History Lessons

by Clifton Crais

  Possibilities for a different recounting of past nonetheless reside among the artifacts families keep, the rituals enacted, the reasons family members insist this happened for that reason, even the silences and aporias that reside within personal narratives. In my case, it’s been difficult trying to gather some of the pieces. My father passed away nearly twenty years ago; I am left sifting through a small box of photographs and assorted records. Mom offers the terse “I can’t remember” to many questions, no matter how I try draping them in soothing language. In the middle of a question she simply turns away. Siblings offer a kind of vacant response to my queries, the sort of “I’m not sure, what do you think?” answers that leave me wondering. Susan and her ex-husband rejected repeated requests for interviews. They seem afraid, as if I am gathering facts for a prosecution in a case half a life ago. Or perhaps that I will expose dark misdeeds committed in a marriage’s unraveling.

  Amid the silences and silencing research has produced a few facts. Information has a way of leaking out. The world is just too messy, too complicated, for any one of us to contain or sanitize the past, to hermetically seal history the way we might wish, no matter the costs. Subjugated pasts surface in the most unexpected ways: a document an official forgets to shred, a slip of the tongue, even what remains unspoken.

  I discover, for instance, that I boarded that flight to New Orleans in the early summer of 1976 with a one-way ticket. I wasn’t meant to return. Susan was sending me back to New Orleans, hopefully for good.

  I email my sister, trying to abide by a standard rule of historical research: validate what you’ve found. She refuses to say anything about it, or to have her words reproduced here. My question about a bit of information that invariably concerns an intention—the “why” behind every human act—opens a thunderclap of words about how she saved me, how terribly neglected I had been, how under her care I had received medical attention, decent food, and an education. I want to say that all of this is true. It is true. I am forever changed by her kindness, and thankful. I owe her my life. Had she not saved me I wouldn’t be where I am today. Most likely I’d be poor, troubled, and miserable. She did more, much more, than anyone else—more than I would have if I were in her shoes. But it’s impossible to have this conversation. She interprets my question as an accusation, pleads a familial Fifth.

  A simple fact, a little piece of history we happen upon, changes how we explain the past. This is often how it works in scholarship. The historian knows the end of the story. A war breaks out. Politicians sign a treaty. Peasants revolt, laborers strike. A kid boards a plane to see his mother. Something happens. Historians are reverse engineers of the past, gathering material and trying to figure out how the pieces fall together, realizing how much remains unsaid, unknown, or lost. It’s the weighing of evidence that’s so difficult, the meaning we attach to what we find while rummaging through the lives of others. It’s here that the historian becomes a storyteller. This is why a newly found or reconsidered fact can be deliciously subversive. We have to tell the story all over again. The past begins looking different, as does the present.

  We do this in our own lives, often subconsciously. We are constantly altering the story of our selves, using information (however flawed or incomplete) to explain what happened a minute or a decade ago, making various assumptions about what we and others were thinking at any given point in time. Interminable revisionists, we create and recreate our lives through an endless process of addition and diminution. Usually the changes resulting from new information are very small, a shift of emphasis, a slightly different hue to our remembered past as we fit new information into the script of who we think we are. Or they can be tectonic, altering in some fundamental way how we understand past relationships and who we have become. Why did person “x” do thing “y”? Why did we act the way we did? Would we even like the person we once were?

  The difference with the professional historian is that we rely not only on the found material fragments of history but on our memory, with all its frailties and insistence. Wonderfully retentive and utterly bewildering, resolute and feeble, memory is always already an interpretation that usually contains within it something real, a trace of the past that somehow still feels present. We cannot survive without the ability to summon memory with a certain general degree of accuracy, either implicitly or explicitly, for it is by memory that experience becomes knowledge, whether this relates to the naturalness of riding a bike, discussing what we did at work, or recalling that a certain fishing lure works particularly well in late summer afternoons. What emerges in our minds is not an exact replica of what happened but rather a complicated (and to our minds utterly persuasive) story assembled around a “fact.” Memory is a kind of fiction that’s usually not totally true.

