In Descent, a cross-genre hybrid of prose and poetry, memoir and biography, letters and state documents, Lauren Russell attempts to convert the historical records pertaining to her white Texan and mixed-race ancestors into a coherent narrative that might fill in the “holes” in the family tree she reconstructs. These include her great-great-grandfather’s diary, his record of enlistment in the Confederate Army, and newspaper clippings about the exhuming of his remains from a common grave and their reinterment in a cemetery for Confederate soldiers. No ancestral names are missing, but what eludes her investigation is the nature of the relationships between two of her black maternal ancestors and her white great-great-grandfather. Even when Russell tries to shore up her piecemeal narrative with photographs and official state documents (e.g., birth and death certificates, census, and funeral records), these historical records tend to unleash—not constrain—speculations, opening up more uncertainties. In Descent, then, cross-genre hybridity is less an index of aesthetic experimentation than the multiple registers of Russell’s ceaseless search for the “right” lexicons, rhetorical forms, and genres (literary, journalistic, sociological, etc.) that might give clarity and coherence to the source of her bewilderment, frustration, sympathy, and anger.
These feelings accentuate the narratives Russell weaves from the scant materials she inherits as part of the family chronicle alongside archival records in the Polk County Historical Museum and Historical and Genealogical Library and Dallas Historical Society. One of those narratives concerns the relationship between her white slave-owning great-great-grandfather, Confederate soldier Robert Wallace Hubert, and Peggy, his black human female. Aside from “his,” that possessive pronoun, Russell has no other words or concepts for her great-great-grandmother’s status. Was she Hubert’s mistress, concubine, or rape victim? Did she begin as a rape victim who later “became” (evolved into? resigned herself to?) a “mistress” (a word that Russell cautiously deploys) or was she, from the beginning, a willing consort? Russell’s inability to definitively answer these questions, and the subsequent ripple effects on her own sense of self as a single queer woman, is at the center of Descent. This is a text whose documented certainties are only tentative waystations, temporary nexuses in a network of crisscrossing, elliptical speculations:
Were you a tear in her life, the kind
that starts with a moth hole and rips
to the seam overnight? She was sixteen
and newly freed, your cook and once
your slave. Was she peeling potatoes, shelling
peas, bent over an open flame in some backhouse
kitchen when you came from behind
and prick!—your beard like brushfire
at her neck, how in battle exploding shells
set the wilderness and shrieking wounded alight. (10)
Though enjambment and the absence of a final question mark conjoin to drive the interrogative form of this stanza toward a foregone conclusion—heterosexual violence (“your beard like brushfire”) as an instantiation of, or adjunct to, homosocial violence (“exploding shells/ set the wilderness and shrieking wounded alight”)—Russell cannot dismiss the possibility of a consensual relationship even as she stacks the deck against Hubert. For instance, in reminding us of her great-grandmother’s age, “sixteen,” and status, “newly freed,” is Russell investing Peggy with agency? Or is she inviting us to bracket modern state laws regarding the age of consent (generally, 16–18) to underscore slave-era customs per the “availability” of “free” black female bodies to white men (generally any age after puberty)? Is she pointing out how the difference in age (however indefinite) between the black female and white male reinforces the gap between their respective social and cultural power, patriarchy, and white supremacy as the twin pillars of chattel slavery?
