#52 Ancestors 2024 Week 25 Storyteller: James Agee

My children and grandchildren share a relationship with one of America's most famous storytellers: novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic, James Rufus Agee. Since one of my sons is also a James Agee, he has always been curious about his relationship to the famous cousin with whom he shares a name. 

Both are descendants of Mathieu Agee, the French Huguenot immigrant, about whom I have previously written. Mathieu's son, Anthony Agee, is the common ancestor.  My son is descended from Anthony's son Matthew Agee, and James Rufus is descended from Anthony's son Isaac Godwin Agee. So the two Jameses are 5th cousins, twice removed. 

James Rufus Agee was born in Knoxville TN 27 November 1909, son of James Hugh Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler.  When James was six, his father died in an automobile accident, an event which had a profound impact on young Rufus, as he was then known.  His telling of this story in his autobiographical work, A Death in the Family, earned him a posthumous Pulitzer for fiction in 1958. 

After his father’s untimely death, Agee was sent to an Episcopal boarding school where he was introduced to classical literature and mentored by Father James Flye, who subsequently helped him win a place at Exeter Academy and later Harvard. In 1934, after graduation from Harvard, Agee published his only book of poetry, Permit Me Voyage. 

In the early 1930's, he wrote for Henry Luce's Fortune Magazine covering topics ranging from the TVA to orchids.  But it was his 1936 venture with photographer Walker Evans to document the lives of impoverished tenant farmers during the Great Depression that really set off his career. Their visual and oral history was eventually published in 1941 as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It sold only about 600 copies originally, but it has come to be recognized as a classic study of social injustice and Agee’s masterpiece. 

In the Preface, Agee takes a poetic view of his writing.  The text, he said, was meant to be read aloud. “It is suggested that the reader attend with his ear to what he takes off the page: for variations of tone, pace, shape and dynamics are here particularly unavailable to the eye alone, and with their loss, a good deal of meaning escapes.”

In 1939, Agee became the book reviewer and later the film critic for Time Magazine and The Nation, becoming one of the foremost champions of film as art. The collections of his film reviews are considered some of the best film-related books ever written. 

In the late 1940’s, Agee turned his hand to screenwriting.  This career was impeded by his alcoholism, but he was credited as a screenwriter on two of the most respected films of the 1950’s: The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter. 

James Agee had three fairly disastrous marriages and four children. His son Joel Agee became a writer and translator. 

His hard-drinking, chain-smoking lifestyle undoubtedly contributed to his death from a heart attack in a New York City cab in 1955. Ironically, he died on the anniversary of his father’s death: May 16.

During his lifetime, Agee received only modest public recognition. The publication of A Death in the Family after his death and its subsequent award of the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 sparked renewed attention and re-evaluation of his work. 

So let us remember James Agee with one of his best-known poems, once set to music by composer Samuel Barber.

Sure On This Shining Night

Sure on this shining night
Of star made shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground. 
The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth. 
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand'ring far
alone
Of shadows on the stars.

#52 Ancestors 2024 Week 12 Technology: A Miracle of Modern Medicine

 As it happens, this week’s topic of technology coincides with my personal experience of a technology miracle in the field of medicine: robotic surgery. So, I thought I would record my experience for the benefit of my grandchildren who will probably be injecting nanobots for their surgeries and laughing at how primitive this was!

After a diagnosis of endometrial cancer at age 75 (never a happy event), my oncologist recommended a radical hysterectomy, removing everything in the vicinity of my uterus. Of course, this induced some understandable anxiety for me. 

However, my doctor told me that she could perform the surgery with robotic assistance and, as a result, the procedure would be less invasive, involve less bleeding, cause less pain, and have a shorter recovery time. The robot would also allow the surgeon an enhanced view of all those organs inside my body and let her make more precise movements. I thought all of those sounded good.   

When the day came for the surgery, I was pretty insistent that the anesthesiologist not knock me out until I had a chance to see the robot which could produce these amazing results. And he obliged.  I got to “meet” DaVinci before being sedated.  I mean I was curious, but I didn’t really want to witness DaVinci's prowess on my own body. I confess I did watch a video of this kind of procedure after the fact, and it was amazing. 

