by Sally Mann
Saul Bellow reports that for him it was like driving through a plate-glass window that he didn’t know was there until it shattered. All that was left were the pieces, which he picked up painstakingly, right down to the last glassy splinter. But for me, the door analogy works better, the indifferent door that suddenly swings open, perfectly hinged, above the abyss.
In terms of beauty, I am a watered-down version of my mother. Where she had pure black hair, I had brown. And oh, if only I had gotten her dramatic widow’s peak, never defiled with bangs. Below it, her eyes were a head-turning teal, on the order of those tinted contact lenses that were all the rage a few decades ago. Strangers would find themselves squinting at her eyes to find the telltale sickle of colored contact where it had slipped past the iris, but to no avail. The only one of our family who came close to her eye allure was my brother Chris, but mine are an ordinary greenish-gray. And she had height that I never achieved, plus some serious breasts that likewise checked themselves out of the genetic lottery when it came to my turn.
All the same, over the years, our physical similarities have been noted. A family friend once remarked, his gaze traveling between my mother and me, that he’d never really believed in the Immaculate Conception until then. And more startlingly, in the late 1960s on the streets of Boston, a passing stranger asked me if I was related to Elizabeth Evans. When I said yes, I was her daughter, he looked as startled as if he had just tumbled out of a time machine, which I guess he had, sort of. It turned out that my elderly inquisitor had not seen her in more than thirty years.
But that’s where the similarities stop. There was a certain remove about my mother, hesitation and distrust suppressing her occasional, and quite charming, sauciness; hers was an absence rather than a presence. I know now that within her lay a grief too deep for tears.
Operating within her narrow emotional bandwidth, she was naturally suspicious of passion, of exultation, of fervor. The worst of her disdain for temperamental excess was reserved for her own father, Arthur Evans, whom she called “a sentimental Welshman.” But I came in a close second.
In my early twenties, when a dear friend, MacCandless Charles, died in a plane wreck, I appeared at my mother’s bookstore, weeping. She glanced up from running the cash register and by way of explanation to her concerned customer said dryly, “Oh, you know how it is, it’s her first death.”
When she had been that same age and, it turns out, had plenty of cause for her own weeping, she wrote this about her family:
When I was sixteen, and I can remember the exact place on Cedar Street where this happened, I stepped back, almost physically, there on Cedar Street, and I never moved forward again. I stepped away from them and built up a shield. And I never went back.
And so she had, never stepping fully back into that family or any other, even ours, as far as I could tell.
In an immigrant society like this one, we are often divided from our forebears less by distance than by language, generations before us having thought, sung, made love, and argued in dialects unknown to us now. In Wales, for example, Welsh is spoken by barely 20 percent of the population, so we can only hope that the evocative Welsh word hiraeth will somehow be preserved. It means “distance pain,” and I know all about it: a yearning for the lost places of our past, accompanied in extreme cases by tuneful lamentation (mine never got quite that bad). But, and this is important, it always refers to a near-umbilical attachment to a place, not just free-floating nostalgia or a droopy houndlike wistfulness or the longing we associate with romantic love. No, this is a word about the pain of loving a place.
Just like us southerners, the Welsh are often depicted as nostalgic and melancholic, their heads stuck in the past while pining for hopelessly lost causes. This attribution was conceived in the eighteenth century, and right from the beginning it was tied to a representation of landscapes: the blind bards of eighteenth-century fables are inseparable from the misty mountains in which they were imagined to strum their harps while giving voice to their hiraeth. Contemporary Welsh-speakers have continued that expression, linking memory and landscape most vividly in R. W. Parry’s sonnet in which the longed-for landscape communicates to the human heart, “the echo of an echo… the memory of a memory past.”
Distance pain is a real thing; hiraeth is not just a made-up neurasthenic disorder to which the Welsh and oversensitive, displaced southerners are susceptible. Looking through my long photographic and literary relationship with my own native soil I can perceive a definite kinship with those fakelorish bards wailing away about their place-pain. And similarly, after months of research in my mother’s archive, I am reasonably sure that some aspects of that sentimental Welshman, my mother’s father, are woven through my psyche and have emerged in my own landscapes as “the memory of a memory past.”
My grandfather Arthur Llewellen Evans was born in 1880 to Thomas and Ellen Evans, who by that time had already buried five sons in six years. Misfortune this severe is hard to contemplate, but that’s the least of it for Thomas and Ellen. Their life together was a cliché-ridden smashup of the most overplayed themes of late Victorian fiction: social dislocation, debt, poverty, the fallen woman, and the caddish adventurer.
We can start with Arthur’s English mother, Ellen, who before her third birthday had lost both her parents, her mother to a fatal illness and her father to the California gold rush. She was adopted by an aunt and uncle who owned a fashionable grocery store in Mayfair, and later in life she delighted in telling Arthur that she had regularly been “petted” by Charles Dickens, a patron of the establishment. Dickens called her “my little Nelly,” and one wonders if she possessed something of the pure and untainted innocence of his famous heroine in The Old Curiosity Shop.
