On Preservation

The Rialto Theatre is the oldest theatre in the state of Arkansas. It sits on East Cedar Street in downtown El Dorado. It houses big screen movies, the symphony, and a few faceless ghosts. I took a picture of the inside four years ago. The pink walls, the green upholstery, the velvet red drapes: All of the interior took on a strange glow in my camera's sinister flash. I took flashless photos of the upstairs bathrooms. The cold afternoon shown on the white porcelain stalls, the white hexagonal floor-tiles. In the stockade of my dreams, black tarantulas were crawling from the sinks. I held them in my hands.

"The National Historic Preservation Act expresses a general policy of supporting and encouraging the preservation of prehistoric and historic resources for present and future generations, directing Federal agencies to assume responsibility for considering such resources in their activities. NHPA does not mandate preservation of such resources but requires Federal agencies to consider the impact of their actions on historic properties. The statute sets forth a multifaceted preservation scheme to accomplish these policies and mandates at the State and Federal levels."
--from the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966

I cannot tell you if the following is fact or fiction - if I dreamed these things or not: Texas. 1992. Sitting in my dad's old Toyota pickup. The brown leather seats, torn - showing the green foam beneath. We're treasure hunting. [no longer in the truck] We approach a number of grated porches. We duck under hammocked ceilings. We are opening wooden trunks with caution. Prince Albert tin-cans full of black hair clippings. Old baby shoes that my step-mom puts in Wal-Mart bags to restore later with shoe paints. We are harvesting bottle dumps. The sound of my father's metal detector causing us to stop in our tracks. We look at the photos of black people. The ones that used to live here. We save them for no reason at all. We are taking what isn't ours.

Years later, in an event which I can certify as fact, I was walking along the school grounds of the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina. I have a picture to prove it. My pulling out my 35mm was one of a series of birth pangs to follow. It was Thanksgiving 2007. The old cabin sat there in clear day. I was all alone. My grandfather sat in the truck a few yards away waiting for me. [Snap]



I approached the window and saw inside. [Snap]



Old beds with quilts. Their artistry veiled with the dust and all. The metal kitchenware sitting on the high shelf. The bare rocking chair. The windows had bars protecting them. They didn't want anyone inside. They hadn't marked the building. They hadn't, it appeared, touched it at all.

"The earliest Federal preservation statute was the Antiquities Act of 1906, which authorized the President to set aside historic landmarks, structures, and objects located on lands controlled by the United States as national monuments. It required permits for archeological activities on Federal lands, and established criminal and civil penalties for violation of the act. The Historic Sites Act of 1935 was the second major piece of Federal historic preservation legislation. This act declared it national policy to preserve for public use historic sites, buildings, and objects of national significance and directed the Secretary of the Interior to conduct various programs with respect to historic preservation. Although these statutes were significant, they did not create a national awareness of the need for preservation or provide a means to incorporate preservation concerns into Federal agency programs."
--from the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966

More Photos of relics:

- Italianate facades of St. Louis
- Folk homes of Georgia
- Clapboard chapels of Louisiana
- Gothic cathedrals of London

James Agee filled my heart with contentment as I read of the tenant farmers. The way in which he described the shoes, the sound of night, their faces. The smells, or "odors" that he had to catalogue:

"The odor of pine lumber, wide thin cards of it, heated in the sun, in no way doubled or insulated, in closed and darkened air. The odor of woodsmoke, the fuel being again mainly pine, but in part also, hickory, oak, and cedar. The odors of cooking. Among these, most strongly, the odors of fried salt pork and of fried and boiled pork lard, and second, the odor of cooked corn. The odors of sweat in many stages of age and freshness, this sweat being a distillation of pork, lard, corn, woodsmoke, pine, and ammonia. The odors of sleep, of bedding and of breathing, for the ventilation is poor. The odors of all the dirt that in the course of time can accumulate in a quilt and mattress. Odors of staleness from clothes hung or stored away, not washed."
--from 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men'



Perhaps I am drawn more to the life of it all - the living, the procreation, the feeding, the secrets, the games that made them smile. I know the Prince Albert Tin-Can is not questionable. My dad has it sitting on a bathroom shelf. If you open it, you will find the clippings of a black man's hair. Next to it, an old green tin of pomade. I smell inside the old bottles. The perfume, the mint oil, the cough syrup. The "odors" all smell ancient. Like kerosene. Like cold nights. In these odors I feel a great sadness which I cannot distill. They fuel in me a sedated fear, like the tarantulas crawling from the white sink. In dreams, the legs go limp. The body is tranquilized. I feel the ecstasy of time standing still.