History Lessons

by Clifton Crais

  I suppose he was attracted to some of the young men he met downtown. Many had left their family’s disavowal and the small town pettiness and intolerance of the American South, arriving in New Orleans hungry and lonesome and hopeful. It was difficult being homosexual anywhere in America during the 1960s, but especially in the South with its tradition of violence against people defined as somehow deviant. New Orleans was something of an exception, as always, with a substantial gay population. Police looked past bars known to be frequented by gay men, especially when the owners paid them off. And no other American city cultivated a whole season of saturnalian delight when cross-dressing was not only permitted but applauded, though after the fun was had people were expected to return to heterosexual lives, or at least keep their predilections private.

  Bobby kept a coterie of boys and young men; I was the youngest, more a charge than a future lover. They would arrive for weekend parties, hair greased back, standing at the window or on the porch with a longneck in their hand and a cigarette between their fingers, listening to music like Frankie Valli. Bobby sat recumbent at one end of the couch in his bathing suit, an arm draped across its back, happy and sated.

  I think Bobby taught me how to mend socks, and how to tie the laces to my high-top Converse All Stars. The trick was in the preparation, making sure the laces crossed over tightly, holding the loops with your thumb and middle finger. I am in his backyard, sitting on the edge of a chair so that my foot can touch the ground. Bobby is kneeling, holding the laces in his hand, and he is apologizing. They are among the only words I remember from my New Orleans childhood, as clear as yesterday.

  “God made me this way.”

  I knew what he meant, then as I do today.

  My mother warned me away from him; in fact, there was consensus among family members that I was at risk for sexual abuse, or worse that I was becoming a homosexual. Ultimately Bobby became the reason I left New Orleans again. She would say something like “Stay away from that homosexual.” Or “fag.” But I continued visiting Bobby. By the spring of 1969 I had become a part of his life. I must have loved him. From the scraps of evidence I have collected, including photographs Bobby himself kept until 2007, I discover not one but two identical school photographs I had given him, one in color, the other black-and-white. I have no memory of this transaction, of walking over to his house, of placing the photographs in his hand, or of what he might have said, nor do I know his thoughts when he wrote my name on their backs and dated one, 1969.

  Photographic evidence tells me that in May 1969 I attended two birthday parties at Bobby’s house, as if I was family. The first is for his sister Shirley, who in another picture looks to be in her twenties. It is Monday evening. The weather has turned warm. Shirley is in a white dress and white shoes, leaning over the table to blow out a single candle on a layered cake thick with white icing. Everyone is looking at the cake, except for me. I am staring at the camera in my bare feet and stained New Orleans Saints shirt, looking straight at Bobby. The flash has turned both eyes into silvered dots. I am leaning back on my right foot with my fists raised like a boxer. The pose is less aggressive than flirtatious or precocious, as if I was acknowledging our special relationship. A week later, I am at “Jr.’s Birthday Party.” In this photograph I am eating yellow cake with white icing. There are four other children there, all smiling around the cake and tubs of ice cream, an iconic American picture of celebration and family life.

  In the late 1980s I briefly visited Bobby. I had not seen him for two decades. It’s difficult understanding why I stepped up to his door that New Orleans summer day. Perhaps it was because I was still looking for a father now that my own had recently died, that somehow I was reenacting a past abandonment and longing, when my father had sent me away from Mississippi and Bobby had looked after me, offering clothes and toys and sweets and the simplest of skills, how to tie one’s laces. Or that I hoped the visit would somehow allow memory to speak, his and my own. I could discover what had transpired between us, and what my life had been like in his eyes. I could ask questions with the security of an adult, a married man with a steady job and thoughts of having a family. Why had I wandered into his life? Why had he taken me into his fold? Why the apology?

  Bobby welcomed me inside. We went upstairs where I had gone so many times as a child. I was nervous, frightened by the questions I wanted to ask him, hoping something would come from my seeing him again after so long a time. There were two other men, relatives he told me. One, about Bobby’s age with tattoos painted across his arms, was doing macramé. He seemed to spend his time on ships. Bobby and I went looking for the other man, a cousin. When Bobby opened a door, he was lying on the bed masturbating. We walked away as if we hadn’t seen anything.

  We spoke for a while. I took a few photographs of the old pictures he showed me, plus a few others that seemed meaningful: the house, tapestries, six of his young darlings posing on the staircase. None of the questions that swirled within me seemed possible to ask. I told him about my career, offered to help his cousin with his GED, steered the conversation away from what had brought me there. I could not tell him of the concerns my family had had that I would become like him—a deviant, a pervert. Bobby was grooming me to be his lover, they worried. I thought we could laugh together at their silliness, their prejudice. Yet I could not bring myself to ask him about the apology that persists and disquiets, producing within me a strange sensation that something may have happened a lifetime ago.

  Not knowing has brought me to studies of trauma and memory, and I soon realize that my desires, all this neurotic fretting about wanting to know what happened, are more than a consequence of my and my family’s interest in my sexual past. They are part of a cultural and historical moment. Trauma and memory have become international obsessions, especially when sex is involved. Never before has there been such an urge to speak of the unspeakable, to represent what seemed beyond comprehension, and to believe that trauma defines who we are, especially when we are young. The child, we like to say, makes the man.

