Research: Journals

The Journal

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25.1

Priscilla Long

Archeology of Childhood

1. Introduction

The research reported here is directed toward the study of the remains of a human childhood that occurred on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The site is situated on the Chester River at Comegy’s Bight, a mile-wide bend of the river. The Chester River is the ancestral village site of the Algonquin-speaking Wicomiss Indians, who were exterminated by English colonists in the Wicomiss War of 1669. The river is a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States—in geologic terms, the drowned ancestral valley of the Susquehanna River.

The house of the childhood under study—that of “twin” or “Poky”—stands at the end of a deeply rutted and presently impassable dirt road that wends for a mile through greenbriar tangled woods, the marsh, abandoned pastures. It was occupied ca. 50 B.P.

The researcher and collaborators returned to the site on foot on the afternoon of December 26, 1998, tramping over the snow tracks of red fox and white-tailed deer. Wind rattled sweetgum husks high in the sweetgum trees. At the end of the road, the farmhouse came into view. It was found to be overgrown and swallowed up by Virginia creeper. There was a rusted windmill. Sheds. Caved-in barns. Blackberry vines tangled in the doorway of the milkhouse. There was a wooden hut with a cement floor, “the oldest house on the Eastern Shore,” at one time inhabited by African slaves.

2. Artifactual Data

Grackles. Black snakes. The Attic.
Calf-bucket nipple.
Rubber farm boot.
Yellowjackets.
Greenbriar. Barbed wire.
Ashes and bones, my sister Susie’s bones.

3. Structural Remains

Woody vines shutter the rooms of childhood. The brick fireplace in the kitchen was built in slavery days. The dining room—cracked linoleum, fireplace, crumbling yellow walls.
     We go up the creaking stairs to the landing. There is the newel post we once hung upon. There is the landing window, looking out on the long dirt lane. We—the Three Big Kids and Susie—waited there on the landing for our baby sister to come home. At the head of the stairs, the bathroom—rusty bathtub, rusty sink, rusty toilet, the ten-foot black snake in the toilet that made Grandma scream.
     Virginia creeper creeps into the house, creeps along the windowsills, creeps down to the floor and along the floorboards.
     Dark tiny rooms. Andy’s room, Mummy and Daddy’s room, Lizard’s room. The attic, the domain of the twins Pammy and Poky with their whispers and dolls.
     When little Lizard came, Susie, age six, began to teach her to speak. It took her two years of daily work, but at last she succeeded.
     Susie, the one without a room, the one without a twin, the one now dead.

4. Susie: The Third Twin

She lies in the darkness, away from the voices. She is a white form, covered in a white sheet. Voices reach her, whispering in the dark. She whispers to the night, to the phantom that is her twin. The twins whisper about her whispering. Whispering mingles with whispering like mist curling above the river at night, mingling with the ghost shapes of swans. Silence is Susie’s music. Her sadness. Silence white as her white bones.

5. Locality: The Story of Miss Bell

Chestertown Elementary School was the white school. The white school was a brick building, dark inside, with classrooms and cloakrooms and wide hallways with narrow board floors. Classrooms with blackboards and chalk and high windows and rows of iron-legged desks with wooden desktops. The desktops were hinged to lift like lids to a compartment for tablets and pencils and pencil cases.

When Pammy and Poky first moved to Chestertown and entered the second grade, all the other children crowded around them because they were the only twins. They felt pleased to be so popular, but they were shy and it wasn’t long before interest fell off.

Miss Bell was old and she had tight gray curls. Miss Bell called the twins Twin. Miss Bell taught that the slave masters were kind to the slaves. She taught that the slaves would not have been able to care for themselves but for the kindness of the slave masters.

6. Structural Remains

Gutter. Heat vent.
Bulk tank, barn, gate.
Windmill. Water trough.
Tool shed. Machine shed.
Tractor, Conveyor, Rust.
Rusty Pipes. Rust.

7. Primary Phase I: Their Happiness

We had everything we wanted on the farm—ink made of inkberries growing in great droops off the inkberry bush; and 100 cows, 60 milking, the Holsteins with their big udder-bags that gave great buckets of milk and the Guernseys with their small udder-bags that yellowed the milk with buttermilk; and soft babydolls with porcelain heads you could tilt backwards to make them say “Whaaaa”; and a leaky rowboat with a bucket to bail it out; and books with yellow buckrum covers with The Five Little Peppers embossed on the front; and Grandma-stitched black and yellow gingham dresses with yellow piping on puff sleeves; and fields of yellow flowers—buttercups and ragweed and dandelion and columbine; and our own clubhouse made out of an old chickenhouse; and chocolate fudge cake with chocolate pudding glistening inside—Tizzy Lish Cake.

