A Tale of Two Helens
Helen (1868) & Helen (1995)
Dear Reader,
Oh boy. Has it been since February, or has time simply compressed, allowing me to jump over the wrinkled months and arrive at the harvest with bunches of ripe fruits and vegetables in my arms? We’ll say it’s the latter.
Life, it seems, continues to happen throughout the stickier months — and the spring was, indeed, sticky, as I read more Heidegger than I’d expected and contemplated death and its meaning. The summer, too, sticky, sweaty, incredibly and immensely hot across all the places I ventured. My body is now worn out and yet my mind churns and I suppose I’ve somehow sweated something out which is, I suppose, lucky for you, were you waiting on another newsletter. Though I believe this project is now divided; there are the facts, some of which I’ll try to enclose below, and then there are the poems. Or I think they are poems — they should probably be called ‘prose poetry,’ and yet I’m dubious of that. I’ll call them what they are: the truth. They wouldn’t work in newsletter form, trust me; so even as I am wrestling and working and wrangling and wringing here, within pages of ancestral notes and letters and censuses (god, the censuses), I am also working through myself, my tangles.
So I offer you this, a compromise. This is a story about an ancestor, Helen Willard, and it’s about myself. Through this, I’m thinking: how close the past, how close its people. How close the mouth, breathing down our necks. Hot breath.
Helen Armstrong was born in Pottstown, Pennsylvania in 1995.
Helen Willard was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1868.
Helen was the youngest of two, but her father’s first, and her mother’s second, and would, much later, be joined by a third.
Helen was the (eldest) of five, being followed by Frank, Louise, David, and Dwight. Her mother, Isabella, had previously given birth to a daughter before Helen. The child had passed away within less than a year.
Helen’s home of wood: wooden sticks for gathering in the yard, wooden hoop for playing in the field, wooden floorboards for creaking just so, wooden piano with ivory keys on which to play do re mi.
Helen’s home of song. My son, I loved our native land with energy and pride, / Until a blight came on my land, my sheep and cattle died. / The rent and taxes were to pay, I could not them redeem, / And that's the cruel reason why I left old Skibbereen. Rosanna Edwards, 25, from Ireland; Joanna Furlough, 21, from Ireland; Margaret Hazlet, 17, from Scotland. Humming in the kitchen; whistling through the laundry.
Helen’s grandmother was a kind and gentle and bountiful woman. She had no end; she simply went on forever.
Helen’s grandmother was married to an enslaver. She, too, went on forever. Grandmothers do.
When Helen was seven years old, there were flowers to pick from the soccer field and songs to sing with Mommy and treats to eat on the side porch on the summer days.
When Helen was seven years old, her mother died.
When Helen was nine years old, there was lanky growth. Grandma said this was normal, it happened to her. It happened to many of the women of the family. Tall women. The pulling of bones and ligaments and muscles and the skin’s stretching to stay fitted. It was painful, it was hard. It was not, in the end, that hard.
When Helen was nine years old, her father died. This is how it happened: August 4, 1877. Dwight took the children to bathe in the river. (Were they all there?) One of the twins, one of Helen’s brothers, slipped into a dangerous place. (Were they all in the water? Were some on the shore? What was this dangerous place?) Dwight managed to save her brother, but the stories tell us, the history tells us, that in the process he drowned. (Did the other children see it all? Was Helen horrified, did she watch, could she not? Did their father cry out to be saved, in turn, as he had saved his son, and did the children, did Helen stand still, even the dripping one, did they all stand and watch?)
Helen was brought up by her parents and lived in the same old farmhouse until she was 18, at which point she left for college, taking the opposite journey of Helens’ ancestors, crossing the Atlantic to England rather than leaving from it.
Helen was sent to live with her uncle, whom the children called “Uncle Doctor.” (He was, it seems, a well-respected and wealthy physician.) Uncle Doctor built an estate, “Willowbrook,” in Lansdowne, PA. It was outside of the city noise and perhaps it was easier to track the children and their limbs in the green of the suburbs than the gray of the city, into which they blended.
When Helen was eighteen, she traveled to Great Britain and Europe.
When Helen was twenty, she traveled to Great Britain and Europe.
Helen moved to Colorado and married a woman, Kayla.
Helen moved to Louisville, Kentucky and married a man, William McNair.
In Colorado, Helen and Kayla lived in a series of apartments. Not bad ones. Air conditioned and surrounded by open space. Rattlesnakes and mice as neighbors. Coyotes in the night.
In Louisville, Helen and William lived in a house alongside three Black servants: Thomas (49, male) and Willie (47, female) Hill and Sarah Irwin (28). The Hills were from Virginia and Thomas is listed, on the census, as a railroad laborer while Willie is listed as a cook. All of them could read and write. Willie had one living child — possibly Sarah. But it’s impossible to say. There are no records.
In Louisville, Colorado, Helen and Kayla bought some land (how could they, how dare they?), a small patch but a rich one, and — we are now at the present moment, leaning forward.
In Louisville, Kentucky, Helen went on to live with two more Black servants: Bertha Graham, 18, and Lee Martin, 32. Bertha was the house girl. Lee was the cook. Both were single women from Kentucky. Helen had three children, the first of whom she named Helen. Her husband, William, received high honors for his work with the Young Mens Christian Association, or YMCA. Helen died in Louisville on January 31, 1931.
The past may be close with its breath and warmth and yet we are here, poised on the edge of the future, never to arrive at it but always to be thinking of it and reaching toward it. Leaning forward. Looking back: we’d turn and see the thing right in its mouth, wouldn’t we? We’d see its teeth. We’d smell its breath.
With care—
Helen (Armstrong)