Chatting with the Ancestors

How to think about the people you don't know.

In a moment, I’ll talk about today’s topic. But as a native New Orleanian, I’m obligated by birthright to mention that Mardi Gras Day is this Tuesday. This is a bittersweet Carnival season for the city because the pandemic is still out there and many people don’t feel comfortable taking the streets to celebrate. Yet, Mardi Gras always goes on. Even last year, when it didn’t exactly go on. 2021 Mardi Grad had no parades and no floats (a rare situation; see also WWII), so a group of citizens decided to the turn their houses into floats. People could drive by the decorated houses and have a recalibrated Mardi Gras experience in the safety of their vehicles. That was the inaugural year of the Krewe of House Floats and because all Krewes have royalty a local hero and national icon, Big Freedia, was appointed Grand Marshal. I’m this year’s Grand Marshal, which may be a bit of a step down. But what I lack in performing skills and amazing hair, I make up for with…well, this.

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When I was a kid, my parents would bring me to see Dad’s family in the country. Rolling hills. Lush woods. It was a whole thing. We traveled a winding two-lane road with ravines on either side. If you looked out the car window, you could see down 20 or 30 feet. You might imagine that anything was behind the foliage down in those unseen spaces. When we got to the family compound, we’d turn off that road and drive up this long gravel driveway. I say family compound, but that isn’t accurate. The property wasn’t fenced off, so you could see the neighbors little red house closer to the road. Like a guard post. Our family area was only a ranch-style house and a trailer home. One of my uncles stayed in the trailer. I can’t remember which uncle. You’ll forgive me. I was young and had seven such paternal uncles.

We only went out to the country, let me be more specific—Amite, LA—once or twice a year. In the golden age of these travels, I lacked what all small children lack: context, perspective, a sense of history. I was an indoor kid and although we went for family reunions and impromptu cookouts, I preferred what many boys of the early 80s preferred: cable TV, Transformer toys, and comic books.

But the Amite house contained none of these things. Just a series of sparsely appointed bedrooms and bathrooms. No paintings. No heirlooms. No clutter. The kitchen was open and light-filled, but when my ancestor women cooked either they shooed me off (“Go on and play”) or I shooed myself off.

I’d spend the day playing with cousins until I was tired and hungry. As the sun began to fall, everyone would gather at the top of the driveway. My grandmother and great aunts sitting and chatting on foldup chairs in the early evening shadows. I’d chew on my home-fried chicken leg—the products of someone’s daylong labor—and stand awkwardly to the side, my belly poking over my yellow shorts. I was adorable and sensitive. A live-action version of Theodore from the Chipmunks.  

With the benefit of time, that scene is tragic to me. Why? Because I was a doofus. What were their names? What was this place really? How did we all get there? Who lived in the house? Where did everyone come from?

Later, I would learn many things. This wasn’t the original house, for instance. It wasn’t even the second house. This house was less than a decade old, but the earlier version was burned down by family kids playing with matches. And long before that, the family had a slaughterhouse and home at some other location. My father’s father’s job was at a lumber mill. He was killed when a piece of wood impaled him. There was a payout. Is that how they bought the land and house? Who were the kids that burned the house? How did they feel about it?

My grandmother, called Miss Luella by my mother, always sat one of those foldup chairs in that driveway chewing tobacco and spitting into a can. She had short, frizzy hair and a round race that reminds me even now of a sunflower sketched in black and white. Were the women around her Mama Della, my 300-pound great grandmother who also had owned her own roofing company way back in the 1940s. Was the other lady Aunt Mercy, mild and sweet as southern tea? Did she fry the chicken? I know these women now not so much from memory, but from story. From the accumulated residue of half heard tales my parents and others relayed over the decades.

I called myself a doofus, but that wasn’t fair. I’m troubled by the same problem of the past most of us live with. By the time we’re wise enough to start asking questions, the older generations are long gone, just visions across the back of our eyes. When I look down into the ravine of memory, that darkness tells me very little.

But…

Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, James Weldon Johnson, Anne Moody, Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright. These were some of the diasporic writers I was exposed to in my youth. Like my family elders, they seemed a little strange, distant, covered in dust. But their art contained answers for questions I hadn’t figured out how to ask yet. Mundane things like why does my family love yams so much? To the profound, what double-bladed knife sliced through the history of my people to create my present?

In Maya Angelou’s luminescent I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I was transported to Stamps, Arkansas where a young Maya struggled to make sense of her family, the racism they endured, the violations of her body. James Weldon Johnson gave me “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a poem that pulled my chin up, straightened my back as I sung in harmony with my fifth-grade classmates. Toni Morrison, in her slate of preeminent novels, showed me it was possible to shrug off the effect of mainstream culture. To stop seeing myself through the eyes of others, but through the eyes of my own community. It was Baldwin of all people who explained we love yams because they’re delicious and full of nutrients and our ancestors relied on their easy availability.

Humans are social animals. There are few things more damaging to us than feeling isolated, cut off. Today, as a writer, I don’t always have all the details about my family’s history, but I know us. I know us in New York. I know us in Stamps. I know us in Amsterdam. I know us in Lagos. I know us in Ukraine. We don’t really know what time is.  We don’t really know what space is. But I am able to chat with my ancestors. Their lifeforce flows through me.

To write is to take a place by the fire on the night they chose freedom. Somewhere deep in the black woods they found out what it meant to hope for something more than survival. They have shared their stories with me. That’s how I’m able to write anything at all. When I look into the dark wings of time, or down into the shadowy leaves, I’m unbowed and unafraid. I see my people ready to lead me home.

Whoever you are and whoever your people are, it may feel like your personal histories are lost to the mists of time. No. Stories are energy, and energy is neither created nor destroyed. You know more about your past than you think because your ancestors are always nearby. I get annoyed with traditional Western ghost stories that assume our ancestors are goblins that want to chew our faces off. Why would this be the case? Why would all the people who blazed our path want to see us suffer? I don’t believe it. I believe my ancestors just want to sit and chat in silence.