Marketing History

Yesterday, I marched on Washington to call for an end to the war, along with about 10,000 other people. This makes my third trip to DC, my first trip being only a month and a half before 9/11 when I was a fifteen years old from Arkansas visiting with 4-H through Citizenship: Washington Focus. Back then, I remember going to the National History Smithsonian and thinking it was absolutely amazing, and being annoyed that the other girls in my group moved through the museum far too quickly for me because they didn’t care about history. Now that I’m older and finishing up my Master’s degree in History, my reaction to the museum was much different. I call this rection “disgust.” There’s so much left out, and so many exhibits created by a certain cable channel reputed for its bad history skills. It’s emphasis is sensationalism to get more viewers, thus, more money, instead of creating factual programs–which is very strange to me because history is sensationalist enough all on its own because people have the tendency to be dramatic, selfish, impulsive jerks (also, cynical). Now that I’m older, the Smithsonian, to me, is like calling a fast food burger nutritious. The Smithsonian, to me, is now just like high school textbooks, full of heroification and one-sided lies.  Nowhere is there the story of how George Washington became General, then President, because then he would just seem like another egotistical, greedy mortal. Instead, inside the Smithsonian and all over DC, there are various statues for Washington, many of which make him look like some Greek god. But he wasn’t a god, not at all. He was just a dude with bad teeth that showed up on purpose in his soldier uniform to make himself look important, even though he’d only had relatively minor roles in the British army as a Lt. Colonel during the French and Indian War, and surely nothing to prepare him to be a General in a war. (For an explanation of Army ranks, click here. Note the great difference between Lt. Colonel and any kind of General.) It’s like a con, really. But they can’t make him seem like you or I. Instead, they call him “noble” and erect giant phalluses to, perhaps, symbolically show the world for what he was compensating. Instead of telling a fuller, more honest story of history, they devote a huge portion of the museum to war, war, war, of course saying nothing of imperialism or deaths or the suffering of fellow human beings in our names. Why not? What do they fear would happen if they told the American story, both good and bad? Perhaps it is like Langston Hughes’s deferred dream. If they told a fuller story of American history, would those who viewed the exhibits and learned of this mourn, then revolt? Yesterday, I watched as Americans that don’t know their own history walked around like the Smithsonian like a shrine, like they’ve found the holy grail of what it means to be American, which is why the line for the entertainment portion–tv and actors and pop culture and stuff, where they keep Dorothy’s shoes and Archie’s chair–stretched all the way to the lobby. Because fiction is more popular than non-fiction.

It was outside the Washington Monument, however, where Cindy Sheehan had set up camp, where she and others had created a GIANT recreation of Arlington Cemetery for those who’d been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, including civilians, that I watched a fat man point and laugh and suggest to his family that they go look at the protest, to look at the fake cemetery, with all the very real dead people from two sides of the world. I think this is when my dream exploded.

Remembering Old Washington

When I learned that I had to give a presentation on a heritage tourism site I’d visited, I was only too overjoyed. Perhaps winter break had muddled my brain, but the idea of not just talking about a place back home, but also bringing show and tell about a beautiful, historic place I’d visited at least once per year since birth left me giddy. When I went to create the corresponding PowerPoint over why this site was saved, however, I found myself realizing more and more of a dark history. Somehow, I could see this presentation turning into something very different than what I had originally imagined.

Old Washington State Park (yes, I know it was renamed Historic a few years ago–I’m used to calling it Old, therefore, I refuse to change), for the uninitiated, was and is a tiny little town in Arkansas. It was one of the oldest towns founded in Arkansas, predating statehood. Due to its location on the Southwest Trail, it was also a place pioneers to Texas and the Southwest traveled through, and where the struggle for Texas independence was plotted by names now famous to history (for their deaths at the Alamo . . .). The infamous Bowie knife was even created by the local blacksmith at the time. These things leave Washington to be a place associated with myths of superhumanly strong American heroes and the American West, while still being distinctly Southern. Learning the stories of the town amid the absolutely beautiful buildings and springtime blooms can only excite the visitor to be connected to something so important–so far away in history, yet so close geographically.

