Twenty-five years ago, we left Kentucky for an Arkansas sojourn, for me to teach in the History Department of a small liberal arts college. We returned to the Bluegrass after four years away; we loved the tiny Arkansas school, but we missed terribly the rolling hills of western Kentucky. If anything, our exile in the pancake-flat, mosquito-ridden delta rice fields of northeastern Arkansas taught me the intimate connection between the past, present, and future, something that any History teacher should already know.
Students—students of History at least—should also know how to make these connections. What is History? Why is it important to study History? How does one study History? These are questions that I have been wrestling with for some time. These are questions my students discuss in our classes each semester.
When we left Kentucky those many years ago for “the land of opportunity,” “the Natural State,” as tourism brochures proclaimed, Ron Watson, a resident of Hopkins County and a very fine poet, himself a native Arkansan, gave to me a farewell poem that made the connections clear in language that a small town boy from a western Kentucky county seat town could understand. The poet described a father and son experiencing together the eerie sensation of “walking into the past.”
The experience took place in an old general store, no sprawling Walmart mind you, but the sort of place where old gentlemen in overalls gathered in the late afternoon to play dominos around a coal stove:
“It’s Saturday
and we stop at the Dalton Store
before putting in on the river.
Oldtimers are holding down a bench
that hasn’t changed in 20 years
and somebody shot Homer Bailey’s dog
for running deer is what we hear
as the screen door squeaks open
and slams shut
and swallows us into the general store
that is always darker than outside.
A fading red Coke machine
is defining nostalgia against a wall
and kids we might have been
are standing on a footrail
at the counter. We hope
it is black licorice and Moon Pies
but they could be buying anything.
We try not to hurry
and for a moment begin to blend
as easy as shade into the slow scene,
to soak up the almost forgotten something
we once were.
Paid-up, the kids spill toward us
in a stream that we divide. We turn
to watch it reconnect down the dark aisle
that points like a chute in the cool dimness
toward a door that opens like a tablet of light.”
I have tried to picture a father and his small son standing hand-in-hand in the middle of the store’s darkened aisle soaking in “the almost forgotten something we once were.” Standing in the present, the father and son gaze into the darkened interior at “kids we might have been,” gathered in front of a counter, buying perhaps “black licorice and Moon Pies,” only to have the representative group from the past “spill toward us in a stream that we divide.” And even as the past comes hurtling into and through the present, the familial pair “turn to watch it reconnect” into the future, “toward a door that opens like a tablet of light.”
These connections between the past, present, and future also link together an understanding of history and ourselves. “As far as we’re concerned, there’s no such thing as a dead past,” Kentucky’s Historian Laureate Thomas D. Clark told an interviewer in 2001. Dr. Clark, who died at 101, knew whereof he spoke. “You’re part of the past,” he said. “Everything you do, everything you touch in some way has an intimate association with the past. . . .Even human prejudices are age-old.” What can we glean from Dr. Clark’s statement today in 2017?
Duane Bolin teaches in the Department of History at Murray State University. Contact him at duane.bolin@murraystate.edu
