History breathes, and gets sticky-juicy
What do Mohandas Gandhi, Charles Manson, Galileo, and Mata Hari all have in common? Incarceration, and mail.  Their letters, and many more, are on display at Tacoma's Karpeles Manuscript Museum.

I especially liked John Dillinger’s letter to his niece, showing a playful side to “Public Enemy Number One” and Lee Harvey Oswald’s letter, from Russia with love? To his brother, ending with the somewhat foreboding phrase, “I don’t know how I’ll feel to be back in the States.”
Two other presidential assassins had letters on display, Charles Guitreau, who killed President Garfield, was terse and grammatically challenged in his confession, while Leon Czolgosz, President McKinley’s assassin, was about a page more verbose.  Both claimed to have done their duty.

Duty and other lofty concepts didn’t figure in the content of the letter Mohandas Gandhi wrote to his sister, thanking her for the fruit that he’d just eaten, after feeling faint due to fasting; the interesting part of this letter was the content in between the lines, and items as mundane as fruits alluded to so much more.

What is great about the Karpeles’ most recent exhibition, to me, is how, under the subject of “incarceration,” such a huge array of historical figures is accounted for. Represented were:

• the notorious â€" Charles Manson’s letter, signed with a swastika and pee, had me feeling a bit sick;

• the infamous â€" Al Capone signs away with watch, watch chain, and watch case to his brother, in another;

• and the historically significant â€" Napoleon renounces his throne next to his excommunication by Pope Pius the VII, Galileo’s findings on mechanics,  and documents in the hands of Sir Walter Raleigh and Mary Queen of Scots. 

Looking at the handwriting on the papers, seeing the well-known names distilled into such banal and recognizable artifacts as “documents” breathes life into the not-so-dry subject of history.  In the context of “incarceration,”  history becomes as juicy as the fruits Gandhi describes in his missive.

Go see for yourself â€" the incarceration display will be up through Dec. 22, in addition to ancient Egyptian artifacts and Sumi-e painting s on the wall by the Tacoma Sumi-e Art Association, who will hold a reception on Oct. 28. â€" Jessica Corey-Butler