History Lessons

by Clifton Crais

  I sat hunched over the exam booklet writing about the state in Africa, trying to recall the arguments of a slim volume by a Cambridge don on whether or not the concept of feudalism had any purchase on the study of Africa’s past. There were not more than four or five of us sitting at the table.

  The professor tapped my shoulder, leaned over. “I would like to speak to you in the hallway after the exam.”

  She was a tall, elegant woman in her forties who worked on West Africa. I stood beneath the fluorescent lights leaning against the painted cinder-block walls in the basement of Francis Scott Key Hall.

  “I want to encourage you to continue in your studies of Africa,” she said. “I’ll see you in the fall.”

  A few days later I filled a backpack stuffed with clothes and a few books and walked to Highway 95, thumbing one ride after another back to New Orleans.

  In college we begin making real the scripts we began creating about our selves in adolescence. We imagine a future, not only in our heads but in the complex community and inherited culture that is humanity. The maturing brain’s cognitive complexity helps make this possible. Recent research suggests that our memory systems fully develop only in early adulthood, allowing us, for example, to trace memories to specific origins. We can embark on the journey of considering the self and its past, which means that we begin facing all the complications and contingencies of who we have become, our life’s journey. We can bring a kind of history to experience. This appreciation or awareness of the past paradoxically helps us separate from it. We say good-bye to childhood, which also usually means saying good-bye to our parents.

  The challenge is not so much a separation from childhood as it is an integration of the past and our imagined future. What purchase does this past have? Humans have a universal need to form close bonds, beginning in infancy with attachments to caregivers. At times these attachments are less than optimal; there is no such thing as the perfect parent. Sometimes they are terrible, as in my early relationship with my mother. I likely folded her despair into my emergent self, where the past was less consciously remembered than felt and the present seemed forever unreal.

  In early adulthood’s gloaming I journeyed between two belongings, one exerting some powerful gravitational pull toward a New Orleans childhood I could not summon to memory, the other indeterminate, indistinct. College, the comfortable waltz of students across the quad and Frisbees curling in the air, seemed like a fiction. I couldn’t understand what I was reading. Words floated past in some indecipherable whir. I went to class, took my notes, but the world kept slipping away. And I didn’t have the money to make ends meet.

  I often woke in the middle of the night covered in sweat. I would dream of running endlessly through suburban subdivisions. Or I would be in New Orleans roaming the French Quarter or sitting on the couch in my mother’s derelict apartment, legions of roaches marching across the floor. I wandered through my sophomore year dreadfully lost. The world seemed unbearably heavy. Everything that had unfolded in the present simply disappeared, returning me to my New Orleans childhood, to a house and a neighborhood, to a past that felt real but which I could not describe or summon by the simplest of words that might help distinguish the now from the past.

  A doctor at the clinic prescribed antidepressants. I walked into woods near campus, sat down with my backpack next to me stuffed with books, and gulped down the entire vial.

  Depression steals time, erasing the horizons of our inner being upon which we direct our lives. The timing of my crisis was not unusual. In late adolescence our past begins meeting a present that is ours to shape, often for the first time. Will we become our stories, however roughly conjured they may be? Or will we somehow yield to an earlier era when we may have been the subjects of another’s life? Adolescent breakdowns occur for all sorts of reasons. Problems that had emerged much earlier in life may suddenly begin surfacing. In some instances they emerge from our inability to find our mental selves and to reflect on why people do the things they do, what unfolds in their minds. Something remains fundamentally and persistently unresolved. Unable to locate our selves, we assume the mind of the other even as we search desperately for some sort of autonomous existence. In crisis, this untenable conflict ruptures.

  I discovered these issues not only in a therapist’s office but in my studies. Throughout that troubled year I found myself pulled to the work of social historians who were committed to uncovering the lives of workers, peasants, and women—common folk. Theirs was a work of recuperation. At the center of this scholarship lay a vexing issue, what scholars called the problem of “structure” and “agency.” I wrote down a quote from Karl Marx, which I had in my backpack that day in the woods: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

  What structures determined my world? What agency?

  A piece of mail arrived that spring that had made a circuitous journey. Beginning with a trip from some large Washington, DC, building to my sister’s house in Dallas, it was redirected to my mother’s Zimpel Street address. It must have sat on the couch or on a table for some time until Mom scratched out one address and put on another. I am not sure how she found where I lived, whether she called me or someone else, but somehow the letter traveled back north to Maryland to just a few miles from where it began.

  It was one of those official letters with the name of the bureaucratic agency neatly printed in the upper-left corner and a cellophane window, from the Social Security Administration. From 1965 through the mid-1980s, the federal government supported college students whose parents had retired or were deceased. This was the golden age of American higher education and social welfare policies that allowed millions of students like me to attend college. Institutions such as the University of Maryland grew enormously. The Social Security Administration provided an additional cushion, and encouragement, for kids to go to school and, crucially, to stay in.