At the age of seven she was sent to a progressive boarding school, after which, at thirteen, she sailed to Paris to finish her education in music (piano and organ), art, literature, and French.
Certainly her education was as good as that of any girl in Britain at the time, so how it was that she fell in love with a stock boy at her uncle’s store beggars the imagination. But she did, with my melodious-voiced, Welsh great-grandfather, Thomas Evans.
It’s easy to imagine the furious objections of the aunt and uncle to the ensuing marriage and the subsequent decline in the couple’s fortunes: money borrowed from relatives for a business, the failure of that and the next venture, the estrangement from family over the debts, a desperate emigration to Canada, and all the while pregnancies and deaths of babies. Shortly after the family moved across the border to New York, the second of the couple’s surviving children, my grandfather, was born, and Thomas Evans, the onetime stock boy, landed a respectable job keeping the accounts of the wealthy Oneida Community.
So: why, after such a journey, would this man, with a loyal wife, an established income, three healthy sons, and another on the way, walk out on his family one morning and never return? No one knows, but it is suggested in my grandfather’s writings that drinking was the culprit—apparently episodic and intense.
Ellen, having been abandoned first by her gold-hungry father and now her husband, was distraught and ashamed, too proud to tell her relatives back in England what had befallen her. She sold her family diamonds and rapidly went through assets that had included a modest inheritance from her uncle and aunt who ran the store in Mayfair. With great humility, she took in sewing, washing, and ironing but gradually sank into penury.
In careful handwriting, her son, my grandfather Arthur Evans, recorded the money he was able to bring into the family during that time, but it was not enough. His mother, Ellen, still unable to care for her four boys, was forced to farm them out to labor for local families in return for food. Arthur went to a man referred to only as Farmer Skaden. He was thirteen.
There is a decidedly Dickensian aspect to this servitude and separation from his family, but Arthur appeared to love his new home and take pride in his work for Skaden. He describes his work in his journals:
&n
bsp; Rose at 4:30 AM, first chore getting the 16 cows up from the back pasture, milking half of them, a one-hour job, driving them back to the pasture. Feeding and currying the four horses and cleaning out the stables, then breakfast. Took the milk to Miller’s cheese factory two miles down the road, bringing back whey for the pigs, then chores. Next out to the fields for the day’s work…
(Reading this I think: “day’s work”? Hasn’t he just done a day’s work?)
… plowing, dragging or harrowing, planting early in the spring, using, most awkwardly, a sidehill plow, hoeing corn, potatoes, beans… weeding onions, on knees all day long.
One year I hoed a ten-acre field of corn twice… forgot to mention rolling, the field always looked so nice after this operation.…
There was also water for the kitchen to be got, chopping and sawing kindling and stove wood, washing the buggy and two-seater, greasing and oiling the farm wagons and machinery, sharpening scythes, sickles and axes, feeding the hens and gathering the eggs, oiling the harnesses, salting the cattle, fixing fences, pulling mustard from the grain fields and Queen Anne’s lace, everywhere; killing and dressing a fowl for Sunday dinner… and so on, indefinitely.
“And so on, indefinitely.” Weary words from one so young.
There is no evidence of contact with his mother during his indenture, but for sure there wasn’t a trace of his father, except for one curious and heartbreaking incident. About a decade after he disappeared, Arthur’s father, Thomas Evans, made his way back to Oneida from Mobile, Alabama, where he had been slashing pine trees for turpentine. He came to the school that his four sons, the youngest of whom he had never seen, were attending. Standing at the fence as school was letting out, he asked a parent waiting beside him to point out the four Evans boys. After watching them walk past, he turned away.
Thomas Evans apparently made no effort to see his wife, Ellen, on that trip, although parents at the school reported the incident to her. Arthur wrote of his mother’s frequent sobbing, their financial ruin, and her exhaustion from overwork. It was unnecessary to mention her heartbreak.
What I would give to see the letter that Arthur wrote his father, Thomas, when, at age seventeen, he finally tracked him down in Mobile (I can imagine what mine would have said). I don’t have that letter, but what I do have is his father’s response to it. He begins cordially enough: “Dear Arthur, I received your very kind letter of the 18th with profound surprise.”
I bet. After thirteen years?
Thomas Evans goes on to say: “It makes me feel very glad to find that you have all been getting on so nicely notwithstanding a good many adverse circumstances.”
Not the least of which was his desertion, of course.
He then has the effrontery to absolve Arthur’s mother, Ellen, of any blame for those many adverse circumstances; such blame, he adds with late-nineteenth-century epistolary overflow, “is all mine and bitterly have I felt it, in fact my whole life since that unhappy day when I left Oneida has been one continual season of remorse and self reproach.” A few lines down in the letter he offers this advice (hardly necessary in Arthur’s case): “And please note as you read the biographies of Eminent Men that they have invariably been careful and kind to their mothers.”
Surely Arthur must have already noted the kindness of Eminent Men toward their mothers, and, hoping to one day join their ranks, he wrote extravagantly of his own in a later journal entry:
My mother was a woman of high intelligence and talent; generous, unselfish, uncomplaining with almost sublime, unflagging courage in the face of overwhelming and cruel misfortunes. Her devotion to her four fatherless boys, at the expense of her health, sight, strength and social position… was unparalleled.
