by Unknown
It didn’t take her long to find the journals, in a pair of boxes marked with Grampa’s neat scrawl.
She carried them down to the office, pulled one out, and opened it, hands trembling with excitement. It took her some time to figure out Grampa’s notations, but once she did she was struck by the logic of his system. He listed every photo by roll number, but provided as well location, subject, aperture, shutter speed, and any special notes on the image capture or development: “Pushed film speed to 400,” “Extra burn to deepen shadows,” “Darken skies for whole shoot.”
With the journal in her lap, she returned to the rolls she’d looked at the previous day, matching the entries to photos. When she found duplicates of images she especially liked, she set them aside to frame, either for herself or for her cousins.
Late that day, she noticed that some photos weren’t where they were supposed to be. She wondered if they were missing, or had merely been missorted.
oOo
They buried Grampa the next day, the service and reception leaving Jessie no time to go through the boxes. But the morning after, she was back at it. She worked well into the night, slept a few hours, and worked another full day. When at last she finished, she had a list of several shoots mentioned in the journal but absent from the boxes.
That night at dinner, she asked Nana if she knew why some photos might be missing from the collection.
“No,” Nana said, spooning potato salad onto her plate. “I can’t imagine why. Dan never threw anything away. Are you sure you didn’t miss them?”
“I’m sure. We’re missing five days in all. I searched everywhere in the office.”
Nana had reached for the salad bowl, but she stopped now, staring at Jessie. “From when, exactly?”
“The three I remember were from August and September 1962. And two others were from a couple of years before that. 1960, I think.”
“Well, no wonder,” Jessie’s mother said. “You’re talking about pictures from more than fifty years ago. There are bound to be a few missing.”
Nana nodded, picking up the salad tongs and serving herself. “Patty’s right. A lot can happen in fifty years.” But she didn’t look Jessie in the eye as she said this, and though it might have been a trick of the light, Jessie thought her grandmother’s cheeks lost some of their color.
She said no more about the photos at dinner, but that night an idea came to her, one she thought her grandfather would have liked.
“Did you mean it when you said that Grampa’s equipment is mine if I want it?” she asked Nana over breakfast the next morning.
“Of course,” Nana said. “Your Grampa was always so proud that you’d followed him into the business. There’s no one else he’d rather have using all that stuff.”
“Even the camera?”
Nana’s eyebrows went up. “Well, yes. But I didn’t think you’d want that old thing, with all those fancy new cameras y’all use today.”
“Are you kidding? It’s a treasure, not to mention a collector’s item.”
Nana beamed, her eyes welling. “Then it’s yours, sweetie. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”
Jessie took a breath, wondering how her grandmother would respond to what she intended to say next. “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to use the camera today. Several of the shoots missing from the boxes were done right here in town. I was thinking that I might take his journal with me and try to recreate them. If you don’t mind, that is.”
“Why should I mind?” Nana asked, with what sounded like genuine enthusiasm. “That’s a lovely idea. If there’s no film in the camera, there should be a few rolls in Grampa’s desk. He always kept them in the top right drawer.”
The camera was empty, but as Nana said, there were several rolls of Kodak black and white film in that top drawer, and none of them expired for at least another year. Jessie grabbed two rolls, loaded one, and stuck the other in her pocket. She also retrieved her grandfather’s light meter from the desk.
She drove into town, parked, and walked to the square, the journal in her camera bag, the light meter in hand, and the camera hanging around her neck.
She couldn’t have asked for a better day. A few passing storms during the night had taken the edge off the heat and cleared away the usual summer haze. A light wind blew, and plump, cottony clouds dotted a deep blue sky. She halted in the center of the square, retrieved the journal, and read the first entry.
“Roll 147, ASA 200. #1, Stuart Park. F8, 1/125.”
She laughed at the coincidence. She was in the middle of Stuart Park, facing the statue. Towering oaks shaded much of the grass, and if she composed the shot carefully enough, she could include not only the statue and trees, but also the façade of the courthouse behind it. She tucked the journal back into her bag and began her shoot.
Grampa exposed only two rolls that day in 1962. With her digital camera, Jessie could have captured as many images in fifteen minutes. But she slowed down her usual process, composing and setting her exposures with exquisite care, as he would have. His descriptions of subject matter were vague–“Courthouse, north side, and passerby,” “Davis Plaque,” “Courthouse steps and group”–which meant that Jessie had to decide for herself how best to frame each shot. It was good practice; it forced her to be creative, to push herself beyond the simple point and click she resorted to at weddings and corporate picnics. She couldn’t remember the last time she had enjoyed a shoot so much.
She returned to Nana’s house several hours later, feeling almost giddy with anticipation. After grabbing a quick bite to eat, she went down to the darkroom Grampa had constructed in the basement. As soon as she entered, the smell hit her: darkroom chemicals; pungent, acid, like vinegar on steroids, and yet as welcome as the memory of Grampa’s cologne.
Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder if she would find enough supplies there to develop the rolls she shot. She needn’t have worried. Grampa had left her ample amounts of developer and fixer, and more than enough paper for her prints.
It had been years since she’d last developed her own film, but she could hear Grampa’s voice in her head, walking her through each step. As always, loading the film onto reels for processing took forever. Mixing her chemicals, on the other hand, came as naturally as making her morning coffee. Eventually, after perhaps two hours, she had her negatives hung for drying. She left the darkroom and climbed the stairs to the kitchen.
The sun had set, though the last light of day still silvered the windows. The kitchen smelled of roasted meat, and the dishwasher hummed and sloshed. Nana sat at the table working on the crossword from that day’s paper. She turned at the sound of Jessie’s footsteps.
“You’re still up,” she said, sounding surprised. “Your mom and I assumed you’d gone to bed before dinner. We would have called you.”
“It’s all right. I wasn’t hungry. I’ve been down in the darkroom.”
“All this time? You must be starved, you poor thing.” She set the paper aside and stood. “Let me fix you some food.”
“I can get it.”
“Nonsense. You rest.” She paused beside Jessie, inhaled and smiled. “That brings back memories. Dan would come up from that darkroom smelling just like you do now.” She swallowed, dabbed at her eyes with a shaking hand.
Jessie put her arms around her.
“He’d like that you were using all his things,” Nana said, sniffling. “He didn’t get to do much these last few months.”
“Well, he left it all set up for me. The chemicals and paper–it was all there.”
Nana pulled away and swiped at her eyes again. “Good. Then use them all up. No sense letting them go to waste.”
She warmed up some pork and green beans, and then sat while Jessie ate. They talked about trifles: what a lovely day it had been, how much new construction there was in the neighborhoods around town, where Nana liked to shop now that the old supermarket had been torn down. It wasn’t until Jessie had
gotten up to rinse her plate that she raised once more the matter of the missing prints.
“Is there anywhere else Grampa might have stored photos?” she asked.
“Anywhere else? I thought you found all those boxes in his office closet.”
“I found the boxes, but I still haven’t found those missing ones.”
Nana’s expression darkened. “Not this again.”
“I thought maybe he had missorted them,” Jessie said. “But I’ve been through everything in that closet and they’re not there. So then I thought—”
“That’s where he kept all his pictures!” her grandmother said, sounding so cross it actually frightened Jessie. “If they’re not there, then they don’t exist!”
“But he mentions them in the journal, and he never would have thrown any photos away.”
“Is that right?” Nana asked, eyes blazing in the dim light of the kitchen. “So now you think you knew my husband better’n I did?”
Jessie blinked. “No! I never—”
“Those pictures are gone!” She looked away, a frown creasing her brow. “Or they never were there in the first place. Whatever the case, I don’t want to hear about them again. You understand me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jessie said. She hadn’t “ma’am-ed” her grandmother in ten years, but at that moment, she couldn’t imagine addressing her any other way. “I’m going to check on my prints from today’s shoot.”
She crossed to the cellar stairs.
“Jessie, honey, wait.”
Jessie turned to face her.
“I’m sorry. This is all …” She shrugged. “I miss him, is all. It’s hard sometimes.”
“I know.” Jessie returned to the table and gave Nana a quick hug. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“All right. Good night, sweetie. I love you.”
Jessie descended the stairway once more, her thoughts churning. She had been insensitive, she realized, bugging her grandmother about something as unimportant as a few missing photos so soon after Grampa’s death. It was selfish of her. Yes, Nana’s reaction had been strange, overwrought. But she and Grampa had been married for over fifty years. Contemplating life without him must have terrified her. Jessie wouldn’t mention the photos or his camera to her again.
She stepped back into the darkroom, and tried to put their exchange out of her mind, a task made easier by her eagerness to see how the photos had turned out. She took down the negatives, gave them a cursory examination to make sure the exposures looked right, and switched on the enlarger.
Making prints had always been her favorite part of this process. It was like tasting a meal after taking all day to prepare it. She mixed more solutions, set up her trays, fixed the first negative in the carrier, and focused the image.
She noticed immediately that the photo appeared lighter than she remembered the scene being, and she wondered if she had overexposed it. She tried to compensate for this in the developing process, but only when she finally rinsed the finished print did she realize that the exposure wasn’t the problem.
The image simply looked wrong.
It was the same scene: Stuart Park, the statue and oak trees, with the courthouse façade in the background.
But there was too much sky. The trees were smaller than they should have been; significantly smaller. The statue looked the same, as did the building in the distance, but this was not at all the park she had seen earlier in the day.
Puzzled, she hung this print to dry and moved on to the next one, a photo of Davis Hall from the street. But as she focused the lens for this second exposure, eyeing the negative through the loupe, she saw that this one wasn’t right either. The people she could make out in the negative looked nothing like those she had seen that day in the square.
She made the print, her work sloppier this time, more rushed. She didn’t care. Who were those people? Who dressed like that anymore? Who wore their hair that way? Several of the men wore dark suits and thin dark ties; others were in trousers and short sleeved dress shirts. But she couldn’t find anyone in jeans or shorts. And every woman she saw was wearing a dress or skirt.
