bio = life

graph = picture

"-y" attached as suffix to a word describing a product or phenomenon, conveys the process or discipline related to its production (spectrometer --> spectrometry, cryptograph --> cryptography, astronom --> astronomy)

1.

I'm fascinated by identity, and how it works, how it affects power in the world...so, this isn't really a biography...it's more just a casual first-person account, of lives, past, and present, existing in and around mine, as they have been told to me. Identity is probably not a collection of facts, but a force or process (see Stuart Hall “Ethnicity, Identity, and Difference.” In Radical America. Somerville [Massachusetts]: Alternative Education Project, 1991: 28-36). These funny little re-told facts are breathing, constantly editing themselves; I have disorganized them into numbered entries, non-chronologically, because my inquiry here is related to the process of identity as it unfolds from consciousness, and from speech. I am, of course, interested in the facts of lives, but I am not holding their clarity or completeness as a high priority...as much as I can, I want to examine how the facts take hold of one another in the shakey continuities of memory.

My great-grandmother Ruth Shelby, whom I remember with blurry fondness, was an ambulance driver in World War I. She was married several times, and got angry when her grandsons (my father and his brothers) were too protective of her health and safety. I know her younger daughter--my paternal grandmother Libby Brown--much better...she taught me to paint in the public-television style, and she tells stories that imply a life of beauty and privilege. Her sense of place in the world is often consumed with the memory of her brother Everett, a fighter pilot who "fell to the ocean fighting the Germans." She speaks of other problems: the weather, and what should be on the dinner table...though it should be said that, true to her fathers' will, she almost never had to cook or clean. I remember thinking that Libby, at the age of 60, was already a 70 year-old woman. But now she's in her 80s, and just as strong as the grandmother that I've always known.

When Ruth was in her late 30s, Benny Goodman was buying Fletcher Henderson arrangements for his band, and negotiating for a chance to play on a nationally syndicated radio show, among the first of its kind. Her older daughter Essie would have been in her late teens, and there would have been articles in the paper about the affects of swing music on the morals of our youth. Essie climbed into some sporty convertibles in her day, if I understand correctly, and didn't shy away the unfamiliar experiences. Though older than my grandmother, not as thin, and a chain-smoker, she's the one who can still hold her own in the world, walk a few miles in the morning. Essie has a left-of-center talk radio show in New Hampshire.

2.

Johanna Noonan escaped Ireland in the 1860s, lying about her age (34) to meet the criteria of a personal ad. "Teen brides wanted for the Leahy Brothers in Oregon. Reply with tin-type; will send tickets for ship passage via Tierra Del Fuego."

The Leahy family is large enough to have T-shirts and other merchandise mass-produced for its reunions. Grandma Evelyn Leahy is an army mom, proud that all of her ten children are good Christians, and two-to-six children were born to each of them in turn. She's written an unpublished novel about that, as well as a screenplay about pirates and indians. When I moved to California, she sent me an envelope with both of these enclosed, hoping I'd pass them along to my higher-up friends in Hollywood. Grandma also writes letters to Steven Speilberg, Queen Elizabeth, and the Pope. (Only the Pope replies, sending her a bounty of embossed bookmarks, publicity photographs, letters of general gratitude for her faith, and copies of the well-known feast-day prayers.)

3.

Mom eloped, I'm told, because her older sisters, according to custom, should have married before her. But Evelyn helped her pack the suitcases. (Evelyn had warned my mother that in arguments pertaining to science and nature, she should let my father win, if she wanted to keep the marriage strong.)

Escaping a job at a fish cannery, for adventure with a geology professor, was a story without down-sides. Bob Carson: the future...respected social norms: the past. There were no wedding pictures, and no cake, but everyone celebrated.

Libby loved my mother but worried publicly about her son, a confirmed Episcopalean, marrying a Catholic girl. Those worries were soon upstaged by my father's interest in Judaism. "I wanted to be a Jew, because I'm passionate about doing good, and I believe in God. The Ten Commandments make sense. But when we get to the New Testament, I have a hard time. I'm not so sure about Jesus."

"Funny, I'm the opposite," my mother replied. "I see no reason to doubt Jesus living and dying as a subject of the Roman Empire, talking about other-worldly things and doing magic tricks. That sort of thing happens all the time. What I have trouble with is the God part."

Nevertheless, in the early 1990s, my mother turned away from her faith in God's non-existence. It happened like this: although our family was avowedly agnostic, we all went to Catholic schools to please Christian grandparents. When the church got into legal troubles about some land disputes, she took it upon herself to volunteer in defense of the school's coffers, which she saw as being connected to the quality of her sons' educations. Her status as an atheist, though, limited her sense of community with the school board and her other collaborators. At around the same time she was reading new commentary on ritual and myth and the collective unconscious, and decided Catholicism was so close to the core of her life and selfhood that it was impossible to abandon it on purely rational grounds. Once she returned to the church and started attending mass regularly, her life was enriched by a new community and a new sense of purpose.

4.

But I'm skipping the important parts, writing the recent history without its more distant context. In 1699 the English teenager Deborah Smith faught with her elders over the issue of witchcraft. Her mother, fearing for the family's reputation, disowned her. Deboarah's life was saved by Aunt Brigid, an old midwife, who stole her away and put her on a boat for New Jersey. Deborah married a quaker there named Leeds, and, although she was uneducated, set up practice immediately as a traditional doctor. Quakers were supposedly more tolerant than Anglicans. By middle age she was a teacher of midwifery, known as Mother Leeds. It was customary in those days to accuse midwifes, and other powerful or independent women, of witchcraft.

Mother Leeds' twelve known children include Japhet, my great great great great great grandfather on Libby Brown's side. Conservative Christians in New Jersey will tell you that her thirteenth child--my great uncle, technically--was the Devil. He's known as "the Jersey Devil" -- a creature that, minutes after the umbillical cord was cut, sprouted wings and a tail, took to the air, circled the bedroom six times, and escaped up the chimney to terrorize colonial America.

Libby Brown is also descended from Judge Cotton Mather, who's mentioned in most U.S. History books as an apologist for (and later a reluctant critic of) witch burning. I'm much less familiar with that branch of our family.

5.

Japhet's great grandson Albert Ripley Leeds was a well-known professor of chemistry, and friend of Increase Mather, descendant of Cotton. Increase became president of Harvard, and his son married Albert's daughter. (Libby's grandmother.) Albert wrote to Increase about Mother Leeds, but could not convince him, or anyone else, to speak to the courts about exonerating the Leeds name from the tarnish of devil worship.