UNDERESTIMATING THE WORTH
Another primary thread of silencing occurs when others underestimate the value of a person’s experiences. This is “negation by neglect,” and it reigns as the dominant cause for the loss of family stories. Either the worth of the experience or even the worth of the person is underestimated. But Ida and Lillian never could have known the worth of their mother’s memoir. In Helga’s situation, the family had no idea that her written story would offer a significant contribution to American history. This makes sense considering that historians during her lifetime did not value the stories of ordinary women. More surprising was that her immediate family did not consider Helga’s story a positive resource for future generations.
The burning of her manuscript recalls how close the writings of others, such as African-American author Zora Neal Hurston, came to being destroyed. Destitute and no longer acclaimed in her old age, Hurston was considered of “little worth” at her death. When county workers came to clean out her house, they started to burn the clutter. One recalled that Zora was once a respected writer and, hoping there might be something of worth to augment county expenses, hosed down the fire just in time to recover her charred papers.4 It took more than fifty years and a seismic shift in appreciating the worth of African-American women writers before her acclaimed book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was republished. Her writings proved pivotal for inspiring the next generation of African-American women writers, such as Alice Walker. Only recently, with the growing publications of multicultural stories available in schools and libraries, are all children in America able to read about the lives of others with their same ethnic heritage.
BELIEVING ONE’S STORY IS INCOMPREHENSIBLE
When an experience seems incomprehensible to others, it can contribute to the silencing of stories. None of Helga’s neighbors could imagine what she encountered because such an endeavor existed outside their own knowledge. For women to walk unescorted in the wilderness, to sleep unprotected in railroad station houses or in strangers’ homes, to wander alone in New York, Chicago, Denver, Omaha, and Salt Lake City, and to meet with powerful political leaders was simply incomprehensible to her immigrant neighbors. Even the freedom of movement Helga knew from wearing the new bicycle skirts was something the women in Mica Creek could not imagine.
Helga had no one to talk with about nonconformist ideas concerning the possibilities for women or the injustice of entrenched roles. Although women neighbors could imagine a pregnancy before wedlock, in Norwegian communities it was far less understandable that a woman did not marry the man who was the father of the child. Helga’s conversations along the rural and urban routes of 1896 America meant she inevitably experienced the loosening of boundaries that characterized the turn of the century. “Something happens at the end of a century,” wrote one historian referring to the 1890s. “Rules are altered, boundaries are breached, and fundamental attitudes are changed.”5 Helga’s lost stories of encounters with American citizens could have shed light on this theory in lively ways.
Other experiences that often seem beyond comprehension to family members and therefore remain unheard involve war memories, early poverty, sexual identity, academic, work, and professional life. Some of the first generation of educated persons within a family speak of similar separation and silencing that occurs as they advance beyond their parent’s educational level. The experiential gaps that emerge contribute to silences within families, an unspoken acknowledgment that each other’s experiences are simply beyond understanding.
SEALING THE SHAME
Stories that family members perceive as shameful often stay silenced. Shame involves a painful feeling of having lost the respect of others, even if this is culturally bound. This can be caused by “perceptions of improper behavior or incompetence which brings dishonor or disgrace to oneself or one’s family, something perceived as regrettable, outrageous, or unfortunate.”6 Sealing the shame often surrounds stories of incest, alcoholism, mental illness, violence against women during wartime, or AIDS. Shame can include a deep feeling about oneself over something that seems unchangeable.7 Helga could not change the fact that she left home and that two children died, a regrettable, unfortunate, and some say, outrageous act. In her mind, she embarked on this walk as an act of love for her family; she was determined to try to save their family home by this unique opportunity that presented itself during the spring of 1896. Yet, after returning home, she knew her husband and children felt shame because her leaving home had brought dishonor and disgrace to the family, especially after the two children died. Given these perceptions and her own, Helga likely decided the less said about her actions, the better. The act of burning the manuscript may have been her daughters’ effort to seal forever the shame of their mother’s aberrant actions.
Pretending that Clara was Ole’s child sealed the shame of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy. She had practiced silence before, and she could do it again. To go public with her story after the children’s death would place her actions under far more severe scrutiny than her initial trip. Victorian values still prevailed, and she would not want to add more pain to her family. Her life demonstrated that she valued her close connections within the Norwegian-American community. Current researchers on the psychology of women “all agree that interpersonal intimacy is the profound organizer of female experience.”8 The importance that women place on the establishment and maintenance of close relationships clearly characterized Helga’s life, too.
