History Lessons

by Clifton Crais

  A distinctive feature of human memory and storytelling is its relation to witnessing—the idea that we are aware of our selves in the world as participant and as observer. Witnessing is central to the self, a fundamental part of being human, and the origin of historical consciousness. It is one thing to have a mind, quite another thing to have self-awareness. This latter quality provides us with the ability to make meaning, to make our very selves in the sensibilities of space and time. Witnessing, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio suggests, allows us to convert actions into emotions of worth, a hug into affection, pain into suffering. Without witnessing we could not tell a story. Without witnessing there would be no literature, no history.

  Memory and narrative in some senses are thus made at the cellular level. In stressful situations the infant brain produces an excess of cortisol, one of the chemicals that helps prepare the body to “fight or flight,” except that beyond crying or making a fuss the human infant is defenseless. Cortisol plays an important role in how we remember. Increases in cortisol help encode and consolidate certain kinds of recollection, especially those relating to punctuated, highly emotionally charged events, creating in the human mind what neuroscientists call “flashbulb memories.” My vivid recollection of the bathroom that day in 1964 when I stood as witness to my mother trying to kill herself is one such example.

  The crystalline, lucid image of a traumatic experience is not perfectly accurate, though it feels that way. Flashbulb memories are no complete replica within the human mind of what happened. They can be inaccurate, and they exact a certain cost. The very same cortisol that helps create flashbulb memories also destroys neurons, quite literally obliterating memory surrounding the traumatic experience. A likeness exists as if it were a photograph, but shorn of its surroundings. In my case, I have no awareness of what immediately preceded the event or came later, who may have swept me up in their arms at that difficult moment, or if I stood there alone.

  My childhood turmoil unfolded physiologically. The external environment became part of changes taking place inside my head. My inability to remember childhood is ultimately a neurological deficit, but I wonder if the origins of my memory problems lie not only in trauma. There may be an additional reason rooted in the culture of nurturing and its absence. The family’s dissolution and Mom’s collapse into alcoholism and depression brought an end to storytelling. The familial narratives that are so important to who we are and to how the past is handed from one generation to the next disappeared, including those that remained untold until now. I forgot because so much was being forgotten.

  I once believed I could be the story I told about my self. I could speak of experiences like so many stepping-stones. Reminisci ergo sum: I remember therefore I am. But what happens when you can’t remember, when there are too many blank spaces? Without memory’s inscrutable insinuations I am a nowhere man, never certain where I am at any moment or if anything really fits together. In some basic way the past is forever lost. And yet, paradoxically, the past exists within us all, history transmitted from one generation to the next, sometimes plainly, often in whispers. When the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that our ancestors “still exist in us … as [a] burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood,” he was recognizing the surreptitious ways the past endures within the present. Most of us have had the feeling that a distant past somehow seems as if it were whispering in our ear, momentarily calling us away from the expected motions of life. Time may rend our desire to reach across the blankness, but the hunger to return persists, to somehow be there, someplace different.

  I wish that I had relics from my past—books, toys, puzzles, anything really, no matter how tattered—that might awaken memory, help fill in the spaces where my childhood body was. My wife has all sorts of such things, as well as hundreds of photographs. The albums sit above our television. From time to time she looks at them and stories unfold in the neat progression of childhood, adolescence, friends, marriage, children, the deaths of loved ones, our lives together. Her mother has more albums. When the two of them are together, they flip through the photographs and talk about this and that, and the hours melt away.

  There exist only a few photographs of me as a child, not more than a half dozen. I’ve claimed most of them only in my middle age in a kind of rescue effort. I have acquired other photographs from family members, but these don’t help much since I can’t identify the faces or occasions.

  In my professional life, I have a vast collection of evidence from other pasts, four filing cabinets filled with photocopies of documents from archives across the world. I have thousands of notecards full of words a century or two old, hard drives stored with notes and digital photographs of archival records. I make backups, file evidence in manila folders, order and reorder these gathered relics.

  Virtually all of this evidence concerns misfortune. Like many of my colleagues I have been drawn to the study of conflict, oppression, suffering, slavery, peonage, landlessness, poverty, death, infant mortality. I have spent a career among the dead, and more precisely among those who died before their time. Historians are drawn to tragedy, though we usually disavow what we find when we go looking into the past. This is our professional conundrum, running to the past and then running away from its horrors. We are students of trauma, of wars, murders, genocide, and human suffering. Ours is a prose both of longing—to witness what has happened—and of mourning—for our inability to be there.

  Most historians believe that language contains within it something real. The dead have left words and other artifacts behind. Our job is somehow to make contact with them, to create some sort of relationship with these bits and pieces. Repeating again and again words rediscovered, we imagine being there, rescuing posterity from oblivion. We work amongst ghosts, dreaming we might sit down with them for a while and talk, knowing we can’t. From these traces of language that have endured well past the moment they left someone’s lips, we can begin reconstructing the past, not as it really was but a probable past, a history that somehow triumphs over death.

