History Lessons

by Clifton Crais

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2014 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

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  Copyright © 2014 by Clifton Crais

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-0980-5

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  ONE: Nowhere Man

  TWO: Esplanade

  THREE: Second Street

  FOUR: Bobby

  FIVE: Leaving New Orleans

  SIX: Tunisian Nights

  SEVEN: Far Away

  EIGHT: Lessons

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  “Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

  —King Lear

  PROLOGUE

  I IMAGINE IT HAPPENING LIKE THIS. I WILL BE WALKING along Chestnut Street in New Orleans, watching the squirrels running over a cat’s cradle of wires and down creosote poles that stand askew. Or I will be talking on the phone with a sibling and an offhanded remark will spark a momentary flash. Or I’ll be reading the newspaper, and my eyes will fall upon an article about unctuous food and jubilant music, or some political shenanigans by corrupt officials. Or the television will be showing a hurricane menacing the always menaced “Big Easy.” By one of these everyday occurrences, the memory of a childhood lost will rise to the surface. It will be the smell of gardenias in the summer, or the opening of camellias, or something as simple as “How was school today?” The past will begin revealing itself as if a soft sea breeze was gently sweeping the sands from a monumental ruin that’s been hidden right beneath my feet.

  I am a contradiction. I am a historian who can’t remember. I can recall facts about the past as part of my profession; I can stand in a lecture hall and with just a few notes summon information about a war or what people were thinking centuries ago, or describe complicated historical debates. Dates and events and a thousand details come easily. I have spent a lifetime sifting through the records of others, making connections between the lives of ordinary men and women and the forces that so often defeat them, revealing the hidden patterns of our common past.

  It’s my own life that I can’t remember. For years I have kept a crumpled piece of paper with a list of names, dates, and a chronology to help remind me of my past, specifically my New Orleans childhood. I add to it when I discover something new, a simple date and notation to indicate a birth or death or the name of a school. I labor to commit any of this information to memory, but it disappears as soon as I look up, the sands returning to cover what seemed clear a minute earlier. Even now, I struggle with things like names and faces. Classes of ten or more students leave me utterly bewildered, no matter what mnemonic device I deploy. I sometimes momentarily forget my own children’s names, or my wife’s, which can elicit strange expressions from a nurse or receptionist. Perhaps he’s a new addition to the family, I suppose they wonder, or just a little strange. I worry I will one day forget my self.

  I live in the murmur of recollection, a second-person existence. Bereft of time, being no one at all, the “I” that is my self becomes an adjective living the fiction of a noun. The simplest of words—“I am”—become nearly impossible to say because they are inseparable from a past that is irreparably lost.

  This isn’t the kind of forgetfulness created by a blow to the head or some mysterious illness. It isn’t absentmindedness either, or old age’s synaptic attrition, though both I am sure will one day play their parts. Every one of us will lose our memory in some way that will trouble our very being. It might take place in an instant—a headache or flash before the eyes. Or forgetting will seep slowly into our minds. There will be times when we will know our histories are running away from us. Unable to tell the story of our selves, we will become absent, trapped not by our lives’ silences but by the present and its stubborn indifference to time’s relentless passing.

  Scientists have a name for my forgetfulness—they have a name for everything, their way of reducing the complex to something a bit more manageable—“chronic childhood amnesia.” A mere neurological condition, it is simply the inability to remember one’s early years, though this blanket term does little to address the broader question of what constitutes “childhood” and “forgetting.” Chronic childhood amnesia is the world’s most common form of amnesia and perhaps the least understood. Scientists tend to focus on the most severe causes of memory loss that most often afflict adults: strokes, tumors, certain diseases like Alzheimer’s, and serious injuries to the brain resulting from accidents or surgeons’ scalpels. My memory problems, however, fall under the heading of “functional amnesias” that result from mental trauma during childhood—circumstances in which life’s vicissitudes wound the young brain or somehow shape its development. And by “wound” I mean more than the metaphor “childhood scars” we use to describe trauma and mental anguish. “Scarred,” we say. “He was scarred by what happened,” somehow marked forever by an experience no child should have witnessed. We now know that behind this image of ineradicable wounding lies both a literal and a figurative truth. Tissues in the temporal lobe may scar as neural connections grow and wither and die as the brain’s memory systems develop, leaving childhood memory fragmented or lost.

  Advances in the science of memory suggest how this may have come about inside my head. Researchers have focused on two small structures in a region located in the middle of our brains, just above our ears, as especially important to memory’s creation and our ability to tell the story of our selves. Neuroscientists refer to this area of the brain as the “limbic system,” which is unique to mammals. (“Limbic” comes from the Latin word limbus, which means “rim” or “border.” Dante used it for the first circle in the Inferno.) The first structure, the amygdala, helps regulate automatic reflexes and feelings of fear and aversion, storing stressful events with clarity, telling our brains never to forget—history hardwired. People whose amygdalae have been destroyed have no sense of fear, no matter the threat. The cold blade of a robber’s knife pressed across their neck elicits no fear response, no panic, no rush of hormones rousing them to run or fight.

