Nonfiction review: Objects of Our Affection

NONFICTION

Perhaps it's that delicate bone dish of your great-great-grandmother's. Was it part of a set, and did she really lay that formal a table?

Or maybe it's the spool cabinet that your grandmother converted into a repository for table linens. Or the 18th-century cherry secretary that goes to the eldest child in each generation. Or the rocking chair that's eerily similar to the one in which Abraham Lincoln was sitting when he was assassinated.

As Lisa Tracy writes, "We can, in fact, never be free of our stuff until we have dealt with the stories it carries. In the end, it does indeed tell us something about who we are. It's just stuff, our possessions. Family furniture. And it's what we make of it."

In "Objects of Our Affection," Tracy, who was born and raised in Lexington and teaches journalism at Washington and Lee University, makes it into an engrossing history of her family.

In 1992, Tracy and her sister, Jeanne, inherited her parents' home in Lexington -- and a wealth of antiques, curiosities and family papers. Busy with careers and unready to make any big decisions, they had most of the contents crated and sent to two large storage bins in Staunton.

Ten years passed, and the sisters reluctantly came to the conclusion that something had to be done.

As Tracy writes, "We can and will let go, prying our emotional fingers off the mother lode." But that came at a price: "They were the medium for a peculiar layered intimacy that continues, even though the people with whom we commune have been dead for decades. For centuries, in some cases. The furniture and the people, we are truly intertwined."

The task was daunting. The sisters came from generations of military families whose nomadic existences led them to collect items from throughout the world.

Their maternal grandfather, Charles E. Kilbourne Jr., was a Medal of Honor recipient and, after his retirement from active service, superintendent of Virginia Military Institute. A great-grandfather, Harry Egbert, was a colonel who died leading a charge in the Philippine-American War in 1899. Before that, he participated in the infamous Battle of Wounded Knee, and Tracy concedes that her forebears were not always on the side of right.

But they were certainly on the side of acquisition, given the quantity of stuff that Tracy and her sister had to sort. Along the way, Tracy realized, she had committed the error of youth: She had failed to ask her mother about the origin and provenance of many of the items -- and about the ancestors who had acquired them.

Personal curiosity -- and a desire to establish some items' history to raise their auction value -- set her on a search that took her far from those storage bins in Staunton or the auction house in Charlottesville for which they were bound. Eventually, her travels into the past sent her to Arizona and Manila.

Among her hunts was one for the background of what the family had always called the George Washington chair. Tracy's exploration led her tantalizingly close to the possibility that it had been the first president's during his time in Philadelphia, but just distant enough that she couldn't be certain.

Then there were the 130 Canton luncheon plates. Why so many? Because, she learned, they were cheap and useful in the Philippines for an Army wife wishing to entertain well, so breakage didn't matter.

And on it goes, as Tracy investigates hundreds of items and, in so doing, learns to her satisfaction as much about their previous owners -- her family -- as she does about the things themselves. Regrets surface, of course, in seller's remorse at the auction and in awareness of her ignorance of some familial secrets.

Richly illustrated with photos of people and things that went before, "Objects of Our Affection" is an intimate look at family history, moving but rigorously unsentimental. Take this passage, typical of the understated elegance of Tracy's prose, about the moments after the death of her mother:

"As Jeanne and I sat in silence after the monitor stopped reflecting her heart's journey from Manila to the mountains of Virginia and beyond, I closed my eyes and tried to see her. What I saw was a long corridor filled with a quiet blue. At the end, a small figure turned and waved. I hoped it was Mother."

"Objects of Our Affection" succeeds on many levels and will delight "Antiques Roadshow" fans, military-history buffs and family-memoir lovers -- and those who cherish the concept of home. You don't have to be a born-and-bred Virginian to appreciate it, but those of that rarefied status will think they've died and gone to Sotheby's.

Contact Jay Strafford at (804) 649-6698 or jstrafford@timesdispatch.com.