In a recent episode of the television series Modern Family, a boy named Luke interviews his grandfather, Jay, for a class project on “life in the 60s”. After hearing Jay’s memories of working in his father’s barber shop, Luke complains that his grandfather’s past is boring in comparison to a classmate’s relative who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. on Capitol Hill. Without missing a beat, Jay stops what he’s doing and says, “Well who do you think cut his hair?” In the next scene, he reveals to the camera, “Do you know who cut Martin Luther King Jr.’s hair? I don’t. And Luke’s teacher won’t either.”
Ah, the problems of oral history. When you are dealing with memories, you can never be sure of what is fact and what is fiction. Sure, it is probably more difficult for an eight-year-old to figure out that his great-grandfather probably didn’t cut Martin Luther King Jr.’s hair, but professional oral historians grapple with similar, if less obvious, issues.
While my experience with oral history is fairly new, I am gradually being exposed to both the joys and the frustrations of this field. This summer, my fellow classmate and I are designing the oral history component of the Promised Land Project, a joint project between a number of universities and community partners in Canada that aims to create a database of primary sources regarding the experience of the black community in the Chatham-Kent area of Southwestern Ontario, and extending as far as the American-Canadian border. We have tried nearly every form of communication to reach potential candidates in the area: mailed, cold-called, emailed, and, perhaps the most effective of all, relied on word of mouth.
This is a small community, as we have quickly come to learn. If the people we interview aren’t related to one another, they certainly know who the other person is, and their family, and dog, and (you get the picture). Despite the numerous connections, however, it is not easy to persuade people to share their memories, particularly since those memories are believed to be unimportant, or trivial. Many people think that they have nothing of significance to say for the purposes of historical research. While oral history began to appear in academia in the 1970s it is still a popular belief that history is to be found in books rather than the voices of average people.
On both sides of the table, there is almost a fear of memory. For the researcher: how do I know what is fact from fiction? How will my own life experiences colour the way that I hear this history? For the narrator: What if I misremember things, or forget certain details about my own life? What if I say the wrong thing?
I can see now why the literature on oral history stresses the importance of building a good rapport between the researcher and the narrator. These fears have to be subdued by a common understanding that the goal of oral history is, essentially, to collect stories. I am of the belief that all history must be created anyway. History doesn’t just exist. It is studied, analyzed, compared, applied and interpreted, debated and spoken about and written down. Oral history is a different animal, and perhaps more delicate, because the product results from the interaction between two individuals rather than an academic and her texts.
Is history less objective in this way? I haven’t decided yet, and it’s a subject of debate amongst historians. Maybe that’s not the point. Because really, oral history is just another source, another lens through which we might see the past. Combined with thorough research on the subject at hand, be it a particular time period or community, an oral history interview can provide a much-needed human element. It connects the world of academic history to the memories of a community’s past, an individual’s past.
Historian Ronald Grele puts it perfectly when he writes that “our stories grow from a process of remembering and forgetting our encounters with the relics, fragments, whispers of an always already-recollected time…we live both the history we have learned through reading and research and the history we have experienced and inherited, passed down through the groups with which we identify, sedimented in the body, and created through talk”
[1]. History is interwoven and complex, just like our own lives. It is just as much in people’s homes, in their recipes and quilts and traditions as in the texts of academia.
In this pocket of the world that encompasses Chatham-Kent, Essex County, and Eastern Michigan there is a history as rich as the soil which has sustained this community and witnessed its past. Its history does not end with the Underground Railroad, the so-called “Promised Land” for escaped slaves, but includes the complex development of race-relations over the 20th century and the civil rights movement well into the 1960s.
Together with our narrators we have been exploring the collective memories that have shaped this regional history, and more generally, why oral history exists. Despite the occasional frustrations, it truly has been a wonderful learning opportunity so far. After nearly ten weeks on the project it is evident that half the work is in locating potential narrators and convincing them that their histories are worthy of being shared and preserved for future generations.
As of yet, no one has claimed to have barbered Martin Luther King Jr.’s hair, but I’ll keep you posted.
[1] Charlton, Thomas L., Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless, eds.
Handbook of Oral History (Lanham, MD : Altamira Press, 2006), 85.