  Just behind the amygdala is the hippocampus, which creates and “holds” memories for a while before sending them elsewhere within the brain, in a process that scientists describe as “memory consolidation.” The hippocampi play a central role in the creation of declarative and autobiographical memory, upon which we create the notion of our selves through the remembrance of life’s minutiae: the taste of bouillabaisse one afternoon in southern France, a lover’s smell, a child walking away to kindergarten. They account for the uncanny way a smell or a taste awakens lost time. This capacity to reflect on and organize experience in space and time—to recall the past, tell stories, make associations, create histories—is our brain’s most recently evolved memory system. Without it there would be no history, no art and literature, no civilization.

  Scientists suspect that repeated overwhelming experiences may have a particular impact on the young brain, which undergoes significant changes up through puberty as structures mature and neurons make connections, or synapses. One part of neural development i
s the depositing of a fatty material called myelin along the axon (also known as nerve fiber), which acts as a kind of insulation and helps stabilize or complete neural development. Amnesia seems to emerge as a result of incomplete or absent myelination. In children who have been systematically neglected or subjected to repeated trauma, cells die and the hippocampi may atrophy, affecting their ability to bring language and a sense of time to experience and leading to problems with summoning personal memory. These children carry within them a past they do not know consciously but which nonetheless possesses them.

  Amnesia is not only the inability to remember—the past that has somehow strayed into the realm of the forgotten. It is the habitation of loss, a life lived amidst silence. For someone with chronic childhood amnesia, it can seem as if the self wanders through the ruins of a destroyed city, unable to piece together exactly what happened, unable to quite figure out why he or she is even there. Life-threatening events may return willy-nilly amidst the oblivion. Memory arrives in fragments—a thousand little pieces of scattered recollection that can’t be organized, except for those memories that seem as if they happened yesterday.

  My own memory problems began to haunt me more acutely in August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans. The city hadn’t had a bad hurricane for four decades, since Betsy slammed the city in 1965. Southerners, of course, expect weather forecasters to announce depressions forming off West Africa’s coast in the late summer months. A few hurricanes will emerge, one or two of which might hit the United States just as children are bemoaning the start of another school year. But usually life will return to its expected rhythms and cooler temperatures will soon arrive, a harbinger of serene autumn days.

  Some people fret about the weather; New Orleanians turn to revelry. The below-sea-level city, with its ring of levees and stations pumping water back into Lake Pontchartrain, likes to thumb its nose at Mother Nature. Booze is the first thing to disappear from the shelves before big storms, followed by other vital necessities such as ice, water, and food. There are bars to hang out in, special drinks to guzzle, the washboard sounds of Cajun zydeco, raucous jazz, and summer’s boiled crabs, crayfish, and shrimp downed with ice-cold beer and watermelon sprinkled with salt. Some storms have been bad, but for the most part the city has endured them and emerged the morning after ready for runs to McKenzie’s Bakery for sticky buns; to Community Coffee, where the brew drips into tin pots; and, before long, to fried oysters at Casamento’s. The camellia still blooms along Saint Charles Avenue, and it’s time to plan for another Mardi Gras.

  Katrina was different. Around its swollen eye, swirling gray-black clouds consumed much of the Gulf of Mexico. In the city the light turned milky, then yellow and otherworldly. The clouds looked as hard as anvils and nearly black. Roiling, hungry waters marched inland from the Gulf. Like millions of other people glued to the television, I watched streams of cars fleeing New Orleans. The canals weakened and broke open and waters rushed from the 17th Street Canal all the way to Freret Street, just a long walk from my childhood home. People fled to the Superdome or sought shelter beneath overpasses. There were acts of generosity and heroism, and of extraordinary violence. New Orleans collapsed.

  My sister Sabrina packed her Honda before the storm with food and clothes and a menagerie of pets: a golden retriever wagging its tail in excitement, three cats, and a bird. Another cat had gone missing. She put out food and water for it before heading north to Baton Rouge to her daughter’s apartment. She figured she would return to a refrigerator of rotten food, and at worst a fallen magnolia in the backyard and a few shingles pried off the roof. A few days later her husband reached the house by boat.

  Sabrina had raised a family just a few blocks from the 17th Street Canal, trading the rough-and-tumble Uptown of her childhood for the safety of suburban Lakeview, though she felt like an exile living among the nondescript houses that sat far from her favorite city jaunts. She remained at heart a New Orleans hippie, joyous and disorganized, wishing she could bicycle around town or hang out listening to music while cracking open some crabs, rushing her kids late to school every morning, partying into the evening, living day to day. She and her husband had come into a little money, and after paying off their mortgage, they’d figured they no longer needed insurance. Sabrina lost everything, the roof of her house peaking above fourteen feet of water. She spent the next two years in a trailer, coughing from the mold and the formaldehyde and surrounded by abandoned houses and concrete slabs washed clean by the great storm.

