In my senior year of high school, for my pick-yer-topic college application essay, I wrote about Home - how I'd long felt like I didn't have a Home, a Hometown, a Homeplace, a Back Home. I hadn't moved all that often, relatively speaking - I wasn't a military kid or anything like that - but often enough that where I was born, and where I was a little kid, and where I grew up, and where I started to feel grown-up, were all different places. Where were my roots?
A woman asked me once where I was from, and I started to cry. That's the story I told in my essay, except then I added an ending to the story, saying I'd found a home in Harrisonburg. Which is true, but that doesn't make it an ending. Personal essays need endings, but stories don't always.
I don't know if our thoughts move in circles, or just the same straight line over and over again, but here I am again, back wondering about roots and homes and places. This time I'm not thinking about one place I can claim as my own, though. I'm looking back a little farther, to the deeper roots laid by people born five generations before me, and here's what I'm thinking, in case you were curious:
My grandfather, and his parents, and their parents, and theirs, and theirs, were born in the Philippines. We say that makes me 1/4 Filipino. We have a long and disturbing tradition of applying such mathematics to race. Is it equally as problematic to quantify our cultural heritage like that? Am I Filipino at all, or can I only fairly say that my grandfather was?
My grandmother, and her parents, and their parents, and theirs, were born in rural Georgia. Does that make me 1/4 Southern? Or does that make me 1/4 Irish, because my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was born in Ireland? Or English, because another great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was born in England? Or French, because etc.? More to the point, do I have roots in Georgia, or am I as much a stranger there as anywhere else - Ireland, say, or England, or France?
My grandfather, and his parents, and their parents, were born in the frozen stretches of Montana. Does that make me 1/4 Montanan? Or 1/4 Polish, because my great-great-great-great-grandfather spoke Polish, and because of that I carry a Polish last name? If I moved to Montana today - oh god, the winters, I can't even finish that thought.
My grandmother was born in Southern California. Her parents were born in Tennessee. But go back far enough and there I'm Irish, too. So I'm 1/4... Californian? Southern? Irish? Something?
If you're sitting there asking what's the point of all this, well, that's the question I'm asking, too. Maybe there's not much point to any of this. Or maybe there is a point, in that our history and our heritages are somehow inescapable.
Or maybe, as a third option, the truths behind these lists of people and places and dates - marriages, christenings, deaths, burials, the tiny scraps of lives that stay behind on paper after everyone who remembers a person has died - maybe the data doesn't matter a whit, but family history does. Not the facts, but the stories we tell about ourselves and our inheritances.
Maybe it matters less whether Richard Regan immigrated from Ireland in 1752, and more that the family says the Regans are Irish, a tiny bit of history passed down long after the name of that first immigrant was forgotten. Maybe it doesn't matter that the Domonoskes and the Huffmans moved to Montana from Canada and North Dakota, but matters a lot that the family takes pride in being descended from hardy frontier homesteaders.
But then again, maybe the facts do matter, if only because facts can reveal which stories are more legendary than others, and because knowing what's untrue can be illuminating. Oh, but maybe not. If I knew all the answers, I'd be sleeping in my bed at home right now, so since I'm typing on a netbook in north Atlanta, you can tell that I'm clueless.
I find it best to start a trip by doing two very important things. The first is to prepare really, really well. After you've done that, the second thing is to acknowledge that you're still utterly unprepared. So yep, I'm almost entirely unsure about how I feel about the role of family history and heritage in my own life. And here I am, trying to figure it out.
I'm traveling around the country tracking down the places my family is from, staring at the horizons, smelling the air, stepping in the dirt. And I'm interviewing the older family that's left, and asking for stories about the lost generations, and digging a little into genealogies and old photo albums. And along the way I'm starting to come up with - if not clear answers - at least more questions to ask.
And that's at least 1/4 of a start.
No comments:
Post a Comment