The shapes we take
Joanna Manning
We are driving through the perpetual twilight of the deep forest. The snow that was falling at the outset of our drive down from Mount Rainier has settled into a gentle, windless drizzle, and the play of light through the clouds gives the sky an ochre cast rather than its usual Northwest gray, a warm glow that somehow shifts the mood from sullen to pensive. Those of us from these wet climes recognize this as a perfect rain.
My son is in the back seat performing some kind of past life regression therapy on his sister. There is only the sound of the rain, our tires on the pavement, and Dylan's voice, gently prodding.
"Imagine you have lived before in a different body," he says. "Try to picture what your life was like."
I play with this thought problem in my head. I spend a lot of time investigating the lives of the people who have come before me, trying to get a sense of how their lives might inform my own. I have lived a thousand lives through them: I am my mother's mother, and her mother before her, on back before her to the origin of these genes that define us. But this is genetic legacy, mapped out in neat lines of code we’ve learned to decipher over time. Dylan’s question is more mystical, an invitation to think on the life of a soul. What, he has me wondering, has been my spiritual ancestry?
Many faith traditions accept reincarnation as a fundamental truth, even though their practitioners have no conscious access to their previous incarnations. Of course, some people claim to know how their spirit has been embodied through time. General George S. Patton famously did. Patton believed it was his fate to be continuously reborn as a soldier, and he was unselfconscious about discussing his beliefs. In his poem "Through a Glass, Darkly," he describes the range of battles he participated in during his many lives, serving as foot soldier and general alike, “Dying to be born a fighter / But to die again, once more.”
His life as General Patton ended in the Army hospital in Germany that I served in decades ago, and as adjutant of that unit, I was tasked with putting on a ceremony each December to commemorate his death. At the time, Patton's granddaughter Helen Patton-Plusczyk was living in the country with her German husband and children, and she would attend each year's ceremony to read her grandfather's poetry and provide some remarks. It was a strange and almost surreal event in retrospect, this bridging of generations, this marriage of past and present, of German and American ideals. I still wonder how much the general had a hand in arranging certain ironies of the occasion.
I sometimes think about Patton’s certitude in his belief that he was predestined to live and die by the sword. His conviction intrigues me. Why are some people so attuned to their purpose—regardless of how they have arrived at their belief—while so many are left adrift? We are told from childhood that we each have our own specific purpose, something that we alone have been called to do. I tend to reject this idea as fantasy, a fiction successful people have written for the underclass to keep them striving, but then I will think of Patton’s sense of singular purpose and I am given pause. He believed he was called to fight through God’s will alone, that he could “see not in [his] blindness" the reason for his eternal fate, but he knew it just the same. The reason itself was unknowable and therefore irrelevant. We can only do what life expects of us, regardless of the drives of our ego and ambition.
What has life called me to do in the past? What has it asked of my forebears? What does it ask of me now? I wish I could have access to that knowledge, wish I could see in the smoked glass a reflection of the life I am meant to live. I have to believe I will be given a clear view in time. Perhaps it will take many lifetimes for the reflection to take shape. Perhaps it is enough that there is an image in the glass at all.
Please explore these questions with me. . .
patrilineage
“The Lord…visits the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”
At the turn of the twentieth century, on a dusty North Carolina farm far removed from her family’s Swiss homeland, fifteen-year-old Emma G’schwind found herself in a family way. Whether she arrived at this state from a moment of passion or from some kind of coercion is unknown. Either seems plausible. She was neither beautiful enough to attract much trouble nor so lacking in affection from her family to go looking for it elsewhere; nevertheless, she was an unwed pregnant teenager in the deeply religious South, and her condition was a problem.
A year after she gave birth to a boy she named Alvin, Emma’s father married her off to a man nearly 30 years her senior, a German immigrant named George Laubscher, who lived on a neighboring farm. George gave Emma’s young son his surname, sparing the boy the shame of his bastard roots, and the couple would go on to have seven other children together, all of whom would grow to be upright citizens and fine representatives of their family name. Even Emma’s illegitimate firstborn would become a highly regarded town servant and Chief of Police for many years.
By all accounts, it appeared that this union had made a respectable woman of young Emma, and the couple lived out their days in the sleepy town of Vass, good God-fearing Methodists until the end.
If Emma believed she had been absolved of her youthful indiscretion through her marriage to George, however, she was mistaken. Her son Alvin would still pay a price for his absent father’s sin, just as the lines in Exodus had forewarned.
Of the six children Alvin and his wife Margaret raised together, three would die in alcohol related incidents. One would run off when she became a teenage mother, prompting her mother to disown her. Another—my grandfather John—would settle into family life only to later abandon his wife and three boys. Of those three boys, two would eventually take their own lives.
I am the final generation to pay the debt of this forefather’s sin.
When the author of Exodus penned those lines, he knew nothing of genetics, of course, only that certain families seemed plagued by various demons, which could only be attributed to some moral failure of a long-dead ancestor. The lines were meant to serve as a warning against depravity, a caution to move through the world in a considered way. Who among them would be willing to condemn four generations with their actions? Perhaps this idea gave some people pause, but human nature tends to privilege the known present and the urgency of sins of the flesh. Everything else is mere fantasy.
I often wonder about the progenitor of this particular family line, the one who tipped the dominoes that have fallen one by one with each generation. And while the biblical warning is meaningless to me—I don't believe my family has been literally cursed for four generations—I do wonder what genetic legacy he has left to us. Alvin’s boys did not fare well, nor did their sons.