  In those months following Katrina, I found my thoughts turning constantly to New Orleans, to a house and a neighborhood, to the French Quarter, to a past I could feel as if surrounded by kindred ghosts: uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins, nephews, and especially my mother. Somehow a very public trauma—entire neighborhoods disappearing beneath the storm waters, the anguished cries of people stranded on roofs, the exiled and disavowed—tugged me homeward. I realized I had spent my life looking to a home and to a childhood I couldn’t quite remember, wondering just who I had become—a professor of history, a student of the past—and how I had managed to make a life against the white pages of forgetting.

  Memory is notoriously difficult to study, childhood memory doubly so. In some basic ways childhood is lost to us all—in the forgetting that memory demands, in all the remembrances that turn through telling and retelling into family legend—persisting only in the myriad traces that appear in our minds like so many apparitions. Forgetting is a necessary condition of being. So too are the facts we polish into metaphors and the stories we hone into history lessons, processes and results that shape how we live our lives. We wonder what’s true and what’s lost, what really happened and why.

  I decided I had to go back, to try to somehow discover who I was then, what really happened, and what I have become. I had to go searching for clues about my life, become a detective investigating my self. I would walk through the city, eat its food, sit in bars watching people drink, revel in the music all around me. I would abide by the rigors of my discipline. I would interview relatives and neighbors, wade through records, read obscure tomes, take copious notes, scrutinize evidence, test hypotheses, and follow leads wherever they took me. I would create an archive, and from that archive a history. Perhaps I might awaken the past. Memory would return. I could begin putting the pieces together for the very first time. If necessary I would become a memory thief, a historian pursuing his own history, transforming what I found into a facsimile of remembrance. I wanted to know the nature of forgetting. Somewhere within the turmoil of past relationships and even in the folds of my cerebral tissues, I could feel the magical, sometimes awful tugging of a lost New Orleans childhood and the histories bequeathed there from generation to generation.

  History Lessons is the story of that journey into the past, a story of loss and silence, survival and recovery, of how we make our way in the world and how that world resides in our very bodies. It is also a journey into the nature of memory and history, science and literature, into our ceaseless longing to know what it means to be human. But above all it is a personal journey. I wanted someone to finally tell me who I am.

  I knew I would need to place the data I gathered into some kind of rough chronological order before I could begin figuring out what it meant and where the silences were, chief among them the origins of my amnesia. I decided I was going to begin with the beginning. I wanted to know about my birth and the early years of my life, my parent’s divorce and the two deathly experiences I had before turning five. The first was when my mother tried to kill me. The second, a year later in the fall of 1964, was when she tried to kill herself.

  ONE

  NOWHERE MAN

  MY MOTHER LOOKS AT ME AND THEN LOOKS AWAY, at nothing in particular.

  “Son, I can’t remember. Ever since that operation, well … Son, I just can’t seem to remember much.”

  Her memory has simply disappeared, wiped clean.

  “You see, son,
that doctor must’ve …” and she winds out a story about how things are just different now, how a trauma to the brain or a surgeon’s scalpel excised her past.

  Nearly two decades ago, my mother suffered a brain aneurysm. An artery ballooning inside her head pressed against fragile cerebral tissues, creating a screaming headache and disorientation. Mom knew she was losing herself. She remembers that it seemed to take forever to walk to the front of her shotgun home just off Magazine Street, three disheveled rooms one after another, to pick up the old black rotary phone and dial zero. She felt her life running away. She tried speaking, but the words would not come out.

  The operator traced the call, alerted the emergency services. The medics found my mother unconscious. An ambulance rushed her down Magazine Street and along a warren of side roads to Charity Hospital in downtown New Orleans. A talented neurosurgeon specializing in aneurysms happened to be on call. The artery had ruptured, each heartbeat gushing blood across her brain. A CAT scan revealed the torn artery’s location. Quickly, nurses shaved the left side of the scalp. Drills and a whirring of surgical instruments removed a portion of the cranium. Gently repositioning her brain, the surgeon exposed the bleeding artery, around which he placed a shiny titanium clip, much as one might repair a hose.

  In the United States, more than 750,000 people suffer a stroke each year, the third leading cause of death. Bleeding inside the brain very often results in serious debilitation. Pools of blood pressing against the brain or cells deprived of oxygen can destroy vital tissues. Victims may lose feeling and control over muscles and limbs or the ability to communicate. Depending on where in the brain the damage occurs, patients often can’t remember aspects of their past or solve simple problems that once had come to them effortlessly. Sometimes they lose all the knowledge that once was theirs. They lose their selves. These problems can be fleeting or persistent, and trying to understand them has become the subject of enormous amounts of research. There is no single area of our brain where memory is stored, no cerebral filing cabinet that holds our lives’ experiences or the bodily skills we take for granted, like walking or opening a bottle or recalling a child’s birthday. Memory entails a complicated interplay among various regions of the brain. Since individual neurons are capable of limited change and any given task typically involves more than one area of the brain, stroke survivors may relearn how to to walk, or memories may somehow begin returning.