Hi hi,
The Guardian U.S. has published my argument for what I’ve called acknowledgment genealogy, the importance of reckoning with our individual families’ participation in slavery. “Amid a rise of laws forbidding discussions of racist histories, sharing our ancestors’ shameful wrongdoings is more urgent than ever” is the subhead. Acknowledgement is a baby step toward the repair we need.
The illustration above was created for the piece by the artist Jon Key. I’m grateful to the Guardian for pairing my words with Key’s tremendous art—and to editor Jessica Reed for giving me space to expand on an argument I first made in this newsletter last year. I’m committed to this acknowledgement, as a first and continuing step toward reckoning and reparation(s). (My book, Ancestor Trouble, is deeply connected too.)
There’s been very little rain in New York City this summer—a drought is afflicting much of the Northeast—and over the months I’ve watched the woodlands across the way droop and then begin to brown in spots. A couple of recent storms, including a deluge on Sunday night, have brought some small relief, for the trees and for all living things, myself included. But an atmosphere of thirst remains.
Or is it me? I wonder if the drought seems more poignant and tinged with metaphor because of my mom’s recent stroke. It’s her third, at minimum, maybe her fifth or sixth. She tries to avoid doctors. This time she had a blood clot in a major cerebral artery and would have died if a surgeon hadn’t removed the clot and inserted a stent. Her period in the hospital and then in rehab was difficult, and while she was away one of her dogs was attacked by a bear and had to be put down the very day my mom returned home. Is it monstrous to share intimate details like this, like the ones I shared in my book? I am a writer and thus arguably my monstrousness calibrator is suspect. Still, last November a good friend of mine read the galley of my book over the course of a night, and said, “I knew you loved your mom, but I didn’t understand exactly how much you loved her until now.” And if that comes through, mission accomplished. I share these details with adoration for my magnificent, intractable, infuriating mother, giver of love and complication and language to me, and one of the best storytellers I have ever known.
She’s had an increasingly hard time emailing for a couple years now, the strokes having affected her typing ability and spelling. On Sunday she sent me what she said would be her last email. It wasn’t unexpected, but oof. I’ve written before about our shared love for books, how even once she committed her life to Jesus and started her own church and denounced secular things at large, she could not bring herself to forbid me the depth and solace of literature. In my teen years, she gave me novels that she herself had loved. While I knew this day of no more emails would come, and probably soon, I’m sad. The grief that descended surprised me, though I suspect it would not surprise her. She knows what it feels like to lose a mother, in little ways at slow intervals, and then utterly. And I, despite our tough times, do not.
I see that in the way of children, despite all of our disagreements, all the boundaries I’ve set and all of the work I’ve done with myself to accept the way things are, I’ve continued to cling to the hope that somehow through words we would sync up again, she would come to see the world in a way more aligned with my own vision of truth and compassion and fairness. I caught glimmers of this fantasy in myself during the Trump era, shimmering behind my fury at her for supporting him and his toxic vision. This longing will never be satisfied, will forever be thwarted, but for now I am giving myself space to grieve the impossibility, again.
Some links:
“Is it bourgeois to like ‘good food?’”: “These contradictions have always been fascinating to me, a person who grew up in an immigrant working-class family, and who now operates in a middle-class world.” — PoppyNoor
Latria Graham on the posthumous essays of Randall Kenan (author of A Visitation of Spirits & Let the Dead Bury Their Dead).
I’m enjoying Ava Chin’s Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming, out next April. She has an online talk coming up on October 13. And I recommend Hafizah Augustus Geter’s The Black Period, which is out next week.
I loved Alice Elliott Dark’s new novel Fellowship Point. I’m luxuriating in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend — reading her work always feels to me like spending time with a brilliant, incisive old friend. Next up are Marcy Dermansky’s Hurricane Girl, and Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Take My Hand, which a friend stayed up late into the night to finish recently.
“I began leaving voice-mail messages for my mother about a month after she died.” Maggie Smith recommends talking to the dead.
A book for anyone who’s queer and grew up in an evangelical family and suffers from aftershocks of that dissonance and the pain of their bio family’s non-acceptance: Jeanna Kadlec’s debut memoir Heretic, out next month.
Baynard Woods on his name as a Confederate monument. Also, his interview with Code Switch, which is in my queue.
For Just a Little While (more on my mom, at my blog).
Upcoming events:
October 15: Southern Festival of Books, details to come (in person). Nashville.
October 25: Books Are Magic, launch conversation with Jeanna Kadlec about her debut memoir, Heretic (in person and virtual; mask and vax required). Brooklyn, 7 PM EDT.
October 28: Six Bridges Book Festival, conversation with Stephanie Maxwell Newton (virtual). Little Rock, 8 PM CDT.
November 19-20: Miami Book Fair, precise date and details to come (in person). Miami.
All good wishes until next time,
Maud
I enjoyed the piece by Maggie Jones, I have kept my mother’s messages on my phone but didn’t know about the Japanese installation. I read your blog as well Maud. Hope you are going okay with those tough and tender feelings. My mother was like that in some respects - it is interesting that someone has to feel!