  We can try to listen in on the past, bear witness to what unfolded, glimpse how people tried to make sense of what was happening to them amidst swirling confusion, learn something about how the past comes to be transmitted from one generation to the next. All the while we work with silences. Of course there is the simple absence of evidence. There is so much that is not there—pasts not recorded, material that time has whittled into nothingness. But I wonder if silences aren’t also created within the evidentiary record, as if something exists only by the simultaneous creation of its opposite. Presence and absence, memory and forgetting, remain inextricably intertwined, often in struggle, as in my mother’s forgetfulness pitted against my attempts to remember. Historical memory exists only by a radical paring down of sensory experience and the ordering of evidence into a narrative of who we are—our pasts, our dreams—amid the ruinations of human existence. The past is a mess, a bloody terrible mess of infinite horror. We historians spend our professional lives in its viscera, and also in the silence passed from one generation to the next like a hungry wound that is there and then gone.

  For a long time I refused the veracity of that first memory, of my mother trying to take her life. I can see her there on the bathroom floor. She wants to die. Even a child could tell something was terribly wrong, though at the time I could not put into words my mother’s despair. But it is the knocking on the door that comes to me most vividly.

  “I was coming home from school,” my sister Sabrina tells me. Kinta, Sabrina, and I have the Jacksonville beach pretty much to ourselves. Mom is back in her apartment, exhausted by the family gathering and by my questioning. Now I am hoping my sisters might share with me their memories of that day nearly a half century ago. A ring of late afternoon thunderstorms a mile or two away has kicked up a breeze and sent everyone home for the day. We huddle near a lifeguard station. I watch the storm, count the seconds between the lightning and the rotund booms racing along the slate bla
ck sea. Not more than fifty yards from the shore, dolphins are jumping into the air, smacking their tails against the water, and in between talking about madness and our mother, Sabrina remarks on the beauty of the sea and the wondrousness of dolphins chasing fish.

  “Oh look, one jumped right out. That’s so fine, so so fine.” We follow Sabrina’s words out to the sea, always a second too late.

  “Yeah.” Sabrina takes a swig of beer. When she is on vacation Sabrina is seldom without a beer or glass of wine in her hand and a joint in her purse. I half expect her to suggest we take a swim among the dolphins in the middle of a storm. Kinta marvels at her recklessness. Mom’s alcoholism scared Kinta away from booze and drugs; she keeps her distance from our family scourge, finds a certain safety in tentativeness.

  “Yeah, I was coming home from school, and Gus was breaking down the door.” Sabrina was in fourth grade then, Gus was fifteen, and Kinta three years younger. The girls had walked home together past magnolias and the last hydrangea blossoms, saying good-bye to friends along the way, up to the cement steps, where they had heard the sound of our brother banging his fists against the door until the lock broke. The door crashed open. Someone called Marie, our nineteen-year-old sister, who took Mom to the hospital.

  A few weeks later I am driving down to New Orleans with Sabrina, who was left stranded in the Atlanta airport on her way home from visiting Mom in Jacksonville. By chance I had been heading from Atlanta to New Orleans the next day, to visit Sabrina but more importantly to conduct some research, so the two of us have woken early in the morning for the seven-hour drive. Barreling along Highway 10, we drink coffee, gossip about family. We talk about our childhoods. I describe some of the reading I have been doing on attachment and maternal bonds, on how the brain develops as if in some symphonic relationship to the world of which it is a part, and on how we have narrative brains. On the bridges we pass I find myself pausing to look at men in flat boats fishing for sheepshead, redfish, and speckled trout, and a memory arrives, age seven or eight, of dipping a cane pole into the muddy Gulf.

  Turning my head for a second, I ask my sister simply, “What is your greatest hurt?”

  She replies right away, as if the words were formed long ago, an answer waiting for the question. “Mom didn’t love me. I know she didn’t love me.”

  “I don’t think she could love anyone then.” I talk some more about maternal attachment and depression, but our conversation quiets.

  I drop Sabrina off at her father-in-law’s country house on Bayou Lacombe. I need to make the next leg of the trip alone. I have a three o’clock appointment at the Southeast Louisiana Hospital, a state psychiatric facility. I turn onto Highway 190 and drive through Mandeville. I glance at my Mapquest directions, see a sign for Fontainebleau State Park, and know I am close. A final left hand turn will put me on a straight road through a pine wood to the hospital.

  I’m early, so I wander through the park. The stifling humidity fogs my eyeglasses and camera. A train track has been turned into a bike path. Except for a few rangers, the park is empty. Half a mile in, I come upon the ruins of an old building. It seems industrial; perhaps sugar was produced here when Louisiana plantations grew wealthy by slave labor. I look around for signs but find nothing, just red brick amid oak trees and palmettos.

  Directly opposite the entrance to the hospital is a derelict bus stop. Families visiting patients would have gotten on and off here, but the county authorities discontinued the bus service. Nowadays everyone drives a car. No one has sat on the bench for a very long time. Someone will tear the structure down, or more likely it will simply disappear into the undergrowth.

  The hospital is mainly used for drug rehabilitation, for children and adolescents, and for people who have gone off their medicines and need to be re-stabilized. Most everyone leaves within two years.

