashen cliff peaked with snow—multitudes of
Hasegawa’s albatross, rising and falling like the squalls I know so well from
winters in the American Midwest.

159
Anca Vlasopolos

Notes
1. Although Manjiro brought the knowledge of the Western world’s appetite
for feathers to Japan, he himself did not promote the industrial-scale exploita-
tion and killing of albatross, moving instead into the academic realm.
2. The details of Manjiro’s encounter with Tamaoiki and of the near-demise
of the species, as well as of their recovery, come from personal communications
with Hiroshi Hasegawa.
3. Dr. Hiroshi Nakahama has kept up the tradition of the Nakahama fam-
ily, according to which every eldest son of each generation succeeding Manjiro
writes at least one biography of the famous predecessor.

Works Cited
Ackerman, Dianne. “Short-Tailed Albatrosses.” The Rarest of the Rare: Vanish-
ing Animals, Timeless Worlds. New York: Random, 1995. 43–93.
Steiner, Rick. “Resurrection in the Wind.” National Wildlife Magazine, Aug.-
Sept. 1998: 1–8.
Vlasopolos, Anca. The New Bedford Samurai. Kingsport, TN: Twilight Times,
2007.

160
 
Stumbling in the Archives
A Tale of Two Novices
Lisa Mastrangelo and Barbara L’Eplattenier

Recently, we were honored to be on-line guest lecturers in a rhetoric and

composition graduate methodology class. The teacher of the class wrote to us
that he couldn’t find anything about “doing” archival work—could we please
fill in the blanks? This unnerved us a bit as neither of us had had any specific
training in archival work. We just wandered in one day, sat down at the table,
and started thumbing through boxes and boxes of old dusty, tattered papers.
We had none of what John Brereton says historians need—the “combination
of paleography and the appropriate languages and . . . working knowledge of
the relevant online and print bibliographies” (575) that makes archival work
so much easier. We knew little of the archives available to us and had little
understanding of how archives function or how to work effectively with archi-
vists. We didn’t know about indices and standard texts. We didn’t know about
grants. We didn’t have texts such as this to refer to. We were fools rushing in
where angels fear to tread.
But we were happy.
We took into the archives a fascination with the lives of the women we had
been researching, an insatiable curiosity about them, a willingness to do detec-
tive work, and a determination to find answers to our questions about them.
As Robert Connors notes in “Dreams and Play,” “the Archive is where storage
meets dreams, and the result is history” (17). We took with us the blessings and
support of our teachers and their belief in our ability to do this work.
We’ve learned a lot since we first began—enough so that in 2004 we co-ed-
ited Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Commu-
nities, and the Formation of a Discipline. Most of the essays in Historical Studies
draw on archival research in order to present the first sustained examination
of the historical roots of writing program administration. The experience and
our many discussions with the authors about their archival work enriched our
own knowledge immeasurably. So it’s a pleasure to talk about our archival
experiences, our love for the people we study, and the work we do.

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Lisa Mastrangelo and Barbara L’Eplattenier

Barb
I have been sitting in the Vassar College archives. Modeled after a Euro-
pean castle, the library has huge stained glass windows, buttressed arches,
and glorious high ceilings. It looks and feels more like a church than a
library. The archives have recently been renovated. They are sleek and
modern with tubal furniture, located deep in the library’s basement.
All day, I revel in the lives of women who lived a hundred years ago.
I peer at their portraits, read their personal letters detailing travels down
the Hudson to New York City to march in the suffrage parade, thumb
through memos about light bulbs and pleas for mimeograph machines. I
am transported.
At closing time, I stumble up the stairs and out the front door. I blink
dumbly in the bright summer sunshine, certain I see young women dressed
in long skirts and mutton-sleeve blouses laughing and talking under the
huge oak tree on the Vassar lawn. It takes a long time to return to the
twentieth century.

Neither one of us went to graduate school thinking we were going to be

rhetoric and composition historians, much less archival historians. Like our first
trips into the archives, we discovered our research areas serendipitously. Barb
compared the history she was studying in one class with the current status of
composition and asked, “When and how did this change?,” while Lisa wanted
to know about the history of writing instruction at nineteenth-century women’s
colleges. This curiosity led Barb to Vassar, where she studied how Laura Wylie
and Gertrude Buck ran the turn-of-the-century English department, and Lisa
to Mount Holyoke and Wellesley, where she studied Clara Stevens and Sophie
Chantal Hart. After years of reading their papers and secondary sources about
them, we know these women as well as, if not better than, our own families.
Such passion and questioning are the historian’s most valued characteristics.
Rejecting blanket assumptions about how people did things or about current
traditions is how historians are born.
Lisa
I am in the cafeteria of the state university where I am completing my
graduate work, desperately reading James Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality
before I meet with my mentor. It is one of the only books about the history
of rhetoric and composition available to me and is a near-biblical text in
rhetoric and composition. I read a passage that tells me that Mount Holy-
oke College, my alma mater, had an undergraduate degree in rhetoric

