Where Granny Was From: To Be, Rather Than to Seem

"To be, rather than to seem” - a motto that expresses a worthy aspiration, to be real, to exemplify the idea that "what you see is what you get."  When I read it my first thought is of Act I of Hamlet, the prince's indignant response to getting publicly chided by his mother and his (shudder) step-father/uncle for what they regard as ostentatious grieving over the death of his father, like he seems to be overdoing it. Hamlet, enraged to be lectured on this of all topics by these two phonies, gives them an earful about the authenticity of his gloomy exterior:  “Seems, madam?  Nay, it is; I know not 'seems." He goes on in this vein:

Tis not alone my emo gear, good Mother, 

nor all this heavy sighing, these shapes of grief, 

that can denote me truly.

Get out of here with that "seems" stuff! 

My feelings are for reals, Ma!  

Yea, though you may say that my grieving

is all hat and no cattle,   

there you would be wrong.  

There is so, so much cattle in my grief.   

It think it goes something like that.

In Latin the expression "to be, rather than to seem" is esse quam videri.  It appears that way as a decorative inscription on the architecturally distinctive Sibley Mill, a mothballed textile mill near the waterfront in Augusta, Georgia.  I got to see it recently.  What a peculiar business slogan!  But I suppose that when you have 38,000 spindles running (as Sibley Manufacturing's promotional materials once claimed) then perhaps you want the world to know that the stylish exterior of your building is not deceiving anyone about the productivity within.  Here at Sibley Mill, we don't just videri - we esse.   We esse the hell out of it, every day. 

Visiting this place was yet another family history adventure.  I've written elsewhere about my ancestral background in the Southern textile industry.   One of the figures in that story is my maternal great-grandmother, Pearl Sibley Law.  When my great-grandfather John Law of Spartanburg, an aspiring textile executive (and, it goes without saying when speaking of that era and that business, an aspiring exploiter of labor), married Pearl in her hometown of Augusta in 1895, he must have regarded it, at least in part, as a shrewd business move: she was the daughter of Willam C. Sibley, a co-founder of Augusta's famous mill.  As a little girl Pearl had been given the symbolic task of laying the mill's cornerstone. She had grown up in one of Augusta's most famous historic mansions, a house popularly known as "Ware's Folly", on Telfair Street.  If John Law's purpose in marrying Pearl was to accelerate his path to legitimacy as a businessman in his chosen field, it appears to have worked: he did make it big as a textile baron in upstate South Carolina, becoming founder and proprietor of Saxon Mill when he was just 30 years old and growing quite wealthy.  Who knows how much having a Sibley on his arm contributed to the early success of this ambitious young man?  Whatever the case, things ultimately went sour in this royal union of Southern industrialism - John Law's notorious affair with tyrannical yankee sociologist Marjorie Potwin blew up the marriage and unraveled his carefully constructed fiefdom at Saxon.  When he sold his mill and took off with Miss Potwin to Connecticut, he left Pearl to play out the string on her own in Spartanburg, in considerable economic comfort, to be sure, surrounded by servants and family, but certainly humiliated and lonesome and knowing firsthand a painful thing or two about being versus seeming.  

I never met Pearl, but I imagined her, from what people said of her and from my viewing of the portrait of her (painted by a great aunt) that hung in my Grandmother Grace's living room, as an imperious Old South matriarch.  I'm sure there was some of that in her, but there is always more.  My mother and everyone else who had known her referred to her by the affectionate-sounding appellation "Granny."  One of my aunts described her to me as "a sweet old lady."  

It took a long time, but Granny's past finally became interesting to me. After a lifetime of treating Augusta merely as a place one passes on the way to the beach (perhaps pointing vaguely in a Southerly direction from I-20 and declaring, "James Brown is from there, kids"), I finally spent an afternoon in town with some of the family, strolling along the beautiful river walk, visiting a hellacious dime museum and chatting up its remarkable proprietor,  learning about the redoubtable Archibald Butt at the Augusta History Museum.  Two main orders of business were to lay eyes on the stately carcass of Sibley Mill (there are plans afoot to make it a tech hub) and Pearl's childhood home, Ware's Folly.  In the latter case we actually got a tour.  The old house is now home of the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art (it has been for a long, long time).  Maybe this is just family pride talking, but the activity I saw evidenced there - exhibits coming and going, the residue of busy art classes - is way, way more impressive than any repurposing I have seen for any of the antebellum homes in Athens.  To dedicate a special old house like Ware's Folly to making art instead of to being a mere elegant backdrop for weddings is to put "being" before "seeming" in a way I can really appreciate.  

It was fun to finally walk for a little while in Granny's footsteps (and some places she never would have gone - that dime museum, whoa!).  I'm looking forward to going back.