Poet Lucille Clifton recently said that her early writings form part of a movement that “brought to American literature a long missing part of itself” (Rowell 67). Her 1976 memoir, Generations, traces her genealogy back to the African matriarch first brought to America and shows the obstacles Clifton personally must overcome to bring this story into American literature. Clifton says of the importance of incorporating her family's story into a larger tradition,

All of our stories become The Story. If mine is left out, something's missing. So I hope mine can be read as part of The Story, of what it means to be human in this place at this time. I am a black human being, and that is part of The Story.

(Rowell 58)

The obstacles Clifton overcomes in the process of gaining her voice as a poet and contributing to “The Story” stem largely from what Regina Blackburn calls “the double jeopardy of being both black and female in America” (148). Those obstacles are what Eva Lennox Birch calls the “hitherto male preserve” (127) of autobiography and the mourning stories which Karla F. C. Holloway says form a “cultural narrative” (32) in African American culture. My purpose is to show how Clifton works within and against those obstacles to confront the ways in which they would silence her and to find in them the potential to bring her story into American literature.

In confronting the challenge of male autobiography, Clifton prefaces each chapter of her memoir with a quote from Walt Whitman's “Song of Myself,” which embodies the self-expressive impulse of traditional male autobiography with its focus on the achievements and autonomous self-identity of the author. As for Clifton's choice to use quotes from Whitman to indicate the tradition of male autobiography, she could very well be responding to Albert Stone, who argues that “the whole oratorio [of American autobiography] is … composed of separate Songs of Myself” (26). Whitman becomes a site for responding not only to the tradition of male autobiography, but to the whole of American literature, since, as Ed Folsom argues,

At some point in the lives of most twentieth-century American poets … some encounter with Whitman takes place. … at some point, most American poets after Whitman have directly taken him on—to argue with him, agree with him, revise, question, reject or accept him.

(21-22)

In Generations, Clifton's response to Whitman's “Song of Myself” speaks with a double voice as she embraces the Whitmanian spirit of inclusion and celebration, but replaces the autonomous individuality informing so much of “Song of Myself” with a collective, generational sense of self based around an expanding African American family.

The narrative of Generations centers around the death and burial of Clifton's father, which situates Clifton's story within what Holloway calls an African American cultural narrative of mourning stories, a narrative which she says differs from mainstream American writing in that “the familiar literary theme of a character's quest for identity is revised in the African American narrative to a body's search for a safe harbor” (37). While mainstream American writing, especially autobiography, is concerned with the identity of the living self, African American literature often deals with the specters of the dead, beginning with slavery and extending to lynching and police brutality. These stories about the dead pose an obstacle to the traditional “quest for identity” at the center of any memoir because of their overpowering presence in the collective African American experience. But Clifton finds the potential in this obstacle by harnessing the power which comes from the collective memory of the deceased generations. As Holloway says, “the bodies we would leave behind will challenge our own being unless we incorporate their stories into ours and, in so doing, claim their right to a memorial” (38). Memory of the dead, instead of silencing the autobiographical impulse, becomes a way to memorialize the generations.

Where Whitman's “Song of Myself” epitomizes the male tradition of autobiography focused on the autonomous self, Clifton works within this to find the potential in Whitman for inclusion, specifically, a place for her family's story. Where African American mourning stories would drown out the voice which searches to tell its story, she shows how memory of the dead can form an integral part of one's story, bringing the missing body of the past into the story of the present and thereby connecting the voices of the generations. What Clifton ultimately develops is a generational impulse to storytelling rather than an individualistic one, an impulse which brings all the generations of her family into “The Story” of American literature.

WHITMAN'S “SONG OF MYSELF” AND MALE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Generations is divided into five chapters; each focuses on a different generation of Clifton's family: great-great grandmother Caroline Sale (the African matriarch), great grandmother Lucy (who killed the white father of her children), grandfather Gene (Lucy's orphaned child), father Samuel (whose recent death serves as the motivation of the narrative), and finally, Clifton herself. “Song of Myself,” alternately titled “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” and “Walt Whitman” before it settled on its final title (Whitman 28n2), is emblematic of the self-expressive impulse in male autobiography with its focus on the achievements and autonomous self-identity of the author. The self-proclaimed American Bard, Whitman has also come to be seen as the litmus test for the literature of American democracy. But despite Whitman's attempts for democratic inclusion, his poetry bears a history of exclusion. As Clifton says,

Walt Whitman saying ‘I hear America singing’ made it necessary for Langston Hughes to remind, ‘I too sing America,’ not so much because of what the writer might have understood but because of what Langston Hughes guessed about the reader.

