Box of Letters
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
Monday, September 15, 2008
United Airlines Flight 58 Memphis to Amsterdam
It should be mentioned that I saw that horse in my neighborhood again yesterday; again the day before a long trip. This time he was ridden the wrong way down Saint Joseph by a rider talking on a hands free, blue tooth, cellular ear-piece. I love that my neighborhood, Beauregard Town, has an eccentric black wireless, urban-cowboy (a new, emerging demographic type? Hockey-Mom, meet Wireless Urban-Cowboy and Millennial Early Adopter) and that he thinks nothing of ordering a McSundae from the back of a neighing and side-stepping quadruped. With high gas prices, he may be onto something. The augurs and the Magic Eight Ball are unclear on the meaning of this sighting. Regardless, here is what I intended to be the closing piece from my last trip. I guess it will have to double as the opening shot from this outing. Pictures from the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, Spiral Jetty and the Nine Mile Canyon Petrogylphs are included.
In the cool, dark back bedroom of my grandparent’s house, on the bottom of the closet floor, under forgotten party dresses hanging in cleaner’s plastic and outgrown suits there was a hatbox full of letters. The letters were mostly written on pale blue paper, hard at the folds and marked by the passing of insects and time. Ancient quills had scratched graceful sentences across the paper, as much art as writing. Age had turned the ink brown and burned through the paper in places making the notes look like stencils or lace. The thin, brittle paper was laden with my family’s history and in reading them you could start to imagine the personality of my great-great-great grandfather, Henry Swayze.
From the first glance at these letters, sitting cross-legged on the floor with the documents of our past spread around me, I knew that he was my kind of guy. Henry had finished his education in Natchez sometime prior to the period covered by the letters, the 1830-40’s, and seems to have found that graceful, bluff-perched city to his liking. Most of the letters were posted out of Yazoo City, Mississippi and would have come by steam ship, down the river and into the perhaps dissolute and certainly wandering hands of my ancestor. There he would have broken their red, wax seals, read the contents and been reminded of why he had left the farm in the first place.
The letters to Henry discuss the small-town, agrarian life of the time; parties and weddings, disease, fishing and the state of the crops. Henry’s relatives talk about the new courthouse in Yazoo City and seeing to it that the county turned out for the election of Zachary Taylor. In these respects, the letters could be to anyone of the same time and of a similar position. But, the letters are unique in the picture that emerges of Henry even though he is mute throughout; we only have the letters sent to him, none of his replies, if he ever bothered to write back. The letters make a silhouette portrait, a blackness left behind after Henry had gone, showing us as much about where he was as about where he wasn’t.
“Henry, we have not heard from you lately.” “It has been some time since your last letter, Henry.” “We grow worried from lack of news from you.” The letters almost all lead off with these lines or ones like them and all contain some similar sentiment. My great-great-great grandfather had gotten out of Yazoo and Yazoo was now far from his mind.
I like to imagine Henry, starched cuffs and pin-striped waist coat, broad hat and maybe a percussion cap pistol in his belt, reading these letters over a glass of whiskey in one of Natchez’s wide-planked saloons; Jim Bowie waving his knife in a lantern dappled corner, a game of whist being played between a navy lieutenant and two corseted whores, drinking songs plinked out on a tack piano. The letter finished, another round ordered, Henry returns to his seat at the card table and the night goes on.
His life may have been more mundane, or even virtuous. He might have been busy spreading the Gospel to the Indians or working in a house for tuberculoids. But, I prefer to think of him flush-faced and cheering a line of dancing girls, much too merry for Yazoo City.
The letters to Henry make me wonder what sort of impression develops from reading these multi-year travel logs that I have been sending. Not about me, my personality is plain to see and often all too un-tempered. I wonder what these letters say about you. What black form will be left on the paper once you have moved your head away? Am I writing to the college friend turned poet, turned carpenter, the Texas ladies from cooking school or Domenica and Sebastian who pulled magic out of the stones of old Quito? The starlet, the army lieutenant or the civil rights lawyer? The ex-girlfriends, the musicians, the photographers or the cousins in Beijing? The guitar amp maker, the cartoonist or horse trainer? When I think about the variety of people that I am writing to, the lecture hall of my mind fills with characters all dressed in the uniforms of their kind. The room bustles with archetypes taking their places.
And as much as I know they are only connected through a mutual reading (or skimming) of my letters, I want champagne toasts to old friends and introductions all around, I want to all be together and I want to show my family to the assembled multitude and make it plain why I love and value the whole cast of my life. A life for which I am so grateful.
Original post here: http://www.lemonsandbeans.com/?p=241
