Outside the Providence Train Station with three members of the Snowtown Project Collective, walking on asphalt  where there used to be water, we discussed the challenges of telling a place’s story when much of the evidence of its existence has been scrubbed from the record. Those who fall outside of the narrative of power and progress, such as the residents of the Snowtown neighborhood in the nineteenth century, who do not keep records or whose records have been destroyed, lose agency in putting forth their perspective on past events. In his essay A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative, Cronon emphasizes the importance of how and by whom a story is told. He also asserts how time scales influence how one understands a story, writing that “where one chooses to begin and end a story profoundly alters its shape and meaning” (Cronon 1364). While holding historic facts to be true, he asks us to question the positioning of a story in relation to the subjectivity and choices of its author. In Providence – where the author has in many cases been the government, the powerful landowners and men of industry, the mapmakers, and the media – the perpetual erasure of communities, the filling of the Cove, and other such violent histories are typically wrapped into a grand, morally absolved, narrative of urban growth and progress. With Cronon in mind, we can seek the weak spots between factual evidence of this story, to begin to understand how those displaced and marginalized by these actions, the non-white and the not-rich of the past and of today, would tell these histories very differently. Similarly to how the Snowtown historians and archaeologists are assembling a buried history through disparate hidden threads within dominant accounts of the city’s past, both John McPhee and Patricia E. Rubertone offer some insight into how narrative can be a tool to move us across and through the materials we do have, the maps and official histories and census records and memoirs, and of course stories, to give voice to the silenced and shed new light on the past.

In “Travels of the Rock”, McPhee reintroduces us to Plymouth Rock. His structuring of time opens up new holes in the nationalist mythos of the rock and allows the reader to draw their own conclusions about its significance; by moving back and forth between deep geologic time, the present day, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he tells us stories of the rock as an object, of the persistent nationalist mythology of the rock today, and of its journey in becoming such a monument to America’s colonial past. By choosing not to tell a coherent, continuous story, he instead offers an assemblage of vignettes like a deck of cards, that you could shuffle and see new connections between or tag along a historical timeline if you so wished – he does a masterful job of both extending our perspective of this country’s history into geologic time and allowing light through the subjective weak points in the narrative of America’s more recent history. While the rock is just a rock, broken and pieced together and underwhelming in its tidal cage today, its role in the cultural mythology of the nation makes it a potent example of how the stories we tell influence the ways we remember our collective past and understand ourselves today.

Patricia E. Rubertone’s Native Providence chapter on Lippett Hill also uses a creative, piecemeal approach to creating space in the recent history of Providence for the Native Americans who lived and worked here. She begins her narrative by situating the “Lippett Hill homeland” in the geography of present day Providence and asserting the vital presence of Native Americans in the city (Rubertone 71). She ends the narrative in a similar place. In between, however, she opens up the history of the neighborhood to the voices of those Native people and the systemic injustices they faced through what few records are surviving today. In describing the stigmatization of Lippett Hill and its residents and how that suppressed the perspectives of those living there, she writes that “these physical caricatures of neighborhood localities resonating in historical narratives and public perception do not mean that the experience of the Native people who lived there are inaccessible. They exist in stories woven through both individual and community memories, documentary evidence, and archaeological traces. These evidentiary strands create interpretive bridges to the past regardless of the degree to which Lippett Hill or other urban neighborhoods have been effaced by redlining for development, invaded by industry, ravaged by vandalism, or mythologized” (Rubertone 74, my emphasis added). Looking nearby at the Cove and those who lived along its fringes, we can see immediate parallels in how that story has been told and what opportunities there may be to subvert it. 

These authors all in some way thoughtfully interrogate and/or subvert the role of narrative and its importance in how we perceive history and where we are situated today. Where artifacts and ‘evidence’ of alternative perspectives on the past have been erased by violence and/or time, as we know has happened in the filling of the Cove, the approach of piecing together an obscured understanding of a place through accumulated subjective, human (& more than human) accounts can be one way to stretch a flexible web of diverse stories between the firm pillars of historical fact. Similarly to how Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou’s Feral Atlas project attempts to tell true, localized stories of change amidst the anthropocene to reinterpret our present condition, by alleviating the pressure of telling a coherent story and instead putting forth specific stories of the Cove we can make connections across time, in doing so opening up the opportunity for oppressed stories to emerge and show us something new.