Every now and then I pull out crinkled family photographs of
people I never knew or only knew slightly for a brief time. Scalloped-edged black and white photographs
that are fading into sepia tones. Photographs of my great-grandmother, a
great-great aunt, or women whose names are forgotten to time. Women in long
shirtwaist dresses and wide brimmed hats.
Women holding a child by the hand or laughing beside a handsome young
man. Women frozen in a moment- one moment spliced out of an entirety. Women who
lived their lives during a time that was in some ways simpler, but also a time
when women, especially the women of the rural south where my fore-mothers were
born and lived, had very little control over their lives. Those women seldom
went to college, in fact they rarely even graduated high school and they sure
didn’t ponder aspirations of becoming engineers, writers, or scientists.
My maternal
grandmother quit school after sixth grade to work in a cotton mill. My paternal
grandmother never got past third grade. Women of that time and place didn’t
have access to birth control or other reproductive health care, they were
stymied when it came to buying a house or car in their own name, they would
never have dreamed of going off for a weekend with their friends without their
husbands and children. Their political opinions mirrored their husbands’
opinions. They served their husband’s dinner and then they ate. They existed on the periphery of racism and
homophobia and xenophobia. They knew
little of sex when they married. My paternal grandmother told me that she had
two children before she understood how she was getting pregnant. She was
thirteen when she married my eighteen-year-old grandfather. Today an eighteen
-year-old man marrying a thirteen-year-old child is illegal, and rightly
so. Neither of my grandmothers ever
drove a car.
My maternal
grandmother, Ma, died in 2003 after a short illness, She was eighty-four. My
paternal grandmother, Mamaw, the thirteen-year-old bride, passed away just two
years ago. She was ninety-four-years old. I often wish my granddaughters, now
that they are getting older, could talk
to my grandmothers. I wish I could talk
to them. There are so many questions I didn’t ask, so many stories I didn’t
hear, so many memories that left the earth with them. There are no letters,
only a few birthday cards with their scrawled signatures. There are no diaries. There are no videos. There is nothing but memories, and after I die and my
cousins die there will not even be those.
We rail
about the evils of social media and the internet. I know I do, but still I am
an active participate. My social media footprint is large: Twitter, Facebook, a
blog, posts on news comments sections of the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal,
and New York Times. I ponder this: what if my grandmothers had had access to something
like social media? How many of their thoughts and fears and hopes would be
preserved for my granddaughters to read in their adulthood? Imagine going
online and Googling your great-grandmother and reading the thoughts she had of
her children, her life, her fears, and her dreams. Was she scared when war
broke out? How did she feel about becoming a mother for the first time? What
were her favorite meals to prepare? Who were her closet friends? What jokes
made her laugh? What tore at her heart strings? What books did she enjoy reading? All of that is lost to my
generation and the ones before me. I will never have access to any of that
information because it died with my grandmothers and my
great-grandmothers. But many many years after I am
long gone my granddaughters, great-granddaughters, and great-great-granddaughters
will, for better or worse, be able to dig into my social media presence. and in a way get to know me.
They will
discover that I cussed like a sailor at times, that one of my favorite books
was Go Go Girls of the Apocalypse,
that I believed in a woman’s right to her own reproductive decisions, that I thought
everyone should read Voltaire’s Candide
at least once, that I loved the color blue but that most of my clothing consisted
of black, that I found the movie Pulp Fiction
riveting, that I mourned deeply when my father was dying of Alzheimer’s, that
social justice mattered a great deal to me, that I traveled as often as possible,
that music was like oxygen in my life, that I loved my country but didn’t
always agree with my government, that the notion of a supreme god made no sense
to me and I was comfortable with that, that I could be unreasonable and opinionated
and kind and good and shortsighted and stubborn and funny and scared and loving.
In other words, I was a human being. In a hundred years my great-great-granddaughter
could read this very blog entry and think, “We aren’t so different after all.” No,
sweetheart we aren’t. Now go conquer your world.
