haunted by the ancestors

July 2024 Letter. About families, war stories, myths, ghosts, codependence vs. independence, the messiness of the times.

Two weeks ago, I listened to my Great Grandfather’s voice. He spoke to me on the phone, even though he has been dead now for nearly eleven years. He was talking about his life during the Second World War. He was one of three Ohioans that I know of who fought in the war, all of them my great grandfathers. One of them, James, drove one of the first American tanks to cross over the Rhine River into Germany. The second, Paul, flew bombers over Europe as the Allies raced towards Berlin. And then there was Roland, who I knew the most well out of all of them, the one who spoke to me through the phone.

Roland was a farm boy, who carried a heavy rifle for the Army. In early December 1944 he was staying at a group of farmhouses, along a river in France. At 5:00 am a German panzer tank fired pointblank into his home. German troops entered the building and marched the Americans out into the street. Roland was taken prisoner, and sent on a train car into Germany, across the same rail-lines that took families and children to the extermination camps. He was housed in a prisoner of war camp, forced to do slave labor for the Nazi war machine. For five months him and the rest of the prisoners teetered on the brink of starvation, nearly freezing to death. He was liberated in the spring, only a score of days before Hitler killed himself. The Third Reich collapsed, the war in Europe ended, and the ‘innocent’ German civilians who had said nothing during the war were marched through Dachau and Buchenwald and forced to witness the corpses. And Roland was sent back to America, where he built a good life for himself in Ohio.

Sixty years later he was invited to Washington D.C for the opening of the World War Two memorial on the National Mall. He was interviewed there by an oral historian. And twenty years later, two weeks ago, I was able to listen to his story again, as I sat in front of the roaring water fountains at the war memorial. It was the first time I had heard his voice in a decade, and it was like I could feel him sitting next to me.

***

There are people who try to be characters, and then there are characters. Roland was the latter. His voice sounded like how the Joad family speaks in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. He pronounced my home-state as ‘Worshington’, and ‘creek’ as ‘crick’, and by the end of his life, when his skin was paper-thin and purple and black with bruises from all his stumbles, he would go on and on about how ready he was to ‘kick the bucket’. “Oh when I kick the bucket… Oh pretty soon now I’ll kick the bucket,” he’d say to me. But even in his old age he would have moments of sharp ferocity. He’d slowly sit up, lean in, and start slowly wagging his finger, and his low voice would start building up like a diesel engine kicking into gear. It was how you could tell he had something essential to say. And from the very beginning of his war-story interview, he had a mission, and you can hear him through the audio beginning to wag the finger.

The oral historian (oh, bless her heart) wanted to hear about his war stories, about the glory of it all. But Roland wouldn’t have any of it. Right as he was asked the first question, he launched into a tirade against George W. Bush.

“As far as I’m concerned, if Bush came around and wanted to shake my hand, I’d tell him that I wouldn’t shake my hand with a liar, because I’m not in favor of anything that Bush is doing.”

At one point Roland seemed to confuse Iraq with Germany, but in this next beat he corrects himself. A Freudian slip. “Those guys say that they don’t know certain things, but they’ve known it… they also know about what’s going on now too, as far as that stuff over in Iraq now. You know, undressing them and things like that. They knew about that.”

I wasn’t sure what he was talking about at first, but then it clicked. He was talking about Abu Gharib. In 2004, around the time of the interview, photos were leaked of American troops torturing and humiliating prisoners at the Iraqi prison. In his speech at the American war memorial, Roland wasn’t primarily thinking of the war he served in, or what it had been like for him: he was thinking of the war in Iraq and the brutal terror of the occupation. Roland had been a prisoner of war, a slave laborer in Nazi Germany, and sixty years later he looked at photographs of prisoners being tortured at the hands of soldiers and decided that he wanted to talk about that first. I wonder who he empathized with more; the American soldiers, pointing and laughing in the photographs, or the prisoners in their black hoods humiliated and dehumanized by a force that viewed them as less than human.

***

This month was my first time back in Ohio in five years. I used to nearly go every year, until I didn’t. It used to be a place to see family, and then it turned into a destination for funerals. It began at age four, when my 16-year-old cousin was killed in a car accident. I don’t know where fact or make-believe starts with this, but I can remember standing at the far back of the funeral parlor. His body was raised on a flat dais, and there was a protective glass tube around his body. He looked like snow white, sleeping there. When my great-grandpa Paul died a few years later, the family gathered and scattered his ashes in a spot that he liked to fish at along the Maumee River. From then on, Ohio was a succession of visiting the aging and the ailing. The people would be alive in one trip, and then in the next I would see them in funeral homes, their frail forms on display, and then we would carry their caskets from mass and drive in a long caravan of rental cars to the cemeteries.