8. Cultural Items Not Directly Associated with Life Sustaining or Economic Pursuits

The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.
Sears Roebuck catalog.
“Jesus loves me, this I know.”
Montgomery Ward catalog.
Monopoly.
Things-To-Do Closet.
Salt-Water Taffy.
Cherry Ames: Student Nurse.
Oliver Twist.
“Old Black Joe.”

9. Locality: The Lady at the End of the Lane

Pammy and Poky are in the Third Grade and the class is seeing who can sell the most magazine subscriptions. The pupil who sells the most will get a prize. Poky asks her mother if they can buy a subscription. Her mother says don’t be ridiculous they are too poor for such things. Then she tells the twins they are not allowed to go to Johnsontown to sell subscriptions. Johnsontown is the black people’s village at the end of the lane. The mother says the people in Johnsontown can’t afford it any more than we can.
     One Saturday after her barnwork is done, Poky takes her folder, sneaks out of the house, and walks down the lane to Johnsontown. At the end of the lane she looks at the neat wooden houses and decides to go to the one that doesn’t have a dog. She walks up to the side door and knocks. A kindly looking black lady in a cotton housedress comes to the door.
     Poky looks up at her. “Would you like to buy a magazine subscription?”
     “Why come in, chile, lemme see what you got,” the lady says.
     She smiles and Poky enters the house. The living room is pretty much like theirs, except that it is very clean. It even has the same linoleum on the floor, red flowers with swirling green leaves.
     Poky opens her folder and starts telling the lady about the magazines. Vogue, Ladies’ Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, House and Garden.
     The lady decides to try House and Garden. Poky carefully writes her name and address in the space. Then the lady asks how much it will cost. Poky looks on the chart and tells her.
     Then she looks up.
     The lady is blinking and her mouth is quivering. “Oh my,” she says. “Oh my.”
     Poky doesn’t know what to do. Finally the lady wipes her eyes and goes to her pocketbook. She fumbles in it and takes out some money. As Poky takes the money she can feel the lady’s hand trembling.
     “Thank you,” Poky says.
     Then the lady asks, “How soon do it come, chile?”
     Poky looks at her chart. “In five months,” she says.
     “Five months?” The lady is still blinking and now her face is quivering all over. Poky is afraid she will burst into tears.
     “Thank you,” Poky says politely, and goes out the door.
     Instead of going to the next house on Johnsontown Road, she sneaks back down the lane, past Neil Lindsey’s pig, past the far cow pasture, past the marsh croaking with frogs, past the near cow pasture, and back to the farmhouse. She tells no one what she has done, not even Pammy.

10. Faunal Remains

Box turtle, white-tailed deer.
Dogs: Zeppy, Laddie, Peggy, Bo, Robbie, Meg, Princess; Lady, Prince.
Thumper the cat.
Barn cats: William Shakespeare, Louisa May Alcott, Oliver Twist, et al.
Pussae (Latin for Puss).
Pammy’s white mice.
Mumbo the elephant.
Pammy’s sheep*.

* Note on Pammy’s sheep: Pammy owned seven sheep, and they grazed with the cows and identified as cows. At the Kent County Fair, these seven sheep remained perfectly indifferent to other sheep, but they bleated pathetically at the sight of any cow.

11. Way of Life

You get up in the dark and you pull on shorts and a tee shirt and go out barefoot into shadows and morning stars. You unchain Robbie and Robbie wags his tail for joy. You go through the gate into the front field, past the row of dark cedars, through the back gate into the back field. The herd is there, shadows lying down. You give the command and Robbie begins to herd. One hundred cows rise to their feet to begin the procession to the barn. They will not be hurried and you must not hurry them. Their udders are swollen with milk. Night recedes. Light silhouettes the horizon. You and Robbie and the herd reach the barn and your father is there. You head each cow into its stanchion, and feed each cow a scoop of grain. The milking begins.

12. Effigy of the Father

Winslow Long is all bone, sinew, and gnarl. Weather has rusted his scalp and his thinning hair to the colors of a woodthrush. He goes about hatless and when he speaks he strokes his brow with the stub-fingers of a man who has worked the fields his whole life. He is a man of few words and strong values. He abominates television. He is friend to yellow finches, black snakes, crickets. He lacks certain experiences common to American life: He does not “go shopping.” He wears baggy brown pants and plaid flannel shirts that may be 10 or 20 years old. He is beekeeper, bookkeeper, dairyman, an erudite amateur botanist. He is never without Prince, the largest and youngest in a long line of friendly German Shepherds. Recently, he was appointed Conservator to a large marsh. “I went,” he wrote to one of his daughters, “and I found a paradise.”

