As a child whenever possible I asked the adults around me for details about common ancestors and living family members. Not everyone complied in a forthcoming manner; some lacked interest in history altogether, while others clammed up for undisclosed personal reasons. The three people in our image — and everyone who knew them in life — are dead now, so the bare outlines of their existence live only in my memory; and in whatever story we can derive from this colloquial image. The photographer’s identity is unknown and will remain forever hidden and irretrievable.

We scarcely need incident and biographical data to create empathy for this unhappy man and wife; their misfortunes have engraved themselves on the surface of our photograph. They are poor, working-class and have always struggled. The man wears a coat and tie, yet manages to look unkempt, his shirt tucked in without a belt. His clothes have the shiny look of infrequently laundered garments; they need pressing and sad to say this probably represents the very best of his wardrobe. A scowl covers the husband’s face. With his lips he appears to attempt a smile for the camera but fails miserably. We get a clear view of his left hand — large with thick fingers perhaps used habitually for grasping and lifting heavy objects. The appendage is well-matched to his strapping physique.

With her right hand the man’s wife — my paternal grandmother — pushes hard into her torso, a movement we associate with a person experiencing abdominal pain. Her face shows more than anything else her browbeaten condition. Still a pretty woman, she is in this moment completely cast down. Her head, her eyes and her mouth seem as if under great pressure to sink. She holds a daughter spooked by fear.

I can tell you the couple has just returned from burying their infant child, dead from a fever. At this point in the woman’s life she has birthed six children, the youngest now at rest in a fresh grave. A widowed mother of three sons and a daughter before meeting and marrying this man (her second husband), she labored years in a rubber factory manufacturing tires, an occupation notorious for its carcinogenic working conditions. The employment probably caused the cancer that killed her a couple years after this picture was taken.

I know they called her husband Big Henry, sometimes Big Hank. Henry drank heavily and from all accounts acted a mean drunk. My grandmother conceived two offspring with Hank including the child she is holding. She must have perceived some good in him; whereas my father (who issued from her first marriage) saw nothing but a brutish alcoholic, had contempt for his step-dad, and once engaged him in a domestic fist-fight.