As passing years have made known all these things there came into my heart… pity for the pathos of it all.
On the other hand, what those Eminent Men had to teach him about how to treat a pathetically flawed father his writings do not reveal, but later in life when he wrote about Thomas Evans, he was charitable:
I have no remembrance of my father. Many people at the Oneida Community spoke of him with affection and respect for his qualities of mind and heart. They said that he was a man of ability, talent and a capacity for leadership and friendship. He was also a fine singer and made a name for himself in that way. He was a great reader and well-informed, so they said.
Seven years later, Thomas Evans dropped dead on a street corner in Mobile. His burial expenses were paid for by my grandfather Arthur Llewellen Evans.
Arthur’s arrangement with Farmer Skaden lasted through his teens, by which time his mother had married a German named William Hansen. Arthur was deeply pained by this second marriage and describes Hansen as “a cruel, evil, fearsome man, so brutal and terrible that I cannot bear to think of what my mother endured all those years.”
Arthur entered Oneida High School in October 1894, graduating in June 1897. In that first year of high school, when he was fourteen, he met a girl his own age named Julie Keller, whom he described at the time as “the overpowering, all-in-all, fiercely passionate love of my life.”
Carefully preserved in my attic archive is a crumbling, yellowed letter with Arthur’s handwriting on the envelope noting, “First letter I ever received from Julie,” and a postal service stamp that requests one penny more. This letter to Arthur begins “Dearest” and proposes a rendezvous for later in the week. But the postscript ominously reads, “If you have been at Brobly Dance you needn’t trouble to come down. This is not irony.”
There’s no trace of irony in the eye of the young girl in the picture. She is straight-up lovely, and it was poverty, I am guessing, that prevented Arthur from proposing marriage to her upon his graduation from high school. His notes report that he worked at the Oneida newspaper, mowed lawns, tended furnaces, and continued to work back at the Skaden farm just to put himself through high school.
College was another matter. To pay college tuition he had to work as a schoolteacher for three more years, becoming a high school principal at age nineteen. By 1900 he had saved a hundred dollars and, as he put it, “I made the plunge,” enrolling in Syracuse University. His resolute jaw-set, intense gaze and front-row-first position give some indication of his determination, setting him rather obviously apart from his classmates.
Despite that apparent strong will, when he wrote about his college experience he described himself as inferior in many respects:
Penniless, without adequate social status or training, physical attractiveness… musical or other talents or training that would find place in college life; with mental powers sufficient for college work; with capacity and experience in sustained work, hard or otherwise—that’s all.
Still, he managed to graduate in four years with a bachelor of fine arts degree, summing up his achievements with this doleful assessment, written in the third person as if owning up to himself in the first person would be too difficult:
As to most of the fine young men and women of his class… he instinctively knew they were neither his friends nor admirers. And he knew they were right in their judgments of him.
Despite this evident self-doubt, after loving her for fifteen years, Arthur was finally in a financial position to ask Julie Keller to marry him. In his journals from the time he praised her as
the graceful, gracious, fair and lovely girl… destined to mark forever the heart and soul of this boy with an ineffable something so all-pervasive that no words of his can ever describe or express.
The modest wedding ceremony, which, according to the newspaper accounts, “surprised their many friends,” was held on June 12, 1909, at Saranac Lake, New York.
Five months later Julie Keller Evans died of tuberculosis in his arms.
Their honeymoon and married life together, it turns out, had been spent at a sanatorium. She died on her twenty-ninth birthday. On that page of her daily calendar, carefully saved by my grieving grandfather, she noted in her unwavering handwriting, “I don’t have any mor
e birthdays.”
And then, incredibly, Arthur’s life got worse. He met my grandmother, Jessie Adams, of Braintree, Massachusetts.
10
Uncle Skip and the Little Dears
My mother always suspected it was Jessie’s wealth that attracted Arthur Evans, and who could blame the poor man for that? But she was good-looking, too. So tall and slender that she was nicknamed “Slats” as a kid, Jessie had inherited her mother Emma’s distinctive auburn hair, pale skin, green eyes, chilly imperiousness and, important to this story, her sexual allure and appetite.
But more than that and more than her wealth, I suspect what Arthur, the immigrant tormented by his soi-disant lack of “social status or training,” most desired about Jessie Adams was her illustrious ancestry. Early on when he wrote of her, he repeatedly noted her distinguished lineage, citing breathlessly that Jessie was
a descendant of the original Mayflower passenger John Howland of the Plymouth Colony, and of the Adams line of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and eligible to join the Mayflower Descendants, and also eligible for the Colonial Dames and the Daughters of the American Revolution.
What Arthur doesn’t speak about here is the miserable marriage between Jessie’s mother, Emma Coles (the Mayflower descendant) and the man, Charles Jesse Adams, who gave her that esteemed surname, or how Emma’s behavior presaged the calculating willfulness of Jessie herself. Nor did he note how that behavior stood in marked contrast to that of his esteemed mother, Ellen, or to his own stalwart and upright path through life.