If These Walls Had Ears

The Biography of a House

By James Morgan
Warner, $24295

ISBN 0446519146

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Review by Katherine R. Harrison

My first memory of my childhood home is of refracted light streaming through a diamond bracelet. Shortly after we moved in, I discovered this treasure in the attic, nestled in a floral-patterned box yellowed with age. My young eyes did not know that the bracelet was made of rhinestones as I poured it from small hand to small hand, cupping it gently like water. But I did know even then that what I held had a past life. I had found something that belonged to the woman, now dead, who lived in this house before me -- I had caught a glimpse of her history and touched it with my very fingers.

James Morgan appeals to memories like these in his new book If These Walls Had Ears. On the surface, it is the story of a physical house and its transformations over time, but this book has many layers -- like the layers of linoleum on a much-used kitchen floor. Morgan strips these away both literally and metaphorically to reveal truths about the passage of time, the histories of people, and memory itself. The result is a book that is part history, part memoir. It is also meditation on how our surroundings shape our lives and how we in turn give form and meaning to them.

Morgan chronicles the lives of the eight families, his included, which have inhabited a certain house in Little Rock, Arkansas from its construction in 1923 to the present. He offers anecdotes from his own past along with witty, often poignant portraits of the lives that came before him. The Armours, who built the house at the corner of Lee and Holly and were one of the more eccentric families to inhabit it, owned a Nu-Grape bottling plant at the height of the soda pop craze in the 1920s. Charlie Armour created a car shaped like a Nu-Grape bottle, complete with a bottle cap and rich purple hue.

One of the most moving accounts in the book is that of the Armours' son, a POW during World War II, returning to his home a man changed forever by war. A strict Baptist family and a bohemian couple are among others that we come to know through Morgan's perceptive observations and lyrical prose.

I like to think of the house on Lee and Holly as a song, its inhabitants former and past the chorus, this book a score, and James Morgan the conductor. The sounds heard over the ages, like the lives of the inhabitants, are at times cacophonous, at times pure harmony, but they are all part of the same movement. I cannot give higher praise to a book than to say that when you look up from its pages, you do so with a certain clarity and awe -- you look at your surroundings anew, and hear the walls, so fraught with meaning, sing.

Katherine R. Harrison is a native Arkansan.

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