by Sally Mann
I retrieved Ron, cuff-linked and immaculate as always, from the Roanoke airport and drove him to Boxerwood, where he and my father sat out on the terrace drinking iced tea and talking of their fondness for rare flowering trees, specifically Cornus coreana and Franklinia alatamaha.
Neither acknowledged that only death’s looming specter, the long shadow of the great-winged black bird, would provoke a busy man to fly from New York to Virginia for less than two hours.
When I returned from taking Ron back to the Roanoke airport, my father was dying on the couch.
On July 5, 2011, as I wrote about that day in 1988, I received a call from a friend saying that Cy Twombly had died in Italy about an hour before. Immediately an image of Cy presented itself: the penetrating eye, his mannerly melancholy, his long fingers daintily picking at the tablecloth, and most especially the sense of stillness and gravity that seemed to accompany him, cohabiting somehow with his love of mischief and repartee.
My image is holographic; I can walk behind him as he sits at the kitchen table and see a scruffy patch of hair matted down from sleep—and it’s in color, with sound, and in motion, too. I hear the little snort that often preceded a witticism and remember the way he demurely covered his lips before uttering something wicked. I can see him moving carefully across the studio in pale leather loafers, his wide-wale corduroy pants depending from suspenders.
When we parted a month earlier, I think we both knew that he was, as he laughingly remarked that day, “closing down the bodega for real.” Instead of turning his big back and flapping his usual fey good-bye wave as he got in the car, Cy turned to face me and looked me directly in the eye. He said with discernible sadness and gravity: “You keep on working hard, sweetie.”
His drawling voice, his wrinkled face, the gap between the front teeth—Cy is right here. Cy, who hated to be photographed, is still vivid in my memory. I hardly have any pictures of him, although he gave me this one that Robert Rauschenberg made of him at Black Mountain College, and showed me where he wanted it placed on my desk.
I am convinced that the reason I can remember him so clearly and in such detail is because I have so few pictures of him. That’s unusual in itself, in this era of ubiquitous camera phones, but imagine a time a mere 170 years ago, when there was no mechanical way to preserve a face, an important experience, or the beauty of the natural world.
Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn’t diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished.
Because of the many pictures I have of my father, he eludes me completely. In my outrageously disloyal memory he does not exist in three dimensions, or with associated smells or timbre of voice. He exists as a series of pictures. When I think of him, I see his keen, intelligent eyes cast askance at me, his thumb lightly resting on his cleanly shaved chin. And I see his thick forearms, the left impinged upon by the stretchy metal band of the watch I keep here still in my desk drawer, the sleeves of his white cotton shirt rolled to reveal his powerful biceps, his waist trim from an absurdly careful egg-whites-only kind of diet, girded round by the same cracked leather belt he wore for forty years.
But… here’s the thing: It’s a picture, a photograph I am thinking of.
I don’t have a memory of the man; I have a memory of a photograph. I rush upstairs to the scrapbooks and there he is. I’ve lost any clear idea of what my father really looked like, how he moved, sounded; the him-ness of him. I only have this.
It isn’t death that stole my father from me; it’s the photographs.
So that’s where I go to find him, to the deckle-edged, yellowing pictures that keep my father, Robert Sylvester Munger II, alive for me. He’s there in the attic next to all those boxes from my mother’s New England side of the family. But the tightly bound Daddy boxes seem somehow aloof and reticent next to the seam-bursting boxes of my mother’s father, unlucky Arthur Evans. Those, by contrast, seem like eager schoolchildren, waving their hands, ready with the answer.
No answers spill out of Daddy’s boxes; within them are almost no personal confessions of insecurity, or of modest pride or passion, or even much emotion, all of which I found in the neighboring Evans boxes. Indeed, even the primary questions about my father, never mind the answers, have taken me weeks to form after sorting out the contents.
Who was this man? How on earth did he turn out the way he did, given his upbringing? Would he have been a happier, more expansive person if he’d followed his great love of art, literature, and high culture instead of medicine? Indeed, was he happy at all? Did he feel his life was fulfilled in the same way as that of his namesake, Robert S. Munger? And most of all: why the fascination with death, especially the iconography of death, and from his earliest years?
If the story of my mother’s family, of Emma Adams, Jessie Adams, Arthur Evans, and Uncle Skip, is primarily about unrealized dreams, flawed character, damped-down obsession, unconventional sexual behavior, poverty, grief, and depression, the predominant story from my father’s side of the family, that of the first Robert Sylvester Munger, is of ambition perfectly realized, marital and professional fulfillment, of wealth and generosity, racial tolerance, an expansive, gracious lifestyle, and of obsession indulged.
This busy man, Robert Munger I, whose business, family, and civic concerns should have occupied every spare moment, was possessed by a passion that completely transported him, and I mean literally: his passion was the automobile. And, similarly susceptible to possession and obsession was his grandson, my father, Robert Munger II, the outwardly calm, respectable medical doctor with the questing soul of an artist. His was an improbable obsession with death, capital-D Death, which he pursued almost his entire life, until it caught him under its eradicating black wing.
