by Melora Wolff

I like that photography and speculative essays both start with visible facts, and accelerate toward the permanent loss of facts; both activate and agitate the shapes that haunt the peripheries. I think speculative essayists, like the kids in the photograph, wander in a realm of real ghosts.

“Remembering is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather, its lining.” —Chris Marker

Forty first-graders pose for their class photo. Twenty-three boys, thirteen girls, and four, unknown. The day appears to be sunny. Several of the kids squint, and light shadow falls across some faces. The year is likely in the 1920s. The weather is mystery. Five children wear their winter coats open; five wear no coats at all; one boy has short sleeves; three boys wear suit jackets. They all pose in the schoolyard of Nowhere. Ten keep wool hats pulled low, one girl wears fur, three boys wear caps and tip them just the way they like, to the right, the left, over the eyes, cocky. In the front row, one child clasps a white boater. Some boys wear long ties, another wears a bow tie that embarrasses him for all eternity. An impish, foppish lad sports a wide, starched collar. The short kids squat in front, their butts suspended above the dust in a pose they will abandon gratefully in middle age. The kids in the middle row stoop over, and the tall kids are in the back. That is where you will find Me, the tallest, most bundled, maybe even the richest kid, whose coat seems a cut above the rest, a fussy, fleecy gift from an indulgent mother. An arrow points helpfully to this child’s head, in case of confusion, later.

At the left, in the second row, crouches the opposite of Me. This child is not really in the image. Thick black hair obscures the face. The small body folds over on itself. The figure does not wear a fleecy coat with deep pockets for mementoes that reassure of maternal love, but instead the black lining of a coat without pockets, frayed. There is no arrow to identify this child. “You!” the photographer points, and waves his hand, impatient. “Don’t spoil the picture!” No response. The other youngsters jostle one another, first-graders forever. Unaware of the blurred other hiding among them, they pose obediently like the rest of us nestled together in the past, with our bare knees and furrowed brows, our faces smudged by oblivion, our noses itching in the sun. We are proud to be seven years old! We will never again think of this day. No one, but every one, is missing from this picture. In a moment, the school-bell will toll, and we will race in to “History.” We gallop to our inkwells, trip each other, and shout each-others’ names. Which one is Me and which one is You? What was the lesson that we learned that day? Our teacher, picturing a life beyond her reach, instructed us only, “Check your posture. Smile. Now count to three.”

One. Two. Three.

This photograph grabbed my attention immediately when I saw it in the museum’s archive. Each child’s expression hints at an incredible personality, a personal history, a future. The word “Me”—a speculative word, I believe--penned onto the photo by a child “unknown,” perhaps dead, haunted me. What does it mean to write “Me” on a photo? Who is the message for? Puzzles of memory, identity, and time started to disrupt the historical facts of the image. We are all in the photo as soon as we look at it and see the word “Me,” our shared name. We must be entering a collective space. Where is that? Somewhere beyond the picture. The photo seems to me a figuration of the certainty and uncertainty, record and erasure, inherent to all History, the true scrap book. I like that photography and speculative essays both start with visible facts, and accelerate toward the permanent loss of facts; both activate and agitate the shapes that haunt the peripheries. I think speculative essayists, like the kids in the photograph, wander in a realm of real ghosts.

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Melora Wolff is a nonfiction writer whose work is in such publications as The Normal School, the New York Times, Accelerate, Brick, Best American Fantasy, and Every Father’s Daughter: 24 Women Writers Remember Their Fathers. Her awards include fellowships from the MacDowell Colony for the Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and multiple citations in Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prizes. She teaches at Skidmore College. “Me: First Grade” is part of a book in progress of speculative nonfictions on vernacular photography.