(58)

While Clifton looks squarely at the way in which “Song of Myself” would exclude her story from American literature, both in what Whitman wrote and in how he has been read, she is able to find in it the potential for an expanding sense of inclusion.

In Clifton's response to Whitman, one of the main sites of struggle is the idea of the individual self of traditional male autobiography. Autobiography, Caren Kaplan argues, has historically focused on individuality and the universal, autonomous self (115-19) as autonomy and self-definition have been the key factors of autobiography since Benjamin Franklin's prototypical Autobiography. This image of the self so present in autobiography is predominantly male, scholars such as Margo Culley have argued, and creates what she calls the “hallowed ground” of a genre for which men still write eighty percent of the texts (6).¹ When women do tell their life stories, scholars like Estelle Jelinek have noted, “[t]he idealization or aggrandizement found in male autobiographies is not typical of the female mode” (15). Birch, elaborating on this theme, writes, “[Autobiographies] by men tend to be success stories charting professional and intellectual progress, in which family is diminished in importance” (129). Whitman's self from “Song of Myself” fits the notion of the “unified, coherent, autonomous, self-present subject,” which James Berlin describes as dominating the West's image of the individual:

From this perspective, the subject is a transcendent consciousness that functions unencumbered by the social and material conditions of experience, acting as a free and rational agent. … In other words, the individual is the author of all his or her behavior, moving in complete freedom in deciding the conditions of his or her experience.

(62)

The traditionally male autobiography imagines the self as Whitman does in “Song of Myself,” “Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am / Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary” (32).

For Whitman to create a unified vision of America within this notion of the self, that vision must consist of discrete individuals, which accounts for the lists of people in “Song of Myself.” While Whitman tries to undercut this concept of individualism and create a unified nation, the individualistic self informing “Song of Myself” restricts the way he can talk about unity, leaving him with the option of unifying disparate selves by subsuming them in an even larger self, hence, the Whitmanian “I” which is “large” and “contain[s] multitudes” (88). Even Whitman himself, in one of his many admittedly self-contradictory moves, asks in “Song of Myself,” “Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?” (55), recognizing here this aspect of his song and the idea of the self informing it. By making her emphasis the generations of her family and by placing this emphasis within the individualistic fore-foreground of “Song of Myself,” however, Clifton changes the singer in “Song of Myself” from a soloist to a choir.

Clifton directly responds to Whitman in the first chapter of her memoir, “Caroline and Son,” by prefacing the chapter with the opening lines of “Song of Myself”: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (Whitman 28; qtd. in Clifton 225). Clifton responds to Whitman in two ways in this section. First, Clifton celebrates herself in Generations as she sings the praises of her identity as a Dahomey woman and Caroline as the matriarch of the generations. She is proud of being associated with Dahomey women and celebrates that heritage, writing, “And [Caroline] used to tell us about how they had a whole army of nothing but women back there [in Dahomey] and how they was the best soldiers in the world” (232). Second, along with the Whitmanian celebration invoked by this passage, Clifton challenges the notion that another voice can presume to tell her story. When Whitman writes, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” he describes the self which contains the whole of American experience. “Every atom” refers to the multiple people and experiences which the Whitmanian “I” subsumes, the multiple voices being articulated in a single voice.

