History Professor Richard White Goes To Work On His Mother's Stories

YES, EVEN brilliant historians call their mothers on Mother's Day. It's the smart thing to do, and Richard White didn't win the MacArthur Foundation "genius award" for nothing.

So White, 50, a much-honored history professor at the UW, will call his mother, Sara, who lives in California, and they will have a conversation not unlike thousands of others occurring simultaneously across the land. But then Sara, 78, will ask as she's done so often lately, "So how's our book doing?"

This is where their conversation will deviate from the masses.

These two have gone where few mothers and sons have dared go together: on a journey through their family's history, now chronicled in the book "Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past.". Mother and son worked on the book for five years, she as the guide through memory and landscape, he as the historian and writer.

The book can be read on many levels: as a story of a family, as a history of Irish Americans, as a meditation on the uneasy intersection of history and memory. White writes like a poet, but treats his subject with the same unsentimental scrutiny that marks all his work.

Books such as, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own" and "The Middle Ground," a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, have earned him the label of "revisionist historian," but he says he tells history as it happened rather than how certain people would like to think it happened. Stripped of hero-making romance, history can bare unpleasant truths.

Even a mother's history.

Tensions arose between mother and son during the writing of their book. On many points of the story, her memory painted one picture while his research painted another. Sometimes he revealed things she didn't want revealed. Other times they settled on a very complex blending of versions.

Ahanagran is the name of the rural town in Ireland where Sara was born in 1919. The book essentially tells her story - her migration from Ireland to America and then back to Ireland - but embodies the larger story of Irish-American immigration with all its contradictions. The struggling Irish came to America, a land where fortunes could be made, in order to live in Ireland.

"We made a deal," White said. "We agreed that I'd write the book, and she'd get to say `Yes' or `No' to publishing it. But she wouldn't get to edit it. She agreed to that. 'Til the very end, I wasn't sure what she was going to say. She sat on it for about two weeks. Then she said, `OK, go ahead.' But she's very clear there are parts she would just as soon leave out."

Those parts include stories of a grandfather who went to prison, and another grandfather who immigrated illegally.

"The stance was that if I couldn't write honestly about my family, I lose the authority to write honestly about anybody's family," White said.

Through it all, White says he and his mother have become closer than ever. Lately, they've been talking on the phone almost every day. They talk about family. They talk about his impending move from the UW to Stanford University in the fall.

White did his graduate work at the UW in the 1970s, and has been teaching there since 1990. A gifted teacher and scholar, he's one of the most illustrious professors in the school of humanities. In 1995, he was given a $295,000 no-strings-attached "genius award" from the MacArthur Foundation, one of a long string of honors he's collected over the years.

He says he'll miss Seattle, but the move will bring him to a great university and closer to his mother. Maybe next Mother's Day, he'll drive over instead of calling. --------------------------------------------------------------- Alex Tizon is a reporter for the Seattle Times