Historian and Scholar Michael Amico reflects on his experience at the recent Freedom's Journey event in Norfolk, Connecticut.
Standing in front of the grave of James Mars on March 30, 2011, I realized that writing history was partly a matter of the speed at which we look at the world and where we decide to rest our eyes. I arrived in Norfolk, Connecticut, for a site visit to Mars' grave after making a wrong turn and getting lost for an hour and a half. When I finally turned around, my first thought was of how much more time it had taken me to get to Norfolk than I had originally planned.
As my car raced ahead, my mind began to trail behind. I looked out the window at the passing landscape and realized that the roads I traveled were essentially the same ones that people like James Mars, a slave and then a farmer in the nineteenth century, would have traveled in a horse-pulled wagon. The scenery of their travels was also relatively the same: trees, hills, rocks, streams.
Yet they moved slower. They saw more. Images remained in their eyes longer. Did they linger in their mind as well? Does stopping and staring at a view that someone who lived over a hundred years ago saw every day give us a close idea of what they might have been thinking--that always impossible yet crucial question of history? I suddenly became least interested in the grave of James Mars. It was no interest to him; he didn't even see it.
Ann Havemeyer, a town historian who runs the Norfolk Historical Society, pulled out a map and pointed to a few places that had something to do with Mars' life. Richard Byrne, another town historian who is also the sexton of the cemetery, offered to drive me around to them, as well as add to the tour with spots of his own. We moved slowly, lingered in front of houses, wandered a little around the cemetery, and wondered to ourselves in the car.
I saw Norfolk more clearly through Richard and Ann. It was not because of their vast knowledge of the town and its history but rather because they were in the driver's seat. All I had to do was stare, for only then could I free my mind from moving ahead in the present and imagine the past. What I learned about the past, what I was able to see in the life of James Mars, I only gathered by letting my thoughts drift, maybe like his own. What I realized was a key to writing history--one available to everyone yet sometimes least accessible to the professionalized historian--was a wandering mind, one that got lost.
The historian must, like history, not lead, but follow.
-Michael Amico