Clifton raises these issues of heritage and voice in the “Caroline and Son” chapter which begins with Clifton receiving a phone call from a white woman descended from the family who owned Clifton's great-great grandparents when they were slaves. Because slaves took the surnames of their owners, the white woman's name is the same as Clifton's maiden name. When Clifton tells this “thin-voiced” white lady, who has called her as part of her family research, that she is a descendent of Caroline, Lucy, and Samuel, the white woman tells her that she doesn't remember those names as part of her ancestry. Clifton says to her, “Who remembers the names of the slaves? Only the children of slaves” (227). The white woman, taken aback, responds with an awkward silence (227). As they talk about the family line, Clifton realizes that even though there is a connection between the two women, “our family names are thick in her family like an omen” (228), there are enormous differences which she cannot assume to know, suggesting that it is not as easy to assume cultural knowledge as it is to assume a surname. Clifton's relationship with the white woman extends and revises the Whitmanian relationship from “Song of Myself” where cultural distinctions are ignored and where one voice can presume to speak for multitudes.

After challenging the limits and seeking out the potential of Whitman's ability to assume that he knows her story in the “Caroline and Son” chapter, in the “Lucy” chapter Clifton shows the extremes of cultural difference. Lucy, Clifton's great grandmother, was hanged for killing the father of her child, a white “carpetbagger from Connecticut” (242). In the preface to the “Lucy” section, Clifton cites Whitman's line, “I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood, / I see that the elementary laws never apologize” (Whitman 48; qtd. in Clifton 235). These lines in “Song of Myself” conjure up the self which responds to the dictates of his heart, unconstrained by convention. Cheryl A. Wall says that Clifton's invocation of Whitman here “underscores the spirit of resistance” (562) in Lucy's self-defensive murder, which indeed it does, but Clifton also finds the potential for another meaning for these lines by using them as a preface to the section about the murderess Lucy. The laws for which Whitman refuses to apologize are laws that do not limit self-expression, while the laws to which Lucy refuses to apologize are based on racism, sexism, and exploitation. As an African American woman whose very life is jeopardized by the laws of the land, she responds to a different set of constraints, more material than metaphysical. The way Clifton tells Lucy's story reveals that while American law hanged her, from her perspective there was no crime committed and nothing to apologize for. After Lucy killed the white man. Clifton makes clear to mention that she “didn't run away, she waited right there by the body with the rifle in her hand” with nothing to apologize for (244). Lucy is following the “elemental laws,” above man-made laws, so she “never apologize[s].”

The third Whitman quote from Generations prefaces the chapter about Clifton's grandfather Gene, whose mother was hanged for the murder of his father when Gene was very young. Clifton quotes, “What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?” (Whitman 47; qtd, in Clifton 247), in order to extend and complicate Whitman's questions about the boundaries and limits of selfhood and to bring the nuances of a different experience into American literature. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman tries to define the individual as self-contained and self-realizing. Stressing the primacy of the self, he says, “And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is” (86). Whitman locates the undefinable something which makes up the essence of human existence in the self: “There is that in me I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me” (88) while Clifton, through the story of Gene, locates it in relationships with others, specifically within the generations of a family. Clifton tells how she and her siblings thought that their grandfather Gene was crazy for throwing bricks through Main Street store windows. She writes, “Daddy, we would laugh, your Daddy was a crazy man. We had us a crazy grandfather” (251). Clifton and her young siblings interpreted their grandfather's actions through the model of humanity which says that a person “is the author of all his or her behavior, moving in complete freedom in deciding the conditions of his or her experience” (Berlin 62). Clifton's father, though, tells his children that what makes a person is not something constructed individually, but that an individual is part of a generational line: “No he wasn't crazy. He was just somebody whose Mama and Daddy was dead” (251). While Whitman “find[s] no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones” (47), Clifton's father emphasizes what Alicia Ostriker calls Clifton's tendency to show “the awful complexity of our connection to others” (42).

In the “Samuel” chapter, Clifton's father recites to her the generations of their family, beginning with great-great grandmother Caroline, and tells her, “We fooled em, Lue, slavery was terrible but we fooled them old people. We come out of it better than they did” (260). Clifton's father never glosses over the horror of slavery. “‘Oh slavery, slavery,’ my Daddy would say. ‘It ain't something in a book, Lue. Even the good parts was awful’” (237). He argues, however, that “we come out of it better than they did” because of the understanding that individuals are nothing without their connection to the generations. Clifton says, “When the colored people came to Depew they came to be a family. Everybody began to be related in thin ways that last and last and last. The generations of white folks are just people but the generations of colored folks are families” (265). Clifton, in prefacing this chapter with the lines “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier” (Whitman 35; qtd. in Clifton 257), invokes Whitman's optimistic confidence while at the same time reworking the notion of the autonomous self freeing itself from all constraints. As she rewrites Whitman, Clifton says that which “goes onward and outward” is not the expanding consciousness of the self at death, but the generations of a growing and expanding family. While Whitman himself admits that “Folks are around me, but they are no household of mine” (76), Clifton is eager to chart out the generations of the household and see how the folks around her are a part of her family line.