As you see from this picture (which is not of me), DaVinci has long metal arms, one of which holds a camera.  The other three hold various surgical tools which the surgeon can manipulate through very sensitive hand controls. These tools are inserted through “ports” (holes) in the abdominal wall.  No, I’m not going to include pictures, but take my word for it, I had some bodacious bruises across my stomach, especially at my belly button which apparently was the ideal spot for a camera. (One of the resident doctors told me later that he had worked quite a long time on reconstructing my belly button, and he hoped I appreciated his plastic surgery skills.  It was apparently so unusual that they took a picture to go in my chart.  And promised me it would never appear on Insta! What a way to go down in the annals of medical history.)

The good/great news was that after seven hours of surgery (found more disease than they were expecting; must have been exhausting for the surgical team), there was surprisingly little pain for me and no big bandages. Not saying it felt great; it was really, really uncomfortable.  But nowhere near what I was afraid it might be considering the extent of the surgery. And after a very few days, I didn’t even really need the extra-strength acetaminophen the hospital sent home with me, much less the narcotics I had been prescribed for previous surgeries.  Mostly, I felt exhausted even though I had the easy part of just lying there unconscious. Fortunately, after one night in the hospital with a lot of TLC from the staff, I had the luxury of being able to go home and sleep as much as I wanted. 

I’m sure that had this surgery taken place a few years earlier, before the advent of robotics, the recovery, and maybe the whole outcome, would have been quite different. I’m very grateful to the skilled surgeon and her team and also grateful that I lived in the right time and place to benefit from the amazing technology of robotics.

So, in tribute to this miracle of technology, which saved my life, I offer the following little ode, with deep apologies to Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan:

I am the very model of a modern medical miracle.

I’ve bruises and some portals that you see are all quite spherical.

I have glue and stitches on my skin,

And several missing parts within,

I’m swallowing acetaminophen.

I am the very model of a modern medical miracle.

#52 Ancestors 2024 Week 17 War: Cousin Walter "Wat" Bowie, Confederate Spy

 

My cousin, Walter "Wat" Bowie, born in 1837, was the son of a prominent lawyer and plantation owner in Prince George's County MD, William Walter Weems Bowie and his wife Adeline Snowden.

A practicing lawyer himself, the tall, handsome Wat, an accomplished horseman, was 23 years old when the Civil War broke out.  Since there were many slave holders in Prince George's County, sympathy for the South was very strong; in the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln got only 1 vote. However, Wat's father, and other prominent men did not want Maryland to secede from the Union and were not anxious to see their plantations become bloody scenes of battle. 

Once it became clear that Maryland was not going to join the confederacy, Wat and many other young men (including my 2X-great grandfather, John Marshall Dent of St. Mary's County) decided to go South and sign up to serve the Confederate cause. 

When he reached Richmond, Wat was made a captain in the Confederate Provisional Army and became a spy in the Confederate Secret Service. His knowledge of the area around Washington and his connection to Southern sympathizers made him an especially valuable operative.

Wat was a bold, even reckless, agent, carrying messages through Southern Maryland and recruiting soldiers for the cause.  Several of his missions nearly ended in disaster. 

 

In 1862, he and a companion were arrested, charged with espionage, and hauled off to the Old Capitol Prison. A month later, his family was apparently able to bribe some guards and Wat escaped. 

Old Capitol Prison

Art courtesy of USF

In 1863, Wat and a colleague were captured again, this time crossing the lower Potomac from Maryland into Virginia with stolen fortification plans for Washington DC. As they were being marched toward the Union Fort at Point Lookout, Wat grabbed a gun from one of his guards, shot and killed him. Wat's fellow spy was killed in the gunfire, but Wat escaped unharmed.  By this time, Wat was notorious among the Union Army, and, determined not to let their prize get away, Union agents swarmed the Maryland countryside hunting for the escaped prisoner. 

A few days later, an exhausted and hungry Wat turned up at the plantation of John Henry Waring, a distant relative.  Waring was not at home, and his wife pleaded with Wat to leave immediately as she knew the Union soldiers were intent on tracking him.  In addition, her son, a Confederate soldier, was also in the house and would be arrested if he were found. Wat managed to charm Mrs. Waring and assured her that he had eluded his pursuers. 

As it turned out, not so much. Late that night, the household was awakened by Union soldiers pounding on the door. Mrs. Waring tried her best to delay them at the front of the house in order to give Wat and her son Billy time to escape, but Billy donned his uniform and presented himself to the soldiers. Wat, meanwhile, hid in the kitchen, and with the help of Billy's sister Elizabeth, smeared soot on his face and donned a dress and kerchief to disguise himself as a female slave.  He handed Elizabeth the papers he was carrying, headed out the back door, hopped on a horse and fled into the woods. 

