Opening the Family Vault

In my family, I am the unofficial keeper of the family relics. Over the past 30 years, I have also amassed a collection of imperfectly scribbled notes on strewn pieces of old yellow legal paper and notecards that have been tucked away into an old, tall file cabinet—each time staring at me to decipher their hidden codes when I put away some bills or filed work.

I have a large Family Bible published by the American Bible Society in 1855 that sat in my living room untouched for years, viewed more as decoration than anything. It’s moved locations over the years—sometimes visible through an old glass front-hinged antique lawyer’s case, sometimes on the mantel of our home, and at other times, just tucked away in the barely-visited library shelves of an old entertainment center I bought early in my marriage.

The Bible has traveled in time over a century and a half. Still, its location has almost always remained stagnant, not opened, except for the occasional curiosity of a person visiting my home or when one of my children used to ask, “what’s this,” to which I promptly would say, “Careful, that’s the family Bible; it’s old and I don’t want it ruined.” Never mind that it sat in a spot that allowed light for years to touch its leather cover and its gilded leaves on every edge of the Bible. It’s a weighty book that takes two hands to pick up and put away; it’s not fragile, but the pages within, indeed, are.

Then I moved it last year. To my office.

My office is a room on the upper level of my home. The walls and ceiling are painted such a bright, painful shade of pink that virtual meetings online usually have my meeting partners say, “Wow, that’s some pink!” Both of my daughters have inhabited this space, my oldest when she was born. We had it painted green with a cast of beautiful, hand-painted characters as a border to attract her eye when she was in her crib. When she was almost two, my new daughter came into the world, and she moved into the room as the other transitioned to the guest room. As the kids got older, they wanted new colors for their rooms—the oldest kid, bold, bold blue; the youngest, dayglow pink.

I painted both rooms at their requests, and I said with determination after this personal labor of love, “You’ll have to live with this color for many years to come. I’m not painting them again!” The blue room has been reverted to a warm white, and the other, well, it’s my office now, and my former office is an empty room without any furniture, waiting for its renovation in the coming years, all a sign that I am not building or maintaining a nest with children anymore.

The move of this Bible to my office was symbolic. It was a first step. It meant I was going to make space for it. I started by emptying most of my professional materials as a life-long educator, and I would replace those labors of love with this massive, heavy tome, which inside held the scribble of ancestors, only one of which I recognized at first glance, my grandmother’s.

It also meant I was going to open what I call The Family Vault. The Vault starts with the Bible, but strewn across my home in cedar chests and in other shelves, or in plastic bins stored away in closets and crawl spaces, are so many other things that belonged to my maternal grandmother and grandfather at one time in their lives (and by extension their ancestors).

Beside the Bible in the office also sits my great-great grandfather’s memoir, something my grandmother in her last years insisted I find before she died. She died in 2009 just a few months shy of turning 104.

When I say insisted, it was mentioned in every conversation, every phone call, every visit. It was signed by her grandfather to her, and she wanted me to have it. I wanted to fulfill her wish, but I also, in the back of my mind, was pretty sure I didn’t want to find it. She had referenced this memoir my entire life—it would explain, in her mind, how not all Southern enslavers were the bad kind. Her grandfather was different; he was a benevolent one, and the book would explain it all to me. So, I was conflicted to say the least when I decided to do everything I could to find this book. This gift offered between generations, skipping over the generation of my mother, signaled that I was being asked to confront something that had remained hidden or rarely referenced, except when my grandmother spoke to me. She chose me.

I failed the task she assigned me, not for the lack of trying. My grandmother lived most of my life in Hilton Head, SC, first in a beautiful home in Sea Pines as one of the first homeowners of that area back in 1970, then in a villa after my grandfather was living with Alzheimer’s, and after his passing, she moved again to a retirement community on the other end of the island. Every move meant new boxes, some of which would be in my mother’s possession in a duplex where she and I lived in Atlanta after my parents’ divorce in the 1980s, and well, there were lots of boxes. I opened each one in the grueling heat of summer in the duplex attic. In my mind, I was looking for a large book, this memoir. I figured it had to be big based on my grandmother’s affinity for it. She had already given me her copy of Children of the Pride, which is another large tome of Southern notable people (it features her grandfather and other men in my family). The memoir had to be about that size? I had no idea what it looked like, not until this past year when I would hold a rather small and thin first edition.

After my grandmother passed away, I had a conversation with my cousin about how our grandmother wanted me to find the book, and I also mentioned that our grandmother said it was in the Library of Congress. The copyright of this book was registered in 1912, but the publication date is 1923. He clearly was interested in writing his memoir, and like most writing, it took time to develop that reflection on his life and times. This was all before the digitization of texts online, so my cousin gave me a beautiful gift one year after visiting the Library of Congress: a facsimile of Memoirs of a Southerner: 1840-1923 by Edward J. Thomas, our great-great-grandfather. The facsimile is a large misrepresentation of the book, but it allowed me to read it finally.

In February of 2024, I visited the Library of Congress, but I couldn’t secure a reservation to see the original text, so I resorted to an online purchase of a first edition, and it registers as a ½ inch-thick, miniature plain-styled book that is about 5 by 7 inches when lying flat. Since the days of the Gutenberg Project, this memoir is easily accessible via the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s website for all to read, but having the actual book, the one my grandmother wanted in my hands was as conflicted a feeling as I had when I was looking for it—when I received the book, the seller’s invoice was marked with two flags crossed: one Confederate emblem flag, the other an American flag. I would learn in the previous year that when searching my family in any graveyard from South Georgia to South Carolina, there would be a Confederate flag, signaling me to their locations like some obscene Confederate GPS.

Making space for something is a vague set of words, and I hear these words often. There is making space in the physical realm, as I was trying to do with this new Tetris-styled move-in-move-out office rearrangement, but there is the metaphysical way of making space that is much more difficult to articulate. In years past, I didn’t exactly not want to piece together the fragments of my ancestors' belongings and lives, but all the years before, the time I allowed for these fragments, were just that—fragments of time with very few anchors or slips in a port where intricate knots are required. And anything I gleaned back when I interviewed relatives in my mid-twenties produced new fragments of paper or writings on the back of framed photographs and didn’t register with me. I had recorded terms like “Peru Plantation,” “Walthourville,” “Harris Neck,” all foreign places even when I asked, “Now where is this?” I couldn’t mentally piece together the threads, a story here, a story there—all of their belongings, photos, silver, art, jewelry, scribbles, letters, furniture were sitting in my home, vaulted and locked. Making space for these things meant I was going to open the vault, call a family meeting, and make inquiries of my ancestors, most dead. Those who might appear, and I, could now have a deep conversation.