Delphine Sims and Kunmi Jeje, Santa Barbara Courthouse, April 2018 (Photograph by Ashley Blakeney)
My daughters have not gotten around to the DNA test. Busy living as who they are, inhabiting their precise combination of blood and family and geography and unknown, the genetic family and chosen family.
On television shows about roots and identity, I’ve seen celebrities shout in relief that their DNA shows they are only 46 percent or 35 percent European or white. They hate their slaveowning ancestors. But the enslaved women who were forced to have children with men like Hardiman, Rawlings, and Sims didn’t choose what they would pass on. They loved those children. They survived.
It’s easy to say the letters casually—DNA—but the thousands of strands in the double helix are not all measured by Ancestry or 23&Me.
My father, Richard Straight, died on January 3, 2018, just after the funeral for Loretta. He was completely alone in the hospital, during his three days of coma, except for me and his longtime girlfriend, Barbara, who is very small and staunch and whom I resemble so much that nurses assumed she was my mother. My father died while I held him. Of his four natural children and four stepchildren, no one else was in his life. Not a single cousin or grandchild. His sister Beverly, eighty-nine, lives in Missouri, near her daughter and grandchildren. She is the last child of Ruby Straight. My father’s story is for another book, but I felt deeply the sadness of this solitude. If he were a Sims, there would have been fifty people in the hospital waiting room, telling stories, buying food, dozing until it was their turn to sit beside his bed and whisper into his ear, the way Dwayne whispered to his mother, Alberta, that I was going to have another baby.
Alone with him, I whispered to my father while he took his last breaths that he taught me to drive better than anyone else ever could have, that he taught me to fish, and once we grew a sunflower eight feet tall and ate the seeds.
In his previous illness the year before, having been tied with restraints to his hospital bed and given morphine, perhaps not knowing I was beside him, perhaps knowing, my father shouted, “Product of a rape! No one wanted you!” I was frightened. He was? I was? I was so scared I left the room and went to the parking lot. Opiates and DNA and memory: not a combination I wanted.
We send off saliva or blood, to ascertain who we are.
Saliva, the bodily fluid used as weapon of disgust and power, the power to spit upon enslaved people or poor women or immigrants or teenagers sitting at a Woolworth’s lunch counter or walking into a high school in Arkansas, or my own daughter on the playground.
Blood, the bodily fluid used to classify and categorize us as humans, the one-drop rule, one drop of “Negro” blood and a human is a “Negro,” a percentage of drops of blood to identify a human as Native American, all the phrases we hear as American history. Purity of blood. Bloodline. The cushions of blood and placenta that held my daughters inside and that was inside them and outside them. Their blood when rose thorns pierced their skin, when they fell on their chins (chins and foreheads bleed so much!), I’d look at the blood soaking the tissue and think about everyone who came before, always imagining a narrative.
I’d tell us both a story, while the child bled, because story was in their blood, too, and would calm them like nothing else. Just as story had calmed me. They were me. I was them.
And I realized that James Baldwin had added something to my own genes—he affirmed for me what was instinct: Secondary characters save us, save not only our stories but our lives. The thousands of humans with their own narratives. I’d given that love to my daughters, telling them stories and then listening while they talked about friends and strangers. When they were teenagers, I told them that if they were reading, watching television, or listening to a human speak, they were working, and no one should ever assume interruption was welcome.
The world is narrative, and America needs to remember that.
It’s the reason people tell my daughters the stories of their complicated lives, just as they have always told me—strangers, friends, people I meet once in a restaurant or on a train or in the park. It’s happened to us all over the world. It is in our DNA, our eyes and ears. Last year, meeting Rosette in Los Angeles for an event at the University of Southern California, where we both received our degrees, she startled me by saying with sadness that one of the first people she noticed when she moved to L.A. was a flower-seller, probably from Mexico or Guatemala, a woman who stood at her freeway exit holding bouquets. That was four years earlier—the woman had been pregnant. Rosette said, “Now her little boy is standing next to her, and she’s pregnant again, and she’s standing in the same place holding the same flowers. I thought something might have changed for her.” She narrowed her eyes and we both paused, looking out at the traffic. A bus passed—the same route on which I’d ridden when I was eighteen, where I’d set the first story I wrote for James Baldwin.
