As Echoes, Stories: On Lucille Clifton's "Generations"

Lucille Clifton | Generations: A Memoir | NYRB Classics | 2021 | 104 Pages

Every funeral is a hole. Wake or scattering, seats packed or empty, each ceremony gropes its way towards language: words are always the substitute, the failing bulwark against permanent loss. The eulogy, even if delivered perfectly, rarely matches the tangle of feeling behind it. Remembering usually means pointing at an absence, and no gesture can make up for the dead who can no longer speak. But in that crevice between emptiness and silence, there are whole worlds, threads of connection that the bereaved struggle to recover.

In Generations, the poet Lucille Clifton’s 1976 memoir (her only prose work that is not for children), Clifton recounts the death of her father, Samuel Sayles: a moment of grieving that prompts a journey through her family tree. Clifton’s celebrated body of poetry is known for its concise mysteries, “physically small poems with enormous and profound inner worlds,” as the poet Elizabeth Alexander put it. Throughout her work, Clifton regularly braids personal experience with the sweep of history, reaching even as far back as God’s creation of light—the paradox is that even as the scale of time widens, its vessel must remain small. Clifton’s practice of paring away might at first seem at odds with an emphasis on memory, where the first instinct might be to say more, to grasp for anything that might be salvaged. Her work readjusts the balance between truth and facts—a distinction she was known to warn her students about. In the presence of a greater beyond, perhaps there are times when “it does not help to know,” as Clifton writes in a poem addressed to her dead husband in her collection The Terrible Stories.

Generations is a nesting of elegant fragments, using prose to compile a linear narrative, but one where the gaps are felt as intensely as what’s present. The result is a work that both preserves history and asks subtle questions about limits of attempting to do so. Moving rapidly between precise impressions of the funeral and the stories, passed down by her father, that trace the family lineage back to African ancestors, Clifton moves between patient observation and a more emotive undercurrent: a reckoning with the unrecoverable. At the funeral, her father’s body becomes a figure for this tension:

He was still handsome, straight and military as he always was when he slept. He sleeps like he is dead, we used to laugh. His hand was curved as if his cane was in it, but 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 this nothing. Nothing was hidden. They were missing nothing. I thought I was going to laugh. They were hiding where there was nothing to hide. Nothing was missing. I walked out of the room.

“Nothing was hidden,” the kind of ordinary phrase that Clifton revitalizes in her poetry, becomes increasingly charged: absence is itself the evidence, but of what? Not just that the dead shouldn’t be embellished—when      Clifton’s sisters say their father looks good, Clifton retorts “No [...] He’s dead.”—but that what’s missing is itself part of the story. Clifton asks what it means to remember that you don’t remember, how to understand unknowing.

The family narrative, as recounted by Samuel, is an eventful one. It begins with Clifton’s great-great-Grandmother, Caroline, or Ca’line, Donald, born in 1822 in the Kingdom of Dahomey, located in modern-day Benin. She came across the ocean on a slave ship and, at eight years old, walked from New Orleans to Virginia as part of a transaction in which she was sold away from her mother. She became a powerful matriarch on the plantation where she grew up, and raised Samuel, her great-grandson, when his mother went to work at a factory. The story of Ca’line’s daughter, Lucille—or Lucy—is no less harrowing. After having a child with a white man, Lucy killed the man at a crossroads with a rifle. The daughter of a respected woman, Lucy was protected from the lynch mob. But afterward, she was tried and hanged.

These are powerful memories, but they come to Clifton as echoes, stories already at least once-removed. Without discounting their power, Clifton chooses not to dress them up by speculating what else might have happened—they stay on the page as oral stories, outlines passed from parent to child. A remarkable spareness is maintained, as if asking us to think harder about what can’t be known. By doing so, Generations asks a provocative question: can reticence become its own form of remembrance?

