Family Stories
The forces of change have been hard upon us for the last few years and they don’t let up. I’m thinking, first, of the real estate subdivisions whose signs of imminent arrival have sprouted in various Fayette County pastures. Some call it progress, but if we, personally, find it destructive, I think we can be forgiven.
If we live in the country because we like a country way of doing things, we can be forgiven for wishing those things would remain undisturbed.
It’s a matter of perspective, surely. Isn’t everything? Take your family story, for instance. The older we get, the more we want to pass on our story, what we’ve heard and what we’ve contributed. We have an urge to preserve the fact of ourselves within the picture of what’s changing so fast. To get down in words what was special, too, about those loveable, or maddening, relatives and forebears whose blood we share.
Family storytellers are the ones who do this best. Even if the stories they tell change over time, gaining in drama and humor, opening the door so myth can sidle in.
Myth is when the real story sheds some of its mud and sweat and sorrow in the yearning to better itself.
Most of the time what gets left out is what the teller finds embarrassing.
This is history’s problem, too. What is history? Well, it’s the aggregation of stories about people and events from the past that are supposed to have really happened in just that way. They’re family stories too, just larger in scale than our own. We study them to learn what worked and what brought disaster.
In my high school history class, we focused on kings and wars all over the world. And so many dates to be memorized, without much context.
The stories themselves arrived all buffed and glossed with the shine of myth. Heroic acts thrilled us. We felt a stirring of our own pride in being connected across time to people capable of actions we know we would personally find difficult. And those are the “good” acts.
All of this is changing now. There are more storytellers in public view from more places, races, ethnicities, with different perspectives. Like the story of the blind man and the elephant suggests, we are now seeing more than the trunk or tail and it’s definitely not all gray.
Historical complexes, from the Alamo to the historic house down the street, are beginning to look at a broader definition of what happened here or there. The lens of attention is growing wider to take in people we never noticed, but who were there and had jobs to do, lives to live. We’ve joined the age of context and it is upsetting to the literalists among us.
It undermines the myths that historic preservation has embraced for decades.
For myself, I’ve never been as interested in a particular myth as in the art and craft an historic property displays. That’s how I fell in love with the painted decoration at Winedale.
When I decided to write about it, however, I found the context I’d missed. And context is the birthing ground of stories—as well as our best hope for truth.
In my case, it produced my story “A Skeptical Parrot,” which gives a re-imagined narrative of how such decoration might have come about within the context of its time. A time of slavery, secession, war, and internal conflict about those issues among the German settlers, themselves, including the women.
It seems we have so much still to learn from the past.
Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com