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  The steady eyes of the crow and the camera’s candid eye

  See as honestly as they know how, but they lie.

  —W. H. Auden

  PROLOGUE

  The Meuse

  We all have them: those boxes in storage, detritus left to us by our forebears. Mine were in the attic, and there were lots of them. Most were crumbling cardboard, held together by ancient twine of various types: the thick cotton kind sold for clotheslines wrapped once around and tied with an emphatic square knot; its weaker version, better suited for wrapping a packet of letters, and the shaggy blond string used for hay bales, the ends raveling.

  I remember having seen some of the oldest boxes, those from my father’s and mother’s families, when I was a child. They had been stored in cabinets above the piles of rags where the dogs slept in the carport and had accumulated dander and dog hair from decades of boxers and Great Danes. Though decaying with age, the boxes bore unmistakable signs of craftsmanship, such as the elegant advertisements from the era stamped on the sides, or the delicate painting on the tin case my father used to ship artworks from “Pnom-Pehn” in the 1930s, which gave them a decorous, dignified air.

  In our attic, they kept an increasingly disapproving vigil, it seemed to me, over the promiscuous sprawl of stuff that piled up around them as my husband, Larry, and I and our kids made our own histories: snapshots, of course, by the thousands, but also letters, science fair exhibits, entubed diplomas, the remains of a costume in which Jessie dressed up for Halloween as a blade of grass, snarly-haired dolls, the sawn-apart cast from Virginia’s broken leg when she was six, paper dolls with outfits still carefully hooked over their shoulders, report cards, spangly tutus and soiled, hem-dangling pinafores, receipts, a box of broken candy cigarettes, bank statements, exhibition reviews, a trunk of dress-up ball gowns, tatty Easter baskets still bedded with a tangle of green plastic grass, two pairs of Lolita sunglasses, their plastic brittle and faded, and the section of Sheetrock cut from the kitchen of our old house on which the heights of the children were penciled each year.

  And, of course, there was also in the attic the residue of my own unexamined past: the many variously sized boxes, secured with brittle masking tape, containing letters, journals, childhood drawings, and photographs. These had been left untouched for decades as I ignored Joan Didion’s sage advice to remain on nodding terms, at least, with the people we used to be, lest they show up to settle accounts at some dark 4:00 a.m. of the soul.

  The tape and twine on these boxes, where my family’s past sleeps, might never have been cut nor their complicated secrets revealed if I hadn’t gotten a letter early in July 2008 from John Stauffer, distinguished professor of English, American Studies, and African American Studies at Harvard, asking me to deliver the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization. After reading the letter, I cycled through the familiar antics of disbelief: forehead slapping, eye-rolling, exaggerated scrutiny of the envelope for an error… but, no. They wanted me, a photographer, to deliver the three scholarly lectures at Harvard beginning on my sixtieth birthday, three years down the road, in May 2011.

  Rushing to my Day-Timer, I searched in vain for a conflict. In fact, I searched in vain for a calendar page that far in the future.

  No way could I reasonably decline. Years earlier, my brilliant young friend Niall MacKenzie had been given to prefacing his ironically self-inflating forecasts with the line “Well, Sally, when they ask me to deliver the Massey Lectures…” I had heard this refrain so many times that the Masseys had come to represent for me the pinnacle of intellectual achievement. But I didn’t think of myself as much of an intellectual, and I was certainly no academic. I wasn’t even a writer. And what did I have to write about, even supposing I could?

  I had acquired some acclaim and notoriety, as well as the irritating label “controversial,” in the early 1990s with the publication of my third book of photographs, Immediate Family. In it were pictures I had made of my children, Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia, going about their lives, sometimes without clothing, on our farm tucked into the Virginia hills. Out of a conviction that my lens should remain open to the full scope of their childhood, and with willing, creative participation from everyone involved, I photographed their triumphs, confusion, harmony, and isolation, as well as the hardships that tend to befall children—bruises, vomit, bloody noses, wet beds—all of it. In a case of cosmically bad timing, the release of Immediate Family coincided with a moral panic about the depiction of children’s bodies and a heated debate about government funding of the arts. (I had received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities but not for the pictures of my children.) Much confusion, distraction, internal struggle, and, ultimately, fuel for new work emerged from this embattled period.

  Would the Massey committee at Harvard expect me to justify my family pictures all these years later? I didn’t mind doing that, but I hoped I could also focus on the work that came afterward, deeply personal explorations of the landscape of the American South, the nature of mortality (and the mortality of nature), intimate depictions of my husband, and the indelible marks that slavery left on the world surrounding me. With trepidation, I called John Stauffer, and his answer only made me more anxious: anything, speak about anything you want.

  Oppressed by this indulgence and uncertain how to proceed, I went into a spasm of self-doubt and fear so incapacitating that it was nearly a year before I told Stauffer I’d do it. And then, as often happens to me, the self-doubt that had dammed up so much behind its seemingly impermeable wall allowed the first trickles of hope and optimism to seep out, and through the widening crack possibility flooded forth. Insecurity, for an artist, can ultimately be a gift, albeit an excruciating one.