Maybe the pie charts and percentages tell us who we are in truth, as opposed to the stories and legends we’ve been told as family, the secrets we uncover in letters or historical records. We who have always thought we knew who we were. Our hair, eyes, teeth, the length of our femurs, the way our brains process information, our inherent tendencies toward sadness, fear, anger, humor.
It may be science. But science cannot change secrecy and survival.
No articles, no photos, no records of how many of the ancestors survived. Now even our cats and dogs have thousands of portraits. General III’s daughter Pashion Sims, great-granddaughter of Daisy Belle Ford Morris Carter, has thirty-five thousand Instagram followers. Her hair, makeup, dresses, and shoes are daily art to friends and family and strangers. She is twenty-two.
Maybe we’ll have a wedding for Gaila and her partner, Andre LeBlanc, with more roses, and maybe we won’t. She met him in Austin, Texas, when they both worked for elementary schools with AmeriCorps. We kept hearing about this guy Andre, assuming he was black. We didn’t know any white Andres. He is descended from the Acadians expelled from Nova Scotia, after fleeing France, and then arrived in Louisiana. His heritage is impressive. He is Andre the White. We find this hilarious. He is a patient teacher of history, student of American Sign Language, and lover of baseball.
Rosette at one time dated a young man also from Nigeria, whose heritage is also Yoruba. Her best friend, Ada, is Nigerian-American, born in California. Rosette and Ada talk about making a film wherein they go to Nigeria and document the way young Nigerian-Americans are changing American culture.
In December 2018, Delphine and Kunmi traveled to Ibadan for his sister Kiitan’s wedding. Six hundred people attended the blessing ceremony. Toby, Kiitan’s husband, presented the Jeje family with forty-two yams. He lay prostrate before his in-laws. Delphine is now Jeje, and Sims. (Kunmi has not been required yet to prostrate. But yams sound good to Mr. Sims and me.)
Full circle. In the most ironic of ways to people who believe in narrowing the world, in closing borders and folding their arms and thinking only of the few people they believe deserve their love and meals, our family is still on Homeric odyssey time. From the enslavement of peoples, not only from the continent of Africa but of indigenous peoples in America, to women held hostage by law or fury or ego, to women who broke free and escaped and stood their ground.
They went west. Always west. My daughter will go to West Africa.
The daughters of our ancestors carry in their blood at least three continents. We are not about borders. We are about love and survival.
That day we said goodbye to Loretta, I sprinkled the suya pepper on the rice, and Bukola Jeje’s hands were with mine, and she was for the first time with the biraderi of Simses. She has given us Kunmi, her only son. We have given her a beloved daughter.
I hope my daughters know this: You are the result of the love of thousands.
There is no other country I’d ever want to live in but this one. This country of women.
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Saphina
Tennessee, 1870
/> And then, last month, I finally drew the four journeys on a paper map I got from the Auto Club, as if I were planning a trip myself. I used yellow marker for Rosa, pink for Daisy, blue for Ruby, orange for Fine. The nation is traversed by their wanderings and purpose. Odysseus has nothing on them. Scylla and Charybdis lurked in the clearing near the woodpile, and in their own homes. The Cyclops sat with a gun trained on a woman with a baby. The Sirens were men who did not sing from the ocean but told them if they were patient and leaped into the plow or the forest, life would be beautiful—and then tried to drown them with sadness. The lotus-eaters were those who told them they didn’t deserve better, they didn’t have the courage to run, to go to school, to buy a piano. The seas were asphalt and dirt. Wind did not move them more quickly toward a destination not the island of Ithaca, which was never home because home was something to flee, until they made California into home.
I put my finger on Murfreesboro, where Fine told a government official that Catheran had been born. I remembered reading accounts of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and how formerly enslaved people were moving, moving, trying to find food and shelter and work after Emancipation. The terror of roving bands of vigilantes. I remembered that free black men as well as Cherokee men were hunted down in Tennessee before and after the Civil War.