The Whitman quote prefacing the final chapter of Generations continues the same theme as the previous chapter:

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was, it led toward life, and does not wait at the
          end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appeared.

(Whitman 34; qtd. in Clifton 263)

Clifton takes from Whitman the idea of connections between life and death, “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,” and extends it to include generational connections. She says, rewriting Yeats,

Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept. … Our lives are more than the days in them, our lives are our line and we go on.

(275, 276)

For Whitman, ultimate transcendence is attained by expanding the self to gigantic proportions. Clifton reworks this transcendental expansion in terms of the generations, not just the self. She writes, “Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations” (275).

In this final section, Clifton lists her ancestors as a way to take advantage of the potential for inclusion in the Whitmanian catalogue. In Whitman's lists, people come together in terms of occupation, or what Ed Cutler calls “the Whitmanian ensemble of laborers who comprise an integrated and abundant American democracy” (73). For example,

The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautions stretchers,
The deacons are ordain'd with cross'd hands at the altar,
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel.

(41, emphasis added)

Section 15 of “Song of Myself,” from which this list comes, describes over 40 people in terms of their occupations. For Whitman, people are related to one another in the way that they keep American democracy functioning. Clifton revises the Whitmanian list by showing how people are related to one another by their generational ties. Her list at the end of Generations reads:

The generations of Caroline Donald born in Afrika in 1823 and
Sam Louis Sale born in America in 1777 are
Lucille
who had a son named
Genie
who had a son named
Samuel
who married
Thelma Moore and the blood became Magic and their daughter
is
Thelma Lucille
who married Fred Clifton and the blood became whole
and their children are
Sidney
Fredrica
Gillian
Alexia          four daughters and
Channing
Graham          two sons,
and the line goes on.

(276, emphasis added)

Not only do the people in Clifton's lists have proper names instead of anonymous titles, but instead of mentioning profession, Clifton gives us their relations.

Clifton's list here is reminiscent of the genealogical lists in the Bible (“a begat b, b begat c, c begat d …”), Whitman's original source for the lists in “Song of Myself.”² By ending her text with this list, Clifton invokes both Whitman and his biblical source. The Bible is constructed around family, specifically, the House of Israel, but when Whitman employs the biblical list form he takes out the generational aspect and makes the “generations of white folks” that he lists “just people” (Clifton 265). Clifton, in using a biblical format for a genealogical list, recaptures what had been excluded, using Whitman's text as a passage back to something that has been lost in order to reclaim it. She also writes in the margin of the biblical genealogy: “and the blood became Magic,” a line more reminiscent of West African than Judeo-Christian religion. Ostriker calls this revision of biblical narrative a tendency in Clifton's writing to “feminize, Africanize, eroticize and make mystical the biblical stories she uses. … recovering and restoring forms of myth and worship which white tradition has all but erased” (43).

Beginning with Whitman's “Song of Myself” as a text emblematic of both American literature and male autobiography upon which to foreground the history of an African American family, Clifton continues to interrogate an individualistic understanding of the self all the way back to the Bible itself, the text she quotes on the title page of her memoir: “Lo, mine eye hath seen all this, mine ear hath heard and understood it. What ye know, the same do I know also; I am not inferior to you—Job 13:1-2” (223). When Job says, “What ye know, the same do I know also,” within the context of Whitman's “What I assume you shall also assume” on the following page, the continuity between traditions becomes obvious. Job is also invoked to claim the right and authority to tell a story, saying that “I am not inferior to you” and to claim the first-hand knowledge necessary for autobiography (“mine eye,” “mine ear”).

