Ourchives
by
Joshua G. Adair
This little essay is a bit of ourchivism, an activist-archivist declaration regarding the equal merit and importance of the not-yet-public papers that inhabit so many of our domestic spaces. Just because a space has not been deemed an official archive does not mean it lacks the possibility. The world is our archive.
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I was inside the only house my grandparents considered their own just once. By that time (1993) they had not lived there—no one had—for some twenty years. It sat abandoned, that tenant farmhouse, unfit for human occupancy, at least by 1990s standards. Just forty-odd years earlier (circa 1946) my grandparents had deemed it “good enough” for them with its newly installed knob-and-tube wiring, cold-water kitchen pump, and late-Victorian outhouse. Apart from the new electrical service, it had not changed considerably since it was built around 1900. An indoor bathroom arrived just around the time JFK was interred. The house’s sole distinction was its back sidewalk made of nineteenth century gravestones worn nearly smooth by countless souls/soles on their way to the toilet or to toil in the surrounding sheds, barns, and fields.
My mother, aunt, and her daughter went inside for the first time since 1971; my siblings and I for the very first time. We went to conduct a séance.
Our purpose did not seem especially strange because we had always known the house to be haunted. This essay will be easier to understand if you accept that premise and quell any critical apparatuses that urge you to object, especially since we are all haunted somehow (especially we archive inebriates) and debating the veracity of ghosts all seems somehow (and somewhere) well beyond my point. My mother and her sister wanted to go back to find something, to summon (or perhaps silence) some voice that called out from that place. I was a teenager with a taste for the supernatural, raised on horror films and novels looking for “real” experiences.
I knew the house in many ways. We drove past it every few days on our way to various errands and obligations. I could see it anytime, still intact, in my mother’s archive of family photos and albums. In those days before the house became derelict, printed on Kodak paper and stamped with specific dates, first in black-and-white and then color, I could find birthdays, graduations, holidays, even my aunt’s wedding in the double doorway between the living and dining rooms. I could see, too, great-grandparents and pets who registered as at least as ghostly as real, having gone long before I arrived.
Those prints, documenting everything from banal to bridal to burial, built a story at odds with a house no longer furnished or friendly. Arranged chronologically and labeled carefully, one might trace certain trends; I always liked to focus specifically on my grandmother, Helen, who first held that the house was haunted. Across three highly photographed decades, from the forties through the sixties, her hair went from long and full to quite short and thin; her shape from lithe to lumpy. Certain snapshots from the fifties document her battle to “diminish” and return to her old girlish self. As a collective whole, no matter how incomplete, that collection of photos gives a general impression of togetherness, ordinariness. It presents a cohesive, coherent life filled with frowsy Christmas trees, pretty cakes made for graduations and anniversaries, and newborn animals and children to compensate for the occasional tragedy. They do not, however, illuminate her haunting.
The photos do not account for the fact that Helen regularly arose from her bed on the first floor, careful not to disturb my fitfully slumbering grandfather, and prowled the house, especially the upstairs, with a flashlight. Her patrol transpired with such frequency, in fact, that one might have figured it to be a form of sleepwalking as she floated about trying to glimpse or get gone her ghosts. In the process, she almost guaranteed that her two daughters never got a good night’s sleep as they anticipated her rounds and feared what she hoped to find.
Her archive of mementoes and photos, you see, told a quite different story. I can say as much because at nearly fifty years old I am quite familiar with it; I inherited it some years ago. It is my own deep familiarity with its contents that facilitates the shaping of this narrative. I first became aware of it when I was five or six; they lived in a different house by then and the archive resided at the foot of their bed in a trunk skirted in pink cotton fabric. Its expansiveness and figurative heft consumed the room; she rarely slept in those years and I think it was because of everything it held but could not contain.
The trunk itself was the very Swedish blanket chest that had conveyed my great-great-grandmother’s trousseau from the old country. Sometime in the forties my grandmother covered it hoping to evoke Hollywood Regency in the days when she was gathering her own marital goods. Once those had been put to use, it became the repository of all her personal papers and photographs. Because necessity dictated that a deep freezer stand at the foot of her bed in those days, the trunk got shoved, against her will, under an eave in the attic for safekeeping.
