Author: Paul Deaton

January has been good for my writing. I organized an approach and it served to reduce stress. I’m better able to sit down, write, and feel like I accomplished something.

I eliminated a daily targeted number of written words. I mean, there is no deadline. It would be great to finish the book so I could begin the next project, yet I’m in no hurry. I want to be true to myself, not to an artificial writing goal.

Instead of a specific daily goal, I make sure to do something related to the project each day. Some days it’s hours, and some days it is minutes. I feel I have a grip on what was an unmanageable project.

I stopped writing and that enabled me to write. It’s the way a lifeguard overpowers a drowning victim to save them. I stopped writing and organized. First I developed a chapter list, or as I call it, the “big sections” list. There are 31 sections and seven appendices. I typed them all in a new document and as I find previously written sections or write new ones I hang them on the framework. The same with fragments located in folders or audio tapes of interviews. It is less hodgepodge than the way I wrote last year. Last year’s work can be plugged into the new framework and rewritten. The whole thing works.

The writing divides into some clean big parts. After the dedication and preface there are five sections where I combined my personal experience with whatever artifacts I could locate or had in my collection. These sections involved historical research and probing my memory. The working titles are Minnesota, Illinois, Virginia, Davenport and 1951.

The next part is written mostly from memory beginning with my earliest ones in the duplex where my parents brought me after being born. We lived there and three subsequent places before Father died and I left home. I don’t have much documentary evidence from these times: report cards, a few letters written to parents, and a small folder of school papers. The 1960s were the beginning of an explosion of home photography, so I have albums and extra photos from that time. I also scanned copies of Mother’s photographs before she died. While documentation is scant, there is plenty to prompt memories. I find it remarkable the detail with which I remember things long hidden in my brain. The working titles of these sections are Madison Street, Starting School, and Marquette Street. I’m a few thousand words into the latter and have to get through grade school, high school, music, work experiences, and leaving for college. This section ends with the Kickapoo Creek Rock Festival I attended with high school classmates the day after graduation.

The next sections are better documented. Leaving Home is about my conversations with my parents about going to university, and after Father died, about whether I should give up college to stay in Davenport and help Mother. I have many letters received from friends, university papers, photographs and newspaper clippings. There are also a few pieces of ceramics I made, some musical instruments, and memories of my time at the University of Iowa. I began writing a personal journal after graduation from university. This section also includes my 12-week tour of Europe in the Fall of 1974, and the year I spent in Davenport afterward.

There is a gap in recent writing during the period when I left for military service, returned to Davenport, and then moved to Iowa City for graduate school. That takes the narrative through four sections titled, Military Service, Homecoming, Iowa City and Graduate School. By this time, I was a regular journal writer and had published a small number of pieces, including travelogues for the Belgian Society in the Quad Cities. I was still taking photographs with film cameras, I had begun to write letters to the editors of newspapers. This section ends with the job search to find something to enable me to stay in Iowa City after graduate school.

A good part of the next section was drafted last year. It takes us from finding a job at the university, our marriage, beginning a career in transportation, the birth of our daughter, and moving to Cedar Rapids, then to Indiana. These sections are titled My Spouse & Me – 1982, Career, A Daughter – 1985, and In the Calumet (1988). By now I’d developed an extensive document collection method producing financial records, photographs, journals, letters, and all the raw material to turn into something. These were years before we adopted email or owned a home computer other than a word processor. When I worked at the oil company, I was introduced to email around 1990.

The final big section is of our return to Big Grove Township in 1993, where we currently live. Because this section has the most documentary resources, I saved it to write last. There are currently 11 sections and the organization and titles of them is fluid. No point writing them down because they are sure to change. I lived here longer than any other place, more than twice as long as I lived on Marquette Street with my family.

The difference this change in organization and methodology made is I have a sense of purpose when I’m writing. When I write something, I know where it goes, or whether it goes. I started a complete rewrite from the beginning and am now on section 10 of 31. It lets me know where I am. I can sleep at night knowing I won’t lose the thread.

January was a good month for my writing.

While revisiting my life history I’ve been increasingly aware of what doesn’t get said between family and among friends. In particular, a gap in the narrative exists on Father’s side of the family when it comes to the legacy of human enslavement.

I intend to use the 1927 Pound Gap, Virginia lynching of Leonard Woods as the coda to the autobiography. I have a photograph my spouse took of me standing in front of a Welcome to Virginia highway sign not far from where Woods was lynched, and a memorial of the event was erected in 2021. At the time of the photo, I did not know that history.

Below are two paragraphs I wrote Wednesday as an example of an approach to the section. Slavery was almost never discussed among family.

