I have two more weeks of class. Two weeks more, and then a wonderful break for the holidays, and then (gasp!) only one course left in this graduate program. That’s right. In May 2006, I will have completed all my coursework for my Masters degree.
That sounds really good.
It is hard to keep it in focus, though, as there is so much to do on an everyday basis.
In fact, my class this semester– and every semester, in fact– feels like something Extra that I do, something I Get To at the end of the day or for an occasional afternoon, and one evening a week for the class itself.
This semester, I must admit, has Asked For More. It has asked for A Lot more, and that is fine, and good, and appropriate. Because this semester I am a Real Live Historian, studying Durham in the New South, studying the history of what was a brand new city in the South’s shifting terrain after the Civil War.
And to be a Real Live Historian you can’t, if you can help it, rely on what other people have written about your subject. No. You need primary sources: original works, letters, documents, deeds, wills, newspaper articles– anything and everything pertaining to your topic that was created by the people living at the time you are studying.
What this means is hours and hours in the special collections libraries at Duke and UNC. It means special security measures and locking one’s folders in special lockers. It means reading materials under security camera surveillance. It means librarians carefully looking through your notes before you leave the library on the off chance that you may have slipped a valuable and ancient letter between your notecards.
What it also means is having reason to Go to the special collections libraries. It means requesting with some authority the precious-because-ancient documents filed away in the library’s fearsome depths. It means sifting with one’s fingertips through sheaves of yellowed newspapers, deciphering beautiful and elaborate script done in fountain-pen ink, unfolding creased documents with Bible-thin pages, opening to the light writing that has been sealed up for almost, and sometimes over, 100 years.
It is difficult, when doing this kind of research, to stay On Task. It is difficult to look only at things that Pertain. It is difficult to continue looking for, say, a letter about the music industry when Look! here’s a letter to Benjamin Newton Duke from Sally Such-and-so requesting money. And Sally Such-and-so’s handwriting is so magnificent. And her circumstances so wrenching. It’s a like a little soap opera, really it is, just looking through B.N. Duke’s papers. But your paper, the one for your class, isn’t about Sally such-and-so. No, it isn’t. And so you fold that letter up again, and you Keep Looking.
And now here we are, as close to the end of the semester as we have been so far, our final papers due in just less than two weeks. We have two drafts under our belts. We have read one another’s drafts. We have made suggestions. We have met with our professor. We are Counting Down.
And we are having problems.
My problem is my topic. I am researching the formation and impact of the African American Church in Durham in the New South. Fascinating, right? I thought so. Still do. And I was delighted, when my research began, to learn that two thriving A.A. churches in Durham today have their roots in the 1800’s. Yes, they do. And I was even more delighted, early in my research, to make contact with the great-great grandson of one of the founders, who thought he would certainly have primary source materils on hand. Certainly he would. And he would get them to me just as soon as he got home from a trip.
Unfortunately, when he got home a week and a half later and faithfully responded to me, he found that he actually had nothing that might help. Nothing at all in the way of primary source materials. He was as helpful and gracious as he could be. He sent me a website address and a brochure from a family reunion, but sadly these were not the exact kind of sources I needed.
And what the libraries have, in terms of primary sources regarding the African American church in Durham, is what might be termed Thin.
Still, I am combing through it. And making phone calls. And leaving my children with different friends afternoon after afternoon while I sit quietly in special collections libraries, distracted by ancient documents that Don’t Pertain.
My friend Jess doesn’t share my problem. She has Ample Sources. She is studying Prohibition, and in her first draft, which I read, wrote a steady stream of relevant and interesting information about Prohibition in Durham, and societies that formed for that cause, politics and local interest. It made this researcher, quite frankly, a little jealous.
But Jess has problems of her own, and this she will freely admit. Loaded with information, Jess is having trouble finding a thesis. Yes, she is. She has all kinds of things to write about, if only she could find something to say. In fact, she told me last night that she’d love to just Say it; to get up in front and tell us what she knows, and not have to develop an argument and prove something and Make A Point. She would love, she said, to just make a presentation.
And now Jess has another problem. It started this weekend and, happily, a remedy is on its way. But her problem amused us both. It is this: she sat down on Saturday, Industrious Jess, laptop on lap, coffee in hand, notes at the ready. She was Going To Write. And then her cat leaped onto her keyboard, fixing to make herself comfortable there. Jess was determined, however. She was going find that thesis, doggone it, and so Removed Her Cat. But the cat had some determination too, it would seem, and in the ensuing struggle, managed to remove the “p” from Jess’s keyboard.
So now, until the new keyboard comes, Jess will be writing about _rohibition and the tem_erance movement, wishing all the while that she could just give a _resentation. And I will take my meager facts and scrape them into my thesis argment and hope that the thing holds together.