Or at least that’s how she explained hiding away her pretty pink chest. She could not—or would not—explain that for her it had come to represent a coffin, a place of death. It had also come to contain the trajectory of her life. It stored dozens of photobooth snapshots of a young, beautiful couple enjoying romance in the years before he would leave for World War II. It also held the scrapbook of her hopeful, playful days of the time spent in Tennessee with him during his time in basic training. These chronicles of their prewar days captured the ghosts of their adolescence, and their naïveté just before vanishing, forever unresponsive thereafter, no matter how skilled the conjurer.
Alongside those bright, hopeful (perhaps delusional) objects rested a Nazi medal emblazoned with a swastika and a German dagger, both presumably purloined from a German corpse during battle. I say “presumably” because no one quite knows. My grandfather did not discuss the war, despite having preserved and transported these mementoes of that experience across the many borders and boundaries of his life. In that life he expressed himself nonverbally—usually by rage, violence, and incessant chain-smoking. Today we would see a traumatized person battling PTSD. His daughters, however, saw a strong, brave, masculine role model—especially when they were not the targets of his maladaptive coping strategies.
When my grandmother assumed the role of family archivist absent his vocal narration, she could not conceive a system of classification for these objects, so they all got placed in that same trunk in an uneasy assemblage, seemingly defying the beholder to discipline them into some manner of satisfactory order.
Nestled near the knife was a neat stack of miniature airmail letters that often required a magnifying glass and great patience to transcribe. I turned to them long after my grandparents (and their haunted house) had gone; I expected them to narrate the travails of a wartime sharpshooter who helped liberate the death camps. Instead, I found steamy love letters that often gave the impression that they had only battled their libidos during those years of separation and bloodshed. I would later publish portions of those letters, admiring the intensity of their passion amidst such abject, immediate horror, only to be told that one should not make private archives public. Who wants to explore the annals of their grandparents’ erotic lives, anyway?
I had not gone to the archive to find the erotic, it just found me. Archives are funny that way; they frequently give us more than we can make out, including, in this case, plenty of allusions to my grandparents making out. Rather, I had gone in looking for a way to approach the photos that had caused Gram to demand that trunk be carried (with great effort and maneuvering) into the attic where it could be locked away, if not forgotten. The ones we were not supposed to discuss but could never keep quiet about because we knew there would be no way for her (or any of us) to forget them.
She first encountered the photos on her own, without the benefit of narrator, docent, or interpreter. They were small shots (2 x 3”) from a Brownie camera; they demanded concentration and a bit of squinting to decipher their subject. Of course, she knew this interpretive technique, having matured alongside the mass production of photographic prints. She understood that that which seems incomprehensible cannot be disowned once translated. And so it was with the snapshots of boxcars full of human bodies that my grandfather had photographed upon the liberation of Buchenwald. They were the purpose for his presence; they were the presence from which no one could be parted.
Not exactly black-and-white, their vaguely sepia tones contributed to, but could not entirely explain, the reticence of the human mind to comprehend them. What had once been the medium of her vaguely risqué swimming-hole photos, him shirtless and her in a polka-dotted halter, now harbored a horror she could not altogether apprehend. It was too terrible; it seemed to exist just beyond the limits of possibility. And yet, those photos had come from the developer just like shots of the Alps or of her bus ride back from “basic” through Kentucky.
He had not forewarned her or foreclosed the possibility of this grisly discovery by hiding, sealing, or otherwise securing them. Like the rest of his wartime experiences, they were there to be found, if not defended or defined.
Not long after the trunk went to the attic, the patrols began. Helen started to hear things at night, especially upstairs. Her daughters say she began to spin stories about the gravestones that made up their back sidewalk and the uneasy souls of those that repurposing had disturbed. She imagined a country cemetery with its stones put to practical use, with angered occupants underneath. She thought perhaps a house had burned on the spot theirs stood and that the victims hovered about the place. She also theorized that the stones had been stolen, carrying along ghosts with them, to be put to use as pavers. She concocted histories to help her manage the miasma of fear and disbelief that hung over her house—one that failed to be captured in any of those many seemingly mundane photos from my mother’s archive.