  I began looking for what I had to say where I usually find it: in what William Carlos Williams called “the local.” I wonder if he would think my admittedly extreme interpretation—working at home, seldom leaving the spacious plenty of our farm—too much local. For Larry, it sometimes is: he once irritatedly clocked five weeks during which I didn’t so much as go to the grocery store. But like a high-strung racehorse who needs extra weight in her saddle pad, I like a handicap and relish the aesthetic challenge posed by the limitations of the ordinary. Conversely, I get a little panicked when I have before me what the comic-strip character Pogo once referred to as “insurmountable opportunities.” It is easier for me to take ten good pictures in an airplane bathroom than in the gardens at Versailles.

  And so I turned to the boxes in my attic, starting with those that bore witness to my own youth. Who and what would I find in them?

  My long preoccupation with the treachery of memory has convinced me that I have fewer and more imperfect recollections of childhood than most people. But having asked around over the years, I’m not so sure now that this is the case. Perhaps we are all like the poet Eric Ormsby, writing of his childhood home: We watch our past occlude, bleed away, the overflowing gardens erased, their sun-remembered walls crumbling into dust at our fingers’ approach. And, just as Ormsby wrote, we all would “cry at the fierceness of that velocity / if our astonished eyes had time.”

  Whatever of my memories hadn’t cr
umbled into dust must surely by now have been altered by the passage of time. I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it. With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us farther away.

  I had learned over time to meekly accept whatever betrayals memory pulled over on me, allowing my mind to polish its own beautiful lie. In distorting the information it’s supposed to be keeping safe, the brain, to its credit, will often bow to some instinctive aesthetic wisdom, imparting to our life’s events a coherence, logic, and symbolic elegance that’s not present or not so obvious in the improbable, disheveled sloppiness of what we’ve actually been through. Elegance and logic aside, though, in researching and writing this book, I knew that a tarted-up form of reminiscence wouldn’t do, no matter how aesthetically adroit or merciful. I needed the truth, or, as a friend once said, “something close to it.” That something would be memory’s truth, which is to scientific, objective truth as a pearl is to a piece of sand. But it was all I had.

  So, before I scissored the ancestral boxes, I opened my own to check my erratic remembrance against the artifacts they held, and in doing so encountered the malignant twin to imperfect memory: the treachery of photography. As far back as 1901 Émile Zola telegraphed the threat of this relatively new medium, remarking that you cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it. What Zola perhaps also knew or intuited was that once photographed, whatever you had “really seen” would never be seen by the eye of memory again. It would forever be cut from the continuum of being, a mere sliver, a slight, translucent paring from the fat life of time; elegiac, one-dimensional, immediately assuming the amber quality of nostalgia: an instantaneous memento mori. Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories. As I held my childhood pictures in my hands, in the tenderness of my “remembering,” I also knew that with each photograph I was forgetting.

  I closed my boxes and turned to those of earlier generations. They had come to my attic in stages—first from Larry’s parents and grandparents and then from my father and mother—and they had not been opened since the deaths that necessitated boxing up a life. In them was all that remained in the world of these people, their entire lives crammed into boxes that would barely hold a twelve-pack.

  When an animal, a rabbit, say, beds down in a protecting fencerow, the weight and warmth of his curled body leaves a mirroring mark upon the ground. The grasses often appear to have been woven into a birdlike nest, and perhaps were indeed caught and pulled around by the delicate claws as he turned in a circle before subsiding into rest. This soft bowl in the grasses, this body-formed evidence of hare, has a name, an obsolete but beautiful word: meuse. (Enticingly close to Muse, daughter of Memory, and source of inspiration.) Each of us leaves evidence on the earth that in various ways bears our form, but when I gently press my hand into the rabbit’s downy, rounded meuse it makes me wonder: will all the marks I have left on the world someday be tied up in a box?

  Cutting the strings on the first family carton, my mother’s, I wondered what I would find, what layers of unknown family history. Would the wellsprings of my work as an artist—the fascination with family, with the southern landscape, with death—be in these boxes? What ghosts of long-dead, unknown family members were in them, keeping what secrets?

  I will confess that in the interest of narrative I secretly hoped I’d find a payload of southern gothic: deceit and scandal, alcoholism, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land, abandonments, blow jobs, suicides, hidden addictions, the tragically early death of a beautiful bride, racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of a prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder.

  If any of this stuff lay hidden in my family history, I had the distinct sense I’d find it in those twine-bound boxes in the attic. And I did: all of it and more.

  PART 1

  Family Ties: The Importance of Place

  1

  The Sight of My Eye

  Until my early twenties, I kept handwritten journals. As I filled each one, I would pile it on top of the others under my desk and discard the bottom one. The first to go, I remember, was a small, pink child’s journal with “My Precious Thoughts” in cursive gold lettering on the cover, those thoughts safeguarded by a pitifully ineffectual brass lock.