As soon as I cut the baling twine that held the Munger box together, the cardboard flaps gently released, revealing this picture of the prosperous Munger clan gathered in Birmingham, Alabama, for Christmas 1922. With even a cursory look,
my eye was drawn to my eleven-year-old father’s intelligent, curious face in the lower left corner.
And, when my eyes traveled upward, I was easily able to find his grandfather, Robert Sylvester Munger, the namesake who was also the family member my father most resembled, physically and intellectually.
The senior Robert Munger is standing among his children (he had four boys and four girls), their spouses and offspring, and gently leans toward his pensive wife, Mary Collett, whose rather unyielding bulk he appears to be coaxing into compliance by demonstration.
What he appears to be demonstrating is sweet and satisfied repose. His eyes are serenely closed, as, in fact, they would be closed forever exactly four months later when he died of pneumonia at age sixty-nine.
I have always referred to my father as a genius of a certain sort, but in fact, the real genius in our family was this man, Robert S. Munger I. And not only a genius, but also a financially successful genius and, more importantly, a generous genius: at his death in April 1923, the Birmingham News praised Robert Munger as “one of the greatest philanthropists the South has ever produced.” The millions of dollars he gave away hadn’t been inherited; he earned them all.
He was born into a hardworking farm family in Rutersville, Texas, a wisp of a town a hundred miles west of Houston. It now barely merits a mention in Wikipedia, having enjoyed its peak population of 175 right about the time Robert Munger was doing his level best to get out of there.
His father, Henry Munger, who ran a sawmill and a cotton gin in Rutersville,
was ambitious, tough, and hewn from sturdy early-American stock; his forebears had come over to Connecticut from Surrey, England, in 1630, just a decade
after my mother’s celebrated ancestor, half-drowned John Howland, was pulled back aboard the Mayflower and into the history books.
Born in 1825 and raised in Texas, Henry Munger was at just the right age to get caught up in the California gold rush, which, you may remember, also excited my great-great-grandfather from the New England side of the family, Ellen’s father. But, unlike that family-abandoning wastrel who never returned, Henry Munger, made miserable by shipwreck in the Pacific and privation in the camps, headed back home to Texas after only two years out West. He walked the entire 1,552 miles.
This one surviving portrait of Henry, which I first discovered in the archive of a ninety-three-year-old Birmingham relation, was put to hard use, even standing in for the encoffined man at his wake after what the newspaper called “a brief but intensely painful illness.”
It wasn’t until later that I realized the portrait was cropped from a larger picture, which tells its own story about Reconstruction-era social relations in west Texas.
Even taken out of its racially troubling context, the one surviving photograph of Henry Munger appears to show the face of a sour, squint-eyed man. Here we may be confronting another of photography’s treacheries over and above the medium’s power to displace real memories.
At its most accomplished, photographic portraiture approaches the eloquence of oil painting in portraying human character, but when we allow snapshots or mediocre photographic portraits to represent us, we find they not only corrupt memory, they also have a troubling power to distort character and mislead posterity. Catch a person in an awkward moment, in a pose or expression that none of his friends would recognize, and this one mendacious photograph may well outlive all corrective testimony; people will study it for clues to the subject’s character long after the death of the last person who could have told them how untrue it is.
When only one photograph survives, its authority is unimpeachable, and we are in the position of jurors who have to decide a case based on one witness’s unchallenged testimony. Within my own attic archives, I can think of a picture that, if it were the only surviving photograph of me, might provoke some descendant to write: “She was a pinched, humorless woman, evidently incapable of enjoying any worldly pleasures. It is tempting to think that the beauty celebrated in the photographs she took was a means of externalizing the rapture and wonder she obviously could not feel within herself.”
The power of any one photograph to falsify a person’s character is, of course, diminished by the evidence contained in every other surviving photograph of that person. It would be an interesting exercise to determine if there’s some threshold number of photographs that would guarantee, when studied together so that signature expressions were revealed and uncharacteristic gestures isolated, a reasonably accurate sense of how a person appeared to those who knew him.
But since we have just this one picture of Henry Munger, we have no way of knowing if it’s a distortion or true to life. Studying it, I resist the impulse to make assumptions based on a fraction of a second snatched from time, perhaps the same second that a slight gassy sensation troubled his lower bowel. So, despite his crabbed countenance and the sense of prerogative he displays as he rides behind that joyless rickshaw hauler, I must take into account evidence of his character derived from other sources. Henry Munger was lauded at his death for his “modest and unpretentious” generosity, and in an even more important endorsement, my great-grandfather, Robert Munger, appears to have loved and respected his father, working devotedly for him in the Rutersville mill.
