Waiting for Release

In the Dark

He lies
in the gloom and wastes
and waits.
He is tired.

He dreams
of the time before.

The moon clings to clouds.
The dogs sing
to the unburdened air.

In the dream he lifts his son
to the sky
settles him on a red horse,
offers it a sweet.

He wakes --
the vision of his baby
laughing,
tangled in the mane
of a wild thing,
blood
spit
tears.

~Elodie Pritchartt

On the First Cold Day of 2018

Today felt like first winter when you're kind of delighted it's Christmastime but the sky is pewter and the air is cold and you wonder if it's ever going to be a bright, sunshiny day again. Halfway between desolation and utter joy.

You think of all the dead, but also of the children who still wonder at the magic. And the knowledge that one day in the not-too-distant future, you'll be among the dead they're missing at the table, wishing you could make it easier for them.

In the meantime, the constellations turn in their heavens and never notice the tiny starts and finishes of the ants who live upon this hill. And people wonder why I never make the bed.

11/01/2018

Remembering the Enslaved: Delia -- A guest post by Tom Scarborough

This is an oil portrait that has been in my family since the 1840s. It is of an enslaved woman named Delia. 

She was the house servant to my great, great, great grandfather, William Bisland, at Mount Repose, the family's plantation near Natchez, MS. 

It was painted by James Reid Lambdin, a relative of the Bislands by marriage. Lambdin also painted the official portraits of presidents Zachary Taylor, and William Henry Harrison. 

This painting hung in the library of my grandparents' house in Washington D.C. for several decades. I remember being entranced by it when I would visit them. It is currently on exhibit at the Mississippi Museum of Art, in Jackson, MS. 

I went to Jackson last week to see Delia for the first time in at least twenty years. It was strange seeing in a public space, this painting that was a part of my ancestors' history, and a poignant reminder of their implication in the system of American racial slavery. 

William Henry Harrison

Zachary Taylor

Having done my graduate work in the study of the plantation slave economy, I am fascinated by the historical nuances of this painting. 

My Natchez family was deeply involved in the slave economy, owning over 400 human beings spread over five plantations, from Natchez, to Terrebonne Parish, LA. 

I don't know if the family commissioned this painting; if so, it would have been very unusual as slaveowners did not typically commission portraits of their human property. Oil portraits of enslaved persons are exceedingly rare. If they did, however, it would speak to the bonds that sometimes did form between bondspersons and those who kept them in thrall. 

More likely, Lambdin painted Delia on his own initiative, and then gave the painting to his in-laws. 

I love her expression--strong, proud, unbroken. She is dressed in what were most likely her finest garments--for her this must have been an event of special meaning. My aunt and I have both tried to track down any evidence that might indicate what became of Delia, but documentary evidence is scant. What little I have gleaned indicates that she may have moved from Mount Repose across the river to New Providence Plantation, in Concordia Parish, another Bisland plantation. But no records have yet been found to shed light on her life during, or after the Civil War.

It was wonderful to once again see this woman who has been a part of our family for nearly 175 years, though not by her choice. I am delighted that she can now be viewed and appreciated by the public. I encourage all of my friends in Natchez and nearby to make the trip to the museum, perhaps in conjunction with a visit to the new Civil Rights Museum in Jackson.

Tom Scarborough lives in St. Francisville, Louisiana, where he and his wife, Denise, own and operate the Nouvelle Candle Club, and parent a precious, precocious, politically savvy  cat named Andy.

The Reckoning

In the pictures 
we seldom smiled.

Stubborn children 
forced to pause
and pose before the hearth 
in the cabin 
in the woods
in the childhood
in the life
he'd built 
in the 
happy time.

He pulls the tattered box
From under the bed,
studies each fading moment 
for clues.

The lamp sheds no new light
On the mystery of us. 

The smell of dust, 
the screen door’s slam,
the island in the pond
saddles in the shed,
the boat, the chill,
the sweat, the water,
the shadow and the light
the silence of a Sunday
night waiting 
while he locked the gate.

