Agnes Cecelia Kozlowski
— an autobiographical memoir

Editor's Introduction

The memoir transcribed on this site was written by Agnes Kozlowski (b. Wilmington, Delaware June 15, 1927, d. Chicago June 6, 2024) and lent to me by her in late 2014, along with a large cache of other material, with the understanding that I would be using it to put her story online; I scanned everything and returned the originals to her in the space of a few weeks. The physical typescript is the property of her estate. I have of course retained my own scans of it.

This introduction consists of four sections, that progress from dry to rather personal. You can navigate to them individually, if you like:

The typescript •  The text •  The story she tells •  Later years, after the memoir

The typescript

The memoir consists of 60 sheets of ordinary rather low-grade unruled paper, 8 × 10½ inches (i.e., demitab or government letter format), slightly yellowed from age, with some curling of the side edges of the first few pages and the last two as well as some minimal curling and folding of the corners here and there, but otherwise in excellent condition, free of dog-earing, creases, tears, and the like, with the single exception noted below.

Except for an unnumbered first page with the heading Agnes Cecelia Kozlowski set off by decorative hyphens and asterisks, the pages are sequentially numbered at the top, centered: on pp2‑59 the numbers are typewritten, and on p60, which is otherwise blank, the number is written by hand in red ballpoint ink. There is no indication either way that page 59 was the end of the document nor that there might not be further pages directly continuing it, but at any rate I haven't found any: the simple assumption is that for whatever reason, Agnes dropped her account at the end of page 59 and we have all of it. From internal evidence (p46), we know that she typed it up after she left Africa: when, exactly, I don't know.

The text is typed double-spaced on one side only of the sheets, in a standard serif font although from two different typewriters: pp1‑38 in a slightly smaller face, pp39‑59 slightly larger, of which pp39‑45 are noticeably fainter, until a new ribbon was clearly put in to start p46. The text is divided into paragraphs, sometimes rather long and containing unrelated material, not quite what we are taught in school; the paragraphs are irregularly indented by 4 to 12 characters. The reverse of every page is completely blank.

The only preservation issue affecting the reading is on p6, where about 3 inches from the top of the page, on the left margin edge we have an irregular brown stain about an inch on a side, which has corroded the paper to affect some of the first seven characters of that line: where we should read the first character we find a hole, and characters 5‑7 are very faint, almost effaced, so that we can only make out firmly

[. . .] something was going to be  ring me joy [. . .]

which obviously poses no problem as to the reading.

The type itself is completely readable thruout, but the typing is often sketchy, with irregular spa­cing, raised or depressed letters, and a fair amount of overstriking, especially at the right edge of the paper. Since as a child I myself learned to type on a 1920s typewriter given to me by my father, I recognize most of these flaws as due to typing faster than the clunky apparatus would allow, including the overstruck characters at the right margin, where we inserted the paper too close to the right edge of the platen, and then don't hear the bell until it's too late.

Agnes reread the typed text from beginning to end, making many corrections by hand, sometimes up to a dozen or so on the page: often in pencil, in turn almost always later very carefully traced over in red ballpoint; but more often in the same red ink straightaway. These corrections are in a hand similar to Agnes's as I knew it towards the end of her life, and I have no doubt she made them herself. They are for the most part minor, consisting of spelling and capitalization corrections, the insertion of spaces, clarifications of overstruck typing and the like, and the insertion or deletion usually of single words although occasionally of two or three. Once, an entire clarifying sentence was added. Naturally, I haven't marked these in my transcription, in which I aim at reproducing the final state of her memoir as she left it.

On the other hand, five times in her typescript, Agnes made corrections or additions not by crossing out and replacing the typed text, but by enclosing the typed bit in parentheses and usually adding a handwritten alternative above it; a sixth time, a typed word has been enclosed in red parentheses but with no added correction. Since in these six cases it's not clear whether she intended to replace or delete the text or add to it, I've kept both, presenting the text as

ink (typewritten)

In the middle of p25, at the beginning of a paragraph, we find what still remains for me a mysterious handwritten tag: "Pg 16" and a sort of caret. It does not relate to anything on p16 of the typescript, nor to p16 of either of the two other page-numbered writings of hers that I have found so far, but I do suspect Agnes meant to refer to some other item: I just haven't found it yet.

The reader cannot fail of course to notice many nonstandard spellings. These fall into two groups:

In doubtful cases, I let the text stand as I found it.

The timeline in the memoir is somewhat fuzzy, and I do wish Agnes had indicated a few more dates. I've tried to supply a few in the left margin, based on other records of hers; they are not part of Agnes's text; neither is the division I've made of it into nine webpages, nor the headings at the top of those pages.