  When I was eighteen, in the winter prior to my June wedding, I relinquished my room to my mother, who had huffily left her marital bed when Tara, a Great Dane, moved into it with my father. Cleaning out my stuff, I pulled out the journals accumulated so far and bundled them into a box I labeled “Journals, 1968–.”

  Ripping the desiccated masking tape off that box some forty years later, I wasn’t surprised to find that the first entry in the earliest journal was a paean to the formative Virginia landscape of my youth. It begins:

  It has been a mild summer, with more rain than most. We work hard and grow tired. The evening is cool as we watch the night slide in and hear each sound in the still blue hour. The silver poplar shimmers and every so often the pond ripples with fish. The mountains grow deep. They are darker than the night.

  Judging by the unembellished declarative sentences in those first paragraphs, it’s a safe bet I was reading Hemingway that summer, somewhere around my seventeenth. But read down a few more lines and I come over all Faulknerian, soaring into rhapsodic description:

  We reach the top pasture and you are ahead and spread your arms wide. I run to catch up and it opens to me. There is no word for this; nothing can contain it or give it address. There are no boundaries, no states. The mountains are long and forever and they give the names, they give the belief in the names. The mountains give the name of blue, the name of change and mist and hour and light and noise of wind, they are the name of my name, the hand of my hand and the sight of my eye.

  I have loved Rockbridge County, Virginia, surely since the moment my birth-bleary eyes caught sight of it. Not only is it abundant with the kind of obvious, everyday beauty that even a mewling babe can appreciate, but it also boasts the world-class drama of the Natural Bridge of Virginia, surveyed by George Washington and long vaunted (incorrectly, as it turned out) on local billboards as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. Like any true native, I didn’t bother to investigate our local tourist draw until well into my thirties, and when I did I was chagrined, blown away by its airy audacity.

  After checking out the Natural Bridge, visitors looking for a dose of the Ye Olde will usually make a stop in history-rich Lexington, the county seat (pop. 7,000), where I grew up. Plenty of interesting people have been born or passed time in Lexington, the artist Cy Twombly being among the more notable, but also Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the reaper; Gen. George Marshall; Tom Wolfe; Arnold Toynbee; Alben Barkley, vice president under Truman, who not only passed through here but passed away here, being declared dead on the dais in midspeech by my own physician father; and Patsy Cline, who lived just down the creek from our old house in town.

  The young novelist Carson McCullers, burdened by the meteoric success of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and recovering in Lexington, was once hauled out of a bathtub at a mutual friend’s house, fully clothed, drenched, and drunk, by my mother. Thinking about it now, it’s probably a good thing that my mother is not around to receive the unwelcome news that her oft-told stories about Edward Albee writing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? while in Lexington are likely apocryphal. Not only that, but she said he did so in a cottage on the grounds of my childhood home, Boxerwood, while visiting its occupant James Boatwright. I’m pretty sure her as
sertion that the Albee characters George and Martha had been based on a local faculty couple famous for their bickering and alcohol consumption is incorrect, too, but that probably wouldn’t stop her even now from deliciously persevering with it. Besides, it’s still believable to me, for I well remember the sounds of the drinking and bickering during Boatwright’s late-night literary parties at the cottage drifting down to my open bedroom windows during the early sixties.

  The eye-filling Reynolds Price visited Boatwright often (as did, at various times, Eudora Welty, Mary McCarthy, and W. H. Auden), and on the night I attended my first prom at age fourteen, he and Boatwright emerged from the screen porch to drunkenly toast me, calling me Sally Dubonnet, a term I find baffling even today, as their gin rickeys sloshed over the glasses.

  What brings both luminaries and regular visitors to Lexington are often the two handsome old colleges, Washington and Lee University and Virginia Military Institute, which coexist uncomfortably cheek by jowl, as well as the homes and burial places of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. The remains of those defeated generals’ horses, Little Sorrel and Traveller, are also here, one at VMI, the other at W&L.

  When I was growing up, Traveller’s bleached skeleton was displayed on a plinth in an academic building at W&L, pinned together somewhat worryingly by wire and desecrated with the hastily carved initials of students. Just a few blocks north from Traveller at neighboring VMI, the nearly hairless hide of the deboned Little Sorrel was displayed in the museum. I was told that a local guide once explained to his clutch of credulous tourists that the skeleton was Little Sorrel as a mature horse and the stuffed hide was Little Sorrel when he was just a young colt.

  The Shenandoah Valley attracts many visitors; some come for its history, especially its Civil War history, but even more for its undeniable physical beauty. It is said that as the radical abolitionist John Brown stood on the elevated scaffold in his last minutes, he gazed out at our lovely valley in wonderment. Eyewitnesses reported that before the hangman covered his head, John Brown turned to the sheriff and expressed with windy eloquence his admiration for the landscape before him. The sheriff responded laconically but with unambiguous agreement, “Yup, none like it,” and signaled the hangman to pull, pdq, the white hood over Brown’s valley-struck eyes.