  Usually, because sometimes we think we did something that we only imagined doing, or we fill in what we don’t know around what we think we do. Memory, as innumerable studies have shown, can alter by mere suggestion, a kind of editing of the past that can unfold unconsciously. And of course memory can weaken over time. I will be able to recall what I did an hour ago. Six months from now it will be lost.

  Because memory is processual, it is subject to revision in the ongoing telling of our selves through which we build upon the likenesses of that which is already inescapably lost. This internal process of revision unfolds surreptitiously, however, in part because memories very often appear in our consciousness unexpectedly and through a web of association with other emotions and sensations. Tastes and smells can awaken the past, most likely because these senses are connected to the hippocampi, which play such an important role in autobiographical memory. This may help explain, for example, why I don’t go to bars much. The smells leave me in a funk. Somehow the particular combination of tobacco and hard liquor, especially cheap American whisky, creates a slight queasiness. I can feel a once distant yet still proximate past returning. The present becomes a little heavier. My vision turns a pixilated gray. I’ll become sad without knowing exactly why, aware of a cascade of bodily sensations without explicit remembrance. Then unfortunate moments tumble into awareness. I end up back in New Orleans with my mother trying to kill herself.

  In the summer of 1976 when my one-way flight arrived and my sixteen-year-old self slouched out of the plane, I could see her standing there uncertainly at the end of a tubular ramp that bent like an elbow from the plane to the terminal. I kissed her cheek. I could smell the booze and mentholated Salems. There were no questions or arms thrown around me, no smile. Mom was drunk, though at least standing. I carried my Samsonite into the wet heat of the airport’s exit, stepped into a taxi, headed to Chestnut Street. That evening I sat on the cot in my old room, and looked to the door my brother had knocked down all those years ago.

  Mom stole away to the primordial loneliness of her bedroom, with its piles of clothes on every flat surface and the dank smells of stale beer and cigarettes abandoned on a saucer, every one of them crushed and kissed red. Uneaten food lay strewn about the kitchen, a pot of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup on the stove, a chaos of dishes in the sink, and scattered across the room the opalescent egg casings of cockroaches.

  Grandmother had been dead for five years. Sabrina came home one day to find her crumpled in her wheelchair, her head resting on the desk. The ambulance whisked her to Charity where she died a few days later. Mom left the front room empty, not a shrine to her mother but rather an indifference born of their troubled history. Everything was in order. From the small table that had served as an altar, the Virgin Mary watched over the tightly made bed. It was as if Grandmother was still there, about to wheel herself in from the kitchen, the gold and garnet rosary settled on her lap.

  Mom now had neither Grandmother’s Social Security check nor the child support my father had irregularly sent her way. She barely survived, never secure but not quite destitute, always a few months behind on her bills. “They got enough money, too goddamn much money,” she liked to rail. “They don’t n
eed mine.” She felt entitled to their services free of charge. Bills seemed a personal insult, even a conspiracy. Mom would wait until the utility company or Bell South threatened to turn things off before she stuffed a Hibernia Bank check into the envelope.

  Mom had just turned fifty-five, with a mouth of dentures and bridges and blackened teeth, and a face battered by smoking, booze, and despair. She conjured masks of heavy foundation, rouge, thick lines of mascara and red lipstick, which she removed with Pond’s and toilet paper—except on the weekends, when she fell asleep drunk and woke the next day with blacks and reds smeared across her face. The Magazine Street bus took her to a five-and-dime half a block from Napoleon Avenue. She stood at the back selling Lee jeans, cotton-polyester shirts, and Fruit of the Loom underwear to men and women who lived in poor working-class neighborhoods near the railroad tracks that ran alongside the Mississippi. Lunch brought her to the corner bar where she smoked and drank a few beers and snacked on Saltine crackers. She’d return to the bar after work for a few more drinks before stepping onto the bus back home, sitting next to men roughened by war and by loading containers from ship to train, strong men whose flesh had softened from booze and youth’s end, with large tattoos drawn down their arms of big-breasted women in bathing suits.

