Johns Hopkins University Press
Generations: A Memoir, by Lucille Clifton (NYRB Classics, 2021), 104 pp.

What do you call something that goes and comes back in a form not quite, but resembling, the corporeal? Is there any word closer than haunting, or maybe, more narrowly, history? History is a subject that Tracy K. Smith asks us to consider in the introduction to the republished edition of Lucille Clifton’s memoir, Generations.

Clifton’s timeless contribution to poetry has a clear through line in Generations—the stroke of her pen, rays of light running across pages, opening possibility through simple, exact and human diction. It cannot go without mention that light is the very definition of Lucille. Smith writes,

If light is what the work of Clifton is intent upon spreading, then I’m tempted to think that history as we have been conditioned to accept it is unrefracted, all of a piece, and blindingly white. Whereas Clifton’s imagination is prismatic; it slows down the central story so we can see what it is truly made of: all the dazzling colors moving at different frequencies and, depending upon circumstances, in distinct directions. . . .

Generations, first published in 1976, chronicles in dialect several generations of Clifton’s family line. The narrative’s impetus is framed in reflection of Clifton’s father’s death and her journey to and out of his homegoing service. Laden with family photos and quotes from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the narrative is a mosaic of dialogue, poetry, and family records both visual and oral.

Clifton’s memoir, a monument despite its 87-page heft, resonates as beautifully as the life of the poet, who illuminated readers with each word she wrote. Poet laureate of Baltimore from 1974–1985, Clifton’s first book of poetry, Good Times (1969), was selected as one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times. Her career went on to span over four decades of accolades, publication, and poetic service—including, but not limited to, two Pulitzer Prize nominations, several children’s books, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and a position as one of the chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

Through dialogue in the voice of Clifton’s father, Samuel Sayles, and his incantation of his great-grandmother Mammy Ca’line’s voice, Clifton weaves together a nonlinear yet luminary account of her patrilineal grandmother’s [End Page 118] harrowing epic from Dahomey to Virginia. And in turn, an account of how she picks up the baton to continue the line—a six-fingered woman with six children in tow.

The story begins through the wires, Clifton on the phone with a distant white relative who offers to send Clifton a concise log of her family’s history—the Sales/Sayles of Bedford County, Virginia. Curious, the white relative asks Clifton why she’s interested in this family history.

Clifton proffers, “Well, my maiden name was Sayles.”

Eager, the white woman prods, “What was your father’s name?”

“Samuel.” Clifton states, to which the “thin-voiced white woman” says, “I don’t know him.”

“Who remembers the names of slaves?” Clifton asks, both as a statement and an accusation. And then, continues, for an entire book, to remember the names of those enslaved. Samuel Sayles, son of Gene Sayles, son of Lucille Sayles, daughter of Mammy Ca’line, born free in Afrika in 1822.

The story begins with Clifton’s father’s death. Samuel “Mr. Sayles Lord” Sayles finishes breakfast and sends his eldest daughter Josephine “Jo” upstairs to fetch his cigarettes, but, when she comes back, he’s lying on the floor, already in the afterlife. Samuel Sayles, born 1902 in Bedford, Virginia, was raised by his great-grandmother, Caroline “Mammy Ca’line” Donald Sale until the age of eight years old. Punkin, Clifton’s younger sister—by six months—calls Clifton and tells her the news of their father’s passing. Grieving through fits of disbelief and laughter, Clifton, alongside her husband Fred and her brother Sammy, begins the journey from Baltimore, Maryland, to Buffalo, New York, to say their goodbyes.

The story begins with Mammy Ca’line’s exhortation, “Get what you want, you from Dahomey women.” This epigraph sets the tone of the memoir. Mammy Ca’line, a Dahomey woman born free in 1822 and stolen to the New World to a place called New Orleans, at age eight, walked from New Orleans all the way to Bedford, Virginia. She also survived her daughter, Lucille Sayle—the first Black woman legally lynched in Virginia. Lucille killed a white man.

After the funeral, Clifton’s siblings voice their concerns to her about their daddy haunting them: [End Page 119]

“Lue,” Jo cried up the steps to me. “We’re scared. He’s gonna haunt us.”

“No he won’t,” I tried to comfort.

“He sure will haunt me,” Jo was crying. “I’m bad and he’ll haunt me for sure.”

“Not you, Lue,” Punkin whispered. “He won’t bother you. You always was his heart.”

Ironically, through personifying those who have passed, Clifton’s memoir acts as its own haunting. The corporeal enacted as she allows conversation, dialect, and speech to become the narrator of each short chapter. It’s her story told through his voice, and his story told through his great-grandmother’s voice. And let’s not forget Clifton’s story, which begins in her own voice—a voice largely created through repetition, just like the oral history she transcribes.

An oral history that mutates as it is passed down from ear to ear. Mammy Ca’line, reported to have been born in 1822 in the epigraph, is recorded as being born in 1823 in the final paragraph of the book. And what of Lucy, who was, in family lore, the first Black woman legally lynched in Virginia? Even Clifton wants 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.

Truth, a theme that holds like a bloodline through Clifton’s literary canon. Truth and the many ways to illuminate truth—the prismatic glorious messiness of relationships and relating; the spirit and the spiritual—Clifton’s lifelong project. Each poem, each prose piece, is a prism through which to see and be seen—less concerned with fact, jargon, and distancing image systems, and more concerned with the person, their voice, and clarifying a path for understanding.

The first time I remember reading Generations, I was sitting in my mother’s old apartment, holding a cover-torn copy stamped as property of the Baltimore County Public Library. By the looks of it, I’d read it before, but like any haunting, it took its tattered form to remind me. [End Page 120]

That cover—a collage of Clifton/Sayles family photos—drew me in like a curtain drawing up toward the light. The contagious, affectionate smile of Thelma Clifton; the stately shine of Gene’s mustache, all relics of a family line that ran deep through Georgia, Virginia, New York, and Baltimore, the place I too, called home.

I’d just met Sidney Clifton—Lucille Clifton’s eldest child—for the first time. I learned my mother and her attended the same all girls’ high school, Western High School, at the same time. I learned Sidney and I had grown up only 15 minutes away from each other, at different times, yet such proximate places that it’s a wonder our shoulders hadn’t bumped before.

I’d interviewed Sidney about The Clifton House, her childhood home in Baltimore City, which she’d recently purchased and was transforming into an artists’ residency space. Touring the home, Sidney showed me the room her mother used to write in—a room so yellow and full of light, it seemed Lucille had left some of her name.

A few months later, I saw Sidney again. Baltimore’s city public library, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, hosts an annual Lucille Clifton celebration of life—and I was honored to be invited by Sidney to read a poem on her mother’s behalf.

After the reading, I had a question. On the last pages of Generations, Clifton records her mother Thelma’s death date as February 13th. I remembered this was the same date Sidney had reached out about the status of her childhood home and learned it had gone on the market that very day. The same day, nine years to the date that her mother had passed. “Isn’t it eerie?” I asked, more sentiment than inquiry. Sidney’s eyes perked up. She said, “I remember Momma, sick in that hospital, saying she was holding out to go when her momma went.” A chill ran through me as fresh as ice. Not only was the house brought back to life on the same date as her mother’s and her mother’s mother’s passings but also too, the book of memories, was brought back to print, in the same season of the home’s renewing literary lineage. Haunting. [End Page 121]

Jalynn Harris

jalynn harris is a writer, educator, and book designer from Baltimore. Her work can be found in Little Patuxent Review, Feminist Studies, Poets.org, The Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere.

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