Auntie Alice

Christmas is a season for telling family stories. Tomorrow I'll travel to another state to visit my sweetie's family, and I know for certain I'll hear his family stories.

On Saturday I found myself telling him about my great-aunt, Alice Margaret Schuyler Lighthall. I've been thinking of telling some of her story for years, but I'm not sure which part or where to begin.

Every year at Christmas, she and my grandmother (her sister) would arrive at our house, Auntie Alice from Westmount, an English-speaking city now within Montreal, and Gran from Springfield, MA. This picture would have been one of their last visits with us. Auntie Alice is reading, Granny is contemplating the prospect of a cup of tea, I'd guess.

Where do I begin? Auntie Alice was born in 1891 and lived to two months shy of 100. She told me once she didn't want to live to be 100, and so she didn't. She was mentally sharp until the end. I visited her a month before she died, so I can attest to this.

Here are some of the pieces of her life:

Auntie Alice wanted to go to McGill to study law, but her father didn't want any "bluestockings" in the family.

In 1916, she joined the St. John's Voluntary Aid Detachment, which took her briefly to England and then on to General Hospital No. 5 in Rouen, France, where she was a nurse through to the end of WWI. I have a copy of her journal from those two years. It doesn't reveal much of her feelings, as she was an intensely private person and my mother says she was afraid her parents would be too inquisitive. The journal includes photocopies of watercolors she painted while there (though she didn't actually have much time to paint). Here are a couple:

(Chateau near Petit Couronne, Rouen and No. 5 British General Hospital, Rouen. Wards 19 and 20 and air raid trenches.)

She was instrumental in the Canadian Guild of Crafts, started by her mother. According to the Guild website, this organization "was founded in 1906 in an effort to conserve, encourage and promote Inuit art, Amerindien art and fine crafts of Canada." I was present in about 1983 when she was honored by the Guild of Crafts for her lifetime of dedication.

Because of her work with the Guild of Crafts and other organizations, she was appointed to the Order of Canada.

Auntie Alice was a published poet and was the president of the Poetry Group of Montreal in the 1960s, according to an article in the Westmount Examiner in 2008.

She wrote a Christmas pageant set in France, which had Druids as well as Christians in it.

She was fascinated by archaeology and civilization. She was one of the founders of the Westmount Historical Association, and it was due to Auntie Alice that the Hurtubise House was saved from demolition in 1955. This house was built in 1739 and is now owned by the Canadian Heritage of Quebec.

She listened, really listened, to children.

Auntie Alice spent much of her time reading. At her old house in Westmount, she had stacks of books by her easy chair, sporting flags of bookmarks throughout. In her later years, she'd sometimes fall asleep at our house while reading a massive tome, woken only by the clunk of the book on the floor.

She was funny and smart, as well as tremendously dignified. She favored swoopy dresses with multiple folds and patterned scarves. I believe she made the dresses. When she arrived at Christmas, she was festooned with small tote bags.

She lived with her parents until they died. Auntie Alice never married. Because she was the last of her generation in Montreal, her cellar was full of the belongings of relatives who had died. It was an amazing treasure trove! There were fourteen trunks down there at one point. Once I was rummaging around down there (with her permission), and opened a small box to find a set of false teeth. I guess you don't just throw those away.

If you had breakfast at her house, you had to be prepared to have a boiled egg that was closer to raw than cooked. She must have just waved it over the boiling water and called it done. Because we were expected to be polite, we ate everything we were served, no matter what. I put lots of salt and pepper on my raw egg.

We loved her dearly.

P.S. I know my family, especially my mother, will have plenty of comments to add! Suggestions on where to begin?

Spiders

I know, you're wondering when this blog will get back to storytelling. Have patience and read on. I just had to post a couple of pictures of the spider on my neighbor's wall. It may be the largest arachnid I've ever seen.





I tell quite a few spider stories, some about the West African and Caribbean trickster Anansi, one about Robert the Bruce, and one my grandmother told me.

