Battlegrounds of Memory: A Memoir of a Southern Family

Abstract

Battlegrounds of Memory: A Memoir of Southern Family. By Clay Lewis. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1998. Pp. 225. $24.95.) Southern autobiography is distinguished field, and therefore tough game to play. You put your book out there and prepare to have people hold it up to Harry Crews, Frederick Douglass, or Mary Karr, just to name few. But Clay Lewis has nothing to fear. He has written very good book, fine addition to this excellent company. Battlegrounds of Memory is not an easy work to read, just as it was difficult book to write. Its rewards, however, are every way adequate to its demands. Lewis was by evidence of this memoir preternaturally observant child who grew up to become remarkably persistent adult. As child, long before he had words to describe it or knowledge of its sources, he sensed himself inheritor of trauma; as an adult he has tirelessly explored its roots, encountering in generations of my which is southern. . ugly scars of history that hundreds of ways mark us all-the depression, Civil War, busted dreams of frontier America, great shift from country to city (p. 5). The book opens violence, nightmare 1957 Christmas. Christmas Eve is Dad dead drunk, not for first time, and Son snapping into violence, punching his helpless father until Mom calls him off amid Sister's cries. Christmas Day is silent opening of gifts, no mention of last night, services at Church of Good Shepherd. Coming home, the four of us Dodge, all is silence, as guilt and rage knotted tightly with love dark of our minds (p. 3). The narrative of Battlegrounds of Memory is carefully, even cunningly articulated. From opening vignette it turns back to beginnings, to more or less straightforward linear treatment, which narrator is carried forward from infancy to young manhood with few interruptions. But then, as this same narrator's retrospective interests intensify, narrative also doubles back, focusing initially on parents and grandparents but eventually reaching back to more remote ancestors. From this point on Lewis tells two stories at once-the account of his own life moving forward time as his historical and genealogical researches push back. It's artfully done. Lewis places us intimate proximity to his life as he experienced it. Born to maddeningly complex heritage of rage, pride, guilt, and despair, boy observes it first, fearfully and uncomprehendingly, his parents and their families. Later, no less baffled, he registers it himself. And it is here, barely adumbrated at first, and made fully explicit only at volume 's close, that Lewis begins to approach fundamental credo of his work. The past, he senses, is not past at all. Its hurts and humiliations, especially, are passed on, as surely as genes are passed on. Like it or not we embody defeats of our ancestors (which addition tempered our progenitors, and Lewis suggests more than once that some of our strengths may also come to us as gifts). The past, for these wounded people especially, is finally more present than present. Unappreciated, it can only harm. Accepted, so far as possible understood, at last embraced, it can also heal. In telling saga of his Lewis realizes, one might bring light to dark places. Facing trauma, he may undertake cure. Learning of his grandparents, he can better understand his parents; knowing his parents, he will better know himself: Finding impress of inheritance, of despair and hard yearning that comes down to you through workings of time, history, and is to find one's self (p. 219). That exact figure has multiple components, of course, but at its center, no surprise a memoir of southern family, is Civil War. Lewis encounters it early on, and often, long before he senses its weight. On every childhood visit to Smithsonian, I climbed back balcony to see Traveler, Robert E. …