Turned the key 
On another memory.

The sandbar, 
Alligator gar and
Busch beer in a pull-tab can.
Dinosaurs, all gone
like the sound of a horn on a barge,
first large then drifting away.

He puts the pictures back,
Hopes the phone won’t ring,
bringing something new 
to grieve.
Lying back, he sighs,
Closes his eyes and waits
for the reckoning

~ March 3, 2010

In a Hollow Space

A Hollow Space 
By Elodie Pritchartt

"The big sweetgum by the front gate finally died." 

Every death affected him these days, animal or vegetable. 

"Oh, really?" I answered, still unaware of its significance in the scheme of things. 

"I took the tractor and went down to the gate to cut it down the other day." 

He crushed a pecan with a hammer. Shells skittered across the counter and spilled onto the floor.

"I hooked a cable onto it, up high so I could pull it down, you know?"

I nodded, having seen it done many times before. "

And then I went to cut a vee out so it'd fall the way I wanted it to. It's a big tree." 

I shuddered. He had no business pulling down trees like that sweetgum. He was eighty-two, and still doing the work of a younger man. But to tell him otherwise would be cruel. Better to let him die quick and violent than to take away his power. 

I remembered the time we brought the pony into town in the back of the Scout. The pony wouldn't budge. He was a stubborn brute with a mean streak. Finally, he reached down and picked up its front hooves and put them on the tailgate. Then he squatted down behind its hindquarters and lifted while we children watched, astonished, as muscles strained and bulged and 600 pounds of horse was heaved bodily into the truck bed.

Those boys are men now. They still talk about it in tones of marvel and wonder. 

"Well, when I started making the cut, I got about six inches in, and realized it was hollow. So I worried that it might not fall the way I wanted. I called Power & Light and told them they’d better send some people out to cut it down. It could fall the other way and bring down those lines out on the road. You know?"

I nodded, quiet."It was the weekend. So I left it hooked to the tractor 'til they came out on Monday. They brought a crane and cut it off at the top, got it down to a manageable size. Then they said, 'Let's go ahead and pull it down with the tractor.' So we pulled it over. It broke about halfway up the trunk. And you know? It was the strangest thing." 

"What was?"

"When it broke, the front half of the trunk fell off, but left the rest of the tree standing. And inside the trunk, about six feet up, was a horseshoe hanging on a nail."

"You're kidding." 

"No. You should've seen the look on the faces of those men. That tree had to be over a hundred years old. And it was solid, all the way around. No knotholes, nothing. And six inches thick. "

I had to see. Before we left the house, he put the cat outside. 

“Oh, no,” he said as he opened the door. “There’s a dead chipmunk out here. One of the cats probably killed it.”

“He's brought you a present.”  I smiled. He didn't. 

“I wish they wouldn’t. They’re cute little things and I hate to see them dead.” 

It surprised me to see him so upset over a chipmunk. I could remember when we were little, and he’d come home with a deer he’d killed. He’d hang it from the rafters in the barn, make a cut all the way around its neck and set a hook into the skin. He’d attach a chain to the hook and attach the other end to the bumper of the Scout. Then he’d back the Scout up, pulling the skin clean off the deer. It was quick and bloody with a thick, coppery smell that hung in the air. He didn’t give it a second thought. 

Now he spent his days putting out salt licks and corn, and chasing off anyone who dared try to poach a deer, in season or no. It was late afternoon and the light was slanting at sharper angles, sending shadows out across the field. We stopped by the workshop in the woods.

"See that metal post right there?" 

"Yes." 

"Okay, now look over there."

He pointed to another post some distance away. 

“Those two posts are forty feet apart. If you take a string and tie it between the posts and measure 20 feet, that's where you'll find the water line for the house. I know because it broke one time and I had a heck of a time trying to find it. When I did, I made sure to mark it. I couldn't mark the exact point because it's in the roadbed, but you measure, and that's where it is. I'm probably the only person who knows that."

