imagination || craft: The Secret Lives of Things
Eudora Welty, Bernadette Mayer, and my grandmother
In the book One Writer’s Beginnings, Mississippi writer Eudora Welty speaks of being allowed, as a child, to open one of her mother’s dresser drawers and play with a “switch of [the mother’s] own chestnut-colored hair, kept in a heavy bright braid that coiled around like a snake inside a cardboard box.” One day when playing with the braid, the child noticed a small white cardboard box in the same drawer and opens it “to find to my puzzlement and covetousness two polished buffalo nickel, embedded in white cotton.” Welty writes, “I rushed with this opened box to my mother and asked if I could run out and spend the nickels,” to which her mother “exclaimed [‘No!’] in a most passionate way.”
Her mother then reveals that before Welty was born, there had been another baby:
[S]he sat down, drew me to her, and told me that I had had a little brother who had come before I did, and who had died as a baby before I was born. And these two nickels that I’d wanted to claim as my find were his. They had lain on his eyelids, for a purpose untold and unimaginable.
Young Eudora had recently been trying to get her mother to tell her where babies come from, but, she notes, “She’d told me the wrong secret— not how babies could come but how they could die . . .” Welty goes on to observe, “The future story writer in the child I was must have taken unconscious note and stored it away then: one secret is liable to be revealed in the place of another that is hard to tell, and the substitute secret when nakedly exposed is often the more appalling.”
I thought of this passage recently when my mother and I went to our family’s hometown in North Carolina for the afternoon to help my uncle pare down some of my late grandmother’s possessions. In looking through boxes of odds and ends from my grandmother’s closet shelf, we found a white cardboard jewelry box that had nestled on a piece of cotton one small white button.
I doubt that the button was the key to some now-forgotten secret (though I suppose it could be). But I was struck by the sheer inscrutability of the one small white button on cotton in a white box.
In some ways, going through some of my grandmother’s possessions made me feel close to her for the afternoon. I noticed that, like me, she tended to hold onto piquant little objects that had no real purpose anymore. In other ways, of course, looking at these things led me to think of her utter absence and our inability to ask her about any of it. For some of the objects, such as a white smock with red cloth hearts sewn on it, there was a story one of us could remember. (My mother said that her mother had had a seamstress in town make the costume when my mother played the Knave of Hearts in a local production of Alice in Wonderland.) Still others, like a cache of letters my grandmother sent my grandfather during the war, had a meaning we could piece together from the available evidence, though that meaning would be missing all the context and emotion our now-gone family members would have brought to them.
Here are a couple writing exercise ideas from the poet Bernadette Mayer’s Writing Experiments, which you can find here. You could write these as poems, prose poems, or flash memoir.
Turn a list of the objects that have something to do with a person who has died into a poem or poem form, in homage to that person.
Work with a number of objects, moving them around on a field or
surface-describe their shifting relationships, resonances, associations. Or, write a series of poems that have only to do with what you see in the place where you most often write. Or, write a poem in each room of your house or apartment. Experiment with doing this in the home you grew up in, if possible.