A few days ago the New York Times website had an interactive feature about the “East Bathtub,” a section of the World Trade Center site where construction is way behind schedule. Workers are on the job twenty hours a day trying to catch up. Each day’s delay costs the Port Authority $300,000.
The bathtub is an 80-foot-deep pit, the foundation for two new towers. On the screen, the image of the pit moves slowly, providing a 360° view of this eerie abyss, an ocean floor with backhoes bent over like abandoned sea creatures. Men stand in the pit as though to give scale.
Monuments must go up, it seems. They must aspire, literally breathe out and fill the sky. But there is something moving in the idea of digging down, creating a void – the inverse of the inevitably bombastic buildings to come. A hole cut deep into the strata of the city, lined with the remnants of oyster shells and ships’ hulls, the fossils of flora that grow no more.
Showing posts with label the dead among us. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the dead among us. Show all posts
Missing Places
How long does history last?
The Huguenots of Hanover County were still giving their children French names well into the twentieth century. I saw some of their graves today, next to an old plantation house up on blocks, dying slowly, with broken windows.
Should we mourn the plantation house? So many went through horrors to keep it warm, its larder stocked, its wood and silver polished.
What do we lose when we lose an old house? A woman stands at a second floor doorway, waiting to step into a missing wing, waiting to find out.
The Huguenots of Hanover County were still giving their children French names well into the twentieth century. I saw some of their graves today, next to an old plantation house up on blocks, dying slowly, with broken windows.
Should we mourn the plantation house? So many went through horrors to keep it warm, its larder stocked, its wood and silver polished.
What do we lose when we lose an old house? A woman stands at a second floor doorway, waiting to step into a missing wing, waiting to find out.
Southern Morale Soared
I like to read historic road markers, or at least try to read them as I drive by. One that I have read countless times is VA-E2, Intermediate Defenses, at the corner of Chamberlayne and Laburnum, where the red light allows me to savor the text:
Here ran, east and west, the intermediate line of Richmond defenses during the Civil War. Near this spot on 1 March 1864 Union Brig. Gen. H. Judson Kilpatrick halted his raid that was intended to free Union prisoners and lower morale in the Confederate capital. A detachment led by Col. Ulric Dahlgren was defeated to the west of the city. On 2 March Dahlgren was killed; Southern morale soared.
Of course, it is the last, succinct phrase that is so compelling. Another favorite is the heading on the marker at Cedar Lane and Ashcake Road: Stuart Turns North. Both would be excellent titles for short story collections, I think. The roads are filled with markers, most of them about the Civil War, given how much action this part of the world saw in the 1860s.
Growing up in Manhattan, I got the usual bullet-point version of the war from the Northern perspective. Add to this Catholic school Manichaeism and you have a fairly straightforward story of good triumphing over evil. In the eighth grade I did a history report called “The Civil War in Song” and it was quite clever. The report was bound in burlap-covered cardboard and each section opened with a stanza from a different song of the era, ending up, I think, with the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
The South was a very different, kind of scary place to me. I did not really know anyone from below the Mason-Dixon line until grad school. My friend Gerald, from Winston-Salem, was Baptist to boot, and altogether a new breed for me in a city whose immigrants, when not Dominican, seemed to be mostly from Ohio.
But despite my utter ignorance of things Southern, I had always felt a direct connection to the Civil War. My great-grandfather fought in an upstate New York regiment and did time at Andersonville. Later he was part of a prisoner exchange and was transferred to a hospital in North Carolina before being sent home. We know this because we have a wonderful letter he wrote to the U.S. Pension Office in the 1880s asking where the hell his veteran's pension was. The letter is filled with details of his service: where he was inducted, his commanding officers, the names of comrades and battles, and his time as a prisoner and invalid. I do not know if he ever got his pension. I certainly hope so.
In my late thirties I started drifting south, first to Baltimore, then to the DC area, and now Richmond for the past six years. I have tried to educate myself, and road markers are just a small part of this. They cluster in some areas, two or three in a row, lending depth and meaning to the land. Blood was spilled here. Exhaustion, hunger, homesickness. Even victories – “Southern morale soared” – can be heartbreaking.
