Lucille Clifton’s prose memoir generations was obviously not her sole autobiographical text. Throughout her body of work, she draws from her personal life, family history, and even generational history, writing about her great-grandmother Caroline Donald—called “Mammy Ca’line” in generations as that is what Clifton’s father Samuel always called his grandmother—in her earliest poems, collected in good times. But even if it wasn’t the only place she wrote about her family, generations was the most extended view of her family in her published corpus, and the only prose. This text offers sustained and significant clarity on the various figures who appear only briefly in poems, often in single episodes.
The book was released in 1976, the same year as Alex Haley’s more famous Roots. It was a time when a new generation of writers of African descent, including Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor, among others, were publishing dynamic and widely read books about Black life in America, many of them being adapted to film, like Walker’s The Color Purple and Morrison’s Beloved, or serialized into television miniseries, as Roots famously was twice, or Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, which later became a short-lived regular series, starring Oprah Winfrey who also had roles in The Color Purple and Beloved. Critic Hilary Holladay points out about