Everybody Cries with
Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Eyes are opened, floods of
crying, knuckles of gratitude.
Be the recipient of family lore.
Cry if you might, determine that
the path to history is wiped across
centuries. Everybody Cries.
The album of black pages, the
erudition of Dr Gates, the heat
roiled by emotion is the evidence
of harrowing challenges, of
generations of breathing in
ancestral DNA.
I reject the family tree my
parents laid out as if it were
unique. The tiring conversation.
Dr Gates would not be interested
in the memoir of my mother's fantastical
ancestry. Her blood was sanctified
by the Bourbons!
My father's "pig-**** shanty Irish"
was the ongoing lyric of our
youth. Dr Gates would find
the lunatic fringe to which
I belonged unenlightened.
Today I will tear my history
from my mother's voice. I will
rejoice in my father's greatness.
(There is no such thing as the past,
Eliot wrote. Many have argued.)
I paste my past into notebooks.
I am in
the final quarter acre of my life
and I am neither better nor
worse for the pages of my
family tree.
I am unholy and entombed
in a metaphorical book
scribed
of an unconsecrated life.
Caroline Shank
9.11.2022