  My brother Gus lived on the corner not more than fifty yards from the apartment, renting a small gloomy corner house with a chain link fence. He slept on a mattress thrown on the floor, surrounded by dirty clothes, empty beer bottles, rolling papers and the last seeds and twigs from a bag of dope. Garbage cans that had missed the weekly pick-up overflowed with rotting food. Roaches dashed everywhere. Tools spilled across the cement driveway.

  Gus had returned from the Vietnam War a few years earlier, spending the days hiding in darkness behind masks and goggles and heavy clothes, popping on acetylene torches, powering up diesel generators for arc welders that snapped angrily and covered him in sparks and a sharp white light. Terry had returned from Vietnam too, along with many of Gus’s boyhood friends who had been drafted into the war. They had long since burned through whatever money they had on cars and motorcycles and drugs, growing their hair out and spending afternoons and evenings sprawled across couches and beds.

  Gus boarded a plane for Vietnam just as I was receiving the first decent education of my life. He landed in Southeast Asia around the time of the Easter Offensive of 1972, when twelve divisions of the North Vietnamese Army invaded the south on three different fronts. The strategically important city of Quang Tri fell to the Communists. The entire coastal area became a “highway of terror”; a fantastic amount of U.S. firepower fell on the country. B-52 Stratofortresses lumbered their way into the sky from Guam; there were so many of the great planes they didn’t know where to park them. Hundreds of fighter-bombers departed from across the region, a total of nearly 60,000 sorties. Over 100,000 people died.

  Gus had a nervous breakdown. It’s a part of his life no one will discuss, especially my brother. I know not to push. All I can discern is that he had been drafted into the war, something dreadful had happened, and Gus had ended up spending a good bit of his tour confined to base before disembarking at the Oakland Army Terminal and making the short trip to the Letterman hospital in San Francisco. It was serious enough that Mom flew out to be with him. The doctors patched him up and sent him on his way.

  I had seen him for a brief afternoon in the summer of 1974. We had just returned to the United States from Tunisia. Gus arrived on the back of a motorcycle. He had been discharged barely a year, the physical traces of his military service lost to a wild beard and a black sheen of straight hair. In my pubescent selfish innocence I had no idea what he had endured, and worse, no interest in knowing.

  We stood outside the door.

  “Dontcha know what a bear hug is?”

  I didn’t.

  “C’mon brother.”

  Gus grabbed me and didn’t let go. We stood there, the smell of Lucky Strikes in my brother’s hair. He held me for what seems an impossibly long time, finally let go, smiled, and said something like I was turning out okay, kicked his bike on, and left.

  When I returned to New Orleans two years later, he had his hair cut back, though his face remained hidden behind an unruly beard. We fished a couple of times for the sheepshead that lurked near pylons sunk into Lake Pontchartrain. I learned how to smoke dope and drink beer. The weeks turned into a kind of muddy haze. During the day I worked for Louis, my Aunt Cecile’s son, scrubbing stone with a solution of muriatic acid in newly built suburban homes with large stone fireplaces that seemed out of place in semi-tropical Louisiana.

  In the late afternoons I walked up and down Uptown streets, often toward Audubon Park though sometimes to Plum Street for a sno-ball. Mockingbirds chased one another among red and white pinwheel flowers. Air-conditioners half hanging out of bedroom windows snapped on and off. Back in the apartment I disappeared into my closet room, falling asleep to the oscillating fan click-clicking back and forth and the air sweeping across the sheets.