If only that were the end of the story. Washington was the Confederate capitol of Arkansas from 1863-1865. Those who were originally interested in saving Washington were members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who pushed the state legislature to save the Confederate courthouse in 1929, during the Lost Cause Era, when that same organization traveled throughout the country placing Confederate monuments everywhere and trying to retell history that the Civil War was not fought for slavery and that slaves were happy being slaves. They had such influence that not only did this even happen in the North, but they were able to get this history into textbooks for a number of years.

Washington does not shy away from a history of slavery. In fact, a house tour I took last year was interpreted by a woman who was supposed to be a slave. The problem with this is that the woman acted as if she enjoyed being a slave and that they were all one big happy family. I was so creeped out by this, in fact, that I took a picture because I figured no one would believe me.

To me, Washington has always been a place where, as a child, I had fun dipping candles and visiting old houses and going to arts and crafts festivals. It was something different out of our normal routine and a way for my sister and I to get away from our overprotective parents for a few hours of independence in a familiar place. While one has to take the bad with the good, learning a fuller history of the town leads me to interpret the place very differently. While I will still enjoy myself tremendously next time I visit, now I can only also see the park itself as another piece of the complicated pattern of Southerners trying to deal with a grizzly past while also attempting to generate tourism dollars by creating a fun, positive environment for families.

Oral History

Recently, I had to do an oral history project for one of my classes. Thereafter, I decided to interview my parents about basically everything I could imagine. This idea found me researching significant events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to formulate questions. In the midst of doing this, I found myself realizing why my parents have such different ways of looking at certain things than I do.

My parents grew up during the Cold War era in rural Arkansas, far away from the stirrings of  potential McCarthy Communists or Vietnam protests. My dad is a Vietnam veteran, in fact, and my mom a former schoolteacher and librarian who, when I say she’s been outside the South in her lifetime, I mean she’s been to Branson, Missouri even more times than me.

The story of my parents has always interested me–I suppose because they’re my parents, and to understand a large part of myself is to understand where they have come from. As a little girl, I would sometimes dig through my family’s old photographs, which often caused my mother to yell at me to stop getting into stuff. As far back as I can remember, I’ve had a deep sense of wanting to know my own history. Perhaps I am selfish. More likely, however, this came from my parents’ own efforts when I was growing up: every vacation was a history field trip. I spent my childhood in ghost towns, graveyards, and archives. When I was five or six, my brother recreated a model of the entire downtown from the year 1901 from Sanborn maps stretched all over his bedroom. This was displayed at the county fair and the town’s spring festival for a couple of years thereafter and I remember having to sit with him and sometimes the rest of the historical association while passersby patted him on the back for his efforts and I asked my mom things like “can we get a snowcone now?” My brother became interested in history the same year that I was born, and our parents quite willingly fostered this interest. In second grade, my brother, then a Freshman in college, came to my class to give a slideshow about local historical buildings and how local history is important, too. The thank-you card from our class hung on his bedroom wall for years until my mother recreated his bedroom into a schoolroom after she started homeschooling me.

In creating questions for my mother, I found myself thinking about how different I’m sure her answers would be to certain questions than myself. Some things, I expect her to not even know about, even though she reads the newspaper from cover to cover every morning and has in my entire memory. Other things, I find myself knowing I would have such a different response because I was a child at the time. For instance: “Tell me what you remember about the Oklahoma City bombing.” I was nine years old at the time of the bombing. I remember thinking that a girl I had been friends with in third grade, LaToya, had moved to Oklahoma and being worried that she had been killed. I remember a special in the daily paper publishing the entire list of the dead, and my mother reading it on the front porch and saying how terrible it was. I remember my sister and I watching firemen carrying burned babies from the building on tv and her telling me that “there’s a little good in every evil; a little evil in every good,” and that no person was completely evil or good, and giving the example that even gang members can be good people and do good things.

