One of my favorite authors is Cormack McCarthy. (Think No Country for Old Men, The Road, All the Pretty Horses and a bunch of other great books.) 

McCarthy writes prose that belongs in a book of poetry.  He creates passages so powerfully crafted that even the shallowest of readers can discover new depths of emotion and meaning.  His scenes are expertly intertwined in plot and theme yet they can be plucked from the novel’s context whole and breathing and able to stand on their own.

So I should not have been surprised when, recently, I came upon a passage in Cormack McCarthy’s wonderful book, The Crossing, that so completely and elegantly describes what I (and I imagine, lots of old photo collectors) feel when we look at vintage photos.  I was so struck and amazed by this piece of McCarthy’s writing that I just had to share it with you.  I couldn’t have said it better.  I don’t think anyone could have said it better.

“[The Gypsy...] said he’d followed his father through the streets of western cities and they collected odds of junk from the houses there and sold them. He said that sometimes in trunks and boxes they would come upon old photographs and tintypes. These likenesses had value only to the living who had known them and with the passage of years of such there were none.  But his father was a gypsy and had a gypsy mind and he would hang these cracked and fading likenesses by clothespins from the crosswires above the cart.  There they remained.  No one ever asked about them.  No one wished to buy them.  After awhile the boy took them for a cautionary tale and he would search those sepia faces for some secret thing they might divulge to him from the days of their mortality.  The faces became very familiar to him.  By their antique clothing they were long dead and he pondered them where they sat on porchsteps, seated in chairs in a yard.  All past and all future and all stillborn dreams cauterized in that brief encapture of light within the camera’s closet.  He searched those faces.  Looks of vague discontent.  Looks of rue.  Perhaps some burgeoning bitterness at things in fact not yet come to be which yet were now forever past.”

From The Crossing   
Copyright  © 1994 by Cormack McCarthy
Published by Vintage Books

Certainly some songs are as powerful as photographs. Vintage Photographs engage at least one of the five physical senses (sight) and stimulate our imaginations and bring back memories we didn’t know we had.  Melodies and lyrics also engage a physical sense (hearing).  They, too, are likely to evoke memories that transport us to times past.

When old photographs AND songs come together, its magic.  I don’t know if you are a country music fan, but I am.  One of my favorite songs of recent years is In Color, sung by country music star Jamey Johnson.  Here are the lyrics.  See if they have as much effect on you as they have on me.

 Watch the video on youtube here:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYGwxf1gCC4&feature=related

I said, Grandpa what’s this picture here
It’s all black and white and ain’t real clear
Is that you there, he said, yeah I was eleven
Times were tough back in thirty-five
That’s me and Uncle Joe just tryin’ to survive
A cotton farm in the Great Depression

And if it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids just trying to save each other
You should have seen it in color

This one here was taken overseas
In the middle of hell in nineteen forty-three
In the winter time you can almost see my breath
That was my tail gunner ole’ Johnny McGee
He was a high school teacher from New Orleans
And he had my back right through the day we left

And if it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids just trying to save each other
You should have seen it in color

A picture’s worth a thousand words
But you can’t see what those shades of gray keep covered
You should have seen it in color

This one is my favorite one
This is me and grandma in the summer sun
All dressed up the day we said our vows
You can’t tell it here but it was hot that June
That rose was red and her eyes were blue
And just look at that smile I was so proud

That’s the story of my life
Right there in black and white

And if it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids just trying to save each other
You should have seen it in color

A picture’s worth a thousand words
But you can’t see what those shades of gray keep covered
You should have seen it in color

You should have seen it in color

In Color
Artist: Jamey Johnson
Writers: Jamey Johnson. Lee Thomas Miller and James Otto

Download it from iTunes or watch the video on youtube here:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYGwxf1gCC4&feature=related

I know this because in 1894 she hand-copied a poem (A Womans’ Questioning) by popular nineteenth century poetess Adelaide Anne Procter and sent it to the man she would marry little more than a year later.
The poem begins with these lines:

Before I trust my fate to thee,
or place my hand in thine
Before I let thy Future give
Colour and form to mine,
Before I peril all for thee
Question thy soul to-night for me! …

and ends in Leeanna’s flowery handwriting with -

Nay, answer not,
I dare not hear,
The words would come too late
Yet I would spare thee all remorse,
So comfort thee, thy fate
Whatever on my heart may fall
Remember,
I will risk it all!

                     Leeanna May Duvall

None of her blood runs through my veins. You’d have to look back 10,000 years to find common blood. She is no relative of mine.

But she is my ancestor. Every moment of her life; every event during her life helped shape today’s world.

I think about what her life might have been like. Did she read about the first manned flight in her local newspaper? Did she die in the 1917 flu epidemic? Did her 3 year old son? Did her young husband return from the Great War wounded and forever changed? Did the arid dirt blow through her farm house and fill the creases in her worried 40 year old face during the dust bowl years?

Share your ancestor stories and love of antique photographs.