Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, December 25, 1993 TAG: 9312250080
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: Betsy Biesenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
This year's book is an 844-page, 3-pound whopper I've wanted ever since I stumbled upon it in a library more than 10 years ago. The book is Raymond Barnes' "A History of the City of Roanoke." Only 4,000 copies ever were printed, and to people like me who think a "fun" read is a biography of some dead person, to own a copy is to own a treasure.
Barnes' book is unlike any other history I've read. He had a knack for making long-gone Big Lickers come alive, and as a life-long Roanoker, many of his stories come from first- or secondhand experience. He reported all of the major events such as blizzards and floods and the founding of new industries. But mixed in haphazardly are accounts of marriages between people no one remembers and the enactment of a cow control ordinance, under which Roanokers were barred from letting their cattle run loose in the city.
The other thing that makes Barnes' book different from modern histories - which, for the most part, try to be objective and sensitive to the needs of a pluralistic society - is that he put so much of himself into his writing.
Most historians will draw conclusions and present theories, but Barnes viewed every event through the window of his own values and beliefs. So, much of what he wrote can be offensive to people today.
Take for instance, his defense of lynching. There was a "savage" element of the "colored" community, he wrote, that posed a threat to whites and to the "better class" of blacks alike. For some reason, however, he wrote, when these ne'er-do-wells were being sought by the police, the "better class" would hide them, rather than turn them in. (Not hard to understand at a time when someone's father, brother or uncle could be killed just for being accused of, say, looking at a white woman the wrong way.)
The whites, he went on, "in a frenzy of self-defense" sometimes just had to lynch somebody.
He also had an interesting view of women's rights. According to him, the women of Roanoke who wanted to work outside the home made a major breakthrough in the 1920s when a woman accused her dentist of molesting her while she was under the effects of ether.
The woman told her fiance, who paid a call on the dentist and was assured that sometimes, even the "better class" of woman was prone to such hysterical imaginings while under anesthesia. After a few jokes and a little back-slapping, the two men agreed that surely the little lady must have been mistaken.
This incident, Barnes wrote, had the effect of frightening Roanoke's dentists and doctors into hiring female nurses and receptionists, to avoid similar charges. New career opportunities were suddenly opened.
In recent years, Barnes has been accused of being a racist. He also probably could be called a sexist, too, if judged by today's standards.
But Barnes was born in 1899. His childhood memories were of Christmas trees with wax candles, dolls stuffed with sawdust, and black cooks and nursemaids, who, however patronizing it may seem today, were considered beloved members of the family.
Barnes grew up in a world where, to his way of thinking, at least, everything was well-ordered and everyone had his place. And it would not occur to him to question that, as a white Anglo-Saxon male, whether his place should be first.
His view of the world was so different from ours, in fact, that when he gave his notes to the Roanoke public library, he stipulated that they be made available only to serious scholars.
The notes document "skeletons" in Roanoke's closet, he said in a newspaper interview in 1980. "The sons of those men are my best friends." He was not a tell-all '90s kind of a guy.
Barnes finished his book in 1968, during the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement and the glory days of feminism. America was becoming a varied and inclusive society.
As a lawyer, judge and journalist, it's impossible to think that Barnes missed all the change that was taking place around him. Perhaps it's no coincidence that he more or less ended his book at 1940. Up to that point, he devoted an entire chapter to each year. But the last, very short chapter covers the entire post-war period, with only the briefest references to Pearl Harbor, integration and Roanoke's Diamond Jubilee.
In fact, in the preface to his book, Barnes wrote: "Since I cannot appreciate the startling changes in `our way of life' since World War II, I leave this phase to some historian of the future."
Barnes died 10 years ago, but he left behind a portrait not only of the time in which lived, but also of himself. It is a unique view of the thoughts and attitudes of a late 19th and early 20th century Roanoker, something usually found only in diaries, letters and other personal papers.
Much of what Barnes wrote is considered insulting and inflammatory today, and it would be easy to dismiss his book because of it. That would be a shame.
Political correctness is a good thing when it's not taken to extremes. It makes our society more understanding and more inclusive of the differences between people.
But political correctness can't be retrofitted. Barnes was who he was, and if nothing else, his words provide us with insight into the way things used to be, and with a measure of how much better they are now.
Maybe the thing to do is to forgive him his weaknesses and admire his strengths. Maybe we can think of Raymond Barnes as Roanoke's own version of Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Past.
by CNB