Generations by Lucille Clifton
By Lucille Clifton, introduction by Tracy K. Smith
104 Pages. NYRB Classics. $14.95.
Lucille Clifton’s brief memoir Generations opens with her receiving a phone call from a stranger. The caller is responding to an ad Clifton had put in a newspaper, asking if there were records of her family line. The caller is a white woman, who gradually realizes that she is a descendant of the family that owned some of Clifton’s ancestors. In the hands of another writer, this scene could be depicted as chilling or somber, but for Clifton it is a moment of pride. While the white woman is “the last of her line,” when Clifton considers her own situation in life, she writes, “I look at my husband and our six children and I feel the Dahomey women gathering in my bones.”
In fact, pride is the persistent feeling throughout Clifton’s book. Generations is Clifton’s accounting of her family history on the occasion of her father’s death, and though her ancestors experienced poverty, disease, racism, and violence, Clifton refrains from indulging in misery; instead, she celebrates how her forebears created a unique life for themselves in a world that wanted to erase them. One of her two epigrams is from her great-great-grandmohter, who she describes as “born free in Afrika in 1822/died free in America in 1910.”
But there is a note of discordance in Generations. Clifton makes it evident that she is undeterred by shame and unwilling to cover up embarrassing truths. She is a woman who, when she sees her father in a coffin, observes, “His body was slightly on its side so that his missing leg was almost hidden. They were hiding his missing leg. The place where there was no leg was hidden. They were hiding his nothing. Nothing was hidden.” Such is her attitude in recounting her family’s past: nothing is hidden because there is nothing to hide.
And yet, not only are many memories of her family lost, but Clifton acknowledges that the years have distorted what stories her family has. One of Clifton’s descendants is Lucy, who is remembered in her family as being the first colored woman to be legally hanged in the state of Virginia - for killing a white man with whom she had a baby. This story is passed down to Clifton with many striking details, and when she questions its veracity, her father tells her simply, “In history, even the lies are true.”
In short, Clifton is telling us the truth, but she is telling the truth about the oral history of her family. They are poetic, metaphoric truths rather than the truths of verified empirical facts. The records she receives at the beginning seem only to be used to help her organize her family’s tales.
It’s a compelling way of writing a memoir, and I think Clifton gives us an indication as to why she prefers this method: the stories of her family are so important because hers is a family without an exact homeland, a family which has been marked by transience and migration. It began with her great-great-grandmother’s forced separation from the Dahomey Kingdom (now present-day Benin) by the claws of slavery, and was soon followed by that same women’s voluntary journey on foot from Louisiana to Virginia - a journey taken when she was ust eight years old.
The unsettled nature of Clifton’s family appears in unexpected places. Clifton’s mother grew up in Rome, Georgia, but would only tell her children was from Rome, so they “thought she was Italian.” When she attends Howard University, Clifton similarly tries to make her homeland ambiguous, declaring herself a resident of New York. “They didn’t know that Buffalo is a long way from New York City,” she writes, “And for them that did know, I could lay claim to Canada, so it worked out well enough.” Even her hometown of Depew, New York, Clifton describes as “mostly Polish.”
We only get very brief glimpses of Clifton’s adult life away from her family. Ultimately she leaves college after two years, disappointing her father immensely. “God sent you to college to show me that you got feet of clay,” he says when he learns she is dropping out. Clifton replies, “I don’t need that stuff, I’m going to write poems. I can do what I want to do! I’m from Dahomey women!” In her unwavering commitment to the tradition of her family, Clifton finds an independence of spirit, an ability to make herself anew.