A Conversation with Rachel Grimes and the Iowa Women's Archives
by Becca Bright
It’s Halloween, and the day before Iowa City’s annual Witching Hour. Figures dressed in black and deep shades of orange move through the fresh snow. A few make their way to the Main Library, up to the third floor to Iowa Women’s Archive. A warm, small crowd gathers together and is welcomed by three women: librarian Anna Tunnicliff, Stanley Museum of Art curator Vero Smith, and folk opera composer and musician Rachel Grimes.
Nannie Arnold via Rachel Grimes
Grimes’ newest project is a multimedia composition The Way Forth which includes both music and visuals co-created with film producer Catharine Axley who was also among the crowd. The Way Forth is a particularly personal album for Grimes, as it is her own women’s archive of family genealogy that holds key threads of American history, as well as American identities only now being recognized.
In collaboration with the Iowa Women’s Archives, Grimes held an hour-long conversation and visual presentation about her family’s past rooted in Kentucky, and how these threads of self-discovery were foundational inspirations for The Way Forth.
On the right side of the room are three tables covered in preserved photographs, newspaper clippings, and a thick, generous notebook that contained most of Grimes’ ideas and thoughts for her album. This portrait of a young woman is the first of these artifacts Grimes shared in her presentation. It is a beautiful photograph of her great-great-grandmother, Nannie Arnold in mid-19th century. When Grimes first saw this picture, she was deeply struck. “I immediately had a desire to know who she was.” Grimes was so determined to learn more about this ancestor that she reached out to friends knowledgeable in costume design, to find out how much this single image could convey about a woman living during the Civil War.
We all lean in our seats, staring at the photograph on the screen to study Nannie ourselves. The crown of her head is pinned with flowers. “Very lady-like,” Grimes comments. We lower our eyes, past Nannie’s steady gaze. Around her neck is a tight ribbon that holds a cross. “And Christian,” Grimes adds. The top layers of her dress are more difficult to assess. The top of her bust is adorned with what seems to be lace, and stripes, and various fabrics. It is all pinned together with something that looks like a tiny pacifier. “I wanted to know if this fashion, her fashion represented something political,” Grimes told us. “Or rather, something white supremacist.” We couldn’t tell, nor could her friends.
Regardless of what Nannie is or is not wearing in her portrait, Grimes shares that she has not needed to rely on preserved light within an image to understand the darkness of her family’s past - a past the majority of multi-generation, white Americans have. During her research, Grimes discovered a ripe family tree of women rooted in rural one-room schoolhouses and musical education, well as the brutal origins of slavery and rape in the settlement Fort Boonesborough during the American Revolutionary War.
Grimes spoke of her family’s connection to Dolly, an African slave whose forced labor within the Fort provided survival to the men who stole, enslaved, and raped her. She explained details of the white colonial invasion and settlement of Kentucky, and how her own ancestry, both women and men, were responsible names in that history.
Grimes’ personal artifacts and informed understanding of her genealogy gave excellent insight into The Way Forward as the creative, audible reflections of a current-day white, American woman. Her presentation with the Iowa Women’s Archives pulled me to wonder about my family’s own past in U.S. history, especially considering my mother’s family has lived in New England since the early winters of the 1630s.
The event itself was surprisingly intimate. It was as if we all looked through the pages of a family album delicately and intentionally layered, together as familiar strangers. Rachel Grimes’ family does not (to my knowledge, anyway) share blood with my own family, and the items presented for strangers to hold, and read, and look at with wonder have no personal significance to my own genealogy. Yet I felt a connection. I felt recognized, like one recognizes the melody of an old song, by recognizing the histories of all women in this country.
Rachel Grimes’ performance of The Way Forth will be held on Friday, November 1st at 8:30 PM at the Englert Theatre. Her film in collaboration with Catharine Axley will be released in 2020.