He sighed and his shoulders seemed to sag.

"You’re going to need to know these things when I’m gone.”

I nodded but couldn’t speak. 

“You know, when people die, it really doesn't matter who they were or what they did. They're only remembered by the few people who knew them, and once those people are gone, you’re forgotten. It's like you were never here at all." 

I knew he was right. I’d thought it, myself, on occasion. We spied two deer eating acorns under the oaks before they saw us and fled for the woods. 

"Brandon died day before yesterday."

“Oh, no. ” 

Brandon was the golden retriever he’d rescued a couple of years ago. He couldn’t stand seeing a dog without a home and he now had a pack of about 14 dogs. At least two or three times a day, they’d gather in the front yard. One would begin with short, high yips and within a moment the others would join in, howling and yipping at ghosts.  Brandon had been a steady quiet, companion who never complained. 

“Remember how he chased after the car the last time you were here? A few days later he just lay down and died. He seemed just fine, and then he died.”

I wondered how old he'd been.  We stopped beneath the oaks from which the deer had fled. He showed me how to tell the difference between a buck and a doe.

“The scat the doe leaves looks like little round balls, like pebbles. See?” 

I looked.

“Now, look over here. This is a buck.”

Several mounds of scat, larger than the first, like little mushrooms bloomed beneath the tree among the acorns and the leaves. I thought about all the lessons I’d missed by moving so far away. 

By the gate, the trunk still stood as he'd left it. I looked down into the hollow. Twisted through the trunk was some ancient barbed wire that emerged again on the outside of the tree.

"Only thing I can figure," he said, "is somebody hung that shoe on that fence a hundred or more years ago, and the tree just grew around it." 

He reached in and pulled out the shoe where he'd hung it. 

"Well, I'll be," I said, shaking my head. I wondered why the shoe hadn't become embedded in the tree. Who had put that shoe on the nail? How long had they been gone? Does anyone remember them? I tried to remember when barbed wire was invented. How many people had come and gone since that day? 

I remembered the arrowheads we'd found in the lakebed a few years before, just feet from that spot. 

"I'm tired," he said. "I don't know why I'm always tired lately." 

We started back to the house so he could lie down for awhile in the cool of the evening.

A Child's Drawings from 1883

My mother had a large cedar chest where she kept all our report cards, newspaper clippings, drawings, etc. that we'd done as children.  It was at my sister's house, and she decided we didn't need to keep those old things, so out they went with the trash.  I understand getting rid of clutter, but I think so often we lose a lot of family history that might've been enlightening to our descendants, who might take an interest in geneology.

When I moved back to Mississippi from Los Angeles, I was going through some cabinets in the library at my father's house.  I was snooping around and found an old sewing basket containing an assortment of old family papers, receipts, letters, calling cards, and one little tablet from a drugstore containing a child's drawings.

The child was Elodie Rose (Grafton), my great grandmother.  She was fourteen years old when she doodled in her little book, just an assortment of her practicing her penmanship, doing her multiplications, and drawings of her friends, whom she named.

Now I'll have to go do some sluething to find out who these friends were and what happened to them.  Tommie O'Brien, Ellen Scott, Nellie Conti, Sophie Wright.  Some of the other names are familiar:  Agnes Carpenter, Bessie Learned:

Elodie Rose

Agnes Carpenter

I found letters to Elodie from Agnes Carpenter when Agnes was in boarding school in New York.

I can't begin to tell you what it feels like when the old photo on the wall takes on a personality.  It's like reaching back in time and meeting each other for the first time. I highly recommend saving those old report cards and letters, and drawings.  It will be a treasure for someone someday.