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at the turn of the century (56)—the turn of the nineteenth century. I am

thrilled. I’ve heard of English degrees, but never a degree in rhetoric given
at the undergraduate level. I am perplexed. The graduate student I am
sitting with does not share my wonder. She asks me who cares. I do.
My curiosity leads me to the Mount Holyoke archives in South Hadley,
Massachusetts. Why would they have a degree in rhetoric when no one else
had such a thing? The archivist shows me the English department records,
dating back to the college’s founding in 1837, and I begin to poke and sift.
I make some notes. I mark some items for photocopying. I don’t know
what I’m doing, and I really don’t know how to find what I’m looking
for. The archivist goes to lunch, and the assistant archivist inquires about
my project. As we chat, she asks if I have seen Clara Stevens’s papers. I
have never heard of her. Clara received one of the first master’s degrees in
rhetoric awarded from the University of Michigan. Consequently, she ran
the Mount Holyoke department and the undergraduate major in rhetoric
for thirty-seven years. Clara Stevens is why there was a degree in rhetoric
at Mount Holyoke. Clara Stevens becomes the topic of my dissertation.

As we talk with scholars, we find that our stories—stumbling into archives,

fascinated but untrained in historiographical methods—are not unique. Most
of us in the humanities were, after all, trained in literary analysis, where the
text (usually) appears complete before you. We didn’t know how to construct
historical narratives or read census data or hunt down archival documents.
Even famed rhetoric and composition historian Robert Connors, with years
of archival research behind him, offered the seemingly simplistic advice to
approach archival research as a directed ramble, an August mushroom hunt
(23). Interesting, but unhelpful when faced with an unfamiliar finding aid.
Barb
I visit an archive to research a woman who ran a large English department
at a normal school. The archives are located in the basement, with pipes
and exposed wiring running along the ceiling. Piles and piles of things fill
up the room; there’s almost no space to work; and there is a devoted and
fierce archivist with minimal resources. No catalogue, no index, no list. I
keep asking for “stuff on the English department,” and the archivist looks
at me thoughtfully, nodding her head and saying, “We don’t have that, but
this might interest you.” The unreliable wiring in the basement won’t sup-
port a photocopy machine, so all documents have to be copied on the second
floor common access photocopy machine. Kids are photocopying lecture

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Lisa Mastrangelo and Barbara L’Eplattenier

notes from biology class. I’m feeding in dimes and copying 120-year-old
documents that are ready to fall apart. It’s all a little disconcerting.

As we look over archival materials, we know we make educated guesses.

We do not work with complete pictures, nor can we ever truly create them.
We know that human beings have left these records and sorted through them,
and as a result, they are flawed. We know that our research only scratches the
surface of what a time period or event was like. We try not to cling too tightly
to a hypothesis—or to wander around the archives without one. Doing either
one puts us in a position of danger. We might ignore—or not see—what the
archives tell us. Like the biologist Barbara McClintock, we work to hear the
stories of the archives and adapt accordingly (qtd. in Belenky 143–44). Like
any good storyteller, we have to be patient and listen, figuring out where our
piece fits. Listening lets us understand a document that has previously made
no sense. Listening lets us place it into a constantly shifting paradigm.
Lisa
I am sitting with the assistant archivist at Mount Holyoke College, look-
ing at an alumnae survey filled out and signed by Clara Stevens. We
cannot make sense of it. The survey is dated after Clara’s death. We spend
the afternoon thinking. Finally, the archivist pulls out the survey filled out
by Clara’s sister, Alice. For some reason, rather than reporting her death,
Alice has filled out her sister’s survey and signed it. Her spidery handwrit-
ing is so similar to Clara’s that we didn’t notice.