Every country needs individuals who refuse to be silenced when breaking out of unhealthy cultural norms, despite the criticism. This courageous spirit allowed Hildegard of Bingen to ignore criticism when she left a male monastery and established a highly influential female monastery in twelfth-century Europe; led Jane Addams to break the lifestyle norms for privileged educated females by moving to the inner city of Chicago to establish Hull House and live among the poor; and inspired Martin Luther King Jr. to defy segregation laws and lead a nation in civil disobedience protests even after his home was bombed. Each of these leaders influenced their societies to make important innovative changes, but their success depended on ordinary women and men speaking up and risking criticism. Once convinced that women deserved to be full voting citizens, Helga stayed actively committed to the suffrage movement, undeterred by disapproval.
KEEPING THE PEACE
A family story that threatens internal relationships will be silenced by those wanting to maintain fragile family bonds. This is particularly true of women who self-silence.9 In the Victorian home, women were expected to create a supportive climate for domestic life, helping all family members to get along.10 There was such bitterness toward Helga, mingled with deep grief and hurt, that avoidance of any discussion of their walk across America must have been their way to cope and maintain the family relationships. If Helga did not speak about her trip, she could avoid personal hurt and the problems it raised in the family.11
Her approach represents a common pattern for handling unpleasant facts, especially family stories that can be hurtful. In Vital Lies, Simple Truths, in the chapter called “What You Don’t See Won’t Hurt You,” Daniel Goleman describes how a “semblance of cozy calm can be maintained by an unspoken agreement to deny the pertinent facts.” When describing how families and groups deny information that makes them uneasy, he states, “We tune out, we turn away, we avoid. Finally we forget, and forget we have forgotten.… It is easier to go along with the silent agreements that keep unpleasant facts quiet and make it hard to rock the boat.”12
Often families consider whether all truths should be told and recognize that the balance between “shedding veils and shielding painful truths” is a subtle one. Clearly there are times when a family or individual may wisely choose that a story needs to be private. “Every family has secrets,” claims psychologist J. Bradshaw. “Some are benign and constructive, protecting the family and/or an individual member and aiding their growth and individuality. Others are toxic and destructive,
destroying trust, freedom, intimacy, growth, and love.”13 Keeping Clara ignorant of her biological father kept Ole and the other children from hearing more about Helga’s pregnancy by another man, a truth Helga believed should not be told.
Helga’s decisions were not unusual for the late Victorian era. “If we don’t talk about it, it will go away,” was one way in which pain and grief were handled. In the mid-1800s, there was a significant amount of sentimentality and religious literature surrounding grief and mourning over the death of children. These included consolation literature emphasizing the afterlife as joyous and available to all believers. This was aimed primarily at women, who were considered especially prone to grieving because of their focus on motherhood and expressiveness.14 Poems and stories about death (particularly a mother’s bereavement) had been standard fare in the middle-class women’s magazines, until they abruptly stopped in 1875 when Helga was fifteen. Victorian values may have caused this shift. As one woman of the era explained, “A woman’s highest duty is so often to suffer and be still.”15 For the next one hundred years, during the rest of Helga’s life, death and grieving became a taboo topic in the United States and no articles appeared in any of the six major women’s magazines.16 It was common behavior to keep painful experiences inside. Helga’s granddaughter Thelma mentioned that she never heard Helga talk about her husband after his death, nor does anyone in the family know much about her son’s death right before she left on the walk across America, or the death of Ole and Helga’s first-born son in Minnesota.
After Ole’s death, Helga did choose to write her memoirs in great detail. Hundreds and hundreds of pages came forth, but still she kept them secret from the sons and daughters, knowing they harbored anger. Yet the comment to her granddaughter Thelma to “take care of this story for me” suggests she held hopes that someday her story could be told. Her very act of creation indicates that she was validating the worth of her experiences, at least to herself. Her need to remember and share her life story remained.
AVOIDING THE ANGER
The children’s anger over Helga’s actions remained until their death. By staying silent, Helga avoided the continuous expressions of her children’s resentment. “She was never forgiven for leaving” was repeated often by family members, although they took very loving care of their mother in her elder years.17 The Victorian emotional culture gave little room for the expression of anger by women or children in the family. Anger was perceived as particularly menacing to family life. Prescriptive literature had firm advice on domestic discord and marital quarrels. Prohibitions existed against angry displays by children against parents. The overarching belief was that the family must be preserved against emotional storms.18
The fragility of the family after Helga returned was obvious to each member. They still were in dire economic circumstances and emotionally broken. It was likely they kept silent partly as a way to contain their anger. During Helga’s later years, when she enjoyed talking about politics, her family always “shut her up,” and her granddaughter said she seldom spoke back. This repression may be how she handled her own anger at being silenced for expressing her unpopular political views. Helga undoubtedly harbored some anger at the unknown wealthy New York woman and collaborating sponsors, if any, for their choices. She endured the humiliation of coming home empty-handed, susceptible to the charges that she had been a fool to trust a stranger’s wager. The family also spoke of Helga’s change to a more melancholy personality after the trip. Although she did not live in a deep depression from the silencing of the self, she lost some of the exuberance within her family that they say used to exist. But she continued to express a vibrant interest in life, friendships, politics, culture, hobbies, and her family.