Then Jessie noticed the cars, and her knees buckled. She braced herself on the counter to keep from falling to the floor, but her heart labored in her chest and her breath came shallow and quick.
The cars.
She might as well have been looking at a still from a movie set. Every car in the photo had that clunky look of autos from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. A few had long, sharp fins on the rear. Most were more contoured, with the round, flat headlights that gave cars of that era an aspect of wide-eyed innocence. The pickups–all of them–had domed hoods, flat grills, and low beds. They looked nothing like the pickups she had seen driving to and from town.
Had one of those antique car clubs been in Berry’s Bluff today? Surely she would have noticed if every car on the street had been vintage instead of modern. Unless her work with the camera had so absorbed her that she was oblivious to everything around her.
She hunched over the carrier and centered the third image on the strip of negatives, and doing even that much made her breath catch. She glanced at the journal, remembering this shot from earlier in the day. She had wondered about it: The north face of the courthouse was essentially solid brick, except for a pair of metal doors that looked like they hadn’t been used in years. It had seemed an oddly prosaic subject for her grandfather, who never wasted a photo.
The image she pulled from the fixer bath, however, was anything but prosaic. Looking at it, she felt her stomach knot.
An African-American man stood by the building, gazing toward the camera, wary and ill at ease. He wore a suit jacket and tie, a beat up pork pie hat. And above him, mounted in between those same metal doors, which in the photo stood open, hung a sign reading, “Colored only.”
“What the hell?” she whispered in the red light of the darkroom.
Obviously that hadn’t been there today. The film had to have been previously exposed. What other explanation made any sense? But fifty years ago? No film, not even professional quality black and white, lasted so long. It would have long since fogged. These images were as sharp and clear as Jessie would have expected from new exposures.
She picked up the canister from which she had extracted the film. She’d checked the expiration date on the box earlier in the day, but maybe she had misread this one. The canister itself bore no date, but she had seen old rolls of film, and had used film cameras for half her life. This canister was new, made of black plastic and bright yellow metal. Film from the early 60s didn’t look like this.
What the hell?
She rushed the rest of her developing, but she no longer cared about the quality of the prints. She just wanted to see what else was on the roll.
Images of the statue and the Davis Building plaque appeared much as she expected they would, and yet not entirely. The perspective on the statue wasn’t quite as she remembered; the plaque had been in dappled sunlight when she took the photo, and yet in the image the sunlight was complete, without any shadow at all.
Because the trees weren’t as tall then.
Jessie shook her head at the thought. None of this made any sense.
On the second roll of film, she found more pictures of that north side of the courthouse, each one with different groups or individuals standing outside the “Colored only” restrooms or walking by the building. Some showed only African-American men, women, and children; in others whites and African-Americans walked side-by-side. And yet she could see from their facial expressions, particularly those of the white pedestrians, that proximity didn’t breed intimacy. The two races, it seemed, moved in different though adjacent worlds.
But in all of them, the clothes of those on the sidewalk and street were appropriate to another era, just like the cars in the background.
The last photo on that second roll had been the hardest to recreate. “Courthouse steps and group.” She hadn’t known to what group
Grampa referred, so she had snapped a shot of the steps with foot traffic in front of it. Using a slow shutter speed and narrow aperture, and bracing the camera on a parking meter, she had hoped to blur the people while keeping the stairway in clear focus. She had looked forward to seeing the resulting image.
But this photo was nothing like what she shot. Nothing at all.
The steps of the building were crowded with a group of people, obviously posing for the photo. There were perhaps thirty of them, men in suits and ties, women in fine dresses and white gloves, all of them smiling. They stood with their bodies angled toward the center of the stairway, those on the right turned slightly to the left, those on the left facing right. Every person in the photo was white.
But that wasn’t what drew the short, sharp breath from Jessie.
On the second step from the bottom, a bit to the right of center, stood Nana. Jessie grabbed the loupe to look more closely, but she was sure. She had seen plenty of photos of her grandmother as a young woman. The loose curls of her light brown hair, the round face, wide-set eyes, and bow-shaped mouth: There was no mistaking her.
Jessie straightened, grabbing hold of the still-wet print, fully intending to go upstairs and ask her grandmother about the image. Who were these people, and what was she doing with them? But she stopped herself, remembering Nana’s cross words in the kitchen. Only a short while before, Jessie had chided herself for forgetting how fragile her grandmother was right now. The last thing Nana needed were more questions about Grampa’s photos.
And who else could have taken this one? Jessie hadn’t been alive when it was shot. Somehow, these old images had found their way onto new rolls of film. Perhaps her grandfather hadn’t lost the missing photos. Maybe he had given them away, and before doing so he had captured images of the photos themselves. It wasn’t the best technique; if he still had the negatives he should have printed new ones. But it was possible that he had been unable to find the negatives and so had resorted to this.