Writing in margins of canonized texts, both religious and secular, is common in African American writing. Houston A. Baker says,

The most forceful expressive cultural spokespersons of Afro-America have traditionally been those who have first mastered a master discourse … and then, autobiographically, written themselves … palimpsestically on the scroll of this mastery.

(139-40)

Writing an autobiography “palimpsestically” on the margins of texts like the Bible and “Song of Myself,” Baker argues, functions as a “personal negotiation of metalevels that foregrounds the nuanaces and resonances of a different story” (144). The “metalevel” that foregrounds Clifton's text is the autonomous notion of the individual and the “personal negotiation” she puts in the foreground are the generations of an African American family. Clifton's inscription of a separate, autobiographical text in the margins of these texts brings out the “nuances and resonances of a different story” and succeeds in fulfilling what Baker sees as the goal of African American women's writing: “The general goal is, finally, I believe, a family identity a Black, national script of empowerment” (143). Clifton's palimpsestic rewriting of Whitman in which relationships, not the individual, have primacy, is finally able to bring this family identity into American literature.

MOURNING STORIES IN AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURAL NARRATIVES

At one point in “Song of Myself,” Whitman writes, “The sickness of one of my folks … [is] not the Me myself” (32), disconnecting the essence of the self from community suffering. This isolation from death and suffering leads Whitman to challenge. “And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me” (87). For Clifton and other African American writers, however, death and mourning form what Holloway calls a “cultural narrative” which dominates individual self-expression. Clifton cannot isolate the self from death because, as Holloway says, “[t]he familiar literary theme of a character's quest for identity is revised in the African American narrative to a body's search for a safe harbor” (37). From slavery to police brutality, these narratives of death so dominate the African American experience as to overshadow attempts to tell the story of the individual self. The challenge Clifton faces in writing a memoir, which is in many ways a “quest for identity,” is that the cultural raw material she has to draw from is so saturated with stories of death and mourning as to make individual self-expression nearly impossible.

Rather than succumbing to the obstacle posed by mourning stories or merely asserting an even stronger self-identity in opposition, Clifton finds the potential for a generational mode of storytelling in the memory of the dead. Focusing the narrative of Generations around her father's recent death and burial, she combines stories about her own life and the lives of her ancestors alongside the story of her father's death. Weaving these stories throughout the first four chapters of her memoir so that passages about her father's death, viewing, and funeral are interspersed with memories of her ancestors, Clifton is able to find the potential for a collective, generational mode of storytelling amid the mourning stories of the dead. As Holloway says, “the bodies we would leave behind will challenge our own being unless we incorporate their stories into ours and, in so doing, claim their right to a memorial” (38).

As mourning stories are incorporated into Clifton's memoir, the lament for the dead becomes what Holloway calls a “performative text of mourning” (39). In a scene when she and her brother approach their parents' house the day before the funeral, Clifton records, “We are orphans, my brother whispered” (234). While both Clifton and her brother were grown people with children of their own at the time of their father's death, the familiarity of this scene belies individuality and makes every African American an orphan when a mourning story is told. As Clifton and her brother play roles in Holloway's “performative text of mourning,” they act out a narrative which reduces death and mourning to an anonymous performance. As these stories are constantly repeated and reenacted, they become examples of a type, not individual occurrences of their own.

Clifton writes of her grandfather Gene, “And my father would say ‘No, he didn't hardly get to be a man. He wasn't much past thirty years old when he died’” (251). As Holloway argues, when “maleness and death … find identity in each other” (39), the very definition of manhood becomes one's death, a bleak reminder that Clifton's dedication of Generations to her dead father says that in death he is “somewhere, being a man” (223). But Clifton's father's insistence that Gene “didn't hardly get to be a man” because of his early death presents a paradox: since he was an African American man, and since “maleness and death often find identity in each other,” Gene died. But because he died early, as Holloway argues happens all too often to young African American males, he did not get to be a man. This is the paradox of African American manhood: manhood can only be realized through early death, but it is never fully realized because of early death.