  We surround ourselves with traumatic pasts. Countless television shows parade victims and perpetrators, most often as vulgar sensationalism but also sometimes in the guise of therapy. Modern technology has transformed the exceptional into the everyday. In our pockets and purses we can instantaneously access a shooting or a tsunami, watch a murder or a battle, or tweet about a violent death, whether any of these things happened next door or ten thousand miles away. These events become part of our memories in ways that are dramatically different from reading a newspaper story about a tragedy that took place in a faraway land. At the same time, we can share our inner lives with the multitudes, in real time.

  The medical manipulation of traumatic memory has become an exciting area of scientific research, and for some quite troubling. Scientists have identified a gene and its variants that is tied to susceptibility to PTSD. This has helped lead to identifying biochemical markers and developing drugs that will interrupt the making of memory, specifically the consolidation of long-term memory. In one experiment scientists were able to produce PTSD in mice; injecting the mice with a drug before or after a traumatic event seemed to prevent PTSD symptoms. Propranolol, a very widely used drug, has been found to alter the process of memory consolidation. Now that we have identified various pathways in the brain tied to memory, we can administer drugs that assist remembering and forgetting. Rape victims or soldiers in battle will soon be able to take a pill or an injection that will prevent PTSD or mitigate psychic turmoil by changing the way they recall the traumatic event. These treatments, it is promised, will reduce medical costs and mental anguish—and for soldiers permit their speedy return to war.

  A number of neuroethicists are alarmed by these developments. In 2003 the President’s Council on Bioethics issued a statement of concern around the potential biomedical manipulation of memory, worrying that new drug therapies might “alter our sense of self.” Others are less apprehensive. The medications, after
all, would prevent the formation of a single memory, not the constellation of memories that forms our identity. And, anyway, why would someone want to remember something that produces suffering? As the controversies continue, what is clear is that we live in a radically new world of trauma, memory, and forgetting, a world that is unfolding globally and, quite literally, at the level of individual cells.

  Childhood and memory remain especially fraught subjects, debated among academics, fought over in courthouses, and discussed endlessly around the dining table. Memory is central to how we think of ourselves, but it can be highly inaccurate. Memory can be insistent or fleeting. Memory erodes; forgetting is an important, even vital, part of life. We want to insist on our memory’s truthfulness even as we are quick to point out the errors of others. Our desires and fears shape how and what we remember. Because our minds seem to work through a complex web of associations—as in the reveries cascading from the simple act of Proust eating a madeleine with a cup of tea—the meaning we assign to the past is subject to change. We confuse our feeling for what actually happened. The feeling becomes the fact as our emotions form a narrative around a scant trace of the past.

  The question of childhood memory is particularly challenging. How reliable are childhood memories if childrens’ brain and memory systems are undergoing such profound development? Can adults recover repressed memories such as incest or sexual abuse by caregivers? How does the traumatic event endure within the life of a person, in their unconsciousness and in their daily lives, even in succeeding generations? Does a dream or a fantasy contain within it something real?

  These rather academic-sounding questions reverberate in our public culture. In the 1990s, controversies raged over instances of alleged sexual abuse in nursery schools. Criminal trials ensued, including jail sentences for some of the accused. Across the country, teenagers and adults began accusing others—usually a parent—of committing some unspeakable act when they were children. Their recovered memories of molestation explained who they had become—their sadness, relationships, even careers. Estrangement and divorce often followed. Fathers ended up in prison. Entire families broke apart. Many of these accusations, it turned out, were entirely baseless.

  This history forms part of a far wider set of discussions and fixations on trauma and memory, including a widespread fascination with locating the mind in the brain’s neural networks. There are endless commercials about memory loss, drugs to be prescribed, vitamins to consume, mental games to maintain our selves. There is a multi-billion-dollar industry just about memory. Alzheimer’s and PTSD have become the metaphors of our time. The politics of memory have attracted enormous attention and debate. Some of these conversations have unfolded within our universities, in the commitment of research funds, the creation of memory and trauma “studies” programs, and in exchanges between literary scholars, philosophers, legal theorists, ethicists, and neuroscientists.

  Troubling pasts also have become the work of governments. In South Africa following the end of apartheid, the African National Congress created a national experiment that aimed to recover memory and make public the secret world of state terror. Men described how they tortured and killed others. People offered various histories, some personal, some of entire communities, as though past events remained persistently present and wounding. Men and women spoke of horrific violence, of rape and murder and disappearances. The goal wasn’t justice, the use of historical knowledge to rectify past wrongs or to allocate punishment. The goal was truth—raw, unvarnished, visceral truth. Memories made public and transformed into redemptive histories would explain what happened to a son, daughter, husband, wife, friend, or lover, or communicate to the world—and most immediately to the perpetrator—the sufferings of those who survived and were left behind to pick up the pieces.

