Lessons in Storytelling
"The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All" (1989), by Allan Gurganus
"The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All" was a 1989 novel by Allan Gurganus in which the titular widow, Lucy, tells the story of her 1900 marriage to “Captain” William Marsden when she was 15 and her husband was 50.
The specific details of Lucy’s story are not unique to this fictional family, though I hope your real family history doesn’t combine as concentrated a dose of cringe and tragedy into a single lifetime as Lucy’s family history does. I find a lot of interesting and useful ideas about the nature of storytelling in this novel, but here are the highlights.
My paperback copy of this book weighs in at a hefty 875 pages, but what I find striking about that is the way Gurganus uses that space to expand a relatively small handful of small tales into a sprawling historical story.
The entire narration comes from Lucy, a resident of a nursing home tucked away in a corner of the fictional town of Falls, North Carolina, where she spent her 99 years. Lucy is the classic “unreliable narrator,” given to looping digressions and asides, and constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain to her unseen interviewer what the reader already knows: it’s hard to tell a story like this.
Dwelling On the Details
Lucy’s wandering narrative is designed to do two things at once:
Worldbuild (setting the scenes and introducing a large cast of characters), and
Stretch a few key points out to maximize their impact.
There are only four central characters in this book whose stories are intertwined, but Lucy’s indirect and layered approach to delivering her narrative gives the reader a chance to absorb what she is telling you about their lives. It can be maddening to watch her lead up to a particular question or event only to swerve off into talking about her soap operas or her routine in the nursing home, but there is a purpose to this.
In our own family histories, we rarely have much more to work with than Lucy gives us in the early chapters. You know facts from a handful of census and vital records: who married who and when; where they lived; major historical events that touched them.
To tell compelling or interesting stories about our ancestors, we have to find ways to engage our audience of (often disinterested) relatives in a way that fills them in on the historical backdrop and leads them toward an understanding of who our ancestors were.
Sometimes we have to weave what we know with what we imagine to be true - and if we aren’t careful, we can undercut our credibility by imagining too much.
Flinching at the Painful Bits
There is a lot of difficult historical material to confront in Gurganus’s novel.
The age difference between Captain Marsden (50) and Lucy (15) is an uncomfortable fact; one that is only slightly more extreme than some relationships I’ve observed in my own research.
The burning of Marsden’s plantation and manor house - and his mother - during Union Gen. Sherman’s "March to the Sea".
Willie Marsden’s experiences as a 13-year-old private in the Confederate Army.
The grinding discomfort between freed slaves and former owners during Reconstruction.
Many of Lucy’s digressions are a matter of walking up to an Uncomfortable Fact, and then turning away to delay the inevitable. The reader knows as well as Lucy what is bound to happen at the end of her tales, but her digressions allow her to prepare her audience - usually by adding context and layering on more detail - presumably to help you deal with it once the ugly truth is out.
The key to telling your own family history is to identify where those truths are. You may have to make inferences about why people did what they did (why did they move?) or how they felt about events. What political party did they belong to? What influence would their church have on their choices? Can you weave those facts into what is known about their daily lives?
Taking this narrative approach in your own writing will allow you to do more with your family’s story. Rather than bluntly stating a historical fact and moving on, you can create more context.
Giving a Voice to the Invisible
I have written before about the frustration of finding so little information about my grandmothers. Beyond a certain point, it is rare to find anything in the records beyond their names, and sometimes even those are erased.
But occasionally an artifact gives us an unexpected insight into someone’s personality, as with the memories of my 3rd-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Berlin:
If I were to try to tell Elizabeth’s story directly, as a historical document, it would be difficult to fill many pages with facts. But I know a thousand tiny, incidental things about her - most from Rosemary’s “Silk or Satin” account - that if I treated Elizabeth as the unreliable narrator, I could borrow her voice to tell a bigger, broader story about her and her family.
In other words, if I made Elizabeth my “Lucy Marsden,” it would give the reader fair warning that the facts may be true, but the opinions and feelings about them belonged to the narrator.
Ultimately, the voice is yours - but as long as you stay true to the facts and let your reader know when you are speculating, employing Lucy Marsden’s narrative techniques could be the key to bringing your family to life for modern readers.
Gurganus (through Lucy’s voice) tells us some important things to remember about history - something that we often forget when looking at official documents and big, famous events: the banal, daily humanity of our ancestors.
A while back, when you first started coming and see me, you said I ought to spill my tidbits for ‘‘history’s sake.’’ Oh, I don’t need that big an excuse. I like talking. Only got one subject: what happened next. Besides, ‘‘History,’’ who’s she? I been breathing a while, never met her once. I just saw people waking up for work and hoping to doze those twenty minutes extra. Later, you traipse in by the back door—loaded with names and dates and reasons. Then all that’s up in front of you appears to be history.
But at the time, child, history’s just keeping your rooms neat and hoping company’ll give you a little notice so you can tuck your extras under the bed. What you call history is really just that luxury of afterwards. History is how food the soldiers gobbled at 11 A.M. sets with them at two when the battle starts, how one snack’s heartburn chagnes everybody’s aim. Honey, history ain’t so historical. It’s just us breaking even, just us trying.
Darling, you know what history is?
History is lunch.
Amazing insights that can (and sometimes should) translate to our own storytelling efforts.
All the internets - you win, sir.