Legacy of Creators

Connection is the first thing we, as humans, ever experience. Before birth, we are literally tethered to another person. It is no wonder why we spend our whole lives seeking out relationships: human connection is at the core of who we are and what we need. For most of us, our families offer this first taste of connection and if you are lucky, they are the ones who teach you how to form and foster deep, meaningful, relationships. My dad left when I was young, around 5 years old, and I have only recently connected with him. We have minimal contact, but typically, no contact at all. His leaving required my white mother to raise three biracial daughters, who she had all by the age of 21, primarily alone in Bakersfield, California. And if you don’t know anything about Bakersfield, it is a rather conservative town in the Central Valley. In general, and even within my family, I was surrounded by more people who did not look like me than any that did.

From a young age, I knew that none of my relatives would ever be able to understand or relate to my experiences of navigating racial identity or even navigating the feelings of abandonment left in the wake of my father’s leaving. I, and my sisters, were clearly the black sheep in the family, and even though I was biologically related to these other people, I spent my entire life struggling to feel connected to and understood by them.

I used, and still use, writing as an outlet, as a place to share my innermost thoughts and experiences. Most times, a blank sheet of paper was the only thing willing to hear what I had to say. As a kid, I often wondered where this love for writing had come from. Was this something you could trace through my biological makeup? Was it something that was passed down from my father, from people I would never know? Or was it something that could be traced back through my mother’s lineage? Could this be the bridge that finally connected me to this family I had long felt isolated from?

It was through a handful of happenstance moments that I finally found the answers to where I come from; where I belong.

I was staying with my great aunt the summer before my freshmen year of high school and while sitting on the front steps of her house, she came outside and handed me a book. She told me that this was a novel Red Feather had written. I had first heard about my great, great, great aunt Red Feather when I was in elementary school. According to the stories passed down by my great aunt, Red Feather was a chief of the California Valley Miwok Indian tribe. I remember being 10 years old and checking out every single book the local library had on the Miwok tribe in an effort to better learn about and understand who my people were and where they came from. But reading those books felt very different from reading Red Feather’s own words. With every page I read, I tried to store her words somewhere I would never forget. I wanted to remember every detail of her encounters with the ‘white men’ and all she had learned about love and lose. But my excitement in reading her words had to do with more than uncovering another piece of my lineage. It was the realization that I had something in common with an ancestor I barely knew anything about that awoke this intense happiness in me.

This feeling struck again when I was in my mid-twenties.

I was 78 miles away when I got a phone call that my grandmother was being rushed to the hospital. My wife and I jumped in the car and headed to Vallejo. I stopped at a gas station, about 20 miles away from the hospital, when my mother called again. I could hear the panic in her voice, but all she said was that I needed to hurry and get there quick. She didn’t have to say anything else. I hung up the phone, knowing that when I got to the hospital my grandmother would be dead. I felt it in my bones. We left the gas station, driving as quickly as we could in silence. When I got out of the car to meet my mom, my suspicions were confirmed. The next few days after her passing were a blur. But, one thing I do remember is that while I was helping my mother and my aunts sift through my grandmother’s belongings, someone found stacks of poems my grandmother had written. They were all written by hand on loose sheets of papers, stuffed between and under other things. She wrote about the things that gave her life meaning: her family, her career. That was the day I learned that my grandmother wrote poetry. This woman who had been a staple in my life, a constant presence in my 25 years on Earth, had spent her days writing poetry, and it was something I never knew about her, and something she will never know about me is that I, too, write, or at least attempt to write, poetry. It was something we could have shared together, but never got the chance to. At her service, people were not given the opportunity to speak out or share the memories they had created with my grandmother, but I was invited to read one of the poems my grandmother had written. If I am being honest, I was not my grandmother’s favorite grandkid or the one closest to her. But in standing up there, in front of her family and friends, reading her words, I felt closer to her in that moment than ever before.

I had been searching my whole life for the thing that connects me to my family, and have only recently realized that the thing that connects me to my ancestors is the very thing that has come to define me, to be an essential part of who I am and how I make sense of the world. Writing is the cord that tethers me to my family. The lessons that they have taught me did not necessarily come from the words they wrote, but rather through the act of writing itself. They have taught me, and continue to teach me, that regardless of how extraordinary or how mundane their lives were, whether or not they were able to make a career out of writing, or despite how many or how few people remember their names from the works they authored, my writing matters. Every word I type is important. It may not be the thing that brings me fame and fortune, but it could be the thing that reminds the generations of women that come after me that they belong somewhere, that they matter. It can help them find their way forward, serving as some kind of northern star, always pointing them home.

My writing can be what tethers these wandering family members to me, to their ancestors. I am inspired every single day by those who came before me to continue to keep their legacy and this inter-generational tradition alive.

They inspire me to create. They inspire me to write.