It is hard to scrape away almost forty years of prejudice and stereotype, but I feel I owe it to Richmond and to the South in general. Plus, battles took place on the ground I live on, the roads I drive over every day. It is a confusing, tragic history, one many people still debate. I am not about to mourn the Lost Cause or ignore the misery that sustained the South’s economy and way of life. Recent scholarship has shown how much the slave trade sustained New York’s economy as well. I just know that I am part of this history, and that I cannot live in a place without trying to understand its people and its past.
Here ran, east and west, the intermediate line of Richmond defenses during the Civil War. Near this spot on 1 March 1864 Union Brig. Gen. H. Judson Kilpatrick halted his raid that was intended to free Union prisoners and lower morale in the Confederate capital. A detachment led by Col. Ulric Dahlgren was defeated to the west of the city. On 2 March Dahlgren was killed; Southern morale soared.
Of course, it is the last, succinct phrase that is so compelling. Another favorite is the heading on the marker at Cedar Lane and Ashcake Road: Stuart Turns North. Both would be excellent titles for short story collections, I think. The roads are filled with markers, most of them about the Civil War, given how much action this part of the world saw in the 1860s.
Growing up in Manhattan, I got the usual bullet-point version of the war from the Northern perspective. Add to this Catholic school Manichaeism and you have a fairly straightforward story of good triumphing over evil. In the eighth grade I did a history report called “The Civil War in Song” and it was quite clever. The report was bound in burlap-covered cardboard and each section opened with a stanza from a different song of the era, ending up, I think, with the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
The South was a very different, kind of scary place to me. I did not really know anyone from below the Mason-Dixon line until grad school. My friend Gerald, from Winston-Salem, was Baptist to boot, and altogether a new breed for me in a city whose immigrants, when not Dominican, seemed to be mostly from Ohio.
But despite my utter ignorance of things Southern, I had always felt a direct connection to the Civil War. My great-grandfather fought in an upstate New York regiment and did time at Andersonville. Later he was part of a prisoner exchange and was transferred to a hospital in North Carolina before being sent home. We know this because we have a wonderful letter he wrote to the U.S. Pension Office in the 1880s asking where the hell his veteran's pension was. The letter is filled with details of his service: where he was inducted, his commanding officers, the names of comrades and battles, and his time as a prisoner and invalid. I do not know if he ever got his pension. I certainly hope so.
In my late thirties I started drifting south, first to Baltimore, then to the DC area, and now Richmond for the past six years. I have tried to educate myself, and road markers are just a small part of this. They cluster in some areas, two or three in a row, lending depth and meaning to the land. Blood was spilled here. Exhaustion, hunger, homesickness. Even victories – “Southern morale soared” – can be heartbreaking.
It is hard to scrape away almost forty years of prejudice and stereotype, but I feel I owe it to Richmond and to the South in general. Plus, battles took place on the ground I live on, the roads I drive over every day. It is a confusing, tragic history, one many people still debate. I am not about to mourn the Lost Cause or ignore the misery that sustained the South’s economy and way of life. Recent scholarship has shown how much the slave trade sustained New York’s economy as well. I just know that I am part of this history, and that I cannot live in a place without trying to understand its people and its past.
Frank
I buy my furniture at Diversity because their stuff comes with good ghosts, the kind of people with whom I feel some affinity.
Take the chair I bought a few weeks ago. An old office chair from the fifties, probably, not a boss’s chair but maybe something you’d have in the waiting area or perhaps around a conference table, one with enormous, multi-notched ashtrays. But it is handsome enough, with its fake burgundy leather and brass tacks. It’s not all that comfortable, but it was not meant to be, so I think it does its job.
And it came with Frank, an amiable guy with the usual worries – wife, kids, mortgage and so on. But he’s pretty upbeat – key to a salesman’s success – and he has a lot to be thankful for. The heart attack was just a blip on the screen and now he’s here with me, although sometimes he does wander off for a smoke.
Frank doesn’t notice the computer or the microwave. In fact, he couldn’t care less. He squirms sometimes; the meeting should have been over half an hour ago, but hey, it’s not like he has somewhere more important to be. It’s fine here.
