Oral history as rendezvous: memory and story in the aftermath of state violence
This talk was originally presented by Dr. Celeste Henery on TAVP’s panel “Story Sharing for Cultural Transformation” for the New Story Journey: Connection, Courage, and Creativity on September 26, 2020.
Today I wish to speak about memory and story. Story involves memory and it’s through the process of having our participants share their story that our organization continues to ponder what our work creates. Asking others to tell their stories is to invite complexity in the moment. Story acts as a form of soft power and holds the potential to surface insight and grow connection. While memory nor story are innocent, observations from my work with the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) circle around the generative potential of our memory work and storytelling.
In 2011, within the first years of working for TAVP, I was asked to reach out and interview Mr. Jim Willett, a former warden here in Texas. Willett was publicly known for his 30-year tenure in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and for the 89 executions he oversaw. The New York Times has written about him, and he himself has told his story in a memoir. The non-verbal cue of shifting his glasses to initiate an execution serves in write-ups as the humanizing detail offered about his role and service in the system of capital punishment.
When a fellow TAVP colleague initially reached out to Mr. Willett for an interview, he was apparently not hospitable to our invitation. Subsequently I was tasked with following up in the hopes that there was a way to connect. We felt his story, albeit many times told, would nonetheless contribute to the variety of voices on state violence in Texas that our archive seeks to capture.
It would take several emails and verbal reassurances that we were not an organization looking to antagonize or judge him before a more affirmative relationship took hold. Our organization’s presence in liberal Austin and our mere interest in prisons might have been enough in my assessment, to have him assume disapproval or even accusatory anger at his professional life. Through several conversations by phone and email, we agreed upon a time for us to make the trip to Huntsville. During that last exchange, he shared that part of what had complicated choosing a date was that he had been attending to some personal affairs. It was clear beyond the specifics, simply by his tone, that these matters were weighing on him.
When we finally drove to interview Mr. Willett, my partner and I headed into an otherwise empty building. No sooner than we had entered, I heard my name called with his recognizable accent. Mr. Willett emerged from the far side of the room, looking exactly like the photographs I’d seen of him. To my subtle surprise he greeted me with a warm hug.
I begin with this story to talk about what storyteller Dr. Martin Shaw calls skin and flesh memory. Skin memory holds the facts, the surface events, the order of operations that we recall. Flesh memory is made of what we felt. I remembered Mr. Willett’s hug, an unexpected feeling of connection that communicated that at least some his fears of our intentions had transformed into openness.
Mr. Willett’s interview, not to our surprise, turned out to be filled with skin memory, his timeline working at the prison, from guard to warden to retirement. He also spoke of the executions from the vantage of a warden enacting the will of law, including his doubt and reserve about whether capital punishment was right or wrong or prisons doing their work of rehabilitation. This flesh memory came through as he was inevitably affected by his experiences in the death chamber at the same time that he had pride in the efforts he took to respect the lives of inmates, for example, by attending many of their funerals. In interviewing people like Mr. Willett, who professionally have been asked about their experience, and have written their own story, our concern is less about re-documenting that which has already been shared, but creating a time to explore and to allow the complexity of state violence to come into the room.
At the conclusion of Mr. Willett’s interview, after the camera was turned off, our conversation continued. There was small talk I can no longer remember. But what lingered what his response to my simple question about the troubles he had mentioned on the phone. He drew in a breath and shared more. We listened as his stoic ache filled the room, if only briefly.
I began by speaking of memory, story, and the notion of healing. This off-camera moment evokes the speculation of Verne Harris, the Head of Leadership and Knowledge Development at the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Centre of Memory and Dialogue, that the healing force of memory work, if there is one, may have more to do with rendezvous than closure. Rendezvous, as I understand it, is the encounter and engagement of forces, in our case of people, interests, and experiences. The unique power of this kind of meeting is its timing, which cannot be forced, and often not anticipated. Following Harris’s line of thinking, having Mr. Willett remember the executions was not necessarily therapeutic, but what in the moments from the phone call to the interview and its aftermath, felt like rendezvous, where the relational field deepened and connected us.