  For the Fourth of July weekend we piled into my brother’s pickup and headed out to a small cabin in the woods somewhere up in the country across the lake. In the still afternoon and into early evening, trucks and old station wagons lumbered up the dirt road and abandoned themselves around the cabin. The sounds of Triumphs and Harleys thumped through the pine trees. On the screened-in porch, men newly returned from Vietnam drank and smoked, laughed and argued. I met a woman named Valerie, who arrived on the back of one of the motorcycles in shorts and a sleeveless shirt, her hair cut short, large breasts loose behind a thin cotton shirt. The men seemed foreign to me. I gravitated toward Valerie, who was ten years my senior. We talked through the afternoon and into the evening, the beer turning youthful confidence into boastful exaggeration. I described living in Tunisia, quoted from books and spoke French, whatever I could do to demonstrate my sophistication and, most insistently, the absolute importance that we have sex.

  My seventeen-year-old self could not summon the wisdom to say that this was all too much, that the last place on earth I should be was in New Orleans with my drunken mother, stoned on pot, drinking alcohol, having sex with a very experienced woman. I didn’t call Susan to ask her to take me home. I didn’t call anyone, even if somehow I knew that I had to escape. When I heard that two of Sabrina’s friends were heading to Key West I joined them. Anything was better than New Orleans. Anything was better than being with Mom.

  Sabrina worked as a waitress in one of the town’s many seafood joints. I had no money and barely any clothes. We slept in a shack at the back of a house where there was an avocado tree. I would climb the tree and drop the green fruit into my sister’s hands. In the afternoon I biked around the city selling avocados for a quarter. I made enough money for a lunch of yellow rice, black beans, and a piece of fried fish. In the evenings I ate dinner with the Hare Krishnas at the end of Duvall Street and watched the silver tarpon flash through the clear water.

  Returning to New Orleans had been a disaster, enough of a calamity that I had left within a matter of weeks. Susan technically had guardianship, a legal responsibility. Perhaps the idea that I would end up as a dropout in Key West was too much. There must have been some sort of conversation between Mom and Susan, followed by phone calls to Key West. Susan must have changed her mind. Sabrina and I hitched the thousand miles north.

  Within a few bewildering months I had taken that plane to New Orleans, hitchhiked from Key West to Maryland, smoked dope, lost my virginity to a much older woman, tossed back shots of tequila until I passed out. Back in Maryland I dropped acid, ate hash, smoked PCP, and worked nights and weekends in a shopping mall making pizzas to pay for dope and booze for weekend parties.

  Lots of middle-class white kids did the same, particularly in affluent Montgomery County in the permissive 1970s when the state had all but decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana. Drugs suffused my high school, with students splitting bags of dope in the stairwell an
d getting high during lunchtime. I may not have yet become the stereotypical troubled teenage boy, but I was certainly skating on thin ice. My relationship with Susan deteriorated. Just after my seventeenth birthday I ran away. Or I was kicked out. It’s a little hard to tell, even now. I was going to get kicked out one way or another. I was going to end up with my father back in California, or in New Orleans with my mother, or homeless, or in a reform school. So I ran away in some sort of adolescently unrealistic preemptive escape.

  Joe had just returned from California, newly retired from the military and hoping to repair his failing marriage. I had been keeping a diary, I told him. At dinner one night Joe began asking questions in the biting way that had once turned me into a puddle of tears. He had read the diary and its details of teenage misdeeds. I cannot reconstruct the exact words, only the feeling that evening sitting at the table, knowing that somehow the world was dissolving around me. I got up, dashed downstairs to my room, and tore out of the house, running through Glen Echo and Bethesda, Maryland, past three- and four-bedroom homes of brick and ivy set comfortably away from the streetlights shielding the neighborhood. Doctors and lawyers and psychiatrists lived here, and tens of thousands of government employees. I had lived here too, however recently, however provisionally. Their children attended Walt Whitman High School or Bethesda Chevy Chase in one of the nation’s very best public school districts, or went to tony places like Sidwell Friends. Good schools meant admission into solid, established colleges and universities, ultimately a professional degree, and an expected return of those sons and daughters to successful careers and protected lives in one of the subdivisions curling out of the Boston–Washington corridor.