As the first copies of my memoir, Little Brother, begin to circulate and as I plan two readings, I’m struck by the way some friends have responded to the photograph of Jonathan on the cover:
“How cute!”
“How sweet!”
That is not the reaction I expected when I chose this photo. For me, it is dark and strange. Who would dress a five-year-old in this black uniform-like outfit and put dark glasses on his face?
The story I’m telling about Jonathan is neither cute nor sweet. It is an example, an odd one, of tragedy.
But will any of my readers get that?
Probably not. I’ve given up trying to predict or rely on my readers’ reactions. We are so enchanted by our nostalgia for the past, and especially for its children, that we are often blind to the truth. This is the wall that has for centuries prevented explorations of the real nature of childhood. A similar blindness portrays black people as “happy and gay” as in “My Old Kentucky Home,” roared yesterday by the huge crowd at Churchill Downs in Louisville.
An article in a recent New Yorker about our obsession with genealogy mentions that it is the second most popular hobby in the US after gardening, the second on search engines after pornography. At times it seems to me the obsession is closer to porn: self-gratification.
So often we try to rewrite what little me know about our family’s past by finding ersatz connections with British aristocracy—did everyone who landed on these shores come from one of the Great Families? Of course not. A lot were indentured servants like my ancestor. I remember my embarrassment years ago when my family went to England to search for a mythological Great House lived in by Binghams; when we knocked on the front door, we were greeted with surprise, if not dismay, and not invited in. They were Binghams. But not “our” Binghams. How many other children of privilege have taken part in the same search?
But questions are being asked, as they always will be. Institutions are now grappling with their long connections with the slave trade. The noxious attempt to twist family history, usually dismayingly ordinary, into some redeeming legend, heroic, romantic, has been forced to let in a little air.
Who creates the archives we search so assiduously? The biggest compiler is the Mormon Church.
Surely that tells us something.
The homely articles consumed today in the Hermits Peak blaze, still uncontained, probably offer more clues to the reality of past decades than any search through genealogical records. And the fact that the last letters are now being written—I mean real, handwritten or typed letters—will mean no future archives will contain what are, nearly always, records written by women of our non-mythical lives.
In complete agreement over those damned song lyrics.
WTF..why do they persist in using it? Ordering the latest book..many thanks.
Sallie: This is the BEST thing you’ve written lately!!! I’m going to post link to it on my blog. I’m now working with Dem. Pennsylvania Gubernatorial Candidate John Fetterman (I’ve lived in PA three times, including my formative high-school years), as well as Bernie Sanders and Eric Swalwell to UNMASK my Kenan relatives associated with UNC Chapel Hill, etc., who with their Episcopal Church put Trump onto power to enrich the Episcopal Church and Vladimir Putin, the Kenans’ current biggest contracted Oil-Business Partner.
BEST to me was your family’s search of (and snub by), Binghams in the Old World. The Kenans INVENTED the Family Crest they now use when they published the first Kenan Genealogy in 1967, but when they hired Marie DeLamar to update it and Mercer Press published it in hard-cover in 1999, she PROVED they did NOT have the bloodline they claimed going back through the Stuarts of Scotland, TWO Magna Carta Sureties, a line of LORDS in France and even Charlemagne!!!
It’s ALL UNTRUE and the Episcopalian Kenans still insist it’s TRUE and now have corrupted Joe Biden, Joe Manchin, and of course Nancy Pelosi, etc., they some of the BIGGEST beneficiaries of Kenan-controlled Exxon-Mobil donations.
I never blocked you or your emails — although you blocked ME about a year and a half ago. I’m not afraid of you, and hope you no longer fear me — because GOD IS LOVE and the TRUTH WILL COME OUT!!!
https://theweathercontinues.blogspot.com/2022/05/my-reply-to-john-fetterman-pennsylvania.html
Scott
It sounds like New Mexico where no one of high-spanic mindset is related to Mexicans nor Indians. At my 104 year old grandmother’s funeral (she and I were not close), an elderly relative came up to me and said “well, you know your grandmother was from Cochiti Pueblo.” It was the first time I had ever heard anything even remotely like that. I was in my early 50’s at the time. The earliest record I could find for her was her marriage certificate that I found at the Catholic Church archives. I am looking forward to reading your Memoir.