Dead Wood

   I was a writer before I was a historian. For as long as I can remember my head has been filled with stories. At first, the stories were about others, about Laura Ingalls and Mary Lennox and Jo March. Growing up in a county where my mother's family had settled in the 1650s, in a town where the church had my ancestors names embossed in the stained glass, in a house built by my great-grandfather where the floor boards bore worm holes from being carried aboard his schooner, I was also surrounded by stories--and by history.

   My grandmother, Cleora, loved to tell stories that were more like snippets, enticing little facts about which she often neglected to provide details:
      "I broke your Pop Pop's ribs when we were horsing around."
     "My brothers once tied two cow's tails together."
     "A crab pinched my finger many years ago, that's why it doesn't bend."

   In 1985, when I was 15, the stories stopped. My grandmother was 85, and died of a massive heart attack. It came as a complete shock to me. As a small child, my substantial imagination led me to occasionally worry that something bad would happen to my parents, but I never, ever thought anything would happen to Mom Mom. I wrote my first "family story" the next year, a class assignment. It was called "Present Past." My  English teacher, John Wood, loved the title: "Get it," he said to the class, "the past is always present to the main character in the story."


   The past has always been present to me. About the same time I started writing in earnest, I became an avid genealogist and by extension, a student of local history. Names and dates were never enough  for me, however, and I was thirsty to know who these people were, these names on my family tree. Occupations, real estate, names of children, military service, much of this I could discover, but I longed for stories the documents did not reveal.

   So, I made them up. I took the anecdotes, the snippets, did some research (often not nearly enough), and imagined the lives of my family members. I did what every writer of historical fiction does (including James Michener, who I am certain based at least one of his Chesapeake characters on my Dorchester County ancestors) and populated my fiction with the people, places and events of real history. My senior English thesis in high school was a novel based on the Eastern Shore in the late 1700s; my history thesis was a history of Dorchester County during the American Revolution.

   Writing history, I learned, was easy. To write historical fiction well, was not. When I went to Washington College in Chestertown--the Eastern Shore writers' mecca--my split personality continued. My history teachers embraced my love of writing (as long as my facts were footnoted), but my creative writing teacher seemed to loathe my family stories.

   "You've got to get rid of the dead wood," he insisted. "Write about what you know."

   For my senior English project I wrote a novel (oh, and a history thesis analyzing the demise of the Federalist Party in Maryland). For a summer and a school year I retreated to my third floor fellowship room in the Victorian-style O'Neill Literary House and wrote about a young girl growing up on Maryland's Eastern Shore, struggling to exorcise the hold that small town traditions and secrets held over her, to escape her family history.

   Dead wood.

   I guess I didn't understand what he was saying. But that WAS what I knew, what I understood, what compelled me. I am still proud of my novel, the last fiction I ever wrote.

   As I see it now, it was half a novel. The novel of a 21 year old. Almost twenty years later, I can envision the second half of the novel, though it may never be written. The main character embraces the place that formed her, accepts the history that has created her, and finds a way to tell her own story. A story where the past is present.

   I remember the day that the resolution of the novel came to me. On a warm early summer day I was sitting in the shade with my nearly one year old son. It was a day just like one I describe at the beginning of my novel, a scene inspired by the idyllic description of Knoxville, Tennessee in James Agee's "A Death in the Family." It was also the day that I decided to put my full-time history career on hold in order to live my own family story.

I'm thinking of a day when I was five and I was swinging high in the tire swing that hung in the maple tree in my backyard as Daddy mowed the grass and Mother planted marigolds in the flower garden behind the house. I remember tilting my head back to see the deep, robin's egg expanse of the sky  through an olive-colored veil of leaves, then looking out beyond our yard at the sea of full-grown corn which spread to the line of pine trees in the distance. I breathed in the scents of cut grass, the dandelions I held in my lap, and the damp, raw smell of earth freshly uncovered in our neighbors' gardens. The hum of the lawnmower reverberated loudly in my ears while a chorus of sparrow chattered to each other above my head, the cicadas occasionally chiming in with their shrill, dried gourd rattle. Almost all afternoon I observed my world from that pleasant, breezy seat.