I’d been searching six years for Fine’s parents. I tried different spellings of their names—Henry and Catherine—and widened the search area, and then a census record showed up. July 15, 1870. Civil District No. 2, the nearest post office in McMinnville, Tennessee, which was about twenty miles east of Murfreesboro. Henry Ely—Mulatto. Catherine Ely—Black. Five children: Mack Ely, eight; James Ely, six; Mary Ely, four; Irena Ely, three; Saphina Ely, one.
Saphina. Phina. Fine.
It was 2:00 a.m. I trembled. There is no way to be sure. But Fine named her sons Mack and James. She listed her parents with these names. It is so geographically close as to make sense.
I stayed up all night, trying to find more. Reconstructing her life—this woman with so many names in her lifetime. Saphina. If she was born in 1869, her mother died not long after, and she was given away to the white family that beat her, where was her father?
Mulatto. The family story was that he was Cherokee. But who can know what he told the census taker? Henry Ely was “illegal” whether Cherokee or free mulatto or free colored man, because of the Indian Removal Act and vigilante violence. Who could truly know how his wife died, and what happened to him? He could have been one of the thousands of men killed on the night roads and left in the woods.
Where was this house? Were they sharecropping? Did the landowner not want to pay them? Were they among the hundreds of people attacked as those reported to the Freedmen’s Bureau? Perhaps someone wanted those five children.
Fine Ely Hofford Rawlings Kemp, Tulsa, Oklahoma, undated
Near dawn, this piece of paper still gave me that feeling of water trickling down my breastbone. This little girl. A small child. Bereft. Alone. Resolute. They would not break her. The primal gathering of self. The odysseys.
Ruby Triboulet had her sisters and her parents. My mother, at fifteen, had not married the pig farmer in Canada, and she ran away. But her family existed, even if they were in Florida and then California.
Daisy had siblings who were separated, sent to different porches and pallets and kitchens. Pillar to post. But her aunts would not let her starve or die.
Fine had no one in the world. No one.
People tell their descendants, I had someone to live for. A child. A lover. A mother. Even a beloved horse, or faithful dog.
Fine had the tensile strength for survival absolutely alone in a landscape of terror. She was six or seven. Did she think these things? I will live. I will see the sun. The moon. The blackberries. The bullet. The bones of my bare feet will take me down this road.
40
The Work of Women—Evaporation and Memory, White House #3
Riverside, California, 2018
To my daughters:
Home is the place where they have to take you in. Your people would take you in there, in the Swiss Alps, and they would feed you here in the Sims driveway, below our windswept foothills. But since I’m never going anywhere, you will always have this white wood-frame house with redwood shingles, the third white house in the story, on our corner. Even though it’s been painted green, some of that original white paint still clings to the underside of the windowsills you three always leaned out of, looking down into the yard to see the possum swerving along the gravel toward the apricot tree.
Two years ago, for the season of Lent, I was asked to think about this: What do we have that cannot be reduced to ashes? Our houses, our cars, our clothes, our money, our awards, our own bodies—all can be burned.
I thought of the few things that may belong to me: my daughters, my books, my 108-year-old house, my nine-year-old car, my clothes, many that I’ve had for thirty years. (Delphine, who prefers to dress like Sofia on The Golden Girls, loves to pillage my closet for ’80s looks, and Rosette wears as a tunic the batik dress I wore when pregnant with her.) My dog. My six chickens. My own body.
All of us, and those things, can be reduced to ashes. The ashes of my brother, Jeff, came to this house in 2002. They would be ashes reduced to further ashes. I will be reduced to ash and I hope my daughters will scatter the remains of me and the remains of my brother on Little Sugarloaf, the smallest of the three Box Springs Mountains where we grew up together, pushing through yellow brittlebush and the white trumpet flowers of hallucinogenic jimsonweed, listening for rattlesnakes and digging for fool’s gold in the shadows of the granite boulders.
Maybe Dwayne’s ashes will be on the Swiss Alp he hiked with our cousin Hans.