  The letter was simple. As long as I remained in school, each month the government would issue a check, in my case $200. Dad had retired at the end of 1978, halfway through my first year in college. I had accrued a number of months of income. With a few forms completed, the money would be mine.

  A second letter arrived, this time from my father telling me that the money belonged to him. I was to arrange for the check to be sent to California. Dad would then send some of it back, whatever he thought I deserved.

  I didn’t write back.

  Then came a phone call one weekend; I think it was a Sunday. I was living in a student house north of campus, a fifteen- or twenty-minute walk to class. I can’t remember the exact words. I know he said “son” more than once. This meant he was serious, as if a word indicating our biological connection automatically imparted gravity to what followed.

  “Son, I’m retired now. I’ve been sending your mother money from the beginning, son. Susan too, when you lived with her. That money belongs to me—I reckon I’ve worked all my life for it. You make sure the check gets sent to California. I’ll take care of it for you. I’ll send you some money like I’ve been doing all your life.”

  “No, Dad. I’m not going to do it.”

  I don’t remember ever speaking up to my father like this. I had read the bureaucratic language. The money was meant for me, for the children of retirees. My father had rarely been around, and here he was calling me from California, reaching out because the government was cutting me a $200 check.

  “It’s my money,” I told him. “It’s supposed to go to me, not you.”

  Dad said something else, insisted the money was his. I could tell he was furious. I put the phone down. He stopped calling.

  With the tuition scholarship and the government check, college seemed possible again. But I would still have to work to make e
nds meet. I found a job at the Sunrise Café, a diner along a jumbled campus strip of bicycle shops, pharmacies, bars, and cheap places to eat. I would stay up all night on Thursday finishing my reading, typing up my scrawled, barely legible class notes. I worked the Friday night shift, then all day Saturday into Sunday morning, twenty hours washing dishes and making sandwiches and omelets. This way I could spend the rest of the week reading in the library.

  I didn’t return to New Orleans at the end of the school term, nor the next summer. I rarely called or wrote. Years passed by.

  I know now that in those months after I woke shivering in a Maryland woods, some part of me realized that to live, to demand ownership over my life, required a kind of disavowal. One can exist in an alien world where the self remains tied to a past over which one has little or no say, in my case weaving my mother’s despair into my inner being. Or one can begin the awful, lonely work of claiming a future. For many of us with troubled pasts and suffering minds, disavowal becomes a necessary condition of survival, not so much repudiating our history as renouncing its continued haunting place in our present-day lives.

  That spring I filled in the forms declaring a major. I was going to become a historian.

  I am drawn to impossible histories.

  I realize now that I became a historian because I wanted to write into the wounds of the past. My professional life is bound to a childhood of neglect and dislocation and, most profoundly, a difficulty remembering my own past. If I could not have my own memories, at least I would try to preserve others. I turned to South Africa because at the time it was the most brutal place on Earth. In some ineffable way, I transferred an inner narrative onto a historical landscape that seemed far away from New Orleans, trying to figure out what happened, what went wrong, and why.

  In the late twentieth century, South Africa had the unenviable distinction of being the world’s anathema, what Nazi Germany had represented to an earlier generation: intolerance, brutality, an entire political order manufactured to persecute a people on the basis of race. I wanted to write a history of this inhumanity, determine what made this traumatizing present possible by a determined wandering through the detritus of a bygone era. I thought, naively I know, that the archive as a house of memory might allow a return to some inaugural moment, the point where the damage was done.

  We write our own histories, but not according to conditions of our choosing. Constrained by what is or isn’t in the record, the historian brings to the past the perplexities of his or her age, sometimes consciously, often unknowingly. We seem to work with what’s there—the evidence—but it’s what’s absent that often drives our longing, our worried rowing toward worlds already slipping away.

  Historians believe our truth lies not in metaphysical reflection but in the hope that we will discover something in the details of another’s life. All the while we are drawn to traumatic pasts, to the silences produced by terror and brutality, the infinite frailties of existence. We tell stories that move toward some end in time knowing that we are surrounded by fragments and absences, by all that’s not there, that’s forever lost. History, like art, may be the preserver of memory, but like the amnesiac it also remains removed from human experience. We yearn for what is missing. The past erodes and dissolves, even disappears entirely, at times as fragile as the memories we keep within us. And sometimes just as powerful. The historian works with bits and pieces, sometimes bare traces, as if we were survivors walking through history’s wreckage trying to make sense of it all, surrounded by the remains, certainly, but also by silence and forgetting. What’s there in the human record is often as important as what is already gone, the thing for which we stand ever longing.