Anna, one of my great grandmothers, hadn’t been born in Ohio. She had left Bavaria in the mid-1930s, out of a Munich that was bespeckled with swastikas on the Rathaus, and she traveled as a toddler across the ocean on a steamboat alone. At her visitation twelve years ago, the funeral home played a looping playlist of songs. One of them was a German chorus, singing some sort of mournful song that was half elegy, half yodel, ‘La-da-dee, la-da-dee, la-da-dee’, it went. And when Roland died, he was laid out in a simple but beautiful wood casket that had clearly been handcrafted. In life he had been a carpenter: he built homes, and furniture.

On the eleventh of November, a day for remembering the war that was supposed to end all wars, we all drove in a long caravan across the river and into the country, up a lone hill in the middle of flat cornfields. Soldiers and veterans came and draped the flag over the casket. They stood in a row, raised their rifles, and shot a salute. Afterwards a few of us dug around in the cold grass, looking for the spent shells, and I keep a couple of them now on my bookshelf, right next to some books on the war and Paul’s 1939 edition of Mein Kampf, which on the inside jacket proclaims that all of its proceeds “will be turned over to a fund for refugee children”, the children and their families who were later carted on the rail-lines that Roland rode along.

Ohio is not about funerals anymore. Much of that generation is gone, and most of the descendants have all been scattered about; to Michigan, Arizona, California, Washington, New York. Ohio feels increasingly like a land of ghosts. But they are friendly ghosts. Two of these are named Anna and Ed. They lived in the same house in Toledo from the year they were married in 1948 all the way until they died. They had an immaculate garden, a back-patio with vining plants that would grow up and down the wooden arbor. In the yard in front of the brick and wood house was a beautiful gas lamp along the walkway, and on the side a pristine stretch of grass in the grooves of the driveway that you absolutely could not drive on.

There’s a kind of silent movie that plays when I think about them in that house. One scene is them at the kitchen table, Ed reading the newspaper to see how the ball-team did, Anna eating her cereal with the blueberries or raspberries floating in the milk. They had a small basement down a narrow flight of stairs with a bumper-pool table in the center, and a small bar that was strung with colorful Christmas lights and plastic garlands all year round. The wallpaper was covered with Oldsmobile’s, Model-T’s, and in the corner they had a record player with an old but rich collection of vinyl’s; Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin. In the winters I can remember the extended family sitting in the living room around the Christmas tree, the snow falling outside around the gas lamp. And the summers were full of the screech-screech of the cicadas, and the dangling yellow lights of the lightning bugs that I had never seen before out west. We would play long card games on the back patio, and I can still remember how Anna would lightly snort when she started really laughing.

Every trip to Toledo would end in the same way, with Anna and Ed standing at the front door, waving at us. Anna would sometimes bring her hand to her lips and loudly kiss it, ‘mwah!’ she’d say, and then she would fling the kiss towards me as we drove down the road, and the person behind the steering wheel would always be crying, and I’d turn my little head to look through the rearview mirror and wonder what was so sad about all of this, really, never once anticipating that it would end one day .

When I was in Toledo a week ago, a few of us took a detour to Anna and Ed’s house. It looked the same, but smaller. The lamp was gone, we could see the phonelines stretching weakly over the backyard, the garden looked flat and bland, even the trees looked shorter and starved. ‘This is it?’, some part of me thought. It had felt so much bigger and important as a child. We got out of the car, took some pictures of the little house. I shielded my eyes with sunglasses. Even though there was not much to see, I looked over every corner of the house – the brick, the white wood, the mailbox, the sidewalk. We sat there in the car, parked in front of a stranger’s house, idling. The unspoken thought lingered in the air; maybe if we waited long enough, the screen door would open, and we would see the familiar faces again.

***

One of the branches of my family were Christmas tree farmers. They grew fir trees on their plot of land, and some of the trees from their farm still grow around Toledo Ohio. It’s an appropriate profession, because I think of all these people as if they were trees. They were strong, sturdy, and rooted in place. They were tough, because they had to be, and they had this silent but steady look, as if they had gone through storm after storm yet lived to tell about it. They were working people: farmers, laborers. In the family stories fact occasionally blends with myth. One of the ancestors, I’ve been told, worked on one of the great New Deal Dams that was built out west. Another lived on a family farm during the height of the Great Depression, and supposedly the family had to slaughter a good part of the livestock just to feed themselves. But what I do know is that they survived. They planted themselves, and built something like a good life out of hell.