I ask when my mother first heard about 9/11. I had just turned sixteen the week before 9/11. It was a Tuesday, and the fair was in town. My dad turned on the tv at about 8 or 9 o’clock and I remember Mom and I watching for a while too. I remember watching the second plane hit on live television. I had never heard of the World Trade Center. New York, after all, was so far away, it was a place only of imagination. Mom and I left to set up our 4-H fair booth, which had a patriotic theme. We won best of show because of this. That night, my parents and I went to the singing at the fair and I remember there being an especial amount of patriotic songs in light of what had happened. I remember leaving the building at about sunset and looking up at the waving flag and thinking that, far away, there were flags flying in New York and DC, too, and far away, people I never knew were dead, dying, and hurt.

It’s strange to think of the differing perspectives of people you’ve known your entire lives and who, for some of these questions, were there with you when you, too, experienced something. One of my questions for my mother is whether she watched the OJ Simpson car chase or trials. I know she watched the car chase because I remember watching it with my entire family. I was eight, and I remember wondering who would ever name their child Orange Juice. I remember my dad being totally enthralled by the whole thing and leaning forward in interest towards the tv. I remember becoming bored at one point and playing on the front porch, only to come back in and find that it was still the same old thing of some car going down a great big Interstate really slowly with a bunch of cops behind him.

I never really thought of how my parents must have seen any of these things, having experienced so much more of life and history than myself. What did my parents think, watching these acts of terrorism and violence? Did it remind them of so many other bombings of the twentieth century? Did it remind them of the turbulent ’60s, when they were my age and every important person appeared to be getting assassinated or otherwise shot at? Suddenly, I find myself realizing quite profoundly that, despite being a historian, my own viewpoints are limited by my youth and my own opinions.

Small Town Southern Man

A couple years ago, Alan Jackson released a song called “Small Town Southern Man.” I’ve had a love-hate relationship with it ever since.

It’s a sweet song, really. There are many people who are just like the people in this song and, having grown up in a small town in the South, I can tell you that it’s the ideal for many people to live like this. They live and die and are generally good people and never really do much with their lives besides have kids, who want to do nothing with their lives except have kids.

The problem I have with this song, and the problem I’ve had ever since it was released, is that there’s so much it doesn’t talk about: most notably, the exclusion of everyone that doesn’t fit into this narrow ideal. Watch the video. Where are the people of color? Where is the GLBT community? For that matter, where are the handicapped people? Where is anyone that doesn’t fit into this narrow view? Were they not invited to the dance? The video shows the progression of a community through generations, but it doesn’t allow anyone new into the video frames.

This is the story of a community, but it’s not my community. In my hometown, people of all colors live side-by-side. Immigrants from Russia and South Africa and Bangladesh teach at the local colleges. Mexicans work in restaurants and in the poultry factory, doing the dirty jobs that others don’t want and feeling rich with their meager wages. Children of all colors and backgrounds go to the local public school and have the same teachers and classmates. A college professor of mine once called my hometown one of the most integrated in Arkansas. I guess no one told him about the race riots at the high school in 1971-1972. To be honest, I was surprised myself when I found out as an adult. It didn’t seem like something that could happen in my hometown–but it did. In fact, one particular protest by white students happened on the parking lot of the church my family went to, where my parents were married only two years before. What was the high school then is now a primary school, and what was the black high school during segregation became an elementary school that I attended in the mid-’90s. It was no secret to us that this building was a product of segregation, or that the storage building on the playground was a Rosenwald school.

The story of the South is the story of persecution, and there are stories from the South that will rip your soul apart–especially if you do research and realize these people that owned other human beings or did horrible things to other humans are not only the ancestors of your neighbors and family friends–but they’re your ancestors as well. Recently, I purused a US Census from before the Civil War and learned that a well-known family name in my hometown owned many, many slaves. Not only this, but at least two or three were mulatto. How did that happen, exactly? Did Grandpa slavemaster rape his slaves? Last fall, a class of mine explored how to use digital archives to do research. In my curiosity, I typed my hometown into the search engine and found the Blood Red Record. I’d never heard of such a thing before. What disturbed me most of all about this record was that not only had a lynching recorded on there happened in my hometown, but that it was the lynching of an “unknown Negro.” I wondered then, and now, was there even a reason for his death? Did he look at someone funny and a mob decided to string him from a tree?

