Hidden Literacies

What Lives Are Worthy of Narration?

The question of what lives are worthy of narration underlies The Hidden Literacies Project as a whole. While Youth’s Companion sought a wide demographic in terms of class and region, the magazine’s founding had largely been motivated by cultural anxieties about the children of a more leisured and urban middle class, deprived of the physical activity, intimacy with nature, and productive labor characteristic of farm boys like the Nelsons. The lead serial in the 1892 Youth’s Companion, “A Tale of the Tow-Path,” tells a didactic tale about a rural boy who, tiring of the labor of haying, goes fishing and is caught and punished by his father. Angry at what feels like injustice, Joe runs away and so learns to value his strict moral home and the honest work of farming. For the city boys reading about Joe’s trials and transformation, the farm becomes a symbolic space of virtue. The Nelsons generally do not write such didactic tales—a quick perusal of the serial stories included in this issue of Chit Chat will reveal far more of violence and dime novel adventure than can be found in the pages of Youth’s Companion. But the brothers do seem to recognize the role that their rural lives played in the national imaginary of boyhood. One of the stories in the January Chit Chat narrates the pleasures of a group of city children sent to the country for the summer. In this tale there is no haying, and the boys get to spend all their time in a mix of fun, angler knowledge and skill, and lazy, lyrical beauty: “soon they began to fish the farmer caught lots and Tom and Roy a few what fun it was now and then they saw a pickrel go skimming along or a black bass laying near the top of the water sunning him self and Tom and Roy was sorry when the farmer said they must go in to dinner.”
“A Tale of the Tow-Path,” written by Homer Greene for The Youth’s Companion, ran as the lead story over six issues of the magazine from January 7 to February 11, 1892, the cliff-hanger end of each segment a prod to buy the next week’s paper. Chit Chat copies this serial format: the January 1893 issue contains four serial stories, some but not all of which can be traced through other extant copies of the magazine. In “Trading Post Stories: In the Wilderness,” the trapper “Mink Skin” tells a rapt Trading Post audience of the various times when he “nearly got killed” by Indians, robbers, and wild animals. “[‘]I should think you had had an adventure[,’] my men all cheered” and demonstrating the serial nature of such oral sites of storytelling, “I told him [them] that we would have the other next time.” The stories serialized in Chit Chat have different settings and situations, but whether tales of island castaways, of a wilderness fur trader beset by robbers, the crew of a gun boat, or a white boy captured by Indians, the basic content of the narratives are remarkably similar: a mix of exploration of wild lands and fights with dangerous enemies. The world-making play that undergirds the Nelsons’ bookmaking is essentially imperial: a thing of conquest, settlement, development, and war. Serials, like empires, thrive on expansion.
The Nelsons well knew that claiming lands entailed the death and expulsion of prior inhabitants. Walter recalls:
Playing Indian was the most exciting game we played in those days and I hardly believe I should yell louder if I should see a genuine, wild-Indian than I did then. The last year or two, that we lived there we had a platform in a great spruce for the white-man's fort and our stratagems, surprises, and pitched-battles were blood-curdling in their intense reality and the neighbors said that we could be heard half-a-mile away as some body was being scalped by the wooden tomahawks or getting killed from ambush in the alders with milk-weed spears.

As Philip Deloria has shown, “playing Indian” has proved a highly durable cultural performance, a way of expressing a wide range of American virtues from the revolutionary era to the present.  Sometime after 1898, the Nelsons photographed the Indian play of other, younger children, perhaps including their little brother Ernest [fig. 7]. In the boys’ own “blood-curdling” play some children must have wielded “wooden tomahawks” and “milk-weed spears,” but the “we” of Walter’s narration plays the white man. Thus, as Robin Bernstein says of the violent ways white children used their black dolls, children and their play “were not only repositories and reflectors of racist culture; they were its co-producers” (212). The exuberant creativity and pleasure of the Nelson archive are powerfully, crucially, and perhaps inextricably linked to the most exploitative and destructive aspects of American history and culture. Part of what is hidden in the charming literacy of the Nelson’s periodicals is genocide.

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