If my ancestors were trees, then I often feel like a little dandelion; bendy, fragile, prone to explode at the slightest tension. Some of this flexibility is a good thing, a genuine improvement from the past. I don’t romanticize the gruff insecurity of the ‘tough love’ male figure, of the kind from the cowboy stories that my ancestors loved. It is not just the backwardness and the ‘isms’ of that old world that I despise, but the strict binaries that so many in those generations fought to uphold. They were steeped in an age and a worldview of essentialism; in gender, in race, in every conceivable way related to identity. They were agents but also victims of it. They went to war against a whole ideology that categorized whole swaths of people as Untermensch, but then returned to a society that treated many of its own people as less than human. The steadiness of the tree can be a blessing, but it can also appear rigid, cruel, and suffocating.

The bendiness, flexibility, and ambiguity of the current times are good then, I think. I want to move through the world with a generosity of spirit that takes people at their word, and doesn’t begin from a place of cynicism. I want to view myself always as an incomplete canvas, and I want everyone to be able to feel that way as well. Whenever I hear people speaking in the language of essentialism, I balk. There are thousands of pieces of writing and punditry nowadays that claim to definitively express what it means to be a man/boy, or a woman/girl, or an American, or a person, or to offer what one person ought to say at all times, or how they should act, and every single time I read something like this I think; ‘this is the stuff that bullets are made of’. Anyone who believes that they alone have the answers is a blunt object waiting to be swung. I try to stay clear of these people; I’m a delicate little nail.

But I do sometimes wonder; is the softness a detriment? Is the flexibility that I’m praising just weakness and resignation? I both hate the hammers and furiously admire them; they at least do something. There are dwindling numbers of actual Communists in my life, but every time I talk with them, I’m astounded at their clarity of purpose. They read a single book, and they have found their entire point of living, whereas the more books I read the more confused I become. Sometimes I just want to be wielded like an instrument and pointed in the direction that I should swing, so long as it does not end in purges or gulags.

But I don’t want to be a weapon, and I don’t want to write like one either. Because these last few weeks have been so chaotic politically, I’ve returned to a kind of writing that I don’t really love; the polemical, the preachy. I can’t help it; I was forged in the fires of speechwriting and organizing, where language primarily exists to rally troops and sell $1,500 dollar tickets for fundraisers. I both love and hate this part of me; I hate how disgusting the language makes me feel, like I am knee-deep in a muddy trench on the western front, emptying a latrine. But I love how it reminds me of the nagging truth; writing belongs in the earth and in the mud, wherever people are stuck and unable to make sense of how to escape.

I want to be as firm as a tree, like how the ancestors were during the depression and the war. But I want to be light and airy too, like a small wildflower that can soak up sunshine. I want to do the work of solidarity and justice, but also The Work of literature and vocation. I want to exist deeply in community with others, but still preserve deep stretches of solitude and independence. It is not an either-or, but these things exist in tension with one another, and the more that I live and think the more often that these dilemmas smash against one another. It is like a continuous tug of war, where one side trades having the upper hand with the other. The trick is in not letting one side totally win, because to stop struggling with these questions is to stop living.

***

Marx warned Europe of the “specter of communism”, but the spirits in my life are just the ghosts of old family members. It is Roland, and Anna and Ed, and other nameless old faces who look like the farmers in American Gothic. And they were everywhere in Ohio: at the old houses, at the edge of the green corn, alongside the red barns, in the tufts of grass with the old rusted tractors, in the family farmlands that were being raised for golfcart suburbs, along the roads peppered with signs and flags with the five-letter name, in the church bulletin that said ‘God loves you more than you can imagine’, in the old tackle and bait-shops, in the fields of soybeans and alfalfa. It is beautiful and ugly, hopeful and frightening. Flatness as far as the horizon goes, a patchwork quilt of monocrops and chemicals visible from space. But then you’re driving and the sameness suddenly ends, and in the middle of the field there’s a lone farmhouse surrounded by a bright garden, and spinning weathervanes on top of the barns, and old groves of trees that are taller than everything around it. All of the trees are the ancestors, and they can see where the road is going, but they can’t tell you. You have to keep driving. The answer will become clear soon enough.