Take the chair I bought a few weeks ago. An old office chair from the fifties, probably, not a boss’s chair but maybe something you’d have in the waiting area or perhaps around a conference table, one with enormous, multi-notched ashtrays. But it is handsome enough, with its fake burgundy leather and brass tacks. It’s not all that comfortable, but it was not meant to be, so I think it does its job.
And it came with Frank, an amiable guy with the usual worries – wife, kids, mortgage and so on. But he’s pretty upbeat – key to a salesman’s success – and he has a lot to be thankful for. The heart attack was just a blip on the screen and now he’s here with me, although sometimes he does wander off for a smoke.
Frank doesn’t notice the computer or the microwave. In fact, he couldn’t care less. He squirms sometimes; the meeting should have been over half an hour ago, but hey, it’s not like he has somewhere more important to be. It’s fine here.
Manhattan, Fall
Dear Dad,
Do you miss the city?
You walked it all your life, and took me with you
through catacombs of schist and gneiss.
You showed me where the dead lie.
For what is this island
but the grave of those who came before
and lay down to make room for the new,
Lenape and Dutchman, free man and slave,
the immigrant and arriviste?
Like a coffin, lined by rivers.
I read about a woman who stood and
felt her husband’s body press against hers
in a rain of ash as the towers fell.
He was a fireman, a hero.
This was after you. You did not see this.
The dust settles, forms a new layer
on city fathers in famous churchyards and
long-lost slaves buried with their cowrie shells,
their babies tucked aside them.
I know there will be others.
A backhoe will find them and work will stop
for a day, a month. The potters field, the family plot –
it makes no difference.
The gap will close. New ghosts will join us.
Dear Dad, are you a ghost?
Do you walk the streets at night,
and scare late travelers and drunks against the wall?
Do you look for me?
Do you miss the city?
You walked it all your life, and took me with you
through catacombs of schist and gneiss.
You showed me where the dead lie.
For what is this island
but the grave of those who came before
and lay down to make room for the new,
Lenape and Dutchman, free man and slave,
the immigrant and arriviste?
Like a coffin, lined by rivers.
I read about a woman who stood and
felt her husband’s body press against hers
in a rain of ash as the towers fell.
He was a fireman, a hero.
This was after you. You did not see this.
The dust settles, forms a new layer
on city fathers in famous churchyards and
long-lost slaves buried with their cowrie shells,
their babies tucked aside them.
I know there will be others.
A backhoe will find them and work will stop
for a day, a month. The potters field, the family plot –
it makes no difference.
The gap will close. New ghosts will join us.
Dear Dad, are you a ghost?
Do you walk the streets at night,
and scare late travelers and drunks against the wall?
Do you look for me?
Missing
I won’t hold a grudge – it was over so quickly. One minute I was at the wheel, making a turn; the next, I was dead. I went missing. The guy who hit me is fine. Hung over, of course, and waiting to see if the charge will be murder or manslaughter.
The thing is, the space, the place where it happened, couldn’t stop being itself simply because I died there. It was hard enough diverting traffic just to get the ambulance and cops to the site. Then the guys taking pictures of the skid marks and my brains splashed across the windshield. The city tapped its foot, trying to give me a decent amount of time, but it's Broad and Belvidere, for God’s sake. They can’t close the lane forever.
Forever. I died about 16 hours ago, and I have a long road ahead. Do I stay here and watch folks pass over that spot? It’s not the kind of place you leave a wreath. Just a few twisted pieces of metal.
The thing is, the space, the place where it happened, couldn’t stop being itself simply because I died there. It was hard enough diverting traffic just to get the ambulance and cops to the site. Then the guys taking pictures of the skid marks and my brains splashed across the windshield. The city tapped its foot, trying to give me a decent amount of time, but it's Broad and Belvidere, for God’s sake. They can’t close the lane forever.
Forever. I died about 16 hours ago, and I have a long road ahead. Do I stay here and watch folks pass over that spot? It’s not the kind of place you leave a wreath. Just a few twisted pieces of metal.
Two worlds: one above, one below.
No one imagines the 9/11 dead walking around under the wreckage or the pit that replaced it. Most of them were pulverized before the towers hit the ground. These men and women do not walk. They went into the air and across the harbor, lodged on windowsills and in the cracks between bricks. We breathed them in.
But the firemen who died a few weeks ago right next to them -- where did they go? They climbed a ghost tower and died in smoke and fumes, not from fire. They burned inside out.