We have worked to develop a sense of what to do with archival documents

once we have them. We puzzle over what it means to accurately (and we hesi-
tate to use that word) present the men and women whose documents we are
exploring. We struggle to keep in mind our subjectivity, our positions, our
ideological lenses, our own agendas. It takes us a long time to understand
archival documents because there is nothing to read them against, nothing to
hold them up to in order to compare.
It seems to be human nature to create a smooth, cohesive whole instead of
settling for disparate parts. We like to work with texts that are complete, and
archival work instead requires us to work with fragments. We long for a plot,
a hero, a villain, a conflict, a resolution. But we would do well to remember
that there are no smooth, unified stories. The stories are rough and bumpy
with false starts and misleading paths, populated with non-heroic, fragile,
determined, tenacious people who went about their daily business, focused
on their own goals and their own desires. Attempts to overanalyze—to litera-

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 Stumbling in the Archives

cize—do them a disservice. We should remember that, ultimately, historians

are storytellers.
Lisa
I am at the Wellesley archives, looking at the papers of Sophie Chantal
Hart. Hart chaired the Wellesley English department for thirty-eight years.
She was beloved by her students, and I read one memorial tribute after
another praising her wonderful teaching. However, Patricia Palmieri,
in her book In Adamless Eden, describes Hart as “aggressive,” “verbally
adept,” and “one of several warring giants” on campus (129). A colleague
accuses her of trying “to get people to work for her as much as possible”
(128). As much as I want to, I cannot ignore the criticism and only focus
on the praise. It is tempting to erase this aspect of her personality, but it is
a part of who Hart was, and while it complicates her history, it also makes
it richer. I cannot ignore the disparity that I see in these documents.

Connections between researchers can be marred by competitiveness, and yet

these connections are vital for sharing work, ideas, and even documents. Our
own experiences clearly demonstrate this. We first met at a break-out session
of a meeting of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric
and Composition, where we discovered we were working on similar areas of
research. Both doctoral students at the time, we each felt like we’d found a
long-lost soul mate. Our connection to one another has been a lifeline.
The Progressive Era that we study—that dynamic and turbulent time pe-
riod between approximately 1890 and 1920—seems to get short shrift within
rhetoric and composition histories. Few texts contextualize events within the
era itself. It is often the end of the story, rather than the beginning. For us, the
Progressive Era and its upheaval—the founding of colleges, the beginning of
departmentalization, the rise in women’s education, and the rise in an interest
in teaching writing—is the story.
As a result, we rely extensively on each other. We share stories and resources.
We argue about what things “mean.” We review each other’s drafts. We pass on
information about new books—usually out of women’s studies or educational
studies. (Lynn D. Gordon’s Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era
and Barbara Miller Solomon’s In the Company of Educated Women have been
particularly useful.)
The community we found in the archives and in each other, we also found as
we worked on Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration. When the
book made its appearance at the 2004 Conference on College Composition and
Communication, we asked the contributors to join us at a celebratory dinner.

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Lisa Mastrangelo and Barbara L’Eplattenier

The result was an evening of laughter and conversation, with people trading
stories about their archival experiences. Our research has opened up our circle
of friends, both living and dead. We know well those who administered writ-
ing programs before us: June Rose Colby, Edwin Hopkins, George Wykoff,
and Gertrude Buck. We know those who write about them: Randy Popkins,
Shirley Rose, Deany Cheramie, Amy Heckathorn, Lynee Gaillet. Just as we
need access to documents and to archives, we need access to one another.
Most important, we’ve encouraged each other’s projects and developed
new ones, both separately and together. The work we do is less “mine” and
“yours” than “ours.” Our work would not take the shape it does without each
other’s input.
Barb
In one of our many early morning phone calls to each other, Lisa men-
tions she found this funny thing—this sort of transcript—in the Wellesley
archives from a gathering at Mount Holyoke. The names listed are names
we know—old friends from our doctoral work: Clara, Laura, Sophie,
Gertrude, Mary Yost, Mary Augusta Jordon, Ada Snell.
“It’s really weird,” she says. “There’s like twenty women there, in 1919,
all talking about writing at their own colleges. It’s almost like a Q and
A—whoever transcribed it took down what each speaker was saying. And
Clara has written little corrections in the margins and initialed them.”
“Huh—1919. I think I have a memo from Gertrude Buck to President
McCracken asking for permission to have a meeting like that at Vassar.
That was ’22 or ’23—she had the stroke, so it never happened. Hang on,
let me check.”