  At the entrance to the hospital is a pine tree that has been damaged by Hurricane Katrina; the tip is bent nearly to the ground. During the hurricane, most of the patients had to be evacuated. Quite a few of the buildings suffered considerable damage. County services had to cut down many of the trees, so there is little shade now. Everyone tries to stay inside. Except for the parked cars and hum of the air-conditioning compressors, the campus looks deserted.

  “I have a meeting at three o’clock with Ms. Washington.”

  “Take your first right, go past two roads, then left, then a cement driveway, and Volunteer Services.”

  I already feel lost, but I nod as if I understand him completely and head down the main road before turning right. I pass a man in a pickup truck wiping his eyes with a large white towel. I take a left at the sign for “Volunteer Services,” and park. The windows have bars, behind them darkness. I can’t find an open door, so I wander around looking for an entrance until one opens, then I walk down corridors until I meet an attendant. He doesn’t know a “Ms. Washington.” I am lost. After a few minutes I get back into the car and drive through the maze of single-story buildings. I see another employee who points me in the right direction.

  I am writing a book, a book about my life and my mother’s, our relationship, I tell Ms. Washington. I hand her my business card. They are not used to this sort of request, a son in search of a particularly bad moment in his mother’s life. I know this is peculiar. I worry that she thinks I’m crazy. I worry that I am crazy. I try to appear patient and professional, though my head is spinning, and I am lost in the fear that at any minute I might fall apart, dissolve right in front of her. I’ll end up in the same room as my mother all those years ago.

  Ms. Washington is actually calm and professional and tries to be as helpful as she can. She explains I cannot interview patients, nor can I use the names of any patients I might come across in the records. No photographing either, though Ms. Washington does assure me that at the end of my visit I can formally request photographs.

  I had hoped to find records that would allow me to hear my mother’s voice. I had hoped that there might have been someone who had cared to listen, who by their empathy had transcribed my mother’s pain onto paper, creating an archive that would give me a little fragment from the past to hold onto, not as a child but as a knowing adult. What had a doctor seen in my mother’s eyes? Perhaps not terror but the anguish of her suffering? In fact there are no extant records, no textual trace of the patient “Yvonne Crais.” Everything had been microfilmed, the original documents destroyed, but in Louisiana’s heat and humidity the chemical residue on the film continued reacting. What once had been clearly legible now has turned to a blank darkness.

  Ms. Washington tells me she did locate a few photo albums from the 1950s and early 1960s, around the time hard-drinking and womanizing Earl Long—the “last of the red hot poppas,” as he described himself—ran the governorship from the grounds of the mental hospital. I gather some data about gender and race and how long people stayed here: eighteen months for most adults, many years for some with no place else to go.

  I look around, imagine what it must have been like for my mother, attempt to be there in the past, a witness again. I try looking through her eyes, those obsidian eyes I fear. I try looking from the vantage point of others, siblings and family, a soon-to-be-ex-husband, doctors and nurses. I think of context, of time and the constraints within which people’s lives were made or, in my mother’s case, unraveled. The only perspective I cannot imagine is my own. This is perplexing. I have no memory of when my mother was in Mandeville. When I try returning to that time, my mind becomes not blank but a kind of graveled grayness, as if the transmission has simply stopped, or as if a tape, long erased, won’t stop playing.

  I walk with Ms. Washington to a room where I can examine the albums. I sit down, gather myself. Mental hospitals are frightening places, particularly state institutions. The hospital was segregated by race and gender. There were children as young as five or six, who seem to have spent a good deal of time with adults; I worry that the abuse some of them may have suffered continued within the
hospital’s confines. The hospital staff provided the patients with many activities, including some, like sewing and carpentry, they might use on the outside. There were billiards and card tables, a large outdoor swimming pool, athletic events, and regularly scheduled dances. A library filled with books. One photograph is of a puppet theater. The show is The Wizard of Oz, except that in this case it’s the wicked witch who towers over the good witch lying crumpled on the ground. Many of the photographs are of Mardi Gras, when everyone dressed up for the hospital ball presided over by a King and Queen and child attendant.

  Ms. Washington tells me later that there are fewer occupational services today than a half-century ago, though the hospital has roughly the same number of patients. Hurricane Katrina strained Louisiana’s mental health services to the breaking point. And just when everyone thought things couldn’t get worse, the recession of 2008–09 hit. For decades state services have been grossly underfunded. Most patients receive minimal talk therapy. They watch a lot of television.

  Mom entered the mental health system at a time when hospital conditions diverged dramatically and treatments differed according to gender. Women were far more likely to receive the most radical interventions and very heavy doses of medications. There were also more likely to die. It took just a few minutes to perform a trans-orbital lobotomy—a matter of administering local anesthesia and hammering a kind of pick, through the eye socket, a few inches into the brain.

  Mental hospital populations rose dramatically through the 1950s. For women, depression—or what doctors judged as an excess libido, or even an unhappy marriage—might be enough to have one’s frontal cortex severed. Following World War II, women like my mother were told to return to the domestic fold of child-rearing and homemaking once their men came home. For many, the dream of blessed domesticity never came true, and the rising incidence of divorce left hundreds of thousands of women living precarious lives.