The text

The account is written entirely in English, with not one word in Polish, Latin, or any indigenous language of southern Africa. This is not the given it might seem. To be sure, the absence of Latin and the local languages of Kasisi is not so surprising, even if she does mention doggedly setting herself to study "the native language" for an hour a day (p48); but the absence of Polish is more remarkable, since she went from a Polish family to an orphanage run by an order of Polish nuns, to which she herself then belonged for the rest of the time covered in her memoir. In all these years, Agnes must have spoken Polish more often than English.

The language of her earliest childhood was clearly Polish: of her first day in school she writes (p15):

and in those same early school days we find her at the door of the Principal's office with her Polish reader (p8).

But well after she became comfortable with English, Polish remained a big part of her life, thru the entire time covered in her memoir. On p31 she reports that as a novice,

and in 1954, as a young woman of 26, she and her fellow nuns would sit together in the evening and read the news in Polish (p52).

Agnes's mostly Polish upbringing and her comparative lack of schooling — she would only graduate from high school in 1955, a year after the end of her memoir — account for her rough English; yet it would be a mistake to dismiss her nonstandard language and her frequently stream-of-consciousness approach: they are often very expressively used.

To take an example, the most characteristic quirk of her writing, her frequent use of a past perfect for the simple past (I suspect that Polish tense structure underlies it). Compare the sadly static scene of her farewell to her mother when she was six (p6):

with her dynamic account of brother Joey's tricycle accident (p4), a full page of vivid writing with a mix of present and simple past, not one past perfect in it.

And as with any writer, even our slips can be revealing, as for example when she writes (p39, my italics):

All the more reason then to "fix" as little as possible.

The story she tells

In this memoir, we watch a very young girl lose her mother, almost immediately to be essentially abandoned by her father to grow to adolescence thru a horrific four years in a boarding house or what we might describe today as a halfway house for alcoholics, followed by a better, more stable environment in an orphanage, and finally graduate into adulthood as a licensed practical nurse and a missionary sister in southern Africa. Yet the memoir will break off in a cloud of doubt, disillusionment, and bitterness as she prepares to return to the United States — where not long after, she will rejoin the civilian world, eventually to get married and live to nearly a hundred as a little old lady that many of us might pass by without a second glance.

Like any good story, hers has its picturesque bits: as she is taken away by car from her family home never to return, a chicken lays an egg on her feet, a story I heard her tell many times always with the same amused gusto; years later, waking up in the middle of the night as a young nun, reaching for her gun and calmly shooting a rat, — "I got him spattered to pieces" — then rolling over back to sleep: an iconic slice of life if there ever was one.

Some of these vignettes are much more emotionally charged: Miss Urban, a middle-aged woman who befriends the teenaged Agnes and was something like a parent to her, teaching her some of the commoner graces of life (which you and I very likely resented, but which to her were a marvelous opening-up to the world). She always writes of this success­ful business executive as "Miss Urban", except just once, where at a special moment on Easter Sunday she records her by her first name Louise: we cannot fail to be deeply moved. Only slightly less touching is watching her learn to ride a bicycle only at 25: for work purposes — most of us learn in childhood, but a true childhood is not something she had.

Somewhat similarly, Agnes lets us be present when for the first time she falls asleep on the shoulder of a man (p43): an extraordinarily candid, fleeting snapshot of the sexual awakening of a young woman, a nun though she may be.

Much darker are several other passages in the memoir: at age 10 in that horrible boarding house, witnessing the rape of her 13‑year-old sister; but also in the orphanage, the unmistakable sadism of one of the nuns; and the heart-wrenching suffering in an African leper colony where the internees see that people come to take pictures of them but apparently not to help them.

Strangely by my lights, two striking incidents didn't make it into the memoir, although Agnes recounted them to me several times: in the convent at Woodbridge, she actually witnessed a nun burned to death on the kitchen floor in a flash fire involving paraffin candles; and the one case in her nursing practice in Africa that affected her the most was that of a little girl who had fallen into a pit of burning coals: it took many weeks of Agnes's care, cleaning, medicating, swabbing several times a day — the little girl's skin spalling off in great suppurating plaques — for her patient eventually to make her way back to home and family.

A life like this will either destroy us or not, depending on what we're made of. In Agnes's case, she survived and eventually flourished, finding her own way to a peaceful and respected old age; and although in her memoir she writes mostly not of herself but of the events she lived, here and there we see (despite the natural doubts and insecurities of youth and more generally of human beings) a confident and stubborn young woman, qualities which served her well.

And then we have a rather nice passage (p55) where we get to watch Agnes in the wild: she spends three days of her valuable free time semi-taming some monkeys to the scary presence of this woman with a camera, and finally does line up good photographs of them. (With a charming vignette of monkey parenting in the wild, by the way.)

Later years, after the memoir

Agnes's memoir breaks off in 1954, when she was 26. She would live another seventy years. At some point I hope to present the story of those succeeding years on a separate page, based on five large boxes of other material and of course my acquaintance and conversations with her over thirty-some years; in the meantime, a very brief summary of her later life is in order.

