 |
| Mary Kirven and William M. Sanders 1942 |
The day I found boxes of personal letters in
my parents’ Virginia attic, I had misgivings about investigating my family’s
past.
What good could come of poking through other
people’s correspondence? Wouldn’t I be
just snooping?
Besides, our parents had always been
secretive. Whenever we asked about the family history “down South,” we got
faraway looks and vague replies.
It was autumn, 1992. Mama had died of
cancer that summer. Daddy, with his usual effort to be meticulously fair, had
summoned us three daughters home to Virginia.
He laid out Mama’s possessions on the living room rug and asked us each to
take what we wanted. China, silver, scarves, driver’s license, wedding ring . .
. a scene of pure pain. We were thinking: No more hand for that ring to adorn.
We were anxious to finish the “divide it
up” business. Neither of us much cared about jewelry or silverware, but we badly
wanted to please Daddy. He was 80. Proper behavior was his watchword, and we
needed to reassure him that he was doing right, that there was peace in the
family.
Later that day, we shared wedding photos from
the dining room drawer. (Mama had demurred: “Our entire wedding party looks
bug-eyed!”) We sifted through bureaus and closets, saving and discarding,
finishing a sad job for our father.
Finally, my sister L. B. and I thought to
check the attic. We assumed nothing was up there, but just in case . . . we
climbed through the hatch into a snowstorm of dust on bare planks. The attic was
empty except for two big boxes in the corner. Crawling through the dust, I
dislodged the lids. Letters. I inspected some dates and signatures.
“What are they?” L. B. called from the
hatch opening.
“Letters between Mama and Daddy when he was
in Europe during World War II. Hundreds. And another box of letters by some
people in the 1800s.”
“Daddy probably wants his own letters?
They’re private,” L. B. said.
But
my feelings were sudden and fierce. I wanted those letters. I had been born a
few months after Daddy left for the war. My childhood had been rocky, full of
sadness and nightmares, for reasons never clear. As an adult, I was besieged by
phobias. These letters might hold clues, might help me to heal myself.
L. B. and I agreed that it was right to give Daddy these letters. They
were his business, to save or not. But I wanted those letters. I was
prepared to get argumentative (couldn’t I just borrow them?) with my
80-year-old Daddy.
So I began gently: “Daddy, L.B. and I found
some letters in the attic . . . “
He interrupted me.
“Take them,” he said. “Take anything you
want. That was a long time ago, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it now.”
That was a long speech, for Daddy.
“Love is madness,” Daddy continued, shaking
his head. “It sweeps you away.”
I wondered what Daddy meant by that one. Never
mind. Gulping down guilt, I took what I could get. L.B. and I slid the two huge
boxes down the attic hatch, out the front door, and into the back of my station
wagon.
That day, I knew I’d probably learn some
family history, but I was expecting basically a personal quest—all about me.
 |
| The Kirven Family 1919 Mary -4 years old |
Over the next twenty years, my goals expanded.
A genealogical amateur, I stumbled
through databases, libraries, and historical societies. The material drew me
in. I struggled to understand my maternal Southern family.
Over 1,000 war letters passed between my
parents from 1942 through 1946, most written by Mama. She was a woman
distraught, pregnant, both her parents dead, her gentle husband snatched by the
U.S. Army and sent to Europe. Whose advice should she heed about how to treat
her first baby (me)? Her five rough-and-tough older brothers believed in not
sparing the rod. Her older sister’s husband died in 1943 and left her with two young
children. Mama often wrote that she felt unmoored and nearly out of her mind.
After reading those letters, I began
regular visits from Connecticut to the South. I sought out that large family
whom I barely remembered.
What had made my mother’s brothers so rough
and tough? I took oral histories from Eckard Lee, a 94-year-old second cousin who
remembered all his father’s stories from the 1800s. With benign, helpless
laughter he spoke of gunfights, throw-downs, whippings, the Red Shirts, and the
lawless times of Reconstruction. I reflected on other historical forces: Civil
War, Depression, World Wars. And slaveholding. My family had owned slaves from
1800 to 1865. What had that done to them?
How had Mama’s brothers gained such
influence over her? Her father had died when she was five. His health had been
poor for years, after one tenant—a black man, as it happened—tried to kill him
with buckshot in 1908 and almost succeeded. This story had been long buried by the
family. My cousins had many versions of the shooting’s aftermath. All were
different, all frightening.
I sought books about Southern culture, the
tangles of race and violence, and the views of Southerners. Enslave people, but
with kindness. Stamp out evil. Impose justice. I found many insistent
definitions of right and wrong, but little moral certainty.
That second attic box held courtship
letters between my maternal grandfather and grandmother from 1893 to 1897—enough
letters for a booklet of 135 single-spaced typed pages that I made for the
family. Their words shone with the ideals of two young people straining to fit
the molds of noble lover and Southern lady. Sometimes they flared at each other
over points of honor. They separated, then reconciled. I read more books—about Southern
womanhood, pure and sacrosanct, nurturing enough to redeem even slavery.
I grew to understand and love my Southern
family. The more cousins I talked to, the more I learned, and not always from
their words. Silences and hints finally taught me that my grandmother had put Mama’s
education before saving the family farm. A perilous clash of ideals. In 1933,
the bank repossessed the farm machinery while my mother was away at college.
Further insights came through creating my
book, Into the Briar Patch, a
personal-and-family memoir. During five years of writing, I tested central
questions about human nature and psychology. Each chapter now answers a question
that arises from its own stories: When
people act as they do in this
chapter, what precious goodness are they trying to protect?
That question and that structure let me
make peace with myself and accept my family’s past. I’ve had to move beyond the
trivial, to a mental place where gossip and scandal don’t matter, where we all
need mercy and we all deserve compassion and respect.
My whole journey was implied in that moment
my sister and I took possession of those private letters from the attic. Through
our misgivings, we kept going.
A
family’s secrets can be a window into human nature.
Meet the Storyteller - Mariann Regan
Mariann
Sanders Regan is Professor Emerita of English at Fairfield University in
Connecticut. She grew up in North Carolina and has many relatives in South
Carolina. She has a BA from Duke, a PhD from Yale, and publications that
include articles, stories, literary scholarship (Cornell University Press), and
a novel. Her recent family memoir Into
the Briar Patch explores the effects upon her South Carolina
ancestors of owning slaves, given that slavery is an evil institution. She and
her husband, who have two children, live in Connecticut. Her book blog is http://mariannregan.authorsxpress.com/.
Reviews of the memoir are at http://www.mariannregan.com/memoir_desc.html.
