The first time I encountered Generations by Lucille Clifton, I was 21 on a train going across Portugal. Living alone in foreign country, I was ushered into the history of another family even as I missed my own. I was listening to the audio book, narrated by Sidney Clifton, another descendant in the generations of Dahomey women who birthed the Sayles and Cliftons. To be part of the Clifton legacy does not necessitate direct ancestry. As Clifton writes about her own mother, Thelma, “She wasn’t a Dahomey woman, but she was the Mama of one.” Clifton was 40 when Generations first appeared in 1976 — and the new reissue brings renewed attention to the mythology, grief, and humanity of Clifton’s family.
The book primarily moves through the anguish experienced by the family due to the loss of their patriarch, Clifton’s father. This grief guides the book as Clifton retells Samuel Sayles’ memories of what his Mammy Ca’line told him about generations past. Sometimes these narratives include blended voices, as Clifton comments on what her father told her in the same chapter as his own narrative.
This communion with the dead is a central part of Clifton’s grieving process. At his funeral, Clifton writes, “I wanted to tell him something, my insides screamed. I remember everything. I believe.” Perhaps this assertion of belief is necessary because Clifton had doubts about some of her family history, including the hanging of her namesake for shooting a white man. Clifton had to be reassured by her husband, “In history, even the lies are true.”
Invoking another poet from American history, Clifton begins each chapter with a quote from Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” In this case the title, the poem’s title converts the individual into the collective as Clifton asserts that the individual interior contains generations of family. Clifton invites us into this collective interior not to be voyeurs, but to join in the project of reconstructing an American narrative. By using an iconic American author as the anchor of her narrative, Clifton includes her own family’s history in the American canon.
The story of the enslaved is perhaps the most American of stories, muted as it is kept. In her introduction to Generations, Tracy K. Smith writes, “To reinscribe these lives into recollected history is to restore history itself to a rightful state of commotion.” The lives of the enslaved and their descendants are marked not only by hardship but celebration, heartbreak, quiet, the living. This cacophony of life is heard in Clifton’s memoir as the dead narrate and conjure their dead and bring to life an American family.
A renowned American poet, Clifton created a poetic universe to encompass her family, history, race, womanhood, spirituality, and anything else she investigated. Toni Morrison, who edited Generations, describes Clifton’s work as “seductive with the simplicity of an atom, which is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude.” A Cliftonian use of simile and image from her poetry shows up in her prose. Morrison wrote:
“Yet she sends the history she has compiled and in it are her family’s names. And our family names are thick in her family like an omen. I see that she is the last of her line. Old and not married, left with a house and a name. I look at my husband and our six children and I feel the Dahomey women gathering in my bones.”
The simile “like an omen” creates a haunting sense of what this family unity signifies. The “gathering in [her] bones” conjures the dead as they reunite in the vessel of their descendant. Clifton’s ability to haunt and summon the dead with her words is a hallmark of her work. As Toni Morrison remarked, “She is comfortable and knowing about the dead.” Clifton’s dead come alive, are present, and take a seat at the table.
The haunting begins almost immediately in Generations: “I didn’t want you to die Daddy. You always said you would haunt us if you did.” Clifton summons or perhaps acknowledges this haunting by ending Chapter 2 with lines from a story Clifton’s father told her: “Mammy Ca’line walked North from New Orleans to Virginia in 1830. She was eight years old.” This is our first introduction to the lineage of the Sayles family, descended from Dahomey women.
The male descendant of Dahomey women, Clifton’s father serves as one of the primary narrators in the text. Clifton mourns him dearly, yet even in recounting her father’s funeral Clifton adjusts her tone to exercise her sense of humor: “They were hiding his missing leg. The place where there was no leg was hidden. They were hiding his nothing. Nothing was hidden. They were missing nothing.” This playful turn of language about her father’s amputated leg is testament to Clifton’s lighter touch even while grieving.
As her father’s body is lowered into the grave, she writes, “My father bumped against the earth. Like a rock,” for her father had always been the rock of the family, and he remains understood as such. Even as Clifton commemorates her father, her memoir does not ignore his flaws: “He hurt us all a lot and we hurt him a lot, the way people who love each other do.” She goes on to attribute the difficulties her siblings had in life to her father’s behavior. She also does not neglect to mention his infidelity and callous ability to move on quickly from the death of his first wife. Even in her mourning, Clifton strives to sing a truthful song.
She also tells the truth about slavery, and her narrative humanizes the enslaved, her family. Her assemblage of voices of the enslaved and their descendants calls into question the language and standards for how we remember them. “Who remembers the names of the slaves? Only the children of slaves,” Clifton observes after connecting with a descendant of the family that enslaved her family. Her prose encourages us to resist what we were taught to accept about slavery: “He was a present to their family. He was somebody and he was a present, a wedding present.” Clifton portrays her ancestors as proud, dignified, wild, weak, strong, and human.
The final chapter of Generations is titled “Thelma,” after Clifton’s deceased mother. All the other chapters focus on descendants of Clifton’s father, so ending with Thelma’s story is a way of reinforcing that she gave birth to Dahomey children and should be included in their record. As in her poem “cutting greens,” Clifton finds the enchantment in the domestic with her description of her mother:
“Oh she was magic. If there were locks that were locked tight, she could get a little thing and open them. She could take old bent hangers and rags and make curtains and hang drapes. She ironed on chairs and made cakes every week and everybody loved her. Everybody.”
Clifton’s mother is magical not because of witchcraft or psychic abilities, but because of what she did to make a home for her family. She was beloved by everyone for the affection she expressed through homemaking. For many years she made a home for Clifton’s father who treated her like a maid. And Clifton’s father does make several appearances in the final chapter, suggesting what a mighty presence he was in his second wife’s life. For Clifton repeats how much her mother loved her father, and admired him, and took care of him despite their marital turmoil. Yet this love is what binds Thelma to the lineage of Dahomey women, as she is featured in the end of the novel where Clifton recounts her lineage in the form of a poem: “Samuel / who married / Thelma Moore and the blood became Magic.” Clifton is proud of her dual heritage from Dahomey women and from a magic woman, and makes this clear at the very end of the novel.
Generations is a lean book, inviting readers to get through it even in one sitting. In five short chapters, Clifton includes historic family photos, usually at the beginning of each chapter. The cover art features dynamic black and white figures connected by lines. The figures seem to be in motion, which points to the liveliness of the history here retold. In her introduction, Tracy K. Smith writes that “Clifton’s purpose is to teach us to see that we are, in fact, moving together and that we are, in fact, part of a large whole.” This movement together, as one, is not only the effect of the cover art but of Generations as well as Clifton incorporates us all into her American family narrative.
[Published by New York Review Books Classics on November 9, 2021. 96 pages, $14.95 paperback]