Wednesday, May 10, 2017:

Last night I received the following email from one of Nellie Conti's descendants:

Hi Elodie,

I stumbled across your blog this evening as I was researching my great grandmother, Nellie Conti of Natchez, Mississippi.  If you want to know more about Nellie, she was the daughter of John Conti and Mary Jane Lazarus Conti and was born in 1866.  She married my great grandfather, John E. Rouse in September 1884, just a year after the notes and drawings in your blog.  She and John Rouse lived in Natchez.  He owned and operated a grocery and a saloon at 510 Franklin Street in Natchez.  They had 8 children, my grandmother Loretta was their youngest child, born in 1896.  Sadly, Nellie Conti Rouse died of tuberculosis just 10 days after giving birth to my grandmother.  We only have one picture of her, which I have attached.

The name Tommie O’Brien is also familiar to me.  The O’Brien’s and the Rouse’s were in-laws. Nellie’s half sister Louisa married Joseph B. O’Brien.  I believe Tommie was a relative.

If you ever come across anything else about the Rouse, Conti or Lazarus families of Natchez, I would be very interested in learning what you discover.

I have enjoyed reading your blog, and am so happy I found it.

Thanks again,

Christie Susslin

Nellie Conti

John E. Rouse. Born August 1859 in Macomb, IL. He married Mary Ellen "Nellie" Conti, daughter of John F. and Mary Lazarus Conti on Sept 1, 1884. He operated Conti and Rouse grocery and liquor store at 510 Franklin Street. He died in Natchez on June 19, 1909.

Conti and Rouse grocery and liquor store at 510 Franklin Street

Related links:

Letter from Agnes Carpenter at St. Agnes School in New York

Letter from Agnes Carpenter at Mississippi Military Institute

Dream a Little Dream of Me

Civil War Journal of my great, great grandfather, Henry Elias Munger

Last night I dreamt I was out at Daddy's. He and I had gone through the attic and the barn and the basement and pulled out all this old family-related stuff. My grandmother had a brother named Joseph Niebert Carpenter who died when he was two. I dreamed we found his baby shoes and his first efforts at writing and drawing. Silver with his initials on it.

There were paintings of people and places I'd never seen. There was a diary written by someone named Miller from the 1800s. World War I and II guns and photos and letters.

I was just asking Daddy to put stickum notes on everything explaining who these people were and how we were connected to them when Tommy came in to wake me up. It was such a sweet dream, visiting with Daddy and talking about old family stories. I didn't want to wake up. Ever.

I've lost my parents and several of my friends' parents in the past few years.  If you can, try to sit and listen to the family stories.  Record them with your phone and write them down.  Go through the old family albums and identify the people, places and times they were taken.

It is a gift that will reward you and your descendants for years to come.

Matters Familia - Ephemera

I used to have a little online bookstore. I loved venturing out to libraries, Goodwill and Salvation Army stores looking for books to sell on my online site. When I first started doing this, I was stunned at the inscriptions and the objects I would find inside books -- ephemera, as it's called -- and how moving it often was.

One day I came across a book written by a mother about her son's suicide. I opened the book and a piece of folded paper fell out. On the outside, written in a child's scrawled hand, was this: "To all the Momis [sic]..."

I opened it up. Inside, was a picture of a sad face (like a happy face with the smile turned down). Next to it, "To all the momis. I'm sorry."

I feel certain it was a suicide note, and wondered if the family who gave all their loved one's books away knew the note was inside before releasing it to the world.

Another time I picked up a book to list it on the computer when I discovered a piece of notepaper stuck inside. The name of the book was Stone Alone: the Story of a Rock-and-Roll Band by Bill Wyman and Ray Coleman. It is, of course, about the Rolling Stones.

I often get a mental image of the kind of person who reads a certain kind of book. So I'm looking at this book on the Rolling Stones and I'm thinking it's probably someone about my age and into Rock-and-Roll. Someone who sowed their wild oats during the '60's or '70's. Someone who's laid back, relaxed, probably divorced by now, contemplating a hair transplant and a neck lift, and is wondering if that cute chick he laid at Woodstock is an insurance broker now.

