Running around like a headless chicken...

I've always liked sayings. One of my favourite phrases when I was a kid was "running around like a headless chicken." I believe it was my dad who explained what it meant. Apparently, when you cut a chicken's head off, sometimes its body keeps going. (And in one instance, going and going!) In any event, even if chickens' bodies do not run around after their heads have been removed, the phrase is used to mean frantically bouncing around from one thing to the next.

That's a feeling any researcher is familiar with. Obviously, you need to have — and use — your head to do history. Still, at the beginning of a project, you bounce around on the outskirts of a subject, careening from book to book, jumping from source to source, lurching from thought to thought, trying to find a way into the subject.

I'm sure the answer to the where to start question is different for every historian. One of the things I like to do at the beginning of a project is read the newspaper. Whether it's focused on local events or on "loftier" matters, reading the paper lets me start to feel the rhythms of the language of the day, the cadence of some of the words that people have left behind. And that helps me feel as if I'm getting oriented to the tenor of the times.

So off and on for the past week or so, in between reading my assigned seminar readings, I've been reading Cape Fear Museum's small stash of Wilmington's 1850s newspapers. The paper at the time was only four pages long. And those four pages are mostly concerned with local matters: they are filled with local advertisements, like the one below, from the Wilmington Journal of May 16, 1856.


You also can read lists of ships coming into and out of port, prices for commodities like tar, rosin, and lumber. And there are other ads, like these where one person is looking for a "teacher of undoubted moral character" to provide a classical education for the family's children, and another is offering a $50 reward for the return of a slave who has run away from him.

History doesn't always record the names of slaves. When there are records, a slave often only possesses a first name. Yet in this ad, one slave uses a plethora of names: two surnames, and three first names. As I read about Mr. Hayes/Smith, I wondered if the fact that both his surnames are different from his current owner meant he was owned by someone else before Bonham bought him. I wondered if he used aliases because he'd run away before. I wondered if he took a number of names as a way to resist his master's power over him. I wondered if he had a family he left behind and that's why he was "lurking" in the region. But mostly I keep wondering if, in the face of a deck that was stacked so high against him, Duncan/Maurice Hayes/Joe Smith managed to truly escape from slavery. I find myself wishing that I knew more about his history and life and hoping that he made it out from under the yoke of bondage.

It's at times like these, when a source creates more questions than it answers, that it strikes me that I've spent a lot of my professional life trying to do something that I know is actually impossible. We can't really understand the past. We can learn about events, and we can sometimes get insights into people's inner lives through diaries or letters. We can see patterns using statistics. But we'll never truly know what it was like to live through the 19th century.

And so, although I love thinking about the traces of the past that we can see around us: in the landscape, in the artifacts in our homes and cultural institutions, and through the primary sources that remain, I also know I'll be spending a lot of time over the next few months feeling kinship with headless chickens.