Out of that conversation came our co-authored “‘Is It the Pleasure of

this Conference to Have Another?’ Women’s Colleges Meeting and Talking
about Writing in the Progressive Era.” Although we knew our women talked
and thought about writing at their own schools, that transcript helped us
realize that there was a community, an early version of the contemporary
writing program administrators community, among the forerunners of the
Seven Sisters colleges. This community worried about admissions testing,
training, standards, curriculum—all the things the rhetoric and composition
community worries about today. Without our early morning and late night
conversations with each other and with other researchers, such work might
never come to fruition.
We understand that the past pulls us forward—all of us endlessly recycle
and reuse that which has come before us, all the while claiming it to be new

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 Stumbling in the Archives

and unique. More and more, we recognize that intertextuality refers not only
to the written word but to everything. To know the past is to comprehend
the future.
Barb and Lisa
While vacationing together in Switzerland in the summer of 2004, we
decide to visit the Abbey Library of St. Gallen, a 223-year-old scriptorium
with books from the ninth century.1 Barb’s Swiss-born aunt repeatedly
tells us not to go to St. Gallen. “It’s a dump!” she says vehemently. Others
clearly look puzzled when we tell them of our plans.
The wooden library floors are original—beautiful inlaid fleur-de-lis
made with four or five different types of wood. They are kept clean and
polished because all visitors must wear oversized felt slippers. We skate
awkwardly, hands clasped behind our backs, along the exhibition cases.
The shelves extend up two levels, from the floor to the ceiling. The do-
cent shows us that each column in between the shelves opens and contains
a type of movable card catalogue so that users can easily locate texts. The
cards are marked with the title, the author, where the book came from,
and when the library acquired it; the cards themselves date back hundreds
of years. The library is both an architect’s and a researcher’s dream.
The exhibit is called A Thousand Years of Charlemagne’s Influence,
and some of the manuscripts shown are from Charlemagne’s teacher,
Alcuin—who, we discover, wrote a rhetoric. An early copy of one of
Boethius’s works is also on display. We are enthralled—by the floor-to-
ceiling books, the card catalogue, the polished wood, the baroque ceilings
and trim, the possibility of research.
It is researcher’s serendipity—finding artifacts that cause us to ask
questions. We even know where we can find the answers, if only we spoke
the language! On the train ride back to our hotel, we plot sabbaticals in
Switzerland, brainstorm grant possibilities, theorize about research ques-
tions, create lists of sources, and try to figure out how quickly we can learn
Old German. Far too soon, we arrive back at our destination.

The St. Gallen scriptorium demonstrated to us how far we have come.

As researchers, we have built a heuristic base upon which to work. We know
enough to think about letters of introduction, to sign up for grant alerts, to
search the databases for additional archival documents, to generate heuristics
about our subjects. While the joy of discovery and serendipity remains the
same, we are no longer stumbling in the archives. Instead, we have become

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Lisa Mastrangelo and Barbara L’Eplattenier

seasoned explorers who know enough to outfit ourselves with pencils (pens
make marks on the documents), lots of change (for photocopying), a structured
method of pulling boxes (so you don’t look at the same ones twice), and a box
of donuts or bottle of wine for the archivist.
We have large questions to ask about doing archival work and only small
answers to share. We share our stories and our experiences, hoping they draw
attention to the need for greater interest in and training for archival research,
but also with the hope that our enthusiasm, our love of the August mushroom
hunt, will be passed on to someone else.

Note
1. For the scriptorium, see Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen at <http://www.stibi.
ch/index.asp>.

Works Cited
Belenky, Mary, et al. Women’s Way’s of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice,
and Mind. New York: HarperCollins, 1986.
Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges,
1900–1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.
Brereton, John. “Rethinking Our Archive: A Beginning.” College English 61
(1999): 574–76.
Connors, Robert. “Dreams and Play: Historical Method and Methodology.”
Methods and Methodology in Composition Research. Ed. Gesa E. Kirsch and
Patricia Sullivan. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. 15–36.
Ferreira-Buckley, Linda. “Rescuing the Archives from Foucault.” College
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Contributors

elizabeth (betsy) birmingham teaches professional writing and gender

studies in the English department at North Dakota State University. Her
research concerns the role of women in architectural practice and history;
she has published this scholarship in architecture, rhetoric, and women’s
studies journals.
kate davy is a professor of English and the dean of arts and sciences at Bentley
College. Her research interests include feminist critical theory and avant-
garde performance. Her most recent scholarly book, Lady Dicks and Lesbian
Brothers: Making Theater in the WOW Café, is forthcoming.
w. ralph eubanks, a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C., is the
author of Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past, which
Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley named as one of the best non-
fiction books of 2003. Eubanks has contributed articles to the Washington
Post Outlook, Style, Health, and BookWorld sections; the Chicago Tribune;
Preservation; and National Public Radio. Since 1995, he has been the director
of publishing at the Library of Congress.
david gold is an assistant professor of English at California State University,
Los Angeles, where he teaches courses in rhetoric, writing, and English
pedagogy. His scholarship has been published in College English, College
Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, and other journals. His
recently completed book is Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of
Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873–1947 (2008).
gesa e. kirsch teaches in the English department at Bentley College. Her
research interests include feminism and composition, ethics, qualitative
research methods, and women’s autobiography. She has written and edited
numerous books, mostly recently Feminism and Composition: A Critical
Sourcebook (2003).
barbara l’eplattenier works in the Rhetoric and Writing Department at
the University of Arkansas–Little Rock. With Lisa Mastrangelo, she co-
edited Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals,
Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline (2004), which won the WPA
Best Book of the Year Award in 2005.