13. Photograph of the Site

A dirt lane stretches through woods of towering trees—sweetgum, persimmon, oak, hickory. Greenbriars tangle among the trunks, and crows squawk high in the branches. A woodthrush startles in the underbrush. Here is a pasture and here are two white-tailed deer bounding away. Honeysuckle tangles on a chickenwire fence, a redwinged blackbird clucks on a fencepost. Yellowjackets buzz in the ditch. Cow fields. Daddy’s row of white beehives. The herd is grazing—Holsteins, Guernseys, Jerseys—and Virginia, the draft horse that the twins ride, and Pammy’s seven sheep. Soon you reach the milking barn, the calf barn, the machine shed, the windmill, the creek. You reach the old farmhouse, the din of angry shouting.

14. Concentration of Fire-Cracked Rocks

Anger burns the way the sun burns. The sun burns your arms and you walk down the lane burning with shame. Between the mother and the father, anger smolders and smokes and bursts into flame. This is the day that the Lord hath made. This is the day that anger hath made. This is the firestorm. This is the rage that burns childhood down to a hot crisp.
     The twins walk through fire burning with shame.
     The brother Andy walks through fire burning with shame.
     Susie walks through fire burning with shame.
     The lives of the children smoke like black candles.
     Susie holds the little one’s hand.
     But Susie walks alone, and she burns with shame.
     The fire burns bright and hot, and the children walk in its coals, they smoke in its flames, they burn in its black furnace, they smoke and burn in the flame that made them.

15. Primary Phase 2

Then it was summer. We took off our shoes. On the first day
after school let out, I went into the hot sun and walked barefoot in the grass. I went into the field and squished my toes in new cowshit. I walked down along the fence, along the row of red cedars, through the gate to the back field all the way to the far creek and sat at the edge of the creek. I watched the creek ripple slow and wide and brown in the hot sun. A dragonfly all green and purple hovered in a grass hummock. A low tree I didn’t know the name of dipped its branch into the water. A kingfisher was fishing from that tree. The kingfisher dived into the creek with a splash and flew up to his branch with a silver fish in his beak. He swallowed the fish and I watched him perch there still as a decoy until he dove again with another splash. I listened to the hum of bugs and felt the hot sun on my legs and I got to thinking how glad I was that school was out and I didn’t have to go back to the fourth grade ever again, I didn’t have to look up to Miss Russell’s glaring pasty face or listen to her scolding me for not taking a bath or for not telling the truth, and I didn’t have to watch her drag Henry by his hair to the front of the classroom. That made me feel light and happy in the sunlight, and I picked up a stick I saw lying there and started sweeping the stick back and forth in the brown water just to make the water ripple more. The sky was white and hot and I sat for a long time and a reverent feeling came over me as if I was in some kind of chapel or something with a vault of hot sun and white sky and dragonflies and kingfishers and I lay down then in the hot sun and listened to the quiet which made a hot humming sound. The marsh grass tickled my bare legs and I opened my eyes to the other shore where trees were dipping their branches into the water and I wondered what kind of trees they were and I guessed I would never know unless I asked Daddy because Daddy knew the names of the trees, but I didn’t want to ask Daddy so I just lay there in the hot sun and I guess I fell asleep because when I opened my eyes there was a snake in the water, maybe a water moccasin Pammy would know because Pammy knew all about snakes and snails and birds because Pammy was going to be a scientist and she collected birdnests and snake skins and bones and mice that reproduced into more mice. I felt happy to be Pammy’s twin, happy to lie there in the sun, so happy, like I was in paradise. I stayed there until it started getting cool. The sun sank. The afternoon light turned to copper and red and gold. Then I got up. I went back along the row of red cedars, through the front gate into the front yard. I went into the farmhouse, just in time for supper.

16. The Clubhouse

The gray wooden two-stall outbuilding called the chickenhouse was lost between the farmhouse and the milking barn. Daddy kept calves in the chickenhouse for a while but it was really not very satisfactory, too far from the other calves, very inconvenient. From the time of the calves living there, manure in the stalls had mounted to two or three feet (they had put clean straw on top of the old bedding to make it warm for the animals). Four feet above the floor of the front room, chicken roosts, two by fours, spanned one stall, a foot between them. The Three Big Kids—Andy, Pammy, and Poky—asked Daddy if they could make the chickenhouse into a clubhouse. Daddy said yes. He told them where to put the manure. For two weeks the Three Big Kids shoveled out the manure. They got it all cleaned out and soon they opened a museum. The roosts served as display racks for bird nests, special rocks and stones, a feather, a rusted machine part that the resident archeologist Pammy had yet to classify. They put a bucket at the door for admission. The clubhouse/museum opened for business. Susie was the first patron. She could not afford the price of admission and was therefore not admitted.
Daddy waited until the clubhouse fell into desuetude. Then he bought 50 chickens.