  In the United States trauma and memory have become a vast industry involving pharmaceutical companies, therapists, and the major branches of government. The past has become uniquely troublesome. PTSD emerged as an “official” disorder in 1980 largely because of the vigorous activism of Vietnam War veterans and doctors, though it had its roots in earlier work on “shell shock” and “combat fatigue” during the First and Second World Wars. PTSD is commonly invoked across a wide spectrum, from war veterans and sexual abuse victims to bystanders witnessing a car crash. Suddenly everyone seems traumatized. According to conventional wisdom, the adult PTSD sufferer can’t forget. The traumatic experience keeps returning, what scientists call “involuntary memory,” while autobiographical memory seems shattered. They become their trauma.

  Alzheimer’s exploded into public attention at roughly the same time as PTSD. Both afflictions involve the same memory systems within the brain. The limbic system is the first area of the brain destroyed by Alzheimer’s, particularly the amygdalae and the hippocampi. Alzheimer’s steals the past, in the end quite literally annihilating the self. The victims forget everything. They forget their loved ones, their histories, ultimately their very selves.

  PTSD and Alzheimer’s occupy the twin poles in our national conversation on trauma and memory: Either we can’t forget, or we can’t remember. Our preoccupation with trauma and memory helps explain the emergence of memoir as our defining literary genre. We all ask “Who am I?” and answer with a story, or more precisely a history. This is who I am now because that was me then, we say—a child or teenager, someone’s son or daughter. We point to people and events that shaped who we have become. Memoirs are histories of the self, stories of how people became who they are. We are drawn to memoir because we live in terror of forgetting, of losing our private thoughts and memories of others, ultimately of forgetting who we are. Today we live without the networks of extended kin and community that once defined who we are and preserved and transmitted history to succeeding generations. In the end, the only thing we own is the past that resides inside us.

  In memoir, memory seems resolute, somehow able to withstand the erosions of time. In many works it’s as if the authors’ childhoods are before them still, or as if they knew from a very young age that they would be writers and that one day they would write about themselves using all the notes and impressions gathered over a lifetime. This clarity exists even in those memoirs in which there is much sadness, the loss of loved ones, of love itself, the brutalizing of adults, and still darker tales of sexual abuse at the hands of relatives or even the writer’s parents. The authors seem so certain, describing what they were like then, how they felt at a given moment many years before, as if they could bring a mirror to their past and declare, “That’s the way it was.” This is in part literary convention, the omniscient narrator’s voice offering the reader a kind of authority or mastery, but there is also the peculiarly American tradition of both knowing the minutiae of one’s past and making it no matter the odds, the usual narrative of struggle and redemption: “This was me then. And this is what I’ve made of myself.”

  The historian in me says something’s amiss in this claim that the past is so readily accessible and transmissible through writing. Few people are so precocious, or so lucky. Writing may be the antidote to memory, but it can never be its substitute. All we can do is offer images of a past that in some basic way remains absent. Memory—and that is what memoir is after all, memory brought to language—can’t possibly arrive so readily, so clearly and truthfully. There are different kinds of memory that involves various regions of the brain, a symphonic dance of synapses, biochemicals, and external stimuli shaping what we see, do, say, and write. Because the brain is ceaselessly changing, the issue is not simply one of processing the external world. That world is also inside us.

  Memory is as capricious as our desire to get the story right. We spend our lives comparing and contrasting experiences, trying to somehow locate the past in its full context, so we can produce within ourselves the history, not a history, a recounting of a probable past. We weigh our lives, much as historians weigh the past. So we tell stories, and tell them again and again, knowing th
at we live in their recollection.

  Perhaps I am just jealous. Memory has yet to emerge from all the interviews, archival research, poring over records, walking up and down streets, sitting in bars, reading scientific papers on the childhood brain, not to mention all the decades of therapy. History is memory’s impoverished replacement. I thought that if I worked hard enough memories might begin revealing themselves from the recesses of my brain like some ancient relic from the sea. Somehow I would be able to put everything together, create a decent enough picture of the past so that I could say, “Yes, that was me back then. This happened, and it was horrible, and, yes, I suffered.” I could connect memory to feelings of guilt and shame, make things right by the simple acknowledgement that I was only a child and everything was beyond my control. I was wrong.

  I could not answer what had happened between me and Bobby; at least I could not do so alone. There were just too many blank spaces, too many absences. And the problem with sexuality is that because it is private, no one else really knows.

  It was a bit more than a year after Katrina. I was well into the research. I had a stack of Xeroxed papers, hours of interviews, and books of notes I had taken. I had spent months reading into the literatures on memory and trauma. And I was in the middle of psychoanalysis. But nothing was emerging, no memories of childhood I could now work through in the safety of a therapist’s office. I became convinced that the absence of memory meant the presence of something terrible. I was driving myself crazy.

  So in 2006 I wrote a letter. It was a simple text, a plain request for information shorn of accusations or histrionics. I had some questions, and I needed answers. I thanked him for teaching me how to tie my shoelaces.

  Bobby never replied.

  Months passed, then nearly a year.