In the fall of 1989, I became Agnes's neighbor; and for a few years we were just that, casual neighbors. Thirty-five years of her life had gone by since the end of her memoir: during those years she was awarded her high school diploma, taught grade school in upstate New York, was released from her religious vows (1956), moved to Chicago where she worked briefly as a nurse, met and married her husband Harvey Nutter (1968), worked for three or four years as a postal clerk, then for many years as a bookkeeper for at least three large companies, and settled down with him in the single-story stuccoed brick house where they lived when I met them.

In 1989 she may still have been working (I will have to check), but if so it was the twilight of her days of employment, as of Harvey's, who for many years was a driver of armored trucks for Brink's, which American readers will recognize as a large company specialized in cash handling: dangerous work, and in fact Harvey was the victim of a robbery on the job in 1966, fortunately with no serious lasting injury to him.

During their working lives, they escaped Chicago from time to time to a small vacation house they owned in Wisconsin; in their retirement, however, they were free to travel, and they did: always by car, always in the United States, forming the project of seeing all 50 States. Harvey died on May 15, 2009, at home, after forty years of marriage, when Agnes was 81 and he was 89 or 91 (there is some hanky-panky about his birth year in connection with his enlistment in the Army as a young man): he missed seeing North Dakota and Alaska.

Although Harvey converted to Catholicism in order to marry Agnes, he was not by any means a churchgoer, and Agnes herself — understandably once we have read her memoir — remained cool and distant (estranged is probably overstating it) from the Church during his lifetime. In 2014, I was happy to report to Agnes the canonization of her Polish pope John Paul II (several pictures of him in her house); but of John XXIII, canonized the same day, I was shocked to hear her say, "I don't know who that is." His papacy was from 1958 to 1963; had I known her story as I do now, I would not have been surprised.

After Harvey's death, Agnes returned to her Polish and Catholic roots, becoming a regular at Sunday Mass and often listening to Polish radio.

She kept on traveling. Her first trip was in her usual mold, a trip by car, to North Dakota, one of the two States she had never visited; but with a twist: she accompanied a small group of Franciscans in cars packed with supplies she donated towards a Native American reservation in that state. Her trips soon expanded to air travel and foreign countries, usually with church-sponsored groups mostly focused on sites of religious significance: she would see Alaska, Canada, Switzerland (and Liechtenstein), Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, Rome, and Medjugorje; she would go on a long double-barreled pilgrimage to Lourdes and Fatima, and travel to the Holy Land with a side excursion to Petra — I'll eventually share a photograph of her there, a woman in her mid-eighties happily ensconced on a camel.

But clearly to Agnes, the most important of these trips of her later years were to Poland, on two occasions; and especially to Zambia, to her old mission at Kasisi, now the Kasisi Children's Home, which is going stronger than ever and where she was received something like royalty, staying with the sisters, by then almost all African rather than Polish as in her day. (Thru the end of her life, Agnes remained up for anything: that included a helicopter ride specially arranged for her, directly over Victoria Falls, banking sharply so she could see them better. I may have a photo of that somewhere as well.) On leaving Kasisi, Agnes made a substantial donation to the Home towards the building of a chapel and the construction of a well.

With advancing years, Agnes naturally slowed down. She and Harvey had occasionally taken me out to various restaurants — usually Polish — and she continued to do so after he died. I in turn cleaned her gutters while she held the ladder and spotted me; or shoveled their walk after our good Chicago snowstorms: several times in later years, after some particularly deep snowfall, taking off my coat and boots and having breakfast with her in her kitchen, in my pajamas and bathrobe. I remembered her birthday every year, with a corsage or a nice bouquet, and usually with some kind of outing — one year to a benefit concert at the Polish/Lithuanian church of St. Stanislas Kostka, another year to a sort of street fair at the Copernicus Center, most often to a nice restaurant: but she had to do the driving — I don't drive.

She continued to tend her garden, and to drive, well into her nineties. One of the last times she drove was in December 2018, to take me to a vet with the body of my dog WhiteSox who had died that morning: Agnes was 91 years old. I continued to celebrate her name saint's day on January 21 (the feast of a young Roman girl of the early 4th century), but also on March 2, often teasing her about it since I maintain she was named for a different Agnes altogether, the much more recent princess of Bohemia who is reverently remembered by the people of the neighboring southern region of Poland that was the homeland of Agnes's family, and who was ultimately canonized by Pope St. John Paul II — Agnes would have none of it.

We had thought she would live to a hundred, and she was well on her way; but in her ninety-sixth year she was suddenly brought low, and after some weeks of weakness and discomfort, died on June 6, 2024: a few days short of her 97th birthday, peacefully, at home. I continue to miss her.

Bill Thayer

Chicago
on the feast of St. Agnes, January 21, 2025

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