Early on, Henry Munger gave Robert the job of driving the oxen that pulled the logs bound for the sawmill. The Birmingham News reported that at nine years of age he drove that oxen team nearly seven hundred miles by himself through the sparsely settled and dangerous Texas outback. Can this really be true? At nine? Seven hundred miles?
Apparently it was, because later in life, Robert Munger made frequent mention of that trip, and especially what must have been the scariest part: sleeping out in the chaparral alone, with only his father’s overcoat for warmth while “blood-thirsty marauding bands, insanely cruel, murdering and robbing” passed near him.
With such a brave and capable son becoming more indispensible on the farm each year, it must have been difficult for Henry Munger to spare Robert after he was accepted at Trinity University in Tehuacana, Texas, 150 miles away. Indeed, after only two years of college, where his son proved to be an excellent student in Latin and law, Henry urgently called Robert back to the farm, rewarding him with the cotton gin to manage as his own. He was just twenty years old.
Robert Munger was not a tall or physically imposing man, but every image I have shows him as strong and lean, even ascetic in appearance, much like my father. Raised under what were clearly physically tough conditions, he was self-reliant, courageous, competent, and, most of all, a hard worker.
He expressed his belief in the importance of hard work as a character-building expedient in somewhat pettish terms much later in his life in a letter to his sons that I found among my father’s papers. (My daughter Virginia says that when she read this letter she was further convinced of genetic determinism, so strongly did it remind her of my voice lodged in her head.)
When he wrote this letter, Robert Munger was sixty-five and one of the most successful entrepreneurs and inventors in the South (we’ll get to that). It’s handwritten in elegant script on hotel stationery from a resort in Ormond Beach, Florida, where he and his wife, Mary, were spending the winter of 1919. Interestingly, he addresses the letter to just three of his four sons, those three he clearly believed were ungrateful idlers. The excluded son, I am pleased to report, was my grandfather, his eldest son, Collett Henry.
He begins by pointedly noting that he has received letters from almost everyone else in the family except the three sons, and he especially commends the four virtuous daughters. Then my great-grandfather describes an encounter on the links:
We played just behind Mr. John D. Rockefeller this morn. And at the end of 9 holes he stopped and came back and was very cordial and sociable, and chatted with us quite a bit about Birmingham, business, etc.… As I told him good bye, I asked him if he knew he was a tenant of mine; I told him he was about the Best paying tenant I had, but I did not tell him his representative worked to his interests so well that he not only got it all back but some more beside. I’ll tell him that next time…
Apparently leisure time didn’t agree with Munger. He comes across in the letter as fretful and remarks that it is hard not to think about the work he has left behind. That provides him with the perfect lead-in to the point of the letter: He lays into those three slacker boys, Robley, Lonnie, and Eugene:
We, Mama and I, feel like we can and should get away from home now… to regain some of the youth and vigor that we have lost in thinking and worrying over our children’s affairs… and we are hoping and looking forward to the time soon when they will do something for us, instead of our working or worrying over them—
We can then direct our energies into channels more for the good of our Community, our Country and our Church and in fact the wide world—Even while away down here we see opportunities and think of the great good we could do if we could just turn ourselves loose for the rest of our lives—
The agitated letter writer continues, contrasting himself, his own boundless drive and creativity, with the trifling trio who apparently have none of his ambition. He reminds them of how lucky they are to be inheriting the successful business he has established by dint of inventive genius and hard work (emphasis his) and of their responsibility to maintain its upward trajectory.
Papa Munger is seriously worked up by this time, eight pages into it, and his handwriting, which was restrained at the start, sprawls across the page, expanding and tightening in sync with his feelings.
He continues with his exhortations:
Now will you do it?
You can if you will. But you can only do it by one way, and that is by �
�Work”.
All three of you are gifted with everything necessary to assure success in anything you might undertake except one thing, and that one thing you all three lack and that one thing is spelled by four little letters—e.i.—W-O-R-K—
Well I would enjoy a few lines from all of you—
Your Affectionate Papa
R. Munger
His father, Henry, certainly never had to spell out those four particular letters—W-O-R-K—for “R. Munger.” This good son, despite having been yanked out of the college he adored and recalled to the hinterland farm, proved to be a dedicated worker at his new cotton-ginning business. More significantly, the thwarted Latin scholar proved to be a brilliant business manager and, important for this narrative, unusually compassionate and empathetic.
Choosing to work alongside his men, Robert Munger learned the ginning process from the ground up. He began as an understudy to the lowliest among the workers, the “basket boys” who unloaded the cotton bags brought from the fields by mule-drawn carts. Straining under the weight of the bulging bags, these youngsters staggered to the feeder bins where they upended the bags and were rewarded by great mushrooming clouds of debris.
Once the dust settled, burly bin workers rushed in to press down the billowing mounds of cotton by hand, faces averted against the spumes of dust. The basket boys scuttled at their feet, gathering up lint cotton that had spilled on the floor, dumping it by the armload into the feeder boxes. Once the cotton was subdued, the feeder boxes were carried to the huge press box.