No, no. I didn’t want to think that the ancestors of my home city could be filled with such hatred. I didn’t want to think that this could happen where I had lived my entire life up until a few months before, where many of my family lines had lived since the 1840s and ’50s. This happened in other, more backwards towns in the boondocks. This happened in . . . my town. It happened in my town. Like it or not, there it was on the screen, like blood splattered from the ancestors of the black children I played with so many times at recess, who weren’t Black Children to me, but Kimberly, Emanuel, Alan, Katrina, Christina . . .

In the community that I call home, our ancestors made Alan Jackson’s barn dance flow with blood, and their children said “Hell, yeah!” and their children covered it up with bleach until pissed off enough that the blood flowed again, then again quickly brought out the bleach and made the ancient floors so white that an outsider might not know of the blood once spilled here, but the dancers know.

Grandpappy told my pappy back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he’d done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street
For all the people to see

- Toby Keith, “Beer for My Horses”

Grandpa Slave Master: When Genealogy Reveals Things You Didn’t Want to Know

With all of this classwork on genealogy and researching ordinary people, last night, I started researching the family of my surname. My family has never been able to get past the year 1800 because this guy (aka, my four-greats-grandfather) didn’t claim his parents or something. Oddness. Anyway, I got to him and I typed his name into a certain famous genealogy website and . . . loe and behold, what did I find?

 Taken from [my home county] Past and Present….submitted by [Big Brother]: [4x g-pa] was born in South Carolina. He married [4x g-ma] in 1821 in [censored], GA, where all his children were born. In 1840 the family was living in [censored], AL. [G-pa] moved to [where my family lives now], in the 1840′s and is first found in the census of 1850. He and [g-ma] had nine children. [G-ma] died in 1867. On 1 July 1869, [g-pa] married second, Mrs. [step-g-ma] McNutt. After her death he married [step-g-ma #2], born 11 Sept 1827. [Womanizing g-pa] joined the [censored] Baptist Church in August, 1858, and was a faithful member. He was apprently a planter; several of his sons also followed this occupation. The 1860 slave census for [censored] County shows him as owning 14 slaves. [G-pa] died in Jan, 1884, from injuries sustained in a fall from his buggy. The [newspaper] stated: he was one of the oldest citizens of the county, while the [censored] Church records noted that he was a consistent, devoted member of that church. The location of the graves of [g-pa] and his first two wives is unknown; he is thought to be buried in the [censored] Cemetery on [our surname] Hill, where his third wife, [censored], is buried.

