Legacy, Distilling My Origins

I am yet distilling my origins. Hear this my treasured, most honored ancestors:

I understood the assignment.

Let’s call this life what it is; rebuking the abiding blasphemy of chattel enslavement. Robbed of my history and stripped of my language, nearly three and a half centuries later, I am still distilling my origins. Seeking to fill vast chasms where our legacy should reside, my ancestors created traditions as intricate as quilts we pieced, guided by Divine insight and divination. The ravages of the colonizers rendered us immune to imposter syndrome, which would have us believe we had not earned rights to be in all the places we now stand. We know better. Descended of kidnapped Middle Passage travelers who steadfastly refused to die, we belong everywhere we plant our feet. Each day as we rise, we embody our ancestor’s wildest dreams.

This is not a treatise. This is a real-life fairy tale about family legacy. It is a love story where little girls lacking suitable alternatives must grow into warriors who save themselves. The women from whom I descend, known and unknown, whom hard storms could have weathered, were burnished and chose, in the words of poet Richard Wright, rather than to

“bend in strange winds,
respond to the warmth of other suns
and…”

in fact,
to bloom…riotously.

There are days when I imagine us descended from the Akan of modern Ghana, recognizing in my story their matrilineal structures. My kin are strong women loved by and married to stronger men. Redwoods, they shelter and protect us, and we submit to them, in our way. They do not rule us, and have never expected us to be weak. Fortitude, fierceness, and our warrior spirit, that is what they love.

Or maybe we were lions. Exceptional hunters and fiercely protective, like lionesses, we have been generationally gifted, with agility and strategic orientation. We collaborate across time zones, and continents, often without words, reading tides, moons, and people.

Whatever our origins, women lead our families. If my grandmother, whom Papa always referred to as Gem, though we never knew why, held the title of Queen, then Mommy, her only child, held the title of Princess Royal. While I am not the firstborn, very early on, apparently everyone but me recognized my preparation for ascendancy to the role of matriarch and heir apparent. Never discussed, nonetheless, it was never in doubt. Even when my parents moved us across the country to continue their education (in the Godless North), I returned to my grandparent’s home each summer, beginning the day after school ended. (I still choose arid climates). Like total immersion language learning, I absorbed everything I’d ever need to know for the moment my time came.

Annually, from June through August, Gem and I were inseparable. She’d fly in for a fortnight, taking charge of our kitchen and lives, blowing in like Mary Poppins, spun of Black Southern Belle and Texas Pralines, the sweetest hurricane ever to make landfall. She imported regional favorite foods, seasonal gossip, warmth, and wisdom. I adored her.

She never talked down to me or treated me like a baby. At four, I was a coffee drinker. Nothing more than hot milk with sugar and only enough java to make it latte-colored like my Mommy’s freckled cheeks, but I didn’t know any better. I’d go home after spending the night and swear to my parents that Gem let me drink coffee with her and Papa at breakfast. Mom rolled her eyes but said not a word.

I look over my left shoulder and Gem is there, in the form of identical scars, earned the same way, on the same day, yet another reminder that I am a barely distilled version of her. For my ninth birthday, my parents bought me a shiny black English racer. It would be years before I genuinely appreciated it; it was not the banana seat cruiser every little girl wanted that year. Nonetheless, when I departed for summer vacation, Gem shipped it along with my luggage to ensure that I’d have something else to keep me occupied.

A week later, she bought herself a matching bike so we could ride around town together. Racing home after a good, long ride, and opting, albeit unwisely, for a shortcut through a gravel-covered alley, she was just ahead of me, so I neither saw nor heard her skid and fall, scraping the stucco-covered wall to avoid a more perilous outcome. Three minutes later, I made the same fateful decision.

I arrived just in time to watch Papa cleaning and bandaging the very wound I intended to present for urgent care. My grandfather laughed like a madman, wiping tears from his eyes, muttering, “You’re just as crazy as she is, God help you both.” He patched us up, and never let us forget it. I remember him tapping us on those tender left shoulders the balance of the summer, gently, but with clear intent. He always saw us, and occasionally called us, “peas in a pod.”

I was twelve or thirteen when Gem first gave me the keys to the car. She knew I’d been driving my Dad’s golf carts and would regularly let me put the Sunday car back in the garage or reverse it down the driveway. Only two blocks straight down the street through one stop sign, no lights and NO cameras back in the day, to the Safeway when she’d forgotten something and couldn’t be bothered. She was testing me, and I passed. Papa knew, but I never told my parents. Everything those two ever did was preparation.

That same summer I started driving to the grocery store, I brought in the mail one day and recognized my name, alongside my grandparents’ on a bank statement. Well-behaved children do not question their elders about such things. Well-behaved women rarely make history. Clearly, I was embarking upon a legendary life. My inquiry culminated in a visit to the lawyer’s office, whereby I was advised that I was the executor of their estate, which for a pre-teen, required some explaining. I didn’t think much about it after that, and except for an occasional signature or something pro forma, I doubt we ever spoke about it again.

Was it deference, or concession? It would take decades for me to appreciate that the documents and the signatures never mattered. It had never been about letters of administration or safe deposit boxes. It was about what our embodied memories held and what our spirits recalled. Across sub-Saharan Africa, as early as the 12th and 13th centuries, royal successions and transfers of wealth were matrilineal. Not only was I being prepared, I was being called to remember. I would spend the rest of my life becoming Gem’s successor while birthing and training my own. While I had a sibling, as the only daughter, the mantle would only pass through me. That did not mean that others could not lead, but as she was my most Beloved Elder, with work, faith, and grace, so might I too become one.

As I begin to look back on a life well lived, and yet not done, I appreciate that I have always been more Gem than Mommy; more iron-willed and determined, more resolute. In southern parlance, I favored them both, easily passing as either’s daughter depending upon whom I was with. My mother was soft-spoken, gracious, firm, and elegant, whereas Gem, and I , as I aged, might be described as congenial, yet quietly terrifying. What a holy trinity, Gem, the elder, GiGi, the gentle, and GoGo, (IsiZulu, for beloved elder) as I would come to be known. I’d have to earn my name.

In the words of Søren Kierkegaard, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” It all makes sense now.

This is not the end. This is, in fact, only the beginning.