These are only some of the gaps in power Russell must imagine since, as we know from women like Sally Hemings and Harriet Jacobs, the experiences of enslaved African females escape many of the heteronormative categories (lover, mistress, concubine, wife, etc.) of the English language. This indeterminacy applies as well to Russell’s white male slaveowner ancestor who not only had children “with” Russell’s great grandparent Peggy but also apparently had children with her sisters, Lucille and Priscilla (44). Meanwhile the question of whether his “wife,” Jenny, was also a mother is even murkier in the historical records that Russell consults. Hence, for Russell, apostrophe is anything but a simple literary device:
Dear Robert, Dear Redbeard, Dear Specter of
the Great White Father, Dear Slaveholder, Dear
Confederate Captain Captured at Gettysburg,
Dear Dispenser of Land Favors Semen,
Procreator of Twenty Children by Three Sisters
Simultaneously, Dear Father of the Negro
League Pitcher… (9)
Given the ambiguity of Peggy’s and Lucille’s “legal” relationships to Hubert, Russell could very well have composed a similar series of apostrophes to these maternal ancestors. Nonetheless, their “place” in the family tree, however ambiguous, is assured precisely because they were mothers, voluntary or not. Russell’s status is less assured, not because her sexual orientation precludes motherhood but because a paternal parent, however unknown or hidden behind a state wall (sperm bank, adoption center, foster care services, etc.), is an apparent necessity within heteronormative family trees. Of course, in this hypothetical scenario, whether or not heteronormative reproduction would remain the privileged mode of family perpetuation would depend on Russell’s future choices. Unlike Peggy and Lucille, presumably, Russell can decide to forego being any kind of mother. What if she chose a same-sex civil union with or without children? How might she be written into, or written out of, a future family tree?
Assembling her research and writing her book during the festivities surrounding her brother’s Maui wedding, Russell does not explicitly consider these questions concerning the propagation of the family tree, though the wedding highlights Russell’s exclusion from the “culture” of marital heteronormativity. The fact that she gets along well with her brother, his soon-to-be wife, and her parents, that they all appear quite “accepting” of her sexual orientation, only sharpens the distinctions between her and her family members.[1] But this distinction may well depend on Russell accepting her brother’s wedding, even as she excludes him and the rest of the family from her life: “Here in / Maui where I’ve landed days before my brother’s wedding, / I have just shed my family to stare at the beach. I have / heard the mermaids singing, each to each.” (15) Here, Russell embraces the path she has chosen, in but not of a heteronormative world. Sister outsider (“I have lived in five regions and feel like an outsider every / where, even in Los Angeles where I was raised.”), she displaces Eliot’s Prufrock, not in order to join the mermaids (even if their singing “each to each” excludes, perhaps neutralizes, the heterosexual nuptials back at the house), but to embrace loneliness as an index of freedom. She is a single person, one able to move freely, if not unproblematically, among jobs in different states, embodying—as opposed to pursuing—happiness. At the same time Russell cannot help but interrogate the value of this largely unmitigated freedom:
Still I wonder at my solitary life—how I’ve blown myself
to the four winds without a map or compass just to
be a woman who owns her own person. Never have been
anyone’s girl. Is this what Peggy would have wished for?
Could she even have imagined such an unchained way of
being? (16)
The two unanswerable questions here—could Peggy have imagined a life of freedom like Russell’s, and if so, would she have wanted “such an unchained way of being”—are rendered moot by Russell’s wariness of projecting contemporary ideas of freedom into the past. Still, projection is the inevitable, if unintended, effect of speculation. Assuming Peggy is either a victim or willing consort of Hubert (“We want to believe that she is a heroine here, that she has some agency, that for once in her life she was given a choice” [30].) are variations of projection . So who is this “We” that wants to “believe” Peggy had agency? The first-person plural is ambiguous here; I don’t believe Russell is using the so-called “imperial” we in this passage. She may be referring to some critics who insist that slave women like Sally Hemings and Harriet Jacobs retained some degree of autonomy, a stance in opposition to those critics who insist that slave women could have only and completely been victims of those who owned them. Russell tends to side, perhaps needs to side, with the former position, since she herself would then be the latest incarnation of a long line of strong, independent women like Peggy’s sister: “Sister Pris in plush petals and sass. Hissing / a whisper, plenty’s a pistol. Purse plundered / pull of the piney woods” (24). Over-the-top alliteration achieves a kind of onomatopoeia here; those explosive p’s and insinuating s’s capture the dance between overt agency and trickster dissembling that Russell imagines Priscilla performing (in opposition to, or in alliance with, Peggy, her sister?).