Gran always said that spiders were good luck. One day as she was walking out her back door, she noticed a spider's web across the doorway. She ducked down and to the side so she wouldn't break it. Just as she did that, a slate fell off the roof, narrowly missing her head. If she had not saved the spider's web, she would have been hit. Good luck, indeed.

My grandmother was proud that we are descendants of Robert the Bruce (as are thousands upon thousands of others). The great man had just escaped with his life after a fierce battle. He ran up into the hills. Hiding in a cave, he cursed the English, who had captured his dog and who would surely use it to track him down. He slept, waking only when the mornig sun hit his face. He saw a spider climb up the side of the entrance, jump across to the other side...and miss, falling to the ground. It crawled back up the side, jumped again...and missed again. He watched it climb six times. On the seventh, he said, "You'd better give up, spider. I tried and tried, like you, and look at me now, hiding in a cave. If you succeed in catching hold this next time, I'll take it as a sign that I should try again." He watched as the spider climbed up a seventh time, jumped across the gap, and caught. It began to spin its web. He ducked under it, went down from the cave and gathered his men. They then fought in the Battle of Bannockburn against the English, and won.

Whether this is in fact true is immaterial. It's a good story, and Granny understood the value of a good story. As do I.

Traces of the Trade on POV

I've written about my cousin Katrina Browne's documentary, Traces of the Trade, in the past. It's going to be shown tomorrow night (June 24) on the PBS program POV.

After Katrina discovered that our ancestors were slave traders, she set out to trace the journey made by the traders and slaves, with a group of family members. It promises to be a fascinating show. I've only seen the trailer so far. I had the same experience as my sisters, who commented that it was hard to watch all the way through because they kept saying, "Hey! There's Dad! Look, it's Aunt Lidy!"

Here's the trailer.

More family stories: Traces of the Trade

There are stories that families tell and stories families don't. While we were growing up, we heard in a vague way that our ancestors were slave traders. It was always tossed off cavalierly without any detail. This was a story we didn't tell.

About ten years ago, my cousin Katrina Browne began making a documentary film called Traces of the Trade about our ancestors, the DeWolfs. We began to hear the vast scope of our family's involvement in slavery and to understand more clearly the issues of race, entitlement, and privilege in this country, not just in the distant past but today as well.

As part of the project, Katrina took nine DeWolf descendants on a physical and emotional journey retracing the Triangle Trade from Bristol, RI to Ghana to Cuba and back home--during slavery, ships carried rum to Africa to trade for slaves who were taken to Cuba to cut sugar cane which was taken to Rhode Island to make rum.

Of course I knew about slavery. The first "chapter book" I ever read when I was about seven was about Harriet Tubman, and I'd read myriad books on the topic ever since. The horror of slavery became even more real for me when I heard that Katrina had found manacles and a whip used on slaves. Awful.

At the beginning, Katrina wondered about "productive guilt" and if that was the reason that so many of the descendants became clergymen (and women), writers and artists. I don't know if she followed that line of questioning. Also at the start of her project, many family members wondered if Katrina was doing this to diminish feelings of guilt for having had a relatively privileged upbringing. It quickly became clear to most of us that this was not at all why she took on the massive challenge of telling this story. It is a story that should be told.

The film is now finished and will be screened at the Sundance Film Festival. I have only seen trailers, which were incredible. Katrina managed to make the experience both intensely personal and universal.

Our cousin Tom DeWolf also wrote a book about his experiences on the trip, called Inheriting the Trade, which has just been published. He'll be at Sundance with Katrina, and he'll also be on Book TV on CSPAN2 at 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 19 and at 1:00 a.m. on Sunday, Jan. 20. That's a filming of his reading of the book at Linden Place in Bristol, the former DeWolf mansion last week.

I'm really proud of these two relatives for telling this difficult family story! You can read more about it on my sister Mary's blog--I was trying not to duplicate her comments.