I washed dishes one night during Lent, thinking of what might be eternal. Then I washed clothes, washed the dog, washed my hands, washed the outside of the chicken coop, washed the kitchen floor, and sat on the cement steps outside. The cement would not burn.
Everything we did, as women, seems evanescent. Evaporated. Invisible except to memory.
Fine: She picked cotton and blackberries, chopped wood that burned and hauled water that dried, all of those things dissolved into the survival of people who hated her and then people who needed her and people who loved her. She cleaned the bodies and hair and clothes of Jennie and Callie. She cleaned houses. She cleaned the bodies of her sons. She went to Tulsa and washed clothes for white people, cleaned the tears of her grandchildren, plucked the feathers from chickens with her daughter, cleaned the blood from animals, and cleaned the pots of the oil and debris from meat.
Jennie cleaned the blood from her own body. She cleaned the blood of the man she killed. She cleaned the floors after hush-hush parties in her Tulsa house. She cleaned her pistol. She cleaned her white house in Los Angeles, and the clothes of all the people who lived there, and the plates and pots of the people she fed. Even when she was an elderly woman, as our cousin Karen Lark remembers, Jennie still ran numbers, which meant she kept figures in her head or on small pieces of paper, and she leaned over the fence in the alley behind her house laughing and talking to the people whose numbers stayed in her head until those daily numerals won or lost and they, too, evaporated.
Daisy made it to California and sorted the munitions of war, the agents of death. She and her daughters plucked and cleaned the bodies of turkeys and washed the floors of blood and feather and guts and bone. They cleaned the floors at Butcher Boy, the beef and guts and bones and fat, the meat that ended in hamburgers and cheeseburgers in thousands of bodies moving along the new freeways. They washed and bleached and dried and starched and ironed hundreds of white dress shirts. They made hundreds of pies and cakes, fried hundreds of chickens.
Alberta told me the story of washing diapers and clothes for her six children in the early 1960s when salmonella tainted the city water supply. She mentioned the wringer washer. She grinned and said it was the worst, children lying half-naked on the floor while s
he hung rows of wet cloth on lines outside; she said this while we folded the thick cotton diapers and washcloths we used to clean the bodies of my two baby girls. “Go on and rinse that cloth one more time,” she said to me, looking down at Gaila’s face. “Look at that little bit of sweet potato on her mouth.”
Rosa Erb Leu washed the blood and bone and vomit and fluid and diseased cells and soiled equipment and linens of thousands of humans, beginning with the inmates of the krankenhaus for the insane, to the body of my grandmother, to the bodies of the steelworkers in Fontana, the origin of Kaiser Permanente Healthcare System, but who remembers her touch on their forehead or shoulder? Her hands so twisted by arthritis when she was ninety that her fingers resembled splayed feathers, as if she would fly from the chair on the square of artificial turf, and even then, blind, she would work her way around the earthen plots surrounding her mobile home, planted with tomatoes and chard and grapevines, telling me she could feel which were the weeds and she would pull them out, and she could feel which were the vegetables and when they were ready for her to twist them from their stems and bring them inside for the boiling water.
Ruby Triboulet Straight must have washed the hair and clothes and bodies of her four children, washed the blood from sheared sheep and castrated cattle from the clothes of her husband. The oil of machine and truck and gun. No electricity or running water in the ranch homes and cabins of the Rocky Mountains—creek water so cold they broke the ice to bring it up. Ashes and ashes of wood fires. The water of boiled beans. Melted snow. The sawdust of hundreds of pine trees felled and dragged by horse, in the hair and clothes of my father.
Only memory cannot be burned.
I made thousands of cupcakes for your birthdays and the birthdays of everyone who came to stay in this house. I made thousands of brownies for basketball snack bars. Thousands of chocolate chip cookies. I washed thousands of socks. I wrote thousands of words. I pulled out the weeds and fed them to the chickens and gathered the eggs and scrambled them for you and your friends and crushed the shells and put them into the dirt and new weeds grew.
In the Country of Women Page 28