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Part of the project of slavery in America was the eradication of the ties of Black people to their past, isolating them from family and memory as part of a brutal regime of subjugation. This erasure is part of a power relationship the scholar Orlando Patterson has called “social death,” in which the slave is excluded completely from any form of social recognition. Facing such devastation, in loss of life but also of information, the work to build or rebuild a tradition is long and ongoing. In his essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” the pioneering historian Arthur A. Schomburg raises a call for Black history as a political imperative:

History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset. So among the rising democratic millions we find the Negro thinking more collectively, more retrospectively than the rest, and apt out of the very pressure of the present to become the most enthusiastic antiquarian of them all.

This desire to dig, with time, has grown from listing the achievements of ancestors to a cornerstone of thinking about identity in general. The excavation for roots is always ongoing—perhaps it is the road to self-knowledge. This idea can be seen diffused through the popular imagination. One example is the television work of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who, on PBS shows such as African American Lives and Finding Your Roots, conducts interviews with celebrities and uses DNA analysis and other methods to establish a forensics of heritage. No matter who we are, this cultural attitude implies, discovering where we came from can help us better understand where we’re going. 

The retrieval of the past then assumes the form of research: the power of gathering evidence, of reconstructing meanings from the archive’s dusty documents. Clifton is no stranger to this impulse, and Generations could be considered an example of a Black memoir tradition that has continued to grow since the 1970s. The book begins with a phone call from a white woman who has seen Clifton’s newspaper notice inquiring for information about her father’s family. Over the phone, with the visual markers of race erased, a wry confusion follows: the white woman on the other end of the line can’t understand how she hasn’t heard of Clifton’s father, not realizing that the descendants of slaves share their name with the descendants of the masters. The desire to learn more is sincere, but for Clifton a certain irony is inextricable from the search. 

Primary sources only take the searcher so far—very often, imagination is invited in to create narrative, or the feeling of the past’s presence, from the raw material. For instance, Alex Haley’s Roots, a literary sensation and near-contemporary of Generations, expands Haley’s oral family history into an epic, and caused widespread discussion about what kind of book it was: a work of fiction or a true story with imagined specifics? The generational memoir continues today in popular works like Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, which brings the meticulousness of a fact-finding mission, complete with map, to the legacy of Broom’s New Orleans family, and is full of rich and developed evocations of the time before Broom’s birth. Saidiya Hartman’s acclaimed book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments enacts this idea of elaboration in a more academic context, transforming copious research into experimental life-writing about early 20th century Black women. Hartman describes these women as “radical thinkers” who could not be properly seen in their time: after all, no one doing the documenting then was really looking. 

Hartman’s intervention leads towards that more familiar ground of synthesis, the novel, where form and function make room for the stories of lives that might have been, the interiorities that can’t be accessed. There is no shortage of intergenerational, historical epics in the landscape of contemporary fiction—often they are described as “sprawling,” their pleasures in rewriting lost lineages and connections. But what makes Generations extraordinary is its brevity, covering five generations in fewer than 90 pages. Its view of history is not brief, but rather compressed: wide spans of time are acknowledged, but with a poet’s sensibility: infinity must be perceived in a grain of sand. The “hard facts”—who did what on what day—are ultimately something external to this process of reckoning:

Later I would ask my father for proof. Where are the records, Daddy? I would ask. The time may not be right and it may just be a family legend or something. Somebody somewhere knows, he would say. And I would be dissatisfied and fuss with Fred about fact and proof and history until he told me one day not to worry, that even the lies are true. In history, even the lies are true.

At first blush, this might bear some resemblance to the maxim—via John Ford—of “print the legend,” but the statement is more ambiguous, more complicated. In her poetry, Clifton sees the family as a gathering where the living and the dead remain in contact. Toni Morrison—the editor of Generations—recalls that Clifton “spoke fairly regularly to her deceased mother” via a Ouija Board. In this visionary kinship, the ability of one generation to send a spiritual message to another is the assembly a new archive, one where research is conversation, storytelling, prayer. It is an archive of living memory and of afterlife. Around the same time that Generations was written, Clifton also became interested in automatic writing, recording messages from voices that she referred to as “The Ones.” In the words of one transmission:

why should we wander bone yards
draped in linen

flesh is a coat we unfasten
and throw off

what need to linger among stones
and monuments

we have risen away from all that
wrapped in understanding

Clifton does not theorize her process: better to be a conduit for the voices and to let the truth be sifted out through the lines. She is a poet of the ordinary and the oracular, considering the two modes coextensive. In Generations, Samuel’s daughters worry that their father will haunt them—the past is something to struggle with on a daily basis. The family story can be diagrammed in facts, but Clifton emphasizes images and feelings, turning her attention to preserving the private frequencies of the family experience. At the same time, the memoir is part of a distinctly political act of remembering: necessary work, but something that is never allowed to congeal into official history or something settled. By showing the depth of the losses, every hard-won fragment is better understood as precious.

If the spiritual lines remain open to the past, loss itself becomes something more ambiguous. Ca’line, the other terminus of Clifton’s intergenerational archive, is a holder of secrets. Near the book’s beginning, Samuel recalls an encounter with the powerful matriarch, recalling,

What her African name was, I never heard her say. I asked her one time to tell me and she just shook her head. But it’ll be forgot, I hollered at her, it’ll be forgot. She just smiled at me and said “Don’t you worry, mister, don’t you worry.”

Her name, as well as her feeling in refusing to tell, remain unknown. But that unknowing, if a dialogue with the dead is still ongoing, becomes a message, something to ask about again later. And secrets have their own potency and charge. Clifton was sexually abused by her father, an unstated fact that weighs heavily on Generations. She wrote about these experiences in her poetry, obliquely at first and then with greater explicitness later in her career. However, these facts are never presented as a revelation—for Clifton, it is part of an experience that unfolds through life, one shard of a complicated truth.

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Clifton’s poetry—Generations among it if you consider the work an extended prose poem—never says too much. The diction is spare; every phrase is weighed and set down when inner experience confirms it as right. Feeling comes first. To call her writing “straightforward” would be to mischaracterize it, in the same way a common phrase, even if it’s used daily, has the strata of former meanings inside it. Her father in his coffin “looked like stone in a box,” and as it rains, “everything cried.” Ordinary language is tested in speech and, skirting cliché, becomes unbearably heavy when truth’s weight is confirmed.

Each section of the memoir is bookended with a quote from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Clifton’s use of Whitman seems like both a nod of a respect and a repurposing, calling to mind D.H. Lawrence’s criticism of Whitman’s sublime egoism: “Walter, leave off. You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter.” Whitman’s multitudes are an act of poetic audacity, either to be admired or chastised, but collective speech is something more concrete for Clifton, who understands the exceptional importance of keeping roots alive for Black people. Remembering her mother, the ancestor closest to her heart, she writes, “the generations of white folks are just people but the generations of colored folks are families.” When speaking with her in poems through the veil between life and death, distance intensifies the connection.

Memories of missing things are a constant presence Clifton’s poetic imagination. One recurring image is the loss of her fingers: Clifton and other women in her family were born polydactyl, with six fingers on each hand. The “extra” fingers were amputated after birth in order to restore bodily “normalcy.” Just as with Samuel’s leg, the phantom limb is an image of what the body feels beyond the rational knowledge of loss—not unlike the dialogue with lost family members who still exert a powerful presence. Still feeling deeply, despite awareness of the absence, is its own information, and ultimately its own reality:

i was born with twelve fingers
like my mother and my daughter.
each of us
born wearing strange black gloves
extra baby fingers hanging over the sides of our cribs and
dipping into the milk.
somebody was afraid we would learn to cast spells
and our wonders were cut off
but they didn't understand
the powerful memories of ghosts.      now
we take what we want
with invisible fingers
and we connect
my dead mother      my live daughter     and me
through our terrible shadowy hands

Further connection always remains possible, even if through the shared memory of what has been taken away. “Things don’t fall apart,” Clifton writes towards the end of Generations. Despite everything. “Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept.” Clifton writes in her poetry that “meaning is the thread / running forever in shadow”—the deepest understandings come from regions that remain obscure—where significance must be worked out again and again, where history merges with the breath of life.