The miners may still be walking, dead but walking, as well as those who tried to rescue them. But they walk on different paths, and may walk for a thousand years, tapping the wall, trying to make contact.
No one imagines the 9/11 dead walking around under the wreckage or the pit that replaced it. Most of them were pulverized before the towers hit the ground. These men and women do not walk. They went into the air and across the harbor, lodged on windowsills and in the cracks between bricks. We breathed them in.
But the firemen who died a few weeks ago right next to them -- where did they go? They climbed a ghost tower and died in smoke and fumes, not from fire. They burned inside out.
The miners may still be walking, dead but walking, as well as those who tried to rescue them. But they walk on different paths, and may walk for a thousand years, tapping the wall, trying to make contact.
Hilda Deptford Trammel, 1904-1976
Descended from Yorkshire yeomanry, Hilda Deptford Trammel was the first woman to rise to the status of Fellow of the Institute of African Studies. Her death last month in Kampala, where she was visiting her niece, leaves a void in her field that will not soon be filled.
As a child, Hilda displayed eager interest in history and the natural world, exploring the Druidic cairns near her home in Stoat-over-Hants and vivisecting church mice. Her niece, Mrs. George Lloyd-Llewellyn Jones, recalls stories about the young Hilda measuring the heads of local villagers in a precocious effort to demonstrate the degeneration theory of Cesare Lombroso, author of L'Homme Criminel.
Briefly affianced in her teens to a ministerial student, Hilda broke off the engagement and in 1922 entered Magdalene College, Oxford, where she received first class honours. She went on to study at the Institute of African Studies, where her thesis on blood-letting and bridewealth among the Nuer of the Sudan was the foundation of all her subsequent research. Hilda never regretted her choice of career over marriage and motherhood. At a speech to the Girls’ Explorer Club of Hampstead Heath in 1962, she urged her young audience to heed their own desires and to shun the “foetid swamp of diapers and dyspepsia” so often women’s lot.
While unable to secure a fulltime academic position, women in those days rarely achieving such distinction, Hilda did lecture frequently at the Institute and was visiting scholar at the University of Saskatchewan in 1933-34. A small inheritance from her mother, combined with the income from a family-owned sugar beet farm in Northern Ireland, allowed her to pursue her research and to travel with chums around the world.
Hilda’s contributions to the war effort were considerable, ranging from serving as air-raid warden in her Kensington neighbourhood to assisting the Colonial Office in its effort to alphabetize the names of more than 3,000 tribal clans located in the path of Rommel’s Afrika Korps during the campaign of 1942. No doubt the full story of Hilda’s role in this pivotal operation will some day be told. In 1946 she was awarded the Silk Garter of Princess May of Teck, an honour reserved for women who have “served their country during wartime with exceptional rigour.”
While committed at the highest level to her scholarship, Hilda Deptford Trammel considered it her duty to help educate the public. In the late 1940s, she was a frequent guest on the popular BBC radio programme “Know Your Natives,” where she regularly bested panel members Sir Henry Atkins-Smythe and Professor R. Zrydzlecki. From 1953 to 1957, she wrote a column for Ladies magazine, “Caravanserai,” a lighter look at anthropology that was well-received, even after the publication of her, at the time, provocative study of segmentary lineage and the semen cult of the northern Nuer.
The circumstances surrounding the incident in Khartoum in 1960 remain shrouded in mystery.
An avid gardener, Hilda enjoyed showing visitors her collection of rare African plants. In recent years, she had exhibited several times at the Chelsea Flower Show, where her exotic garden, “I Had a Farmhand in Africa,” took the bronze medal in 1971.
Hilda’s major work remains her comparative study of kinship and animal husbandry, Kith and Kine among the Swine (1937). She also contributed to the young people’s series, The Sun Never Sets, describing the customs and lore of her beloved Nuer. She was at work on a major revision of that monograph for the series, now called Capitalism, Colonialism, and Culture, at the time of her death.
In this age of “women’s liberation,” it is all too easy to forget the struggles and achievements of those women who, like Hilda Deptford Trammel, forged their own path through a man’s world, oft with their own machete. “Wuht eme le’ane mah’de ciekde le’hn” (All cows come to the watering hole, but only one drinks the non-diseased water), Hilda wrote in her unpublished memoirs, describing her ceaseless drive to overcome the obstacles she faced in her chosen field.
