University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wilson Library: Katy Simpson Smith (Essay)

The archives evoke isolation. Picture the scholar huddled over her documents, blind to her neighbors and deaf to the archivists who ply her with foam wedges and weighted sacks. This, perhaps, is why the archives seem dull, a place of slow mummification. But what if the archives were instead a site of loud and raucous discovery, a fund of information that linked not only friend to neighbor, but daughter to father to cousin to aunt? What if the brittle paper and hushed tones were not the end of an intellectual journey, but the beginning of one?

February 2009, and it was flurrying in Chapel Hill. In the warmth of the Southern Historical Collection, I was reading a woman’s diary from the 1760s, searching for snippets on motherhood for my dissertation. Scribbled on an otherwise empty page near the back of the small volume, I found this:

Epitaphs
No. 1. TOT heme mor yofa po, or WO! ma nag edse vent yando ne.
No. 2. JA mesab bata ilorf ortyf ivey EAR sofa ge.
No. 3. TOMBA tesa far merinde von. HEDI ed inpe ase.
Proverbs
No. 1. Muc kledinand litt lewo O! Quoth Ede ilwhen hecli Petthesow.
No. 2. TAC eisla tin fo racand lehuz ZA.
No. 3. LIT lepit cher shavegre at tears.[1]

I was stumped. I came home and forwarded the passage to my brother and parents, daring them to decipher the scrawl in what I called the first annual cryptography competition. Within minutes, I received a flood of emails, not only from my immediate family, but from friends, colleagues, and a side of the family we always had trouble keeping up with. My mother was the first to crack the code, rearranging the spaces to produce “To the memory of a poor woman, aged seventy and one,” “Little pitchers have greatt [sic] ears,” and “Tace is Latin for a candle.  Huzza!"

My father sheepishly confessed that he almost guessed the whole thing was in Anglo-Saxon. Solving the riddle didn’t put an end to our collective curiosity, though; confused emails continued to ricochet through the ether. What on earth does “Tace is Latin for a candle” mean? (Look it up!) The most merriment emerged from Proverb #1, which we deduced to be "Muckle din and little woo, quoth the deil when he clippet the sow," an old Scottish aphorism. My brother, through the wonders of Google, found a comprehensible translation ("Much noise and little wool, said the Devil when he sheared the pig") and enlightened us about the popular medieval play from which the saying derived. There was an abundance of traded silliness that night, but most importantly, I was communicating with family members in an orgy of intellectual pursuit. This revival of interest in medieval drama, Latin etymology, and each other had sprung from a single scrap of paper, dated 1764, long buried in the vaults. The archive is not just a place for solitary study, then: it’s a launching pad for a communal spirit of discovery.

Katy Simpson