Realizing that Wat had escaped, the soliders locked up Mrs. Waring and her four daughters, who then proceeded to burn Wat's papers in the fireplace. John Waring, who had returned home, his son Billy and three of his daughters were arrested and taken to prison in Washington.

Wat managed to sneak past the Union troops once more and made his way to Virginia. With a price on his head and far too notorious to work undercover, Wat joined up with the now infamous Confederate cavalryman, John Mosby, as part of Mosby's Rangers and distinguished himself leading daring forays into Maryland to harass Union soldiers, steal horses and supplies and sign up new recruits. 

Wat relied on his Maryland connections to hide him from the Union Army. This resulted in several of his friends being arrested for sheltering Confederate soldiers.  In October 1864, Wat devised an audacious scheme to rescue his friends from prison: He decided to kidnap Maryland Governor Augustus Bradford and hold him for ransom in exchange for his friends, having managed to persuade Col. Mosby to lend him several Rangers for this mission. 

On their way to Annapolis, Wat and his Rangers subdued a contingent of the 8th Illinois cavalry, stole their horses, and went on to hide out at the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd (the same man who later set John Wilkes Booth's broken leg). They moved on to Wat's family plantation where they stocked up on supplies and then headed to Annapolis.  There, they discovered that the governor was too heavily guarded and were forced to abandon their kidnapping plan. Deciding that it was too risky to go back to Virginia by the way they had come, they moved west where they planned to cross the Potomac near Rockville. 

Near the small town of Sandy Spring, the raiders planned to "requisition" supplies from the local general store.  Since it was owned by Quakers, they anticipated an easy conquest. This turned out to be a serious miscalculation. 

As it happened, the good people of Sandy Spring were totally fed up with the constant raids and scavenging by both armies. Wat's raiders did easily overpower the shop owners, but soon found themselves pursued by an angry mob of local citizens, Quakers included, who also alerted the Union garrison in Rockville.  

When Wat saw his pursuers advancing toward him, he leapt on a horse and attempt to ride straight through the mob. He was slammed off his horse by a shotgun blast in his face.  The Rangers managed to drive off their pursuers and took the wounded Wat Bowie to a nearby farmhouse, where he died.  They then hightailed it across the river and escaped to Virginia. 

(As a side note, the Quakers involved in this incident were charged by their church with "impudence" for their un-Quakerlike actions.)

Wat's body was returned to his family, and he was buried on family property across the road from Holy Trinity Church.  His mother Adeline was said to be so distraught that she never uttered another word and died a few months later.  She was buried near her son.

In later years, the Bowie graves were moved to Holy Trinity Cemetery to make way for a housing development. 

With thanks to Earl B. Eisenhart. Walter Bowie; Rebel, Ranger, Spy. 

#52 Ancestors 2024 Week 18 Love and Marriage: Lib Dent

 The defining characteristic of my paternal grandmother, Ida Elizabeth Dent Scrivener, was that she was a woman in love, married for nearly sixty years to a man she adored.  

Lib's Father, Papa Dent

Ida Elizabeth Dent, born in 1902 in Oakley, St. Mary's County, MD, was named after her grandmother, Ida Elizabeth Wright.  She didn't like her first name and never used it.  She went by "Lib" among friends and family or Ma Scrivener to her grandchildren. She was the third of four children of John Marshall Dent Jr. (Papa Dent) and Mary Peterson Turner (Mama Dent), growing up on the family farm near her grandparents (Big Papa and Big Mama) and numerous aunts and uncles with her older brother, Jack, and two sisters, Olive and Turner. 

I don't know much about Lib's rural childhood and don't have any pictures of her as a child. However, there is one story about her as a young girl: she won a $1 prize from a local newspaper for her short essay on her greatest mistake: being born a girl instead of a boy. For more on that, see the story here. 

Lib attended the local public schools, but in terms of higher education, she was fortunate to live in St. Mary's County, the home of the St. Mary's Female Seminary, founded in 1839 as a living monument to Maryland's tradition of religious freedom. And even more fortunately, she received the Francis Scott Key Scholarship from the DAR and the Southern Maryland Society in 1917 to cover four years of tuition at the seminary. She graduated in 1921. 

St. Mary's ca. 1890

I am not 100 percent certain, but I think the sorority picture below shows Lib in the front row to the right of the young woman in the dark dress. 