  Perhaps history and the new science of memory are not dissimilar. Scientists once believed that the brain was more or less inflexible, its structures discretely organized. Memory entailed the recovery of data stored inside us, our heads a kind of filing cabinet of past experience. Problems emerged only in the processes of retrieval and interpretation, as if a piece of data had been incorrectly filed and temporarily lost, or we misunderstood what we remembered.

  Memory’s retrieval and interpretation became a central goal of psychoanalysis and other forms of “talk” therapy. The mind repressed traumatic or overwhelming experiences, so the goal of therapy was to make repressed memories visible. Each revisiting of childhood injury, each awakening of memory under the analyst’s wise supervision, would leave the adult with a better understanding of their past and its location in the present. Patients would leave therapy with a new history of their selves, and with the understanding that we have control over what once seemed inevitable. Trauma would no longer seem timeless. The past, finally, would become past.

  Only the most orthodox psychoanalysts now believe in the “repressive hypothesis.” Memory is not a physical “thing” we can lay hold of. Memory amends itself over time, part of the endless little additions and revisions that make a life. The brain is ceaselessly changing in ways that radically differ from any other part of our body. To a certain extent, the external world, that is, culture, shapes neural development. What happens around us has an impact on how the brain encodes subsequent experiences as “memory.” The past that creates us in turn shapes what we make of the world and how we live in it. Memory may be as delicate as a wisp of smoke and as resolute as fired clay. In it resides our past and the past of others.

  The archive of the self, memory is the way the human brain makes sense of experience. Our brains are organized for telling stories of memory. We have narrative brains, prepared for producing and communicating history. Telling the past seems unique to our species. The development of neural structures inside the brain related to memory, such as the amygdalae and the hippocampi, may be related to the fact that mammals bear live young that they tend and defend, and that they typically form social communities. The origin of these bonds goes back to the emergence of the mammalian brain over sixty-five million years ago. History, that is, stories about the past, serves an evolutionary role by translating experience into knowledge that helps us, and others, navigate a world and explain our location in it. We are fundamentally historical beings.

  The ways memory is formed, arrives, persists, fades away, disappears forever, the stories we tell others, and ourselves—all of this is history. Even involuntary memories, those that emerge willy-nilly from external stimuli, seem to be the brain’s way of reminding us that we don’t only live in the present. The past remains forever unfinished because in powerful ways it is inside us and all around us in human culture. Its presence compels us to tell stories, to tell them again and again, and to hope that someone will listen. This is one of the burdens of being human, remembering—insisting—that stories remain ineluctably open. We continue living in the telling.

  I still cannot remember most of my New Orleans childhood, despite all the time and effort I’ve spent trying to reconstruct it. The external world simply overwhelmed my young brain’s ability to put things into some sort of order. The issue is not one of repressed memory, or at least not only this. My brain simply shut down, adopting a cognitive strategy of not remembering, a primitive way of declaring “Enough already!” Certain experiences disrupted the complex interaction of the brain’s different memory systems. Some sort of shutting down—call it repression, inhibitory selection, forgetting even—helped mute the besieging external stimuli. All of this conspired to create problems with autobiographical memory.

  Familial dissolution also played its part. Kinship groups have been the single most important site of historical production, whether it’s about how to survive or the wisdom held in the lives of our ancestors. The destruction of these groups by violence, poverty, or divorce breaks not only the transmission of knowledge but the very ability to tell stories of the past

  There is nothing much I can do about this. This is what it is and what can never be. I grieve for what I cannot remember. It’s a peculiar mourning. Lost childhood remains stubbornly present, its abse
nce an abiding life.

  I have dug into a family past that was lost to me. I conducted interviews, pored over records, sat in bars, walked up and down streets, read books in the library, traveled to distant archives, bowed down before the therapist’s couch. I followed the scholar’s method of verifying information through independent confirmation, a kind of triangulation historians use to guide their way toward some sort of meaning amidst human despair and time’s unremitting erasure. I could glimpse someone else’s past in the most mundane of accounts and, most powerfully, in the coincidences that lay among the shards. This is important. History can be made in the most unexpected ways by the jostling together of bits and pieces that were never meant to meet.

  All this documentary evidence of someone else’s experience, even my own, remains just that: evidence. It can never become memory. There is no return from the nothingness of forgetting. History is my artificial limb connecting the present to some distant past that is forever missing.

  But there is something different now. It’s not memory but still powerful: the knowledge that helps fill in the blanks spaces where a child once walked all those lost years ago.

  All of this raises the vexing issue of survival that scientists have tried to explain by looking at issues such as genetic predisposition, timing, and resiliency. Why do some people seem able to “make it,” even thrive, while for others trauma leaves them destroyed? There are no objective criteria for trauma. People process external stimuli differently. Some have experienced things that seem impossible to endure—rape, war, genocide—yet are able to put together decent enough lives. In some instances, trauma simply isn’t traumatic. For others the situation is vastly different. They are forever haunted by their past.