Tiffany Watt Smith, Queen Mary University of London
https://doi.org/10.58077/yxw1-8920
The silences in the archive are often their most intriguing moments. Silences are where curiosity is sparked and questions unfold: What has been evaded, or wilfully concealed? Who chose what should be recorded, and why? Some silences are musical, a dance of breaths and pauses and ellipses. Others are strategies of protest or refusal, and others still, forms of tacit assent. And silences can also be fraught, because they are where our own participation in the act of making histories is laid bare. Silences are where our imaginations, fantasies and desires do their most urgent work. Where our eagerness for what the medievalist Carolyn Dinshaw calls a ‘touch across time’ becomes clearest.[1]
‘I am totally over objectivity, tbh’ wrote the historian Matt Houlbrook on X, formerly Twitter. ‘Messy intimacy feels more authentic to me now’.[2] Houlbrook, a leading scholar of queer histories, was describing what many historians may be anxious to foreground, but all would surely recognise: that our personal histories, preoccupations and experiences are part of what attracts us to some particular subject or person in the first place, and are never far from how we write about them. Sometimes these ‘messy intimacies’ show up in experiences of curiosity and attraction, and sometimes in the ways we can be mildly repulsed by our own grubbing around in the past. The historian Mari N. Crabtree described her experience writing about a married couple both murdered by lynch mobs in 1918. She wanted to piece together the story, but she was haunted by thoughts of their daughter, now dead: ‘I imagined what she would think of me, a stranger, picking through (and maybe even prying open) the most delicate parts of her life’. ‘On some level’ she writes ‘all historians must navigate this tension between the desire to unearth stories… and the potential for exploiting our subjects’. She continues ‘the absence of these conversations about ethics leaves room for histories to be written under the assumption that all history is fair game and that the value of recovering the ‘truth’ of the past outweighs other considerations.’[3]
I recently was brought up short by a silence that brought me into messy, intimate contact with the past. During my research on twentieth-century women’s friendships, I had come across a 1916 book, Society’s Misfits, written by the lawyer and legal reformer Madeleine Doty.[4] In it, I read Doty’s account of five days she spent undercover as a forger named ‘Maggie Martin’ in Auburn Correctional Facility in November 1913. The ‘prison experiment’ as she called it, was organised under the auspices of New York City’s Prison Reform Commission, its purpose for Doty to identify issues and make recommendations for change. During her stay, she met an incarcerated woman, Minerva Jones, and describes becoming friends with her. I wanted to know more about this friendship – if indeed, that was what it really was. Minerva was a twenty-one-year-old working-class Black woman, and Madeleine was an educated, white lawyer who was lying about her true identity, and seemingly oblivious to the complex power dynamics of race and class threaded through their relationship.
‘Every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known’, writes Saidiya Hartman.[5] It is unusual to glimpse a woman like Minerva, and yet her appearance is shrouded in many forms of silence. Almost everything I knew about her came from Madeleine’s depiction: the words Madeleine had deemed worthy of remembering; the gestures or behaviours that mattered to Madeleine and her agenda as an ‘uplifter’ and writer. In this obvious way, Minerva, by being interpolated, was silenced. But she is also described as a ‘silent type’, taciturn and uncommunicative at first. ‘I don’t dast to talk now’ Madeleine recalls her saying, continuing that ‘I tried to draw her out’ to keep her talking and to find out more about the younger woman’s past, but Minerva would not ‘be drawn’. For Madeleine, the silence is disappointing. She is lonely and desperate for company and distraction. Perhaps there is a particular sting in Minerva’s silence too. It was not uncommon for white women to expect a level of compliance and protection from younger Black women in their employment. As Claudia Jones would later write in her 1949 polemic ‘An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!’, white women always expected ‘friendliness’ from their Black maids, a listening ear, a desire to put their problems above their own.[6]
Minerva’s silence then is her power. As Xine Yao has argued, passivity and silence become powerful forms of agency among racially marginalised people, the act of making oneself inscrutable a deliberate strategy of refusal and non-compliance.[7] Her silence also was a way of navigating the realities of prison life. She was nearing the end of her sentence when she met Madeleine, trusted enough to work in the shop, and – unlike Madeleine – must have felt the risks of being caught talking outside the allotted time very keenly (they involved not only time in The Cooler, but a possible extension to your sentence). Minerva’s silence was, I imagine, active, strategic and deliberate, keeping her safe from the woman who believed she was helping her.
I wanted to read the experiences of Minerva back into Society’s Misfits. I tried to do this following the approach Hartman calls ‘critical fabulation’.[8] Her method of writing allows her to approach the people she writes about through precisely posed questions and deeply researched speculations, which allow critical distance and emotional proximity to unfold simultaneously. Yet even while undertaking this work, I experienced the sense that I ought not to be doing it at all. There was the question of whether my imagination simply obscured Minerva all over again (another white educated woman, writing over her). Like Crabtree, I also found myself imagining what Minerva might think of me, and I felt like an intruder, a thief, as I searched through the census records trying to find out where she was from, and what happened to her after she was released, or deciphered the handwriting on her prison admittance form, culling information for the story I wanted to tell – about the scars on her knuckles, her height, the little fingers that refused to bend. Minerva, who did not want to ‘be drawn’, and who had become involved with Madeleine because she had been tricked and lied to, had – almost certainly without giving her permission – become part of the historical record. Was she really ‘fair game’?
To write about Minerva seemed to compound the original betrayal; to choose not to would consign – until the next historian came along, anyway – Minerva to her role as a supporting cypher in Madeleine’s book, without the possibility of telling a different story about her experiences and desires. I decided to write about Minerva, because I believe that our attempts to reclaim voices marginalised by the archives are important. Yet the lack of permission seemed to haunt me. I was glad when the trail ran cold, and when I could find out nothing more about Minerva Jones. It seemed to me that she had kept her silence in all the ways that truly matter.
As we reckon with questions of provenance in our institutions’ collections, especially at a time when new technologies are making once inaccessible archives widely available to both trained and untrained eyes, questions about consent, privacy and harm are growing more urgent. For historians working with such compromised sources, self-reflexivity about the ‘messy intimacies’ of our work, including a willingness to recognise our own ethical experiences and ambivalences, may become an important touchstone. At least, it is one way we can attempt to understand what is at stake for both the historical subject and those who are curious about her. And one way we can understand the promise and the perils of choosing to write not only about silence, but into it too.
Notes
[1] Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 21.
[2] Quoted in Rachel Moss, ‘The Messy Intimacy of Writing History’, March 7, 2014, Personal Blog. Last accessed 12 February 2025. https://rachelemoss.com/2014/03/07/the-messy-intimacy-of-writing-history/.
[3] Crabtree, M. N. (2020). ‘The ethics of writing history in the traumatic afterlife of lynching’, Rethinking History, 24: 351–367.
[4] Madeleine Z. Doty, Society’s Misfits (New York: Century, 1916).
[5] Saidiya Hartman, ‘A note on method’, in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2019, 2021).
[6] Claudia Jones, ‘An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!’, Political Affairs, June 1949.
[7] Xine Yao, Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).
[8] Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe 26, vol. 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14.