Helga Estby, bilingual since childhood, always loved reading a good book. During later years she wrote a memoir of her cross-continent adventures. Circa 1930s.
Courtesy Portch/Bahr Family Photograph Collection. Detail of this photograph on this page.
Because of the ways Helga’s story was silenced, whether from internal or external censure, her family never knew or valued the fullness of their mother’s life. However, even the family silencing failed to daunt her ongoing interest in the world around her, whether in marching for women’s rights, attending the theater, or joining the Sons of Norway. Nor did this stop her personal growth and desire to write her story, although she wrote it secretly. “Censorship silences,” states Tillie Olsen in her groundbreaking book Silences where she addresses the circumstances that often stifled acts of creation. She explores unnatural silencing, the thwarting of something that is struggling to come into being. “Where the gifted among women (and men) have remained mute, or have never attained full capacity, it is because of circumstances, inner or outer, which oppose the needs of creation.”19
THE IMPORTANCE OF STORY KEEPING
The six threads that contributed to muting this gifted woman’s story often surround the silencing of many family stories. For both internal and external reasons, Helga’s story was thwarted as she struggled to bring it into being. Helga’s adventurous and life-shaping journey was not a tragedy. But the loss of her story, destroyed forever with the flick of a match, is a great misfortune, not only for her family but for all persons interested in understanding more of American life during a significant transitional time in history. Helga must have experienced bittersweet memories as she composed her memoirs. How exciting it would be to read this original manuscript, to see through her lively intellect and courageous spirit the American life she and Clara encountered along their way. The silencing of this walk through the social, cultural, economic, and political as well as geographic landscape of late-nineteenth-century America means our country lost a sweeping eyewitness account of two women’s encounters with the humble and the famous amid the burgeoning cities and frontiers.
Although Helga never received the $10,000, walking across America infused her life with significant intangible rewards. Throughout the newspaper accounts, Helga conveyed to reporters a quiet confidence that their goal was possible, that they expected to be able to achieve what everyone else told her was impossible. She exuded the positive attitude, boldness, and courage that often characterizes leaders. Yet, she admits to discouragement after the grueling walk through the long distances, mountains, and deserts of Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. She overcame the discouragement, exhaustion, and criticism for stepping beyond her cultural norm, enjoyed and learned from much of what she encountered. By putting feet to her faith that “all things are possible with God,” their arrival in New York confirmed this belief that was instilled during her childhood. According to her family, this vital faith proved to be a bedrock of strength, keeping her positively involved with life even while enduring the profound losses of six children, her husband, their beloved Mica Creek home, and her health before her death at eighty-one years old.
She also gained a lifelong love for America and appreciation for the kindness of the average men and women who live in this land. As she traveled the rails, Helga recognized the exaggeration of fears people held toward the unknown. She discovered the need to face down blind stereotypes and prejudices that limit individuals and the nation, whether her own earlier attitudes toward Native Americans and hoboes, or the cultural bias underestimating women’s physical and mental strength. Helga recognized the strength she and Clara possessed as they forged their way across the land; this heightened her awareness of what women could do. Beyond individual efforts, though, she saw the essential force of communal strength. Walking though Colorado and Wyoming, where women had won the right to vote, and through America during the election fervor of 1896, awakened Helga to the possibilities for significant political change when people unite together. Ideas matter, as do cultural norms and legal structures, affecting both individuals and the nation she loved. This freed her to become actively involved in the suffrage movement, even when her daughters disapproved, and to believe that this nation should and would open full citizenship to wom
en. Her grandchildren missed a rich vein of wisdom when they did not get to hear how she approached life’s challenges, and her active belief in what can be called the art of the possible.
The gathering and sharing of the rag-rug remnants of our family’s lives gives a gift to the next generation, a community of memory in a highly mobile world. Through developing written and oral histories, creating scrapbooks, telling stories around a dining table or campfire, displaying photographs and making videos, every family can weave an enduring rug of memories. Capturing the hopes, challenges, actions, disappointments, successes, pains, and joys inherent in every family gives children roots and wings. Other cultures practice the art of storytelling. In the Masai tribe in Kenya, for example, when a person dies, the greatest gift one can give a grieving person is to come and tell a story from the loved one’s life. A collage of memories grow, giving the heart solace and healing, and the stories go on for generations. Remembering the past, telling the children the stories of parents and grandparents lives, can prove to be a pivotal resource in a young person’s life, as Doug Bahr recognized in remembering his great-great-grandmother, Helga.
My hope is that Helga’s story, once shrouded in silence, now can be linked with other voices to contribute to a fuller American history and to contribute to a growing dialogue on the causes and costs of silencing the story of a life.
Notes
Bold Spirit Page 16