An Alaskan Mystery Buried in Pennsylvania

‘The Attic Wife: The Shocking Case of ‘Agnes Young McAlpin’By Marcia BiedermanExposit Books, 306 pagesAfter the first two paragraphs of Marcia Biederman’s riveting biography that reads like a mystery story, you may well be “hooked” too:“My eyes kept going to the tiny photo in the corner of the 1906 Pittsburgh newspaper displayed on my laptop screen. A woman’s head floated in white space. A caption identified her as Agnes McAlpin, an ‘educated’ Alaskan, who was seeking a divorce from a dentist in nearby Butler, Pennsylvania.“The story’s headline promised salacious details about her husband’s involvement with another woman. But it was a subheading that caught my interest. ‘Baby’s Grave Is Hidden,’ it said. I’d gone into the digital newspaper archives intending to research something unrelated to Agnes McAlpin, but now I was hooked. A Haida woman had fought back against isolation and mistreatment thousands of miles from her home.”What happened to that baby? The biographer went looking: “Sometime later, I was in Butler’s South Cemetery searching for the unmarked grave of Agnes’s three-year-old son Victor, who’d died under mysterious circumstances while in her husband’s care. Agnes was in Alaska with Victor’s younger brother. Pregnant again, despite her in-laws’ warning, she’d been forced into scalding baths and surgical procedures meant to produce an abortion. Fearing for her life, she returned to Alaska with one child. Her husband, Kenneth, promised to follow them and bring Victor.”Kenneth never shows up, but Agnes does — in a Butler courtroom where her testimony excites the admiration of many as well as the racist mockery of others. She has returned to Butler to find out what happened to her baby, but Kenneth’s family refuses to tell her where her child is buried. So what does a biographer do? She looks for that grave, which newspaper reports say is in a plot belonging to the McCandless family, but there are many families by that name and hence multiple possibilities.So what is Ms. Biederman the biographer to do? Ms. Biederman enlists the help of Professor Bryan K. Hanks, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert in GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar), but the nature of the terrain and the small grave make it impossible for him to do his work.So what is a biographer to do? Ms. Biederman locates Agnes’s last surviving grandson who knows only in sketchy outline the story of how his grandmother married a white traveling dentist and somehow broke free of his family’s efforts to sequester her in an attic and suppress her story by depriving her of the vital details that the biographer is able to piece together from Agnes’s letters and court records.Ms. Biederman’s story is what she claims for it: a “testament of bravery.” But seldom have I encountered a biography with a first paragraph that is so telling and so symbolic. Return to that “tiny photo in the corner of the 1906 Pittsburgh newspaper.” Imagine the biographer staring at the photo, which turns out to signify how this Alaskan native has been marginalized and yet also fleetingly acknowledged as “educated.”Return to what seems only descriptive: “A woman’s head floated in white space.” What the biographer sees, in effect, is the synecdoche of a story of a woman whose wholeness only a biography can revive, a woman otherwise simply decapitated in that white space. She is otherwise lost to history, captioned off, you could say, in a brief newspaper item.When I say the story is symbolic, I mean it is about more than one person, more than about discrimination and prejudice and racial violence, or about the aftermath of the Klondike gold rush. It is above all a story about displacement and the disorienting divide between cultures and communities that Agnes is able to sometimes surmount and that sometimes overcomes her.In her introduction, Ms. Biederman slips in a telling detail: Agnes’s last surviving grandson is a Korean War veteran, yet he knows his grandmother’s story only vaguely. In other words, he served his country knowing only part of what he had fought for, and against, in the home of the free and the brave.Mr. Rollyson is the author of ‘American Biography.‘

An Alaskan Mystery Buried in Pennsylvania

An Alaskan Mystery Buried in Pennsylvania

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