I just ranted at my mother

My mother is not only a small-town library director, she’s also a damn good grassroots historian—a term coined by C. L. Sonnichsen, meaning someone who is not necessarily trained in academic history, but who does important primary-source work, recognizing “that the original researcher was an old plainsman lying in a buffalo wallow standing off a bunch of Comanches–and too busy to write anything down,” and capable of “conversational dentistry–every fact wrenched out by the roots.”

The problem is that, although she’s remarkably well-informed and well-researched on all kinds of local history, she’s rarely written down what she knows.  Two pieces she knows the most about that she’s never written are the lynching of John Wesley Hardin’s brother Jo in 1874, and the ethnic cleansing of Comanche County in 1886, to be documented more fully in the forthcoming book Buried in the Bitter Waters, for which she provided a good deal of help and material to the author.  Both stories are important local history and need to be told, particularly the Hardin story since no one has ever told this aspect of it.  (Wes’s brother spent several years as deputy clerk of the county court; the county clerk registers land deeds among other duties, and Jo took advantage of his position to engage in a massive land fraud.  Mother’s great-grandfather was one of his victims.  The problem was Jo was so slick at land fraud that no one could prove it, although the community knew him to be guilty as sin.  The affair with Wes just provided a convenient excuse to get rid of someone who needed killing for a different reason.)

Mother has been threatening to write the Hardin article since I was in high school, and in the last few years she’s gotten into researching the local Negro diaspora in connection with the book.  So while we were on the phone tonight and she told me the book’s author had specifically told her he wished she would write an unpublished paper about it which he could then cite as a primary source, but that he had also said he didn’t think she’d ever do it and sure enough she didn’t, I went off and lectured her up one side and down the other.  I told her she probably knew the most of any person living about those two subjects, that she’d been saying “I’m going to write a paper Real Soon Now” for thirty years and more, and that if she didn’t get off her ass and write them and that in a hurry, the knowledge was going to die with her.  I said it was just like the scene in The Pirates of Penzance where the police are supposed to be going to fight the pirates but instead stand about endlessly singing ”We go, we go” while General Stanley keeps shouting “But you DON’T go!!”  I politely laid into her for a good five minutes about it.  At the end of it all, she said, “Yes, I know it and you and Chris both keep telling me the same thing,” which is her current variation of Real Soon Now.

I despair of it.  I don’t think she’ll ever write the articles and the knowledge will die with her, and MAYbe if the world gets lucky someone else will be able to take her notes and make an article of them.  But that article will still suffer and not be the article it could be, because it won’t have her knowledge and experience behind it.