Her fears found ultimate form in a snowstorm in the late sixties. For the first time ever, some twenty-two or so years after moving into the house she haunted, Helen found herself at home alone. Her daughters had married and moved out; her husband had to stay in town to complete his mail delivery route, having taken a second job to fill his time. With everything enshrouded in several feet of snow, the power, as it was wont to do, lapsed. With nothing but oil lamps and her patrol flashlight, she glimpsed ghosts everywhere.
Unable to sleep or to attempt to leave, she sat with her fear, contemplating the corpses in the attic and the burials in the backyard. The phone worked, so she allowed herself a few erratic calls that did nothing to ease her mind. She could not say what was wrong; she found talking only exacerbated her sense of frozen isolation. It was as though her surroundings had finally taken on a literal form far too close to the claustrophobic psychological state in which she had persevered since he came back a war hero. It had never been conflict that she feared; it was the vast silences, the endless refusals to speak that made her feel like she was always breathing through a wet wool scarf.
In time the ice and snow dissipated, but she never quite overcame the dread and trepidation of witnessing her interior landscape made manifest in its terrifying, impenetrable isolation. Yes, her people eventually returned home and meals had to be prepared and vacuums run, but she had slipped outside the quotidian just long enough to gather all she wanted to know about states of abjection that can never be fully assimilated or successfully laid to rest.
In turn, she telegraphed that terror, as she had been doing for several decades, to her daughters, and they accepted the haunting at face value. In turn, they shared her stories and communicated her profound stifled disquietude in their words and actions, forever dreadful of that inevitable impending episode that proves ultimately overpowering, life-altering. I think, too, that they imagined a parallel experience in their father’s confrontation with that boxcar of butchered people, though I am not certain they could sustain that analysis successfully enough to situate my grandmother’s terror alongside his. To them, he had maintained control by enforcing silence whereas she had succumbed by becoming subject to it.
And so, they returned to that abandoned house in search of a voice or voices made manifest using the medium of a Ouija board. Their respective archives, conversant but never fully collated, could not ventriloquize the dead, including their father and the countless others that Helen had pressed into the service of explaining what was happening, literally and figuratively. For her part, Helen had survived, at least in some senses, several severe strokes (catalyzed by countless self-medicating, self-destructive behaviors) and lay wasting in a nursing home. She would never know that, at least in that instance, her daughters had placed more hope in finding an honest straightforward answer from a phantasm than from their own mother. They either did not trust she would tell the truth, or perhaps they believed she could not possibly make that meaning herself. The planchette did move—independently, they claimed—but they never seemed to trust or understand its pronouncements. Still, they found some comfort in that collaboration.
In denying, deferring, and/or delimiting Helen’s ability to determine these experiences and her confrontations with their familial archive, they shifted agency to an exterior (not to mention highly suspect) authority insensate to the contours of her deeply troubled and troubling life. They also forfeited at least some of their own agency in regards to interpretive prowess by permitting the source to become less powerful and impactful in favor of imagining something outside and beyond as possessing an aptitude for assigning and imbuing meaning and significance despite its fundamental, inevitable dissociation and intractable remove from the person/people and experiences they sought to interpret.
Thus goes the archive. I share this queer tale as something of a parable to consider about how we confront and refuse it; our always already inept, inexact, inappropriate methodologies for employing it. Rather than pretend that a perfectible, scientific (and therefore infallible) set of approaches exists (or may come to exist), we must highlight incoherencies, inconsistencies, and improbabilities that often operate quite effectively to help us make meaning even as we must acknowledge that we are unavoidably missing more than we are gathering.
In turn, I would hope, too, that this strange little story with its queer perspectives and improbable portrayals, recommends itself as a kind of model for inquiry wherein the archive becomes the entirety of our world and our allegedly permanently (and appropriately!) un-public family files become fodder for trying to make sense of all that we have obscured, occluded, or overlooked.