17. Effigy of Neil Lindsey

A huge, solid, umber man with a wide face and clipped frizzy hair, he worked as a waterman in the winter and as a field hand in the summer. He wore field attire, gray overalls with a square-cut bib, buckles tarnished to a dim gray metal, and a gray teeshirt with a frayed neckband—he looked like a preacher or a burnt-umber Hercules. He was by nature a gregarious and kindly man. He sat on the tractor with his thick brown hands steady on the steering wheel, looking back to make sure the children were safe in the hay wagon before he shifted into first and released the clutch. In the hot sun, the tractor chugged the haywagon out to the hayfield where hay bales stretched out in long rows. The crew—Neil Lindsey, Buck Washington, Pammy, Poky, and the father—worked all day bringing in the hay. They said little. They took turns driving and pitching and arranging the load. When the sun sank to a red ball on the horizon, they brought the last load in, and Neil and Buck sang—deep and low, back and forth, a chant or moan about work and trouble and tired bones and being in the Lord’s hands.

18. The Story of the Cow

The father bought a cow at an auction in Western Maryland and drove it in the truck through Baltimore where he got caught at every red light. He drove the truck down to Annapolis and across the wide curve of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and onto the Eastern Shore. He drove through Galena where the twins had gone to first grade and he drove past Ravenswood where he had worked until it became a truck farm and where the Three Big Kids had seen him rolling around in the dust with a bad man. He drove on toward Chestertown with his new cow. He crossed the Chester River on the Chester River Bridge and took a left and drove past the old brick river houses with their secret tunnels and hidden rooms, the last stop on the underground railroad before you got to the Mason Dixon line a few miles to the north. He took another left and drove with his new cow seven miles down Quaker Neck Road past Lee’s Gas Station, past the turn to Quaker Neck Wharf. He turned onto Johnsontown Road and then turned right and drove down the long dirt lane. When he got home he backed up the truck to the loading dock and went around to unload the cow.
The cow was not there.
The next day it came out in the Baltimore Sun that a large Holstein cow had attended mass at a Baltimore cathedral. There was a picture of the cow on the front page of the Metropolitan Section, entering the barn-like sanctuary, looking puzzled.

19. Effigy of Susanne

Susie was fair with silk hair and eyes blue as a heron’s wing. She grew tall as Aunt Pat with wide cheekbones, a Roman nose, and a high forehead. Like Queen Nefertiti she had a long graceful neck. She was extravagantly beautiful, with pale, rose-tinted cheeks and a wide mouth and even ivory-colored teeth, unique forensic teeth.
In November 1986, two deer hunters in a greenbriar-thick wood mistook her bones for the white belly of a deer. Then they saw their mistake and went to get the sheriff.
She played recorder with her long fingers. She painted and taught kindergarten and taught English to Cambodian refugees. She married the Love of her Life, traveled to Africa and Morocco, got divorced, became deranged, thick, schizophrenic, dull. She disappeared.

Last words: How is your writing going?

Words on a postcard:

July 18, 1967. Dear Poky, How are you? Found a nice Haiku.
The springtime sea:
                    all day long up-and-down,
                    up-and-down gently.
                                             —Buson
               Please write soon. Love Susie

20. Life on the Site in Historical Time

My mother and father decided to go and live in Rock Hall. My mother went to work in Baltimore. I grew up and moved to Boston and got a job as a printer. I was always at work and I worked twice as hard as the other printers. I missed the cud and breath of cows and was homesick for it. To be separated from my father, from our big barn, from my doll, from the garden I weeded, from the hay in the loft, from molasses milk, from Neil singing the blues, from the hot dust on our dirt road, from the nocturnal whispers of my twin gave me a pain. I went nowhere. How should I have gone anywhere? I could barely drag myself along under the burden of my memories.

21. Conclusion

We leave the site through the winter woods. It is late afternoon. Tarnished copper light. Crows flash black through the trees beside the dirt lane. The sun drops and the trees turn gray as an old barn. Ruts darken. Puddles turn to silver. Night comes on.
We arrive at the car, parked at the end of the lane. We get in. We drive away. Childhood lies behind us, remote, lost in the honking of wild geese, in ruins.