In 1860, the last year the U.S. Census counted enslaved African Americans, a third of the population of Virginia was enslaved. In Wise County, 66 enslaved persons were counted along with 4,416 white ones. Family lore does not include much about slavery. We note that Thomas Jefferson Addington, my paternal grandmother’s paternal grandfather, served in the army of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. Family lore is men from Wise County served in both the Confederate and Union armies. There is no discussion of Thomas Jefferson Addington’s military service in his entry in The Stallard Connection, a thick family history tracing parts of our line back to the 17th Century. There is a Salyer – Lee Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Wise County. I have family photographs of Father playing with some of the Salyer girls when they lived in Glamorgan. They attended school together. During the two trips I made to Wise County, I don’t recall seeing any African Americans or even once discussing slavery. There must be more to the story, although it may be lost in history.

Leonard Woods, a 30-year-old black coal miner, lived in Jenkins, Kentucky, the same town where Uncle Melvin and Aunt Carrie operated a bakery. He was accused of murdering a white coal mine foreman named Herschel Deaton (no relation). On Nov. 30, 1927, a mob broke Woods out of the Whitesburg, Kentucky jail and took him to Pound Gap, Virginia, where they hanged him and shot his corpse many times. Accounts vary, yet when the mob arrived with Woods around 3 a.m., the crowd numbered 1,000 to 1,500 people, in some 500 cars. Members of the sheriff’s office who were present failed to note any of the vehicle license plates. It is difficult to believe members of my family did not know of this history or participate in it. It never came up.

Draft autobiography by Paul Deaton, Feb. 2, 2022.

I don’t know if it fits, yet I feel I should make it fit. Avoidance of the legacy of human enslavement is as American as apple pie. The sweetness is of short duration.

The history of Davenport, Iowa was largely absent from my upbringing. I was born there, yet nothing. There was no Iowa history curriculum in K-12 schools, nor at university. The first biography of George Davenport, one of the city’s founders and its namesake, was not published until May 21, 2020.

I left Davenport for university in 1970 and haven’t missed learning the history. I am revisiting it now that I’m writing my autobiography.

The Trader at Rock Island: George Davenport and the Founding of the Quad Cities by Regena Trant Schantz is a serviceable biography which reflects detailed research into the history of the region. Schantz obviously reviewed documentary records, physical artifacts, and sites. It adequately tells the story of early traders, mineral extraction, land speculation, river culture, and the relations with Black Hawk and other indigenous tribal leaders from the perspective on one of history’s most prominent participants. Because of my education, this history matters little in my outlook toward my home town.

By the time my awareness came of age, the city was in a post-World War II economic boom. Depending upon how one reckons economic history, this was preceded by the trader days, land speculation, the surge in lumber milling after 1850 (as Wisconsin and Minnesota forests were clear cut and rafted down river without replanting), and the rise in farming after the Black Hawk War finished in 1832. Some of my spouse’s family were among the early Iowa settlers after the war. A tide of immigration to Iowa started by the 1840s. With the removal of indigenous tribes and native forests, along with ripping up and plowing the prairie, the landscape in which I found myself was already in existence. There was little reason to think about the early days of settlement.

By the time Mother graduated high school in 1947, the city was ready for the post-World War II boom. Settlement had grown far beyond the initial lots surveyed in the 1830s. The house in which we lived while I was in high school was built in 1910, well above the antediluvian banks of the river. There was infrastructure, a bus route, medical facilities, a wide range of churches, and corner grocery stores waiting to get displaced by supermarkets. Many large manufacturing and food processing companies existed. A person could go their whole life without knowing about the exploits of George Davenport, Antoine LeClaire and other traders turned land speculators during the time before the initial plat was laid out.

What does my writing owe to the history of the city of my birth? Not much, I reckon. It served as a landing place for ancestors displaced from other states. Grandmother arrived with children in tow during World War II. My paternal grandfather arrived after the war and didn’t live much longer.

I plan to tell the story of the initial lot sales, the lumber boom, and development of industry. I suppose that’s needed to set context. Besides the meat packing plant where my father, grandmother and I worked, I don’t have many connections to the old days. Most of our early family stories are derived from immigrant experience in Minnesota and Illinois on Mother’s side, along with Father’s ancestry in Southwestern Virginia and nearby Kentucky.

The biography of George Davenport is engaging, and of interest as an alternative to many stories of settlement in the Tidewater and New England. The Louisiana Purchase is often discussed, yet what happened locally is not. I tip my hat to the work of traders, land speculators and developers yet realize that is not my history.

I am from there, yet not of there.