But Clifton refuses merely to play along with these performances of death and their paradoxical self-realization. In the scenes she presents of her father's viewing and burial, she rejects the part of the cultural narrative assigned to her which would require her to fixate on a dead black man's body. Clifton writes at her father's viewing,

My father looked like stone in a box. Like an old stone man caught in a box. He looks good, don't he, Lue? my sisters begged. Don't he look real good? … My sisters stood behind me. Don't he look good. Lue? They kept saying it.

(238)

Refusing to play her part in this melodrama's worn-out script, Clifton responds, “No, I finally answered. He's dead. I walked away” (238). Accompanying Clifton's refusal to play a role in the performance of mourning is her refusal to play along with the fear of her father's haunting. Clifton invokes the trope of haunting from the outset of the memoir: when she first hears of her father's death, she thinks, “You always said you would haunt us if you [died]” (229). She then contrasts the fear of a literal haunting with her own confidence that if the memories of the generations are preserved, the body will find its way home in the memories of the living.

Clifton's response to being asked to play a part in the performance of mourning is to respond with memory, to harness the power of the legacy of the dead rather than fixating on the present death of her father. She does this throughout the narrative, following up every performative scene of death (funeral, viewing, burial) with the memory of one of her ancestors. This scene at the viewing where the body is made a spectacle, for example, is framed by Clifton's memory of the stories her father told her about Lucy, her namesake, the “first Black woman legally hanged in the state of Virginia” (240). This resistance to performance is made clear in the relationship of Clifton with her sisters, who consistently fall into the familiar tropes of mourning stories, unable to find in them the potential for memory which will create a link between the generations, Clifton writes,

Lue, Jo cried up the steps to me. We're scared. He's gonna haunt us.
No he won't. I tried to comfort.
He sure will haunt me, Jo was crying. I'm bad and he'll haunt me for sure.

(241)

Clifton is able comfort her sisters because she knows how to avoid the performance through memory of the dead.

To reinforce this avoidance of the performance of mourning the next section of the memoir is about Lucy and Caroline as she remembers her father telling her stories about these women (242). Returning from her memory of the generations. Clifton's narrative comes back to the night before the funeral when she writes, “I lay and listened to the house. My Daddy and Mama were dead and their house was full of them” (243). Evoking the mourning story of haunting, Clifton gives us the picture of a house full of the mourned-for dead. But it is not the eerie rustle of ghosts for which Clifton listens, it is the stories of her generations that her father used to tell her: the section following this one recounts the birth of Lucy's son, Gene, and her killing of the white man who fathered him (244-45).

What haunts Clifton on the eve of the funeral, she makes clear, are the memories of her father, the repeated “my Daddy would say,” while her sisters focus on literal haunting. In the following chapter, “Gene,” she remembers the shame she felt when she returned home after failing two years of college:

Daddy, I argued with him, I don't need that stuff, I'm going to write poems. I can do what I want to do! I'm from Dahomey women!

You don't even know where that is, he frowned at me. You don't even know what it means.

And I ran to my room and cried all night and waited for the day. Because he was right.

(250)

She writes, “But I didn't hear my father and I listened all night. He won't haunt you, Lue, they had said. He was always crazy about you” (250). Clifton's fear is not of a literal haunting, but rather that her memory will not be strong enough to create a generational link back to the Dahomey women. As her father's body is lowered into the ground, she thinks “I wanted to tell him something, my insides screamed. I remember everything” (261). Clifton, well-aware that the safe harbor for a dead body is not the grave but the memory of one's generations, is eager to let her father's body rest with the assurance that she remembers the Dahomey women she comes from.

The African matriarch Caroline, who always said, “Get what you want, you from Dahomey women,” becomes the ultimate site of memory's potential for overcoming mourning stories. Focusing on this matriarch is a way of, as Julia Watson says, “uncovering and articulating an eradicated past as a means of gaining individual and transpersonal identity” (305). After the phone call from the white lady that begins the memoir, Clifton writes,

“They called her Ca'line,” Daddy would tell us. “What her African name was, I never heard her say. I asked her one time to tell me and she just shook her head. But it'll be forgot, I hollered at her, it'll be forgot. She just smiled at me and said ‘Don't you worry, mister, don't you worry.’”