Just as Russell imagines Priscilla’s daily life, so too she imagines both Peggy’s daily life (“She has a recipe for cornbread and one for curing hog cholera and another for keeping quiet and another for children born too close together. She has a cast iron skillet and a pale blue bandana and a steel thimble she slips over her finger when she works up a quilt, a shirt, a song.” [37]) and her great grandfather’s life (“faired off a thin shade / Bob’s bogged down in the gin way / fault pulling fodder /right smart ache o’clock / pin raceknife half-chain survey” [35]). Speculating in the absence of documentation,[2] Russell cannot help but imagine that rape is the origin story of the relationship between “Bob” and all the women in the household, including Peggy’s sister Priscilla. But even if sexual violence is at the core of this lineage which leads directly to Russell, the historical record also demonstrates that Robert Hubert’s instructions regarding his family’s final resting place included both Jenny, his wife, and Peggy, his “mistress”: “Bob Hubert placed his family / cemetery on the old survey straddling / the county line—where he planned to lie / forever with his black mistress at his feet / and his white wife by his side” (80). Hubbard’s decision is either a sign of respect for his black mistress or an act of postmortem control. On the one hand, however the relationship between Hubbard and Peggy started, by the end he regarded her as almost the equal of his wife (she will rest at his feet, not at his side). On the other hand, it’s possible that Hubert simply wanted to ensure that Jenny and Peggy would remain under his thumb even in the hereafter. In the end, Hubert’s motivation for where he wanted his wife’s and mistress’s remains to be buried eludes Russell.
Still, endowing Peggy and Priscilla with or restoring their undocumented agency allows Russell to likewise humanize Robert Wallace Hubert. Over the course of her research and writing, Russell’s formal address to her ancestor as Hubert becomes the informal Robert and, eventually, the familiar Bob: “Squinting over 225 pages of Bob’s crisp handwriting, I began to feel a strange intimacy with this great-great-grandfather, as though I were tugging on some line tossed across a hundred and twenty years, and he was holding onto the other end” (33). That last image of a kind of tug-of-war between a present-day black female and her white male ancestor conjures up another strand of the history that Russell weaves into her narrative under the category of intergenerational trauma. The fear that she is the inheritor of “ancestral trauma,” that she is perhaps more like her great-grandfather than her great-grandmother, haunts Russell throughout Descent. The point is not that Russell’s pride at being “nobody’s girl” is merely the flip side of Hubert’s ability to circumvent monogamy in order to be nobody’s “man.” That kind of accounting reduces the benefits and costs of patriarchy, slavery, and white supremacy to individual choices. The point is that, for Russell, she cannot know if her desire for “freedom” is her “choice” or a ripple effect of choices her white male and black female ancestors made. Or did not make. That it might be both, that her capacity for choosing cannot be adequately “explained” by either free will or ancestral trauma alone, offers Russell a path out of the weeds: every choice she makes is an effect of the contradiction between individual free will and ancestral determinism. This interplay allows Russell to embrace all her states of mind regarding her life choices no matter how inconsistent they may seem to an outsider. For example, she berates Hubert for expressing, via a poem he copies, the kind of loneliness she feels:
The last lines of a magazine
poem Hubert copied into his diary: “What is home with
none to meet,/ None to welcome, none to greet us./ Home
is sweet, and only sweet,/ Where there’s one who loves to
meet us!” I want to tell him to get a cat, as I have. (15)
§
It may be that the link between Hubert’s “freedom” and Russell’s, however differently marked by their respective cultures, is provided by two additional strands of the history, the stories of her racist black grandfather and mixed-race uncle. Russell recalls that “Grandpa Russell,” the son of Peggy’s daughter, Dinah, and James Columbus Russell, was a black man with blue eyes who hated his African heritage: “What’s this ‘back to Africa’? You want to swing from trees?” And though Russell does “not want to say my grandpa was a dark-skinned black man with eyes like sapphires,” she can only do by tracing his self-hatred to a lynching he witnessed when he was only five years old: “Jesse Washington hung from a tree, roasting over a bonfire for two hours, lowered up and down” (70). Here, self-hatred is tethered to the remains of a traumatic event: fear and shame. And shame, if not fear, tempts Russell from both sides of the family racial divide: shame that she is the descendant of a possible rapist who was white and a self-loathing black man.
