January 2011

Since last April I have continued seeking traces of my family. Here are some highlights of my journey:

Meeting a ninety-four-year-old black resident of Martha’s Vineyard who as a child knew Dora Hemmings (she called her Gramma Hemmings) and also owns Dora’s old house in Oak Bluffs. This woman told me that Dora Hemmings visited her daughter Anita just once during Anita’s years in New York City—and was made to use the servants’ entrance.

From a rare conversation with an often absent family member, I learned that Ellen had suspicions the grandmother she had never met was living on Martha’s Vineyard, and in 1923 she went looking for her. Ellen found her grandmother Dora—and she learned that day the family was black.

April 1997:

I peered down a narrow alley separating big houses that overlook Pleasant Bay in South Orleans, Cape Cod, part of a row of brand-new summer homes so close-built that they prevented me from seeing the dunes and the water beyond. Then I turned around and gazed at the meager little apron of a field this subdivision of grand houses shared. I spotted a gnarled apple tree and wondered if my grandmother had climbed it as a child…

My grandmother Ellen had gone to camp here for many summers back in the teens and twenties. Camp Quanset, it was called. In the days after the Great War, she had sailed the waters of Pleasant Bay, slept in a comfortable bunkhouse, sat by the broad main field, and laughed and quarreled with her friends. She had performed in the Camp Quanset Indian Pageant in 1922 not far from where I was standing, and I imagined all the young girls dressed in Indian garb, eager and self-conscious in the Quanset interpretation of Native American people.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In the highly unlikely event this list fails to satisfy, I would encourage the reader to make up his own and try it out on friends. Once finished, the reader should ask what the films chosen had in common. If you come up with an answer like “really neat uniforms,” you should go immediately to the library and check out Frank Joseph Wetta and Stephen J. Curley’s Celluloid Wars: A Guide to Film and the American Experience of War , Paul Fussell’s Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War , E. B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa , or the unforgettable Wound Ballistics , a volume in the Army’s World War II official history by the Surgeon General’s Office.

A Walk in the Sun .

The Air Force medevac plane taxied in. I felt a surge of apprehension. The plane stopped, and the ground crew wheeled over the stairway for disembarking. When the door opened, a very small girl appeared, excitedly waving. When I looked more carefully, I realized that she had no nose.

It was 1968. I had come to meet a group of five war-injured South Vietnamese children in need of medical care unavailable in their own country. The Committee of Responsibility, a voluntary organization with which I was involved, was bringing large numbers of these children to the United States with the permission and cooperation of both our government and South Vietnam’s.

The Barbados Tourist Office (1-888-BARBADOS; www.barbados.org ) is a good place to start, but so is your local bookstore. All the standard guides offer reliable advice on hotels, restaurants, and sights. A more focused account of the island’s culture and history can be found in Adventure Guide to Barbados by Harry S. Pariser, which is also a good source for the basics. With its two-hundred-plus years as a resort, Barbados has plenty of hotels and guesthouses in every price range and style. I stayed at two places: the very new and attractive Bougainvillea Beach Resort, a time-share that also offers rooms by the night, and Sandy Beach, a comfortable older property that sits directly on the blazing white beach of the same name. A ten-minute walk from Sandy Beach is St. Lawrence Gap, a beachfront restaurant row, where I had particularly good meals at David’s Place and Pisces Restaurant.

Few travelers head for the Caribbean island to plumb its history, much less its American history. Escaping from winter’s blasts through sun, sea, and sand is the lure. Yet for some of us that’s not quite enough, and so the islands with the richest assortment of historical treasures catch our attention. Up there at the top is Barbados, the easternmost island of the Windward chain, lying sixteen hundred miles southeast of Miami, and on its eastern shore buffeted by the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

A unique feature of Barbados’s history is Britain’s tenure as its sole colonizer, from the time the first English adventurers landed in 1620. Not here the talk of how many flags have flown in succession over disputed island territory, or stories of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century European warfare fetching up on these shores.

When the 105th Congress took a pre-election recess last October, the House of Representatives had already made itself a place in the record books by resolving, for the second time in a quarter of a century and only the third in the nation’s experience, to hold hearings on the possible impeachment and trial of a president.

I was reluctant to add to the millions of words already saturating the media. By now, any reasonably conscious American should know plenty, even about such un-intimate matters as the Constitution’s definition of impeachable crimes and the 1868 case of Andrew Johnson. Can any further and non-redundant historical framework be supplied?