chaun webster: “I cannot make the record whole. It was not whole to begin with.”
I’ve read that the American crow will gather around their dead, seemingly performing a kind of funeral rites, looking at the fallen crow and calling out to it in improvised sequence as though enacting a ceremony where they are mourning their loss. Scientists believe this is more likely connected to a kind of record keeping the crows are doing, where they examine the crow that has died, slowly collecting the details of and around its body and urging other crows to do the same, gathering any evidence of the cause to avoid the same end. They make a sonic archive.Article continues after advertisement
This year a text I’ve been working on for ten years is making its way into the world. I was attempting to write about a loss that predated me, whose echo I could still feel. It emerged from an interview with my mother in 2015 where she told me about her father’s twenty-five years of work as a Pullman porter for the Great Northern Railroad and her claim that he retired without pension, dying seven months later. I would spend years just slowly peeling back her words, gathering a birds-eye view as though perched on a branch of a tall tree, trying to make sense of what happened. In time I would interview porters who worked with my grandfather, chasing the archival remains of my dead in employment records, census data, and newspaper clippings.