Fortunately, Russell can draw inspiration from her mixed-race great uncle, Jesse “Mountain” Hubbard. Hubbard played in the Negro Baseball League during the Jim Crow era. One of Hubbard (an Anglicized “Hubert”) was a star athlete according to the newspaper headlines and clippings that Russell reproduces and strikes through and so, partially erases. Below are the first two clippings:
NO-RUN NO-HIT GAME
Hubbard PitchesPerfect Ball,
Toying With Logan Square
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. JULY 6
(Special). Bacharach Giants made it a clean sweep of the series by blanking Logan Square, 12 to 0. Hubbard did not allow a hit or run and not a visitor reached second, four reaching first on free passes. Ad Swidler was hit to all corners for twenty-three bases, including two home runs.
Hubbard in Form.
PATER/SON, N.J., Aug. 8—
Jess Hubbard, the “Texas hurling wizard,” was in fine fettle today and let the heavy- hitting Silk Sox down with no hits. “Ace” Clinton who recently tamed the fast-going Hilldale boys, was “easy meat” for the Brooklynites and they climbed on him for nine solid smashes combined with two errors, resulting in six runs. 6,000 fans saw the game. Score, 6 to 0.
The strikethroughs represent the virulent racism that Hubbard, like many players in the Negro League, would encounter if they attempted to make the jump to the white American and National Leagues. For many in the so-called Major Leagues, the achievements in the Negro Baseball League did not mitigate the general inferiority of Negroes as Hubbard notes: “Man, I beat those guys so bad it was pitiful! / The team that wanted me was the Tigers. / They didn’t sign me because Ty Cobb was there, / and he didn’t like colored no kind of way. / The team that wanted me bad was the Tigers. / If Cobb saw us coming, he sat out the game. / He didn’t like colored no kind of way. / He’d grip the ball tight and bug his eyes. / If Cobb saw us coming, he sat out the game.” (57) However, Hubbard refused to accept all the social codes of his world. When three white men seek his advice about getting some “colored girls,” Hubbard “loosed a terrific / right.” The men surround Hubbard and give him a vicious beating:
The pain that
opens the door is
brisk and gut eyed.
It staggers in its
brogans, dragging
its death, a tin pail
stocked from the
rubbish sack.
When it sprawls
upon you smelling
of the Big Thicket
scratching your
neck with its
homespun and
switches, you
barely wince. (63)
Here, self-respect is tethered to one of its effects: corporeal punishment. And though it survives the physical assault (“you/ barely wince”), Russell’s reaction to this collective history is to recognize the chasm between her life and experiences and those of all her ancestors, black and white:
I am not a cook or a Captain. I have never
been a slave or a slaveholder, a soldier or a
chattel. I was not born in Georgia and carried
to Texas. I was not raised in a slave cabin or
trained at a military academy. (66)
One can certainly understand why Russell might wish to free oneself from the biological family and its temporal and spatial tentacles, yet the pull of blood, or perhaps her insatiable curiosity, keeps her in orbit around the family. Russell calls upon the great-great grandson of one of Robert Hubert’s friends to help her search for Peggy’s grave. And it isn’t just her black ancestors that still pull her toward the family. She belatedly learns that at the behest of one of Hubert’s white descendants, his remains were transferred in 1999 from Hubert’s private plot and reinterred in a cemetery honoring Confederate soldiers (80). Hubert’s separation from his white wife and black mistress confirms, for Russell, the entangled sexism and racism that are also a part of her legacy. The effects on her are made apparent in the middle of the book. Her cherished freedom from personal attachments does not insulate Russell from being heard (over the phone) and viewed in public along separate racial tracks:
In L.A. and New York, I never identified as black. Even in Pittsburgh where there is no middle ground, I would say, “My dad is black.” I was partly distancing myself from an “undesirable” degree of blackness—the “internalized racism” I could recognize but not quite expunge—and I was partly resisting the urge to make a claim I could not deliver on. For me, the right to blackness always felt unearned. (Aren’t I a white girl on the phone?) In Madison, I have become black. Is this inextricably linked to my hatred of Madison? (50)
