My grandmother had a true talent for interesting stories about people in her family. They first came to Virginia in 1607 and, according to Grandma, did wonderful and horrible things. She inherited and added to several family books with handwritten notes in the margins. When she passed away, I inherited them. The books were, at best, dense. Multiple indentations, codes, and incredibly tight leading made them less than useful for easy information. So, as a designer, I attempted to make sense of it with a diagram. It quickly became a tangle of fishing lines as the Virginia branch enjoyed marrying other family members. This was clearly the influence in John Huston’s film Chinatown:
Evelyn: “She’s my daughter.”
Gittes: “I said I want the truth!”
Evelyn: “She’s my sister. . . .”
Evelyn: “She’s my daughter. . . .”
Evelyn: “My sister, my daughter.”
Gittes: “I said I want the truth!”
Evelyn: “She’s my sister AND my daughter!”
In one of the boxes of images, I found an image of President Chester Arthur's wife, Ellen Lewis Herndon Arthur. She had an amazing resemblance to my mother, 100 years later. I found the same bizarre genetic duplication with an image of my great-grandfather when he was eighteen and myself at the same age. I compared the images in Photoshop to determine if the facial structure was similar, or I was completely imagining things. This led to a disturbing project of replacing a relative with me. I can’t explain the psychosis here. There is something connected to family, history, responsibility, agency, identity, shame, pride, and all the contradictory feelings inherent with a history inexorably interwoven with the nation’s history. A better option would have been therapy, but that would involve introspection. So that was, obviously, out.
Eventually, I will sort out the issues and make a wonderful, albeit disturbing, book.