Years later, I gave a talk to university’s students during a week-long fellowship out-of-state, about my work doing these interviews and in mitigation with death row inmates. I showed a clip of the interview with Mr. Willett — a small moment that might give texture to and animate the prison complex for undergraduates, who presumably had likely never visited a prison, nor knew much about carceral state and its executions. I no longer remember which clip I showed, just that I delivered the talk with a sobering style, attempting to create skin memory, but perhaps a little flesh memory as well. The room was mostly silent.
Days later, a student asked to meet with me. We scheduled a time, as these encounters were part of the responsibility of the fellowship. At the given hour, a young woman cautiously entered my makeshift office. I welcomed her and I began to ask her simple questions about her life as a student. She shared with reserve and with one-line answers that had me start to wonder why she had desired to connect. After 15 minutes of question and answer, I finally asked how I might help her. Her response was to ask if I knew who she was. My answer was no.
From there she began to tell the story of one of her parent’s murder by a person with mental illness and the fraught political, social, and familial world in which the homicide occurred. She had come to my talk, for only the first part, before having to leave, but it had compelled her to come speak to me, to share her desire to help save her parent’s killer. She had arrived at her vantage through much faith-based tribulation and now felt alone in her perspective and thus alone in her action. She told me I was the first person she could share her story and terrifying dilemma with. She also asked me what she should do.
This meeting left me with unanswerable questions even as I engaged the young woman and provided her points of reflection rather than any directives. I now understand our encounter as several forms of rendezvous. The first occurred in her watching the clip of Mr. Willett. Her encounter with the short video and perhaps some of my talk led her to the second rendezvous of which I just shared. These meetings were patiently waited for and largely unanticipated, but ones in which her internal quandaries were palpated, expressed, and her perspective expanded. These were not moments of telling her story to heal or forget, or feel better. In my assessment, these were ones in which a vulnerable and complicated agency occurred. In having people remember and tell their stories a depth of spirit and humanity itself is engaged and felt in relationship.
This young woman’s story, like my time with Mr. Willett, had an effect on me. I was wordless in the moment; the import alive. With time and now Shaw’s language, I think of her story and the echoes she perhaps felt in Mr. Willett’s, as bone memory. Shaw speaks of bone memory, by contrast to those of skin and flesh, as the archetypal storyteller’s domain, where the archetypal range of human experience and emotion are evoked through story and ripple back into the human past as well as forward into its future. Bone memory sounds and smells, and enters us like myths.
In Mr. Willett’s account, his professional words lay over a soul unresolved, a mediator of life and death. His story was one of executioner, chaplain, and caretaker. In the exchanges with the young university student, in watching Mr. Willett’s video and in the space opened around such questions of state violence, she may have encountered elements of her own dimensional struggle, including the reverberations of an abandoned and lost daughter, a wandering and purposeful soul, the multiple meanings of justice, an initiatory experience of suffering that I couldn’t imagine facing at such a young age. These memories and stories were not meant for resolution.
The stories we document certainly teach about state violence. This remains a primary intention, as I understand it. Yet attuning myself to the process we undergo has led to a deeper study of memory, particularly bone memory in our work, that threads stories across and through time and into another. This process had led to the restless and agitated side of remembering. This is a risk of a storytelling project that welcomes and accompanies haunted and tender memories. The potential of retraumatization is a constant part of our dialogue and informs our practice. And at the same time, I’ve come to wonder if some of our difficult encounters were spurred by ill timing or, contrastingly, if they too are part of the mysterious process of rendezvous, meetings and their stories not meant to be archived for the public, but important in the lives of our participants and that of our organization. Bone memory and rendezvous are the breathing forces behind so much of our work, and ones often unnamed. Indeed, a lot of our work turns inward, away from the public. These dimensions are what I sense inspire the affirming words of our collaborators and staff. They also are what, in these troubled times, gesture to what cultivates human connection and enables the complexity of the interwoven human story to palpably arrive and fill our shared space.
Dr. Celeste Henery is an anthropologist and creative guide who doubles as a Research Associate in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at UT Austin. She is a long-time TAVP interviewer and serves on TAVP’s board of directors.