To be black is to be angry; this motif, internalized by both blacks and whites,[3] has long haunted the construction of an “authentic” black identity. Hence the various monikers people of African descent living in the United States have tried on and discarded (Negro, colored, Afro-American, black, African American, etc.). Long before the concept of race as a social construct was popularized across academic institutions and popular media outlets, black fiction writers took up the fiction of race as it played out in real lives. As though she were reliving the life of Irene Redfield in Nella Larsen’s notorious novella Passing, Russell finds herself trapped between the privilege and shame of being able to pass for nonblack in some publics—e.g., Los Angeles or New York—but not in other publics—Pittsburgh and Madison. Reading Descent, one senses that she is not unlike Helga Crane, the black protagonist of Larsen’s other infamous novella, Quicksand. Unable to “fit” within the separate racial public spheres of black and white Americans, Crane finds respite only in a peripatetic existence, moving from city to city in and outside the United States. For Russell, moving from place to place (she recently took a position at Michigan State University in Lansing, Michigan), is analogous to writing, but neither is as liberating as she may have first imagined:
All my fields are
figurative, and if I say they are furrowed, I am
only referring to a momentary fold between
my brows. Most of my feelings are caught in
my throat. Or deadweight in the bottom of a
well, bloating with the white man’s corpse.
How the heft of history is sinking me still—
and I don’t even fight it, don’t even kick. (66)
And, as it turns out, Kris Kristofferson was right: freedom is just another word for loneliness, except in Russell’s case, it is the loneliness of the human without a fixed racial category. As was said so often about late nineteenth-century Chinese railroad workers that it became a racist cliché, Russell is read as unreadable, and thus, inscrutable:
My lover left me because I was impossible to read. “I
think I would have fallen in love with you,” she said, “if I
could see my emotions reflected on your face.” But I am as
inscrutable as chalk. The lover who left me is white. She
studies epigenetics, which suggests that external factors can
affect gene expression. The question of ancestral trauma
looms large. I wanted to reach for those scars (cards)—but
did not. How many centuries on the auction block? (67)
In Descent, there are no answers to Russell’s questions about ancestry, about family or about her choices. For her, history is literally the pockmarked, perforated materialization of equivocation:
“Loneliness gives us space to create.” I can’t say that when
I heard this I tore the vine from my neck or severed any of
its too-tenacious limbs. But periodically, for years at a time,
I stopped wrestling it and we two would coexist—not like
lovers but like the brokenness that love becomes, which is a
troubled kind of peace. At the bottom of my loneliness I see
a rope swinging overhead, sometimes dipping into the well.
“It is a noose,” warns Peggy. “No, a ladder,” Bob says.” (93)
Notes:
[1] This would be true even if her brother and his wife do not reproduce or adopt children. The marriage itself is an initiation into heteronormativity. What, then, of gay and lesbian marriages? I side with those who see this mode of “progress” as a form of concession to the state apparatus. This partisan take is less a criticism of individual choices than an insistence on being open and clear about what is at stake when one cedes relative autonomy to the ideological superstructure.
[2] As Russell writes on the last page of the narrative, “I know my Peggy is no approximation of the real Peggy, but the Peggy I know can see me here with my broken heart, and holds me, for a moment, still—whether or not she believes we can transform the master’s house from within.” (95)
[3] The 1959 documentary, The Hate That Hate Produced, written by television journalists Mike Wallace and Louis Lomax, offered a telling, if distorted, reading of the Nation of Islam and black cultural nationalism.