“Grandpa always took good care of the place,” my mom told me last time I mentioned the house to her. It means more to her than it does to me, I think; she lived there some as a kid, and my grandparents loved her. She has a photo of them in front of the side porch of the house. It’s bright out, in the picture, and they’re squinting pretty heavily. My mom told me that this picture was taken when we went to help them pack up their stuff to move to an assisted-living facility in Fort Wayne, two and half hours northeast of their home.
Ralph and Maxine Swim are actually our great-grandparents, but my siblings and I have always just called them Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa kept a daily journal for most of his life, written in pencil in your basic college-ruled notebooks. I can remember him sitting in his chair at night, recording the weather patterns and the day’s events as well as notes on the books he was reading. For a long time I thought that these had been sold off in the move to Fort Wayne. They’ve been stored away for most of my adult life. Somewhere. Nobody’s sure exactly where. In a storage facility, maybe, or some boxes in the back of a garage—family bones rotting in an unmarked grave.
* * *
The thing about being ambiguously white in America is that you’re simultaneously everything and nothing. Our legacy is forward; we hit the eastern seaboard running and never looked back. It’s about mobility. It’s about freedom. It’s about progress and futures and 401(k)s. Growing up in the suburbs, you don’t learn how to look backward to find strength: you don’t have to know your history to make it. I don’t remember when I first realized this; it just sort of surfaced in the process of trying to find my roots and discovering I didn’t recognize the tree. I am not talking about immediate family. I am talking about history. I am talking about knowing where you come from, and the strength of generations.
I am a child of colonizers whose roots, I have long believed, run shallow across the face of the continent. My culture, as a function of its tendency toward domination, is largely invisible. I don’t carry on any traditions; I know little of my heritage. The closest thing I have is a childhood steeped in the evangelical church, my dad’s small furniture business, and the hole my grandfather dug behind this house in Oxford, Indiana.
* * *
I was thirteen years old when my great-grandfather died—old enough to miss him, but not yet old enough to know why.
Ralph Davis Swim, to use the name on his obituary, worked for the United States Postal Service most of his life, minus a short stint in the army, first running the mail trains through St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit, then at the post office in nearby Lafayette. At his funeral, my grandma (his daughter) told me that he saw the St. Louis Arch go up day by day as he rode the rails in and out of the city. My mom told me she remembers him sitting in his office memorizing the maps of these cities, and that he could pretty well draw them out from memory. Apparently he was the one who would sort the mail by street for drop-off.
I know a few other things about my great-grandfather: I know that he put the same amount of change in his pocket every morning. I know that he labeled everything with small typewritten notes on strips of paper. I know that he was fascinated by engineering—when they started building wind farms in Oxford he would go out and watch them, peppering the builders with questions and suggestions. He is the only person I’ve ever known who actually used a handkerchief, and he loved to work with his hands, building little sets of drawers and child-size chairs for my brother and sisters and me. (One of these sets of drawers sits in the hallway of my apartment now.) There’s a video clip in the family archives of Grandpa raking leaves at my parents’ house. He was always raking leaves or doing dishes or something like that at everybody’s houses. I am helping him, in the clip, though since I am about four years old I am mainly just spreading the leaves around.
* * *
“This will be a history of Ralph and Maxine Swim.” Written by Ralph.
The document was tucked away in the back of a binder: seven sheets, one-sided, stapled together. It’s handwritten in my grandpa’s distinctive cursive scrawl; I’ve seen it a hundred times, on pieces of paper taped inside handmade cubbies and inscribed on the inside cover of books. The pages are photocopies of photocopies of (probably) photocopies. There’s no date, but context clues tell me he wrote it some time after he retired (1981) and before they moved out of the house (1998). It is a short document, considering the fact that it encompasses something like seventy-five years, but it’s obvious that this isn’t meant to be comprehensive. It’s a short rundown of facts, names, and dates, with just a bit of commentary.
Sometime in September, 1939, Ralph [STRIKETHROUGH] we started working on a farm two miles south of Covington Indiana. A house was furnished to them [STRIKETHROUGH] us and that was their [STRIKETHROUGH] our first home.
It’s written in a mix of third and first person, though he went through and corrected dozens of pronouns after the fact in an attempt to create a uniform voice. He glosses over large sections, and goes into meticulous detail on others—there’s a particularly specific section giving an account of every car they ever owned—with shorthand names for places like “the Scott House” and “Old MacDonald’s Farm.” He recounts their first few years together, in which they bounced around from job to job, place to