 Hokay, so a.) you people aren’t me, and b.) you’re not from my hometown/a historian from my hometown, so let me tell you what I see in this.
1.) Evil little bastard makes his way onto the Internet. Fml. Okay, that one was obvious.
2.) MUAHAHAHA he’s wrong! G-pa moved to our town between 1850-1860! /historical sibling rivalry moment
3.) You misspelled step-g-ma #1′s name, you stupid prick. Although, I can’t imagine the name you have her being much better . . . /historical sibling rivalry moment #2
4.) McNutt: a name of a historically richer-than-god, influential family in our hometown.
5.) The fuck you mean he was “apparently” a planter? Every goddamn census says he was a farmer. Apparently, my ass. What, do you need it tattooed to your forehead before you get the memo he was a farmer? This is history! There is no indecisive language or you will be chopped to pieces! TAKE A STAND. /historical sibling rivalry moment #3
6.) But, you see, I DO see what he’s getting at calling him a “planter” instead of a “farmer.” He means to say he was of a higher class than your typical poorer-than-dirt family farmer. Having looked at his census data myself, I can tell you he was a rich little mofo. His property was worth $6,000 in 1860. That’s like millions of dollars now. In the Old South, how rich one was was determined by their property rather than how much cash he (always he) had. And the most expensive properties one owned was land and slaves. Having a lot of both these things = aristocracy. At the same time, though, he was NOT a planter. He was six slaves short of that title. 20 slaves = plantation. Plantation = planter. He still had more slaves than most of the people who actually did own slaves, but he was still “just” a farmer. So there.
7.) The newpaper he quoted: racist, pro-Confederate (what do you mean, the South lost?) newspaper. GUESS WHERE BIG BROTHER GOT THE NAME OF HIS PAPER FROM?
8.) Yep, that’s right. Our Surname Hill. As in, our family. There were so many of my ancestors (big farms = big families) and they all lived in the same area, that this became known as Our Surname Hill. Things get named after . . . hmm . . . oh, that’s right. Rich people.
9.) Now then. Being his sister and a historian and from this community, I see this: mister sheet-wearer is trying to alleviate our ancestors into the aristocracy after death to make himself look better to his other sheet-wearing friends. He also wants to sneak in tainted documents as the greatest places for researchers to find documents (I’d turn to that paper if I wanted to study racism in the South, thanks). If someone didn’t know a lot and didn’t know him or this background, they wouldn’t necessarily recognize the newspaper bias in that paper. Overall, this totally goes along with Big Brother wanting to continue to act like he’s some member of the aristocracy, or like it’s still 1860. Yeah. We’re not, and it’s not.

The Story of Buddy Reuben, Part Two

Today, I turned in my paper over our dear friend Reuben, a random dead guy in the cemetery over whom I had to write a biography, for the uninitiated. I used primary sources, such as the US Census, as well as secondary sources to piece together his life and his relationship to the local community and the greater world around him. Reuben was just an average person, so it was really great to study the average person’s relationship to his community. After this project, I find myself thinking about a community differently. I find myself reminded of Our Town, when all the ghosts in the cemetery of a community talk to one another. All of these dead people were once–well, people–just like us. They had struggles and hopes and dreams and loves and heartaches, they lived and died in the same geographic places that we do now, but, at the same time, their worlds were completely different.

All of that said, here is the story of Reuben.

Reuben was born July 19, 1782 in [censored], Connecticut, the son of Ann [censored] and Revolutionary War soldier Azariah [censored], who served under General George Washington at Valley Forge.  Reuben was descended from John [censored] who immigrated to Plymouth, Massachusetts Colony from England in 1640.  Reuben married Sarah “Sally” [censored] in 1804 and had ten children with her, eight of which survived to adulthood.  He fought in the War of 1812 in the First Regiment of the Connecticut Militia, also known as Brainerd’s regiment, as a private and was still a private at the time of his discharge.  Due to the dates of two of his children’s births, he could not have been in the military very long.  The family lived on South Main Street in [censored], where they were farmers in an age of growing industrialization.  Reuben died at age seventy in 1852 in [censored] and was buried in the [censored] Cemetery, alongside two of his children who had preceded him in death.  He would later be joined by his wife and a spinster daughter, Sarah.

            The story of Reuben is the story of a country in an era of change from agrarianism to industrialization.  It is with the greatest of irony that not only did he briefly fight in a war of imperialism, but his own way of life would be threatened by the same passion for imperialism, industrialization, and progressivism.

            When Reuben was born, the American Revolution had not yet ended.  America as its own country was brand new, and still fairly backwards by British standards.  The British had begun their own Industrial Revolution in Europe long before the same ideas would make their way to what would become the United States.  The America Reuben was born into was a very different place than the one in which he died seventy years later, even though it was geographically the same.  By 1852, New England had changed into an industrial society while the South remained agrarian, leading to such differences in morals, opinions, and politics that the country would be split apart only nine years later by a bitter war.

