In Their Shoes

They'll Never Fit Perfectly, But Try Them On Anyway

Writing about the past through the lens of today is always fraught. With some writers, the tongue-clucking when it comes to old morals and behavior can be deafening, while others prefer to put blinders on and focus on the facts, ma’am, just the facts.

IMO, the happy medium is somewhere in between. It’s important to acknowledge people and events through the social lens of yesterday while also providing a clear-eyed perspective into the past through today’s somewhat rheumy vision.

In other words, you gotta step into their shoes, if only for a moment.

Admittedly, it’s a very delicate balancing act, and one that can be close to impossible to achieve. But I think one of the best practitioners is my friend and neighbor Alisa Kline, who writes an excellent blog on the history of Canaan, New Hampshire, with a specific focus on Noyes Academy, a school that was a radical experiment in not only interracial but co-ed education when it opened its doors in 1835. In each weekly post, Alisa uses passages from The History of Canaan, New Hampshire — the “unofficial” town history by William Allen Wallace published in 1910 — as her springboard, and I always look forward to hearing her take on this often-hoary history.

In each post, Alisa accomplishes three objectives that every memoirist and family historian should strive for: 1) she plucks out passages from the book that intrigue her, 2) injects her spin on the facts and events from a distance of 190 years, and then 3) projects how folks back then might have reacted to a particular event because of the physical and emotional context and historical constraints of their lives. [emphasis mine]

Actually, there’s a fourth component: Alisa also never hesitates to ask questions out loud without judgment. In other words, she meets the people on both [all?] sides of an issue, nestling herself into their shoes no matter how pinched her toes may get. And by asking a question, she often gets an answer.

shoe stretcher

IMHO, this is a particularly useful skill to possess at this point in time.

In her post from last week, “Money, the having and not having of which makes all the difference,” I want to analyze for you how she accomplishes this precarious balance.

First, she places the lives of the people she’s researching squarely in the context of their times:

They lived their lives and made mistakes. They themselves were not always good. But they were sincere in the belief that rules would make it better. The alternative to rule of law is simply rule of the strong. That was the King and the old world. This was the New World. So, New Hampshire simply kept on keeping on, each challenge being one more test God placed before his children.

Next, she injects her own present-day incredulity into the lives of strangers from almost two centuries ago, and asks the questions that naturally come up.

In reading about Canaan’s early years, I’m amazed that these people kept at it. Were there seriously no better options? Even to get bread, or rather the grain to make it, required great effort.

Then, she cites a passage from the book that reiterates how different the lives of people back then, who trod the same earth that she walks today, a realization that can completely take over your life…ask me how I know… :-/

For several years it occurred that a man must walk to Lebanon, where a mill had been built, work a day to earn a bushel of “bread corn” and have it ground, then pack it upon his back to his home in the forest, by that blind trail through the forest. [From p. 20 of The History of Canaan, New Hampshire.]

FYI, Lebanon, 12-14 miles away from Canaan, was accessed via a narrow, barely bushwhacked path through the woods, hilly in spots, a trip that took the better part of a day, longer in winter.

Then…BLAMMO:

That grain wasn’t just sustenance, it was currency.

In another post, Down The Rabbit Hole. With Sheep., Alisa touches on the peculiar but common side effect of researching family history, your own or somebody else’s: becoming so entrenched in THE DIG ITSELF that you get incredibly sidetracked and end up researching something totally different.

Here, she also eloquently introduces her intended topic — and IMO perfectly provides modern-day context for how her subject must have felt about the wins and losses of the time — but then describes how one small step sideways can blast open entirely new doors in the present day.

Wallace’s History of Canaan was written after the Civil War. Wallace was writing in the glow of having been part of something truly amazing. He was part of the generation and the movement that ended slavery in the United States. [emphasis mine]

When Wallace wrote about the mobocratic [!] destruction of Noyes Academy, he detailed a moment in the life of New England when people knew they had a moral responsibility to end slavery but had no possible way of doing so. The best among them tried whatever they could. Noyes Academy was one of those tries.

This week, I intended to discuss the September 11, 1834 rally that followed the first formal meeting of the Noyes trustees. The rally was held at the Old  North Church, which was then quite new, having been built a mere six years before. Famous abolitionists came to speak. David L. Child, Samuel Sewall, and Nathanial Peabody Rogers all addressed the rally. The diarist Wallace relied upon didn’t provide much detail about what they said. So I went in search of it in the The Liberator, the nation’s leading abolitionist newspaper. I didn’t find it. Instead I fell down a rabbit hole. [again, emphasis mine]

Indeed, Alisa’s post appeared the same week that I touched on rabbit holes in my Marry Me, Newspapers.com post. Something was [still is/always will be?] clearly in the water up here on the hill…

Photo by Maxime Bouffard on Unsplash

Choosing art and illustrations for Rooting Around can be fraught, just like interpreting history of the past. As you’ve noticed, I lean towards opening with some cheesy video from the Seventies — my formative years and favorite cultural decade by far — and sprinkling the text with Substack stock photos or more 70s-era videos and illustrations, if I can find them.

Alisa exclusively uses the artwork of Gary Hamel, an acclaimed artist who lives in Orange, New Hampshire, who claims a special artistic reverence for the faded-away history of this area. I’ve written about Gary previously, though not in these pages. His illustrations provide a haunting but informative backdrop for the people and locations Alisa writes about.

In the end, the sooner that we admit that we will never be able to Michael J. Fox ourselves back to the days that we so want to experience firsthand, the better. But we can get just a bit closer by stepping into the shoes of the people back then, even for just one brief moment.

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The Takeaway: When researching and writing about people who lived totally different lives from yours, and who may have had polar-opposite philosophies, imagine standing in their shoes. Try to place their lives and philosophies into the context of their times, and then ask them the questions you’re curious about. They may not shout the answers out loud, but if you listen closely, you may hear their whispers.