Woman Born in 1856 Talks About Teaching Herself to Read in Secret

Описание: Woman Born in 1856 Talks About Teaching Herself to Read in Secret

Margaret Vance (née Caldwell) (1845–1924) was born in a small farming settlement in the valley country of western Virginia, the third of five children. She grew up in a Presbyterian household where hard things were kept quiet and managed without ceremony — a world of careful flour and lamp oil and nothing said that did not need saying. In 1862, at seventeen, she married Thomas Vance, a farmer's son from the next county, a man she had known for less than a year and loved with the particular certainty of someone who had never loved anyone before. He left for the war that same autumn. He came back in July of 1865. In this account, given in her seventy-seventh year, she does not dispute his goodness. He was a good man. What she disputes — what she has carried for sixty years without disputing to anyone — is her own silence: the thirty years she spent living beside a man she recognized as changed and unreachable, grieving him while he was still at the table, still in the bed, still in the yard, and never once telling him that she knew he was not all the way back. He died in 1900. She has visited the stone on Sundays since. A daguerreotype taken before he left — the young man with the near-smile, the settled weight, the eyes still fully in the room — sits in a cedar box in the bureau. A later photograph sits in the drawer by the parlor window. They have never been in the same drawer.

#1800s #historicalnarratives #19thcentury