In the middle of this, Reuben lived, a farmer in an increasingly industrial society.  While Reuben had lived his entire life during the Industrial Revolution—Eli Whitney had invented the cotton gin in 1794, when Reuben would have been twelve—it was during his adult life in the nineteenth century that industrialization really took hold in New England. 

Economic historian Fred Shannon wrote that farmers are “incurable individualist[s].”  As the United States became more industrialized, however, farmers like Reuben became increasingly dependent on the outside world to stay afloat.  Commercial farmers needed to do more than just battle Mother Nature—now they also had to battle rising and falling crop prices in selling produce and other goods.  Working in a time prior to Extension services, he would not know how to test the soil to see which crops would be best to plant or what fertilizers would best help produce bounty crops.  He also lived in a time prior to animal vaccinations, knowledge of twentieth- and twenty-first century hygiene, and gas-powered tractors.  Had Reuben lived a century later, his wife could have joined the Extension Homemaker’s Club, which would have taught her proper canning and other techniques to keep her family from growing sick from poisoned food.  Their children could have joined 4-H and learned how to become scientific farmers and housekeepers themselves in a hands-on atmosphere.  Reuben and his family, however, lived in a rather unfortunate time to be a New England farmer.

New Englanders were leaving their farms during Reuben’s lifetime.  Farms, themselves, were being transformed into huge mills throughout the countryside—a location chosen for the ample supply of cheap labor.  During the nineteenth century, it was common for New England farm families to send their unmarried daughters to textile mills to have one less mouth to feed with the expectation that the daughters would send their wages home to help the family.  One of the most famous of these textile mills was the Lowell mills in northeastern Massachusetts. 

In Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Zinn tells the story of the rise of industrialization in America through the Lowell and other mill girls of the Northeast.  Zinn records the coexistence of the cult of true womanhood for higher classes and the factory work of lower classes, the dramatic strikes of working women for higher wages and better working conditions, and the push for more education of lower class women.  All of these things happened in Reuben’s lifetime, all ultimately affecting him and his agrarian way of life down the line, though he, perhaps, did not even pay attention to these happenings, instead focusing on local crop prices and weather forecasts.

Reuben is most often mentioned in relationship with another family member, such as his Revolutionary soldier father or his postmaster son, Walter.  David Nelson Camp’s History of [censored] briefly described Reuben’s existence in his book:

The only other house on the [censored] Road, or [censored] Street, was that of Reuben [censored]. He had a large family of children, among whom was Walter [censored], for many years postmaster. At that time [censored] Street turned east at the sand bank, and intersected [censored] Street some distance north of the brick yard.

A history of the First Church of Christ of [censored] called Reuben “a farmer, of industrious habits and of great economy, and by dint of hard labor raised a large and respectable family.”  This same history called his wife, Sally, a “faithful wife and anxious mother,” and commended her for “having built a commodious house towards the close of life on [censored] Street.”

While Reuben was not a famous man in his time, his life story reflects the greater story of New England’s shift to industrialization in the nineteenth century.  While Reuben was able to live his whole life as a farmer, many others were not.  Indeed, many of his other relatives took to the frontier of Ohio to settle new cities with a fresh hope for their way of life.  There, in this new frontier, the [censored] family was able to rise to some level of prominence, with the family including Washington [censored], a famous preacher within the Congregationalist churches of the time who also served on the city council of Columbus. 

The story of the [censored] family is the story of potential and the enduring spirit of humankind.  When the door of agrarianism began to shut in New England, a window opened in the Midwest, allowing the family to be more prominent than they would have been in New England.

Searching for Buddy Reuben

While I’m still quite determined to find out anything I can about our dear friend Karl, for the purposes of my paper, I’ve had to research someone on whom I can actually find information–and who, well, lived longer than four years. That said, I would like to introduce the world to my new bud, Reuben. (I’d say his entire name, but I’d like to find more than my own posts when I google him.) Reuben lived from 1782-1852. He was called an “industrious farmer” and had ten kids with his wife, Sally. It fascinates me that he was apparently some huge farmer with a huge house and tons of kids–on Main St, in what’s today the ghetto, with big tall buildings, graffiti, and immigrants. I’m trying to picture what it would have looked like as a farm–I even found a book on Google Books with a short description of the area–but I just can’t see it. I can’t see Liberty Pizza as the approximate place this book says there were many large rocks on the side of the grassy common. I can’t see anything like that anywhere in the Hartford metro area. I can’t picture a place so full of the relics of industrialization once being even remotely rural–but, of course, once it was.

