Page 146 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

140 CULTURAL STUDIES

‘…wearing the Easter dress that had been made for her by her mother and grandmother—
she is only 6 years old.’
Source Family photograph from Immediate Family. Courtesy of Sally Mann.
Remembering that rainy night in Virginia and the quilts made of lost dresses, I
recall a photograph, not taken by, but of, Sally Mann. Perched on a swing,
wearing the Easter dress that had been made for her by her mother and
grandmother—she is only 6 years old. You can see the lovely little dress
showing its bright face again in Mann’s Easter Dress (1986). Like the dresses in
the Slavick family, passed down from mother to daughter, Mann has continued
the process of acquisition and exchange by passing down the Easter dress to her
daughter Jessie. In Mann’s photograph, Jessie holds the bright white pleated
cotton skirt, sprinkled with flowers, out into a wide smile for the camera. A little
sister in a white baby dress hunts in the weeds for what? I am charmed. But I am
also haunted, not only by Jessie’s brother who pulls himself along the wire fence
(his face strangely hooded, his legs in shorts), but especially by the torn
nightdress that hangs on the clothes-line. The nightdress—caught in the gentle
breath of the Blue Ridge Mountains, caught between the movement of a
grandfather’s dancing steps and the blur of a winged creature—is ripped at the
back and at the hem. This dress is a horrible dress. Hanging and blowing like
shed skin—it is a souvenir of loss, among shadows of change.
I am reminded of my children’s little baby sweaters, and the grief that I felt
(and still feel) when I discovered that they had been ravished by moths. I try to