Tomorrow Perhaps the Future by Sarah Watling;

Author:Sarah Watling; [Watling, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2023-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

Looking for Salaria Kea, Part 1

Salaria Kea was like Gerda, slipping into the record and out of it, her story in the hands of others. When I looked for her, I looked for a woman named Salaria Kea, or Kee, or O’Reilly. Or, as a high school mention of her had it, Sarah Lillie. Even more than Nancy Cunard, whose papers were eventually stomped into the ground by occupying Nazis, Salaria seemed destined to evade narrative consolidation. Certain records survive because they are deemed more worthy of preservation than others. On the uneven field of remembering, organisation, coherence and posthumous care are everything. Writers have at least this advantage over death and marginality. They are always heckling the unanswering face of history, leaving a trail for memory-gatherers. Salaria seems to have known this herself, since she made several attempts to wrest her story from propaganda-makers. But by that point they had laid down a version of such deceptive clarity – such easeful logic – that she had trouble making authenticity out of what was left.

The place I went to look was New York. It was New York where Salaria was living and working when she decided to volunteer in Spain, and it was in the Tamiment Library – a rusty-looking building on Washington Square – that my best chance of piecing her record together resided.

Salaria came from Akron, Ohio, but in 1937, aged twenty-three, she was working as a nurse at Harlem Hospital when she volunteered to join a medical unit headed for Europe. She left New York in March and became the only female African American nurse to volunteer in Spain. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, made up of American volunteers, was already heavy with significance as the first integrated military unit in US history. Salaria, pictured with her thick nurse’s cape flung proudly over her shoulder to show her AMB badge, became an icon of African American solidarity with Spain, and of the broad spectrum of causes associated with the Republican Causa. The communist and African American press alike ran stories about her; she appeared in at least two contemporary movies about the war. Yet the record of her time in Spain remains confused and confusing.

One of the first accounts I read was a propaganda pamphlet published by the ‘Negro Committee to Aid Spain and the Medical Bureau and North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy’ in 1938, which was devoted entirely to Salaria’s story and seemed to rely on her personal testimony. This was the tale of one young woman’s political awakening. (‘Now she was learning to resist, to organize and change conditions. She emerged with a strong new feeling of group identity.’) What drew me to the Tamiment, however, was evidence that Salaria had made several attempts to write her own memoirs of Spain independently. There was, for instance, While Passing Through: a sketch that was intended as part of a fuller autobiography, from which excerpts were published in the late 1980s. Four typewritten sheets, numbered six

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