Before industrialization, there was farming. In the late 18th century, industrialization began to replace farming, first slowly, then quickly. By the late 19th century, many immigrants had began settling in the area to work in the factories–like, most likely, our dear friend Karl’s family, along with rest of the 12,443 German immigrants counted on the US Census in Connecticut in 1870. Between these times, Reuben lived and, from all accounts so far, prospered.

I’m still trying to learn more specific details. What did Reuben grow? Where did he sell his crops? How large was his farm? Why did he continue to farm when more and more people were leaving farming for manufacturing? Is there anything else even remotely interesting about this man to learn besides that he was a farmer (no, seriously–come on, man, tell me you were a mason or religious or something)? I continue on my quest to learn more about the elusive farmer Reuben and 19th century farming in Connecticut. (Honestly, move 1,500 miles away from an agricultural state to a state famous for its manufacturing prowess, and what dead guy do I end up choosing in the cemetery? How does that happen, really, that in a cemetery full of familiar manufacturing names, I find a farmer?)

“It’s Passion.”

I find I’m having trouble truly caring about my studies this semester. I find myself weighted down by suddenly irreverent studies. “Why should I read about British furniture fanaticism in the 19th century? Don’t you know there are people dying in Iraq?!” I want to yell at my professors.

My classmates discuss things I suddenly find to be pointless drivel before class: fast food restaurants, shopping, sports, apartment adventures, homework whines. I find myself distanced from them, unable to understand the point of discussing such things. Do you know how many uninsured Americans there are? Do you ponder why Connecticut is the richest state in the country, while Hartford is one of the poorest cities?

I find myself thinking not-so-nice thoughts about classmates who talk about calling the police on neighbors. I find a distance between our realities. In my reality, I walk through the ghettos by myself with schizophrenic old men yelling at me and dirty homeless men following me until I cross the street, and I am unfazed. In my reality, I sometimes have conversations with complete strangers of all different races and economic statuses waiting on the bus or on the bus. In my reality, I buy huge bags of apples for the homeless when I, myself, don’t have a job right now. In my reality, a homeless man with a buggy full of ramen noodles boards my bus and I want to cry because that’s all he can afford to eat. In my reality, I once walked across our campus with a rainbow flag draped about my back like a cape. In my reality, I start conversations about feminism, peace, racism, tolerance, GLBT rights, religion, and politics with just about everyone I know (including the campus nurse, who told me she found one of my soldiers and it now stays on her desk) and find out what their beliefs are. In my reality, every day is a protest and every day is a chance to learn more about the world around me and to inspire others to do so as well.

In the reality of my classmates, they see homeless people as Others to be feared and, most definitely, not someone to sit down next to at the bus stop. They see poor people and minority poor, in general, as Others, and don’t consider that the police may treat minorities very badly for no reason, because they can. Though some of my peers are not from New England, either, and have been in New England longer than me, they do not see what I see. When I helpfully told a classmate last semester which buses to take to get to the airport, she gave me a look like there was no way she was ever getting on a city bus, thank you very much, even though the bus would take her straight to the terminal door and it would only cost her $1.25, as opposed to about $50 in a taxi she had been telling me she willingly paid. When I listen to my peers talk, they describe other people with my level of enthusiasm as “crazy.” They ignore me when I offer to take care of a problem with a creepy stalker at our apartment complex. I, too, have become an Other to many of my more mainstream peers. “Crazy” people question the status quo. “Crazy” people don’t care about fashion. “Crazy” people don’t care what other people think of them.