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Contributors

lisa mastrangelo teaches writing and literature and is the coordinator of

women’s studies at the College of St. Elizabeth. With Barbara L’Eplattenier,
she has recently published the collection Historical Studies of Writing Program
Administration.
alicia nitecki teaches in the English department at Bentley College. Her
research interests include creative writing (the personal essay), medieval
literature, and the Holocaust. Nitecki is the author of Recovered Land (1995),
Jakub’s World (2005), and six translations of Polish works on the Holocaust,
including Janusz Nel Siedlecki, Krystyn Olszewski, and Tadeusz Borowski’s
We Were in Auschwitz (2000).
gail y. okawa is a professor of English at Youngstown State University
(Ohio), where she teaches courses in American multicultural studies, life-
writing studies, and sociolinguistics. She is the author of numerous articles
on the politics of language, literacy, culture, and identity and is currently
completing a book-length study on the little-known captivity and literacy
experiences of Hawai’i’s Japanese immigrants who were subjected to U.S.
Justice Department internment during World War II.
malea powell is the director of rhetoric and writing at Michigan State
University and is the editor of the journal SAIL: Studies in American In-
dian Literature. Her edited volume Of Color: Native American Literatures
is forthcoming.
barry rohan has been a reporter at large midwestern metropolitan newspa-
pers, including the Milwaukee Sentinel, the Minneapolis Tribune, and the
Detroit Free Press, for thirty years. He is currently a freelance writer in the
Detroit area.
liz rohan teaches in the English department at the University of Michi-
gan–Dearborn. Her research interests include feminist research method-
ologies, computers and writing, writing centers, literacy studies, creative
nonfiction/life writing, and American studies. She has published several
articles about women and literacy; her latest appeared in the winter 2006
issue of Pedagogy.
lucille m. schultz is a professor of English at the University of Cincin-
nati. Her most recent book, Archives of Instruction (with J. Ferguson Carr
and S. Carr, 2005), won the 2006 Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize from the
Modern Language Association, and her 1999 The Young Composers won
the Nancy Dasher Prize from the College English Association of Ohio in
2000. Her research interests include the history of composition instruction
in nineteenth-century schools and colleges; girls’ literacies in the nineteenth

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 Contributors

century; the authorship, publication, and reception histories of nineteenth-

century composition texts; and composition theory and pedagogy.
wendy b. sharer teaches in the English department at East Carolina Uni-
versity. Sharer published Vote and Voice: Women’s Organizations and Politi-
cal Literacy, 1915–1930 (2004) and also co-edited the anthology Rhetorical
Education in America (2004).
ronald r. stockton is a professor of political science at the University of
Michigan–Dearborn. He is the author of Decent and in Order: Conflict,
Christianity and Polity in a Presbyterian Congregation (2000) and is co-author,
with Frank Wayman, of A Time of Turmoil: Values and Voting in the 1970s
(1982). He has written numerous academic articles.
christine mason sutherland is a scholar and teacher of the history of
rhetoric at the University of Calgary. She has published numerous peer-
reviewed articles and is the co-author of two edited collections. Her most
recent book, The Eloquence of Mary Astell, was published in 2005.
victor villanueva is the Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor of
Liberal Arts at Washington State University. Villanueva has published
both scholarly and creative works, including the award-winning memoir
Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color (1993).
anca vlasopolos teaches English and comparative literature at Wayne State
University. She publishes both scholarly and creative works, most recently
Penguins in a Warming World (2007) and The New Bedford Samurai (2007)
as well as No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement (2000).
kathleen wider is a professor of philosophy at the University of Michi-
gan–Dearborn. Wider is the author of The Bodily Nature of Consciousness:
Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (1997) and is at work on a book
tentatively titled A Woman in a Treeless Landscape, in which she reflects on
issues of selfhood in the context of her grandmother’s life.

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