Thoughts on Walking Into the Past

Two decades 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 have discussed in our classes this 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,” standing at 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.”

Now, what can we—students, teachers, and newspaper columnists and readers—learn from that?