I love it when class discussions turn to something I feel is actually important. I love discussing inequality in history and reflecting it back to our present-day world. I feel energized when I try to make a difference in the world around me and try to educate others about the injustices I see. I feel like a lot of people don’t even notice. I feel like a lot of people stay in their comfy, insulated worlds–or, they’ll see an injustice or something will bother them, but they won’t do anything about it. At some point, I crossed the line between silence and speaking up and found it to be an amazingly transformative experience for me, but the rest of the world didn’t come with me. At some point, I stopped being afraid of going back home for Christmas and, instead, became energized for the epic battle of the millennia between my hate-mongering brother and myself. Looking back over my life, I feel like becoming an activist was a natural progression for me.

Searching for Karl Calmeach, Part Two

I have two updates in regards to our dear friend Karl. First of all, I asked my German friends to try their hands at translating the tombstone, since I had problems reading it. I figured they could figure out things from context better than me. I was close in translating the first stanza, but I missed a critical element: “mother” is part of the poem. Oops. That said, it should be more like this:

Mother
When the father asks
Where did our darling go
When he sadly mourns me
Say that I’m in heaven

So, instead of this being a stanza where the mother talks, the dead child is talking. The second stanza is also Karl talking, this time to his father:

Father
when the mother cries
dry her tears
plant a flower on my grave
when the sun shines.

(In case you’re wondering why it’s the mother and the father, adding “the” before people’s names in German is a term of affection.) This translation means that the father was there all along.

Now, onward to the second part of this update. I tried searching for any Calmeach in all of Connecticut in 1870, and I can’t find anyone anywhere on the Census. I also tried just putting Calmeach into FamilySearch.Org for anywhere in the United States from the beginning of time until now, and I still didn’t find even one single person with that surname. Do you ever get the feeling you might have read the name on the tombstone wrong? This could be a bit of a problem in solving this History Mystery.

Nevertheless, I took the liberty of typing in the name of the third tombstone I found and this family is everywhere on the internetz. The dead person’s father was in the Revolutionary War and served with General Washington. (See what awesome things you learn when you purposefully pick out huge phallic tombstones?) His father is mentioned in books and stuff. His descendents moved out west to Ohio, wilderness at the time, and did something important enough to be mentioned in a book of the foundation of Ohio. While I think I’ve found who I’m going to do my paper over, I still want to know about our dear Karl and what happened to him, and I’m not done looking yet.

Searching for Karl Calmeach

Today, I found myself sitting on the cemetery ground with my legs straddling the tombstone. I had previously found a large, phallic monument for my history project of looking up dead people. Whomever must have been pretty rich to have had such a phallic monument, right? They should be pretty easy to find. I whipped out my piece of paper and began writing the details on the stone, interested because the man had died at only 31 and, walking all around the monument, the others in his family had a bad habit of dying very early too. Nevertheless, I figured I should find a second stone, just in case. I began wandering around the cemetery.

That’s when I saw it. The lone, gothic cross leaning in the distance. I bolted for it, thinking at the very least, I had found a pretty. When I reached the cross, I realized it was in German.

This was when I flopped down on the ground, straddled the tombstone, and started talking to myself in German aloud in the cemetery trying to read it.

Karl F. Calmeach, geboren 7 Jan 1871, gestorben 10 Marz 1875.

Mütter
wenn der Vater fragt,
wo ist unser Liebling hin
wenn er traurig um mich klagt
sag das ich im Himmel bin

Mother
if the father asks
where our darling is
if he complains to me of sadness
I will say he is in heaven

The thing is, there’s no mention of who the parents are, and the German word for if–wenn–can also mean “when.”  So it’s possible that the father of this child was away when he died. There’s another stanza after this, but I had problems reading it on the stone well enough to translate here, besides to say that it ends with “if the sun shines no more on the grave.” I find myself desperately wanting to know this family’s story. How did Karl die? Where was his father? Who were his parents? Why did they come to America? What happened to the family after he died?

Since Karl was only four years old when he died, I expect to have problems with this, but I’m going to try anyway.