For most of the years I gave to this book I worked at a desk with the records spread out under a lamp, which is more or less how Mary Baker DeGraffenreid Johnson worked at hers. The difference is the direction. She kept the record forward, a line at a time, as the thing happened — a birth, a death, a marriage, the two words at the foot of a letter going out to a brother at the war. I have been keeping it backward: reading what she and the others set down, and the far greater amount they did not, and trying to find the people in the spaces between the documents.
I did not begin meaning to write their book. I began with a smaller question — a name on a chart with nothing behind it — and the smaller question opened onto a larger one, and the larger one onto this. That is the way it goes. You pull one thread to see where it is anchored, and the whole cloth comes up in your hand.
What I found was not a family of consequence in the way the word is usually meant. They held no high office that outlasted them. The one baron in the line had gone home to Switzerland and left the name to a son who carried a Bible across an ocean, married in Charleston, and began the line on this side of the water. The grant that anchors the middle of this book was four hundred acres on a creek, and it stood in a woman’s name because the man whose name it should have stood in had ridden out on the place’s business in the autumn of 1775 and not come back. I spent a long time looking for Baker DeGraffenreid’s grave. There is no grave. There is a date he was last seen alive and a date by which his wife was signing herself his administratrix, and between those two dates there is a silence about four years deep that I could not close and, in the end, did not try to. The book keeps that silence open because the family kept it open. They went on not knowing, and they wrote down the rest, and the not-knowing is part of the record now as surely as the births are.
That, I came to think, is the thing the family actually did, and the thing worth the book. Not the founding, not the grant, not the names that turn up in the county histories. The doing. The keeping. The going-on after the rider does not come back, after the colonel’s daughter is buried before her own granddaughter is born, after the war takes the sons north and brings some of them home again and some of them not. None of the great events of the country happened to these people. All of them arrived as fragments — a casualty list in a newspaper, a letter from a grandfather in his particular French — and the household priced each fragment and proceeded. For a long time no one in it had a word for what it was doing. It only did it. And then on a November night in 1779 a fifteen-year-old at a desk came to the foot of a letter and found that the doing had wanted a name all along, and she gave it one — two words — and wrote them twice that night, once in the letter going out to her brother and once in the book that stayed in the house. Fourteen years later, in the small hours of a winter night, with her grandfather dead and his Bible come south to her desk at last, she wrote those same two words a third time, under his death set down in his own French manner in her own hand, and she closed the book and put out the candle.
She was the first woman in the line to hold that Bible. She was not the last person to keep what it stood for, though most of those who kept it after her never saw the book and could not have read the French. The name changed as the line came down — Johnson to Hubbard and on through the marriages, daughters carrying it sideways into other names until it reached the one on the cover of this book. The keeping changed shape, too. It stopped being a Bible on a parlor desk. It became the things keeping becomes when no one is trained to it anymore — a box of photographs, a story told once at a kitchen table and half-remembered, a chart somebody started and did not finish. But it did not stop. Someone always held it, even when holding it meant only not throwing it away.
I am the one holding it now, and what holding it has come to mean for me is this book. I understand that in a way I did not when I started, pulling the one thread. This is my entry on the fly-leaf. It is longer than hers, and it is in English, and it has footnotes she would have found strange, but it is the same act: setting the names down so that whoever breaks it open a long time off and a long way away will know whose hands carried the words this far. I went looking for them because the not-knowing had become mine to carry, the way the keeping had once become hers — by being inside it. And when I came to the close of it, to this page, which is the foot of the letter, I found that the work had wanted a name all along, and that it is the same name she found, and that it is true in the same plain way it was true for her.
So I will write it here, in my own hand, under all of theirs.
we continue