Then I pull out a piece of notepaper. In carefully scripted cursive writing is the following:

When one seeks refuge
in a miracle, perhaps
it is that they are not
reminded that God has
so inundated this great
accident of life with
them; that it is perhaps
impossible to fit another
one in. Hence, it is only
a matter of reminding the
seeker of where they
might be found. And, as
common as they seem - they
are not without the
provision of God.

It sounded like the writings of someone with a terminal illness who'd had an epiphany and realized that the miracle they hoped to find is, perhaps, not the miracle they need. That perhaps their small life is not as important to the workings of the world as it is to him or her. I tried Googling the poem, and found nothing, so I assume it's original. That the person who bought the book wrote the poem.

It's really the old books that affect me the most, though. I remember finding a used bookstore one time that was filled to the ceiling with antique books whose owners had died many years before, the inscriptions inside providing clues to their lives, to their hopes, their fears and loves. And I remember becoming overwhelmed with a feeling of loss. I stood there in the stacks and found myself crying. There's just something so sad about lives that are only dust now, remembered by only a few and growing fewer every year.

I was reminded of these discoveries while going through Annet's house yesterday and finding the ephemera, if you will, of my predecessors.

My great, great grandmother, Anna Snyder from Alton, Illinois, was a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln. I've always heard the story that after the Civil War, she was abandoned by her husband. Destitute, she came to Natchez to be near family, clutching little more than her uncle's naval commission, signed by Lincoln, and a personal, handwritten invitation that Lincoln had sent to her for his inauguration. Being one of those rare people who was a celebrity in his own time, she knew that those signatures had more than sentimental value. If need be, she could get money for them.

We still have the naval commission, signed by both Lincoln and the secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles. But the invitation was lost. Annet used to say that Nana was a terrible housekeeper, and throughout all my searches, I had hoped to find it tucked away in a book or trunk tucked into the attic of the house. Alas, I've been through pretty much everything now, and the invitation has not materialized. I climbed into the attic to see what was there, but found that racoons had taken up residence therein and turned everything up there into confetti. If it was there, it's not there now.

But I did find something interesting. During the Civil War, Nana had permission to cross the Union lines. The story goes that she was good at a card game called "Whist," and was allowed to go back and forth to play whist with the officers. So when I came across an envelope on which Annet had written, "Nana's things," my heart skipped a beat.

Rather than the elusive Lincoln invitation, I found the Union pass allowing her passage back and forth. Written on the pass was her hair color (fair), her place of residence (Alton, Illinois), and "peculiarities," on which was written, "Good dance partner." Ha! (photo above) I also found a lock of her hair, the same color as mine. I'm the only one in my family with blonde hair, and had always wondered where it came from.

And yesterday, when I went through the last closet in the house, I found her marriage license, dated 1865, and signed by all who witnessed the ceremony.

Oh! I almost forgot. I think I found the ottoman spoken of in the newspaper article. I'll take some pictures and post them later.

But the most touching thing I found was a tiny little diary that had belonged to my grandfather. Grandaddy was a sweet, gentle, quiet man -- Annet's brother. I knew him as a patient man who seemed to have an aura of quiet sadness about him. For all the years I knew him, he suffered verbal abuse at the hand of Bessie Rose, his wife. She railed at him constantly, berating him for whatever struck her fancy, and he, quiet as always, simply endured it without comment.

Bessie Rose and her sister, Katherine Miller, were well known for meanness. I remember a conversation I had about them with Catherine Meng, who used to receive at Hope Farm for my aunt Katherine. Mrs. Miller had reduced her to tears one day when she upbraided her in front of a group of tourists about how she had delivered her spiel. And on another day, she'd greeted her at the door with, "Why, Catherine, what on earth convinced you to wear that color yellow? It's horrible." Or something to that effect.

Bessie Rose did the same type of thing, not only to me, but to others, as well. She lost several good friends because of it, but never stopped her behavior. Mrs. Meng told me that she thought maybe Bessie Rose was jealous of the attention her sister got for her efforts with the Pilgrimage, and I think she's right.

