Joe Williams’s cigarbox

Joe Williams’s cigarbox is both a portable store of personal history and a vulnerable object carried through a world of ships, departures, and wartime suspicion. Its contents gather fragments of Joe Williams’s family life, youth, travels, and recent attachments; its repeated recovery and handling show how much of his past he keeps close, even when he has little else with him.

A Personal Archive in a Cigarbox

The box had once held Flor de Mayo cigars, bought by Joe Williams when he was drunk in Guantanamo. Beneath goldpaper lace he kept an assortment that resists any single description: photographs of family and former companions, a packet of razor blades, foreign stamps, Merry Widows, and ten small pink and red shells from the beach at Santiago. Together these objects make the box less a tidy collection than a compact record of places visited, people remembered, and parts of life that have not been discarded.

Several photographs point toward Joe Williams’s earlier life. Janey’s high-school graduation picture sits beside a snapshot of Alec with his motorcycle and a team photograph of Joe Williams as captain of his high-school junior baseball team, signed by the coach and every player. The baseball photograph preserves a version of him identified through a team and a position of leadership; the family and school pictures place that past alongside the more mobile, unsettled life represented by the box’s other contents.

Other keepsakes connect the collection to family, travel, and intimacy. An almost-faded pink photograph shows his father’s tug, the Mary B. Sullivan, off the Virginia Capes with a full-rigged ship in tow. A postcard picture of a woman named Antoinette recalls an encounter in Villefranche, while another photograph shows Joe Williams and two other sailors in white suits before a Moorish arch in Malaga. The shells from Santiago, the stamps, and the snapshots extend the archive beyond the home: it carries material traces of a sailor’s movement from one port and experience to another.

Carried, Mislaid, and Recovered

The box’s importance becomes visible when Joe Williams changes out of his uniform. At noon, he drops the uniform, with a cobblestone wrapped inside it, from the dock into the muddy basin. Only after doing so does he realize he has left the cigarbox behind. He feels bad, returns to the shed, and finds it where he left it. The sequence sets the discarded uniform against the recovered box: the clothes associated with his immediate former identity go into the water, but the small container of remembered people and places is retrieved and carried on.

With the box tucked under his arm, Joe Williams walks to the beacon and watches the fleet steam down the River Plate. The overcast weather soon blurs the cruisers into their smoke, and he turns his attention to a rusty tramp steamer entering the basin. When a man approaches and speaks to him in Spanish, Joe Williams feels panicky, answers that he does not understand, and walks away through the streets behind the waterfront. The box accompanies him through this uneasy moment, physically close while the ships and unfamiliar approach around him make the scene feel unstable.

Later, aboard the Argyle, Joe Williams keeps the cigarbox beneath his mattress. His shipmates stare at him without speaking, and Tiny does not answer when he tries to speak to him. After Joe Williams has fallen asleep, a policeman wakes him and orders him off the ship. He takes the box from under the mattress and carries it onto the deck, then down the gangplank and across the wharf, still holding it as he is led away. Its position under the bunk and its presence in his hand mark the same practical fact: even when he is abruptly removed from his ship, the box remains among the few personal things he takes with him.

Search and Continuing Accumulation

In the police station, the cigarbox changes from a private container into an object examined by authorities. An inspector demands to know what is inside, and a bobby snatches it from Joe Williams and opens it. The officer is relieved not to find a bomb, then empties the contents onto the desk. That inspection puts Joe Williams’s personal archive under the suspicion of wartime policing: the same assortment that preserves photographs and souvenirs is treated first as a possible threat. The box’s contents are exposed in public, while Joe Williams is challenged over whether he is really American and why he has come to England.

The collection continues to grow after the detention. In New York, following an evening with Janey at the Belasco theatre, Joe Williams later finds himself on a bench in Union Square with a headache and no money. He finds the theatre-ticket stubs and puts them carefully into the cigarbox with the other miscellaneous keepsakes. The act gives a fresh, ordinary scrap of paper a place beside school photographs, travel souvenirs, and family images. The box is not a finished memorial to a settled past: Joe Williams keeps adding to it, preserving a trace of the recent evening even as the relationship and his circumstances change.