(228)

After recording the phone call from her sister informing her of their father's death, Clifton writes, “Mammy Ca'line walked North from New Orleans to Virginia in 1830. She was eight years old” (229). These passages about Caroline following both phone calls appear out of nowhere with no transition or introduction. The memory of the matriarch returns in the way that Toni Morrison says memory functions: when a river is routed away from its original course and then later finds its way back to the original course, the river isn't flooding, it is remembering (90-92).³ While everyone around her would reroute stories of mourning into a bleak cultural narrative, Clifton is able to remember the African matriarch and use her stories to counter these stories of death.

Clifton's focus on memory, especially of the African matriarch's generations, is reinforced in the scene where her Aunt Lucille accompanies her to the funeral: “I took her hand and we stepped into the car. I too was straight and quiet. Mammy Ca'line's great-granddaughter and great-great-granddaughter. Dahomey women, (259). At the burial, Clifton records that aunt Lucille invokes the African matriarch: “Mammy Mammy she was whispering in her tears, Mammy it's 1969, and we're still here. I held her hand tightly. Lucille and Lucille” (261). Even though the generations of the African matriarch are sadly “still here” performing the text of mourning at the grave of an African American man, they are coming together as generations. The Dahomey women are still, sadly, so entangled in stories of death so as not to be able to tell their personal stories, but they are also still together as a multigenerational family.

Reinforcing that memory is the way to make the generations “still here” together and united despite being “still here” in a context of mourning stories, Clifton ends this chapter writing, “My father bumped against the earth. Like a rock” (261). Clifton's father's body finally finds safe harbor as it bumps up against the earth, not like a physical rock, but like a memory, as “Rock” was the nickname his father Gene gave him (253). The burial of the body also coincides with the final remembrance of the generations: one page before the funeral is Clifton's remembrance of her father's list of the generations, giving her the names she will later use to revise Whitman's list of American workers (260).

The chapter following the funeral scene is the final one of the memoir, “Thelma,” about Clifton herself, “Thelma Lucille” being her full name. In this chapter, Clifton tells her life story coherently, without interruption, and in her own voice, not the haunting “my Daddy used to say” of a not-yet-departed dead body in the previous four chapters. No longer haunted by her father, Clifton does not interrupt the flow of memory with scenes of the funeral, viewing, or burial. In a chapter twice as long as any other in the memoir, she tells about how her parents and relatives came to live in Depew (265); about her father buying a dining room set on credit, which the white business owners agreed to give to him because “Daddy told the man that his great-grandmother was a Dahomey woman and he could have anything he wanted” (266); about going to college (269); about her childhood in Buffalo (271); about her parents' relationship with one another (273-74); and other memories that comprise the events of a life that is no longer troubled by a dead body.

With her father's dead body no longer the central figure of her memoir, Clifton is able to focus on the memory of the matriarch and her generations. Clifton ends her memoir with a vision of the African matriarch, writing, “I type that and I swear I can see Ca'line standing in the green of Virginia, in the green of Afrika, and I swear she makes no sound but she nods her head and smiles” (276). This image of the matriarch, content and approving of Clifton's ability not only to remember, “I swear I can see,” but to record her memories for future generations, “I type that,” integrates the conflicts with which Clifton has struggled throughout her memoir. On the last page of the memoir, following the list of Caroline's generations, Clifton quotes Whitman's “Song of Myself” one last time, not in an effort to revise him or to prove that “I am not inferior to you,” but confident now of her own life story and its place in The Story of American literature: “Backwards I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, / I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait” (Whitman 32; qtd. in Clifton 277).

Notes

1. While the increase in memoirs and autobiographies written by women in the last ten years would alter Culley's 1992 figure for the low percentage of autobiographies by women, the statistic is still relevant for Clifton's 1976 memoir.

2. “The influence of the Bible on the poetry of Walt Whitman has long been noted. As early as 1866, [critics] pointed to correspondences between Whitman's work and biblical literature, especially that of the Old Testament. … [Gay Wilson] Allen … has often discussed the analogous stylistic techniques of the Scriptures and the poems of Walt Whitman” (Zitter 8).

3. Morrison was Clifton's editor in writing Generations (Rowell 56), and the similarities between the way the two writers deal with death and memory, in a text like Beloved for example, are strong.

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