A collaborative project by Anna Watson and Sallie Mae Watson
Banff 2011
Sallie Mae Watson wove blankets and welded armor from ballpoint pens. Born in 1904, she got 12 safe years out of this life. In 1916, a neighbor threw hot coals out before they had sufficiently cooled, and her childhood home was lost to fire. Her family rebuilt on the same spot, but she was never the same. At 35 she found love and married. At 43, after multiple miscarriages, and nearly dying during childbirth, she gave birth to what would become the light of her life, my dad. Eight years later, a gas explosion at his work killed my grandfather.
The rest of her life was spent merely surviving each day- clenching the bible like a baby blanket, palpable anguish like makeup on her face. Her anxiety manifested itself in obsessive note taking, retaking, list making, remaking, labeling and storing. She did all she knew to do with what remained – archive, archive, archive.
Throughout these records are notes to my dad, “John C.,” and me: she was essentially constructing a life raft for my dad and me to use once she was gone. We would be the only two left, and this world had given her no good reason to be trusted with us in its care.
Through re-working the heart wrenching and evidential truths of her life in small town South Carolina as expressed in the pages of her notebooks, I seek to transform them into the reassurance she so desperately needed, that everything would be okay.