"The more attention Katherine got," recalled Mrs. Meng, "the meaner Bessie Rose became."

Many of my grandmother's friends lived in antebellum houses passed down through the generations. Grandaddy, however, was an insurance salesman, and although they lived comfortably, never lit the world on fire financially. She would bully their friends to buy insurance from him and berate him for not doing the same. Toward the end of his life, he told my father that she'd told him he was never a good provider.

"That's a tough thing to take at this point in my life," he muttered. "A tough thing."

It would be fair to say that my grandfather lived Thoreau's life of "quiet desperation." So, when I opened the little diary and found that my grandfather had had another love before his marriage to Bessie Rose, I was delighted to see a playful, happy side to him that I had never seen before.

The diary begins on January 1, 1919, when he was 21 years old and working at a bank in town. Every entry in the diary refers to a woman named Kate, who apparently lived in another town and with whom he was completely besotted. Tucked into a pocket in the front of the diary was a little calling card: "Miss Kate Doniphan Prichard"

I sat down and read every entry out loud to Sherry, who was helping me clean the house:"I took an eight-mile hike in the morning - wrote to Kate in the evening. A full day!"
"2 a.m. up and off for a hunt. Had a three hours' row. Broke the stock of my gun and killed one goose. The day was very cold -- ground frozen. Wrote to Kate."
"Had a busy day. Collections took a lot of time & I only made two. Am gaining speed on the machine. off at 9:10 p.m.. No letter from Kate."
"Got my balance off early today but statements kept me till 6:30. Went down to the river & arranged for a boat for Sunday. Spent remainder of evening at home. No mail."
"Still no mail from Kate. Am getting worried. Finished work and wrote to Kate and went home."
"Got up at 1 a.m. Had a five-hour row. Percy [Benoist] and I hunted all day & never shot at a goose. Came home and wrote to Kate."
"Got a letter from Kate and read it three times, as usual. Wrote to her and now I am going to read hers again. Good night!"
"Just finished a rather interesting serial in Harper's. It furnished much food for thought. I can't decide whether it was disappointing or not. Wrote to the sweetest girl on earth -- alias Kate."


Remembering my sweet, kind granfather, I got a lump in my throat. My eyes welled up and tears started to fall. I had to stop and pause several times before going on. I think I scared Sherry half to death."This whole week will be heavy. Today was fairly so but watch tomorrow and Wednesday (underlined) I had another date this evening. Good-night, Kate dear. I am going to write you tomorrow."
"Rode around with Percy a little this morning & we went rowing this afternoon. Got a special delivery from Kate (underlined with a little arrow here pointing at Kate) and {red ink}. Wrote to her." 
"Another letter from Kate. She is treating me splendidly. Wrote to Kate."
"Wrote to Kate this evening. Kate dear, I have been more lonely for you than ever today. I tried to tell you all about it in my letter. I am more in love than ever, dear."

At one point, he frets because he's done something to upset Kate, and he promises never to put her in a bad humor again. From the looks of things, though, he was more infatuated with Kate than she was with him. The diary stops on January 17 with nothing particularly notable. I guess he just petered out, as I did with my own diary attempts when I was young.

When I got home, I called my father.

"Who's Kate?"

"That was Kate Don Brandon," he replied, "Mary Ann Jones's mother. Her maiden name was Prichard, like ours but spelled differently. We'd always heard they had a thing for each other."

I called Mrs. Jones.

"Yes," she recalled. "We'd always heard there was a thing with them, and now we've got proof!"

Mrs. Jones mused that her mother was probably away at school at Newcomb at the time. Grandaddy was 21 years old. He married Bessie Rose in 1924, five years after the last entry in the diary.

Kate Don and he had both spent their lives in Natchez, married to other people. I wonder now if the flame he carried for her was ever truly extinquished. Did he love her from afar? Was she a reminder that life could hold better possibilities? If so, he never said anything to anyone, and never showed an inappropriate emotion.

A wonderful but bittersweet discovery in the leavings of the house on the bluff.