I know from DNA testing that Alvin's father was a Scotsman with roots in the ancient clan Campbell, but apart from that, I can never know anything more. I can only observe what his genes might have brought forth in each successive generation: the brown eyes and red hair. A blood clotting disorder. Tendencies toward addiction and mental illness. And while nature’s influence is obvious, nurture’s has been as well. In leaving, he provided an example of how easy it is to abandon one’s obligations.
I can’t help but wonder—which side holds the curse?
Are we cast in a mold, fully formed, or are we tossed into the fire and forged into the shapes we take?
matrilineage
“You should be known for the beauty. . .of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God.”
Young Della McGraw—the author’s grandmother
It is 1968. I am my mother’s mother, an Appalachian coal miner’s daughter, an 8th-grade education my only defense against the trials of the world. I feed three mouths with wages from an automotive assembly line job. It’s work that abuses my body and my spirit, but it’s work I’m lucky to have. At least it puts food on the table. No bellies were ever filled up with dreams.
Besides, hope is a luxury no one can seem to afford. Dr. King and Senator Kennedy have been shot. The war in Vietnam carries on. This violence has found its way into my own home, oozing in under the doorways like so much spilled blood. My husband stumbled in drunk and held a gun to my head as I napped on the couch before my shift, our older daughter screaming at him from the stairs.
Alice Blankenship with her husband, Jefferson McGraw
It is 1948. I am my grandmother’s mother, nursing the last of my ten children on my West Virginia farm. I have learned to read and write in my four years of schooling, so I can read about life outside of the hills, but I haven’t learned enough to find my way out of them, away from my abusive husband, who drinks away his wages from the coal mines. And once I have been paralyzed by a stroke, I have no hope of escaping anything at all.
Rachel Stacy on the farm in Rock Lick, Virginia
It is 1918. I am that mother’s mother still. I cannot read or write, but no one in Rock Lick can save for the preacher. He tells us everything we need to know to live in service to God.
It is 1878. I am Mother Sarah, married at 14 to a man ten years my senior. Neither of us is literate, but we don’t need books to know how to make 20 children. I will bury three of them in the span of five years, and six more that I carry after my fortieth year will be born still. Preacher says that children are a gift for the faithful. Why can’t he see it is loss that has made me faithless?
Della. Alice. Rachel. Sarah. What more would you like to hear? Our voices? They were only a whisper. Our thoughts? They had no more relevance than the wind.
How far back shall I go before you understand?
Our dreams could only rise up from the steam as we cooked, from pots of water we watched on purpose, just to prove that they would boil.
Homelands
“Go forth from your country,
And from your relatives,
And from your father’s house,
To the land which I will show you.”
In my dreams of late, I'm always in Cuba searching for my mother’s father. Everything is familiar to me, from the 1950s Packards to the old men, whose names I know, playing dominoes at makeshift tables on the sidewalks. There is music everywhere. I see the street musicians playing, but the music seems to emanate from somewhere inside of me. This dream world is abuzz. Everything shimmers with life.
Certainly my subconscious mind has simply plucked these images from things I've seen about Cuba, but I can't help but wonder if geography can be encoded into a person's genes, if one's sense of home isn't entirely of her own choosing.
I felt a distinct sense of homecoming while visiting the Tetons for the first time a few summers ago, felt the certainty of memories that were no longer present in my consciousness but were rooted in some place more primal. I knew a part of me belonged to that landscape. Maybe this is how it feels to encounter a soul mate, for those inclined to believe in such things, to immediately think: I know you as intimately as I know myself. I find myself longing for that landscape, homesick for a place that holds something fundamental to my sense of being, a sense of home or of homeland, whether or not those things still exist. Whether or not they ever existed outside of my imagination at all.
The Welsh have a term for this feeling—hiraeth—as do the Portuguese, whose yearning is expressed in the word saudade. Saudade can be felt in the Fado music that is typical of the region, and I can recall, many years ago now, falling for a singer at a Lisbon nightclub, briefly mistaking the longing in his Fado song for love. Silly thing, in retrospect. I was young—barely 22. Call it a mistranslation of the heart. But love and this longing—this hiraeth and saudade—are inextricably linked.
What is love but a longing to think of another person as home?
There's a person who once evoked this feeling of hiraeth in me, a man whose Southern drawl had settled over time into a pleasant lilt, a cadence that connected me to a place that was mine through my father's inheritance, one I am often desperate for, without good reason or explanation. The place itself was never home. It was the setting of my father's story, a place for personal mythologies. Yet here was this person who was part of the landscape of those stories. I was all at once homesick and at home in his presence.
And I am homesick in these dreams of Cuba. My grandfather never spoke to me about his boyhood spent there. I have no stories to root me in that place, cannot claim it for my own any more than I can claim my father's memories of North Carolina as my own. Nevertheless, it is my home in these dreams. These feelings of hiraeth and saudade need not be tied to a birthplace or a landscape that is familiar. The yearning stems, as it always does, from imagining a life that might have been.
~
The waking world is oddly less familiar than Cuba as I ease out of sleep, disoriented by my husband's sudden presence after days away. But the present scene becomes clearer over time. I wake to a home—a real home—built on the accretion of small things: a child's eager embrace. An unprompted story. Laughter that swells into tears. In the map of my life, home is here. Still, wrapped up in all of this is the strange nostalgia for the idea of home. How can a person feel nostalgia for the present moment, for the things that can be held close? It's curious. I hold this life with a care reserved for borrowed things. Just as it is in my dreams, I already know that none of it is for keeps.