Like most of the young ladies at the Seminary, Lib enjoyed attending the dances at the nearby military academy, Charlotte Hall. At one such event, Lib met the dashing young Navy veteran, Frank Scrivener, and was swept off her feet.

Lib went on to the Normal School at Towson, where she got free tuition in exchange for a promise to teach in the public schools for two years. She graduated in 1922 and began teaching in Prince George's County MD, boarding at a home in Upper Marlboro.

Frank's job as an inspector with the State Roads Commission sent him all over the state, but he seemed to find many excuses to visit at the district office in Prince George's County where he would hang around outside Miss Dent's classroom, whistling to attract attention, and then telling her students that class would be dismissed early that day. Miss Dent's students loved Frank. No word on how Miss Dent's principal felt about this. 

Lib and Frank were married in 1924 at St. Mary's Church in Upper Marlboro MD. Frank's uncle, Monsignor Andrew Keene Gwynn, officiated. Lib's father wasn't able to walk her down the aisle due to his health problems, so her uncle Walter Dent filled that role. According to family lore, Lib's family was not happy about the marriage, and her father refused to give her away at the wedding. Possibly they were unhappy that she was marrying a Catholic. Or, it could have just been his health problems. On the other hand, family lore also says that Frank's mother thought Lib was not good enough for her son and treated Lib in such a way as to leave no doubt of her opinion. (It's entirely possible that she believed no one was good enough for her only child. She definitely doted on him!) So, no telling who insulted whom first. Of course, all this happened long before I arrived on the scene, so family stories are the only source. I'm sorry I never had the chance to ask my grandmother for her version of that story. 

The picture below, one of my all-time favorite photos, shows Frank and Lib as a young courting couple. Handsome, aren’t they? And definitely in love.

Lib w/ Frank III

In any case, the couple lived in Baltimore at first where my father, Frank III, was born in 1925 at Mercy Hospital. They later moved to Leonardtown, St. Mary's County, where four more children were born: Louise (Reds), Jack, Bill (Chick), and Keene. 

While they lived in St. Mary's, Frank was the catcher on the local baseball team and helped to found the Leonardtown Volunteer Fire Department, perhaps inspired by Lib's grandparents' home burning to the ground because there was no local fire department. 

Finally, the young family moved back to Baltimore again where their youngest son, Bobby, was born in 1933. 

In the midst of the Great Depression, of course, Frank was very fortunate to have a steady job with the state. Nevertheless, it can’t have been easy raising five lively sons and a feisty daughter during those years. The boys helped out financially by selling Christmas trees and magazine subscriptions, ushering at the Senator Theater and working at the local Nibble and Clink restaurant. Reds earned money by babysitting and later as salesgirl at Hutzlers. 

By all accounts, Lib was a very frugal manager and a creative cook who was proud that no one ever left her table hungry. She shopped by phone on a daily basis, ordering just enough for the day’s meal from the local grocer, telling Carl at the meat market: "Now, I want something right nice." According to my mother, Lib never set foot in a grocery store until after Frank died. 

Despite the fact that her father, her husband and her oldest son all worked on building roads, Lib never learned to drive, claiming that it made her nervous.  Probably true.  Her "green nerve medicine," was legendary. While some have speculated that there was crème de menthe involved, my uncle swears it was a placebo of water and some vitamins concocted by her doctor. Whatever it was, it worked. “Bring me the green nerve medicine” was the first call to help deal with any nerve-wracking situation. 

When I knew her, Lib was a great bridge player and regularly hosted the local bridge club at her home, at which times any visiting grandchildren were banished to the basement. She and Frank were also avid sports fans, frequently attending Colts and Orioles games at nearby Memorial Stadium. She also liked to visit Pimlico and watch the horse races. 

But the one thing that everyone agrees on about Lib: in her eyes, the sun rose and set on Frank Scrivener. 

I am very fortunate to have inherited several of the loving notes that Lib wrote to Frank during their almost sixty years of marriage. She wrote to him regularly on every occasion--holidays, birthdays, promotions, or no reason at all, except to shower him with her love. The note below was written in 1964. 

The photo below shows Frank and Lib in 1969.  I think the love is obvious. 

Frank died in 1980.  Lib outlived him by seven years, dying in 1987.  I'm sure those seven years were the hardest of her life. 

Frank Scrivener and Lib Dent are buried at New Cathedral Cemetery in Baltimore.