A funeral with friends and family was held in Stoat-over-Hants in April. A public memorial service is planned for September at the Institute of African Studies. Contributions to the Hilda Deptford Trammel Scholarship Fund may be made to the IAS. Gifts in her name may also be made to the Girls’ Explorer Club of Hampstead Heath.
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. XI, No. 2, May 1976.
As a child, Hilda displayed eager interest in history and the natural world, exploring the Druidic cairns near her home in Stoat-over-Hants and vivisecting church mice. Her niece, Mrs. George Lloyd-Llewellyn Jones, recalls stories about the young Hilda measuring the heads of local villagers in a precocious effort to demonstrate the degeneration theory of Cesare Lombroso, author of L'Homme Criminel.
Briefly affianced in her teens to a ministerial student, Hilda broke off the engagement and in 1922 entered Magdalene College, Oxford, where she received first class honours. She went on to study at the Institute of African Studies, where her thesis on blood-letting and bridewealth among the Nuer of the Sudan was the foundation of all her subsequent research. Hilda never regretted her choice of career over marriage and motherhood. At a speech to the Girls’ Explorer Club of Hampstead Heath in 1962, she urged her young audience to heed their own desires and to shun the “foetid swamp of diapers and dyspepsia” so often women’s lot.
While unable to secure a fulltime academic position, women in those days rarely achieving such distinction, Hilda did lecture frequently at the Institute and was visiting scholar at the University of Saskatchewan in 1933-34. A small inheritance from her mother, combined with the income from a family-owned sugar beet farm in Northern Ireland, allowed her to pursue her research and to travel with chums around the world.
Hilda’s contributions to the war effort were considerable, ranging from serving as air-raid warden in her Kensington neighbourhood to assisting the Colonial Office in its effort to alphabetize the names of more than 3,000 tribal clans located in the path of Rommel’s Afrika Korps during the campaign of 1942. No doubt the full story of Hilda’s role in this pivotal operation will some day be told. In 1946 she was awarded the Silk Garter of Princess May of Teck, an honour reserved for women who have “served their country during wartime with exceptional rigour.”
While committed at the highest level to her scholarship, Hilda Deptford Trammel considered it her duty to help educate the public. In the late 1940s, she was a frequent guest on the popular BBC radio programme “Know Your Natives,” where she regularly bested panel members Sir Henry Atkins-Smythe and Professor R. Zrydzlecki. From 1953 to 1957, she wrote a column for Ladies magazine, “Caravanserai,” a lighter look at anthropology that was well-received, even after the publication of her, at the time, provocative study of segmentary lineage and the semen cult of the northern Nuer.
The circumstances surrounding the incident in Khartoum in 1960 remain shrouded in mystery.
An avid gardener, Hilda enjoyed showing visitors her collection of rare African plants. In recent years, she had exhibited several times at the Chelsea Flower Show, where her exotic garden, “I Had a Farmhand in Africa,” took the bronze medal in 1971.
Hilda’s major work remains her comparative study of kinship and animal husbandry, Kith and Kine among the Swine (1937). She also contributed to the young people’s series, The Sun Never Sets, describing the customs and lore of her beloved Nuer. She was at work on a major revision of that monograph for the series, now called Capitalism, Colonialism, and Culture, at the time of her death.
In this age of “women’s liberation,” it is all too easy to forget the struggles and achievements of those women who, like Hilda Deptford Trammel, forged their own path through a man’s world, oft with their own machete. “Wuht eme le’ane mah’de ciekde le’hn” (All cows come to the watering hole, but only one drinks the non-diseased water), Hilda wrote in her unpublished memoirs, describing her ceaseless drive to overcome the obstacles she faced in her chosen field.
A funeral with friends and family was held in Stoat-over-Hants in April. A public memorial service is planned for September at the Institute of African Studies. Contributions to the Hilda Deptford Trammel Scholarship Fund may be made to the IAS. Gifts in her name may also be made to the Girls’ Explorer Club of Hampstead Heath.
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. XI, No. 2, May 1976.
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