The Secret of the Black Box by Kenneth Robb

The first years of my life were spent in small settlements along the sandy Sabine River in east Texas. My father was a preacher, and every few years we moved from one village to another.

We lived in parsonages. We never owned a home. In this and some other ways we were different from the other members of the community. In the place we lived when I was in my third year of school, my best friend was Roy Jenkins, and we often walked home from school together. One day, as we neared Roy’s house, he pointed toward it.

“My grandfather built that house 70 years ago,” he said. “And when I grow up and get married, my father says I’m to have it.”

I stared through the fence at the tall, old-fashioned house. How wonderful, I thought for a moment, to be the owner of a house like that! What could I possibly say that would equal Roy’s words?

Then I remembered something. “Well, I don’t care,” I said, “my family has a black box!”

And suddenly I knew, thinking of the black box my mother kept locked inside the china closet, that I really didn't care. There had been at least one rich family in every town where we had lived. Now I knew that I had never envied any of them. Though the true meaning of the black box would not be known to me for years, I felt I was richer than anyone I knew.

I ran all the way home that afternoon, went to the china closet and stood staring at the black box. It was no bigger than a shoe box, but there was something special about it, something precious which for some reason I believed was mine alone.

Just when the box came so important to me, I do not really know, I simply know that the box is among my earliest memories.

I was the youngest of seven children. I remember winter evenings when I played on the kitchen floor while my mother washed the supper dishes with the help of Mary and Elizabeth.

“Now, girls,” my mother said to them one evening, “if the house should catch fire in the night, save the black box. Your father and I will take care of the children. Break the glass in the china closet and take out the box. Everything else can burn. But get that box!”

After Mary and Elizabeth went away to college, I heard the same instructions given to Ben, later still to Kate, who was next in age to Ben. Something of my mother’s concern, something about the seriousness of her voice remained with me.

Once when my father and mother and the girls were not at home, Wilson and Jim talked about what was in the box. Wilson said it probably held money — perhaps hundred-dollar bills.

“It’s not just money,” said Jim. “I believe it holds jewels, too. Mother lived near the Oklahoma Indians when she was a little girl. Maybe she got diamonds and rubies from them.”

Ben, who by that time was a senior in high school, said there was nothing in the box but a lot of junk. He claimed he had seen my mother open the box one night.

It worried me to hear Ben say such things. But Ben said he would prove it. He took a small knife from the kitchen and tried to open the door of the china closet. I suddenly had the feeling that Ben was evil. Wilson sprang upon him.

Jim and I also attacked him. The three of us knocked Ben to the floor. We fought for several minutes. Mother came in and sent us to bed, not asking what had happened.

Often the box seemed to possess mysterious powers. The only time I ever saw my father cry was after he had spoken in church about political matters, and several church members had signed a petition asking him to leave town or stop discussing political affairs in church.

The whole family gathered around my father as he held his head and kept saying he had failed in his duty as a preacher. Kate put her hand on my father’s shoulder and said, “Anyway, Daddy, we still have the black box.”

My father seemed to think that was very funny. He sat up and laughed and put his hand on Kate’s head. Then the rest of us began to laugh, and we all felt better.

It wasn’t till all the other children except Jim had married or gone away to college that I found out what was in the box. I asked Mother one night to let me see inside it.

She laughed quietly; apparently she thought this request was funny. Then she rose and unlocked the china-closet door and unlocked the black box, too. She emptied its contents on the dining-room table.

I shall never forget how disappointed I was. The box held nothing but papers. Suddenly my hands began to tremble; what I saw made me ill. I said, “It’s trash! Trash! Nothing but trash!”

But Mother didn’t even notice that I had said anything. Her strong hands moved rapidly through the papers. She seemed to recognize them by touch. From the bottom she drew out a large thick paper and held it up. My eyes were cloudy in my anger, and the words on the paper seemed unclear. Then I heard my mother’s voice saying: “This is our marriage license. It was just 30 years ago next October...”

Quickly she folded the paper and I could see her trembling as she returned it to its place. Next came several sheets of various sizes and colors, tied with a string around them. “Here’s evidence of our real treasure,” she said: “the birth certificates.”

I only half listened as my mother mentioned the other papers: the ownership papers for our car, a letter from the teachers’ college praising my sister Mary and records concerning the schools we had attended.

Seventeen years have passed since that night. I have seen my brothers and sisters marry and their families grow large. Before Mother died, I saw papers, pictures and keepsakes added to the box until it would hold no more.

As the years flew by, that emptiness I felt at first changed to an understanding of the box’s true value. It contained the real records of our family and showed how we had stayed together in the face of death and the difficulties of wartime. It contained the story of long years of family living, family working and family growing.

When I married, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to buy at once a small black tin box.

Recently, as my wife and I came downstairs, we noticed our three-year-old son standing before the fireplace in the living room. He was staring silently at the black box on the mantel. For an instant a vision appeared to me: a view of six other homes, the homes of my brothers and sisters, with a black box displayed in some part of each house. It was a vision of two dozen children, my mother’s grandchildren, some older than our son and some still too young to walk, each wondering from time to time about the contents of a small black box.

What interests our son about the box is that it is secret. But later he will come to know that the secret held in this box is the secret of himself of how he came to be, of the girl he will marry, of the children he will have, of the manner in which he will pass on his heritage from the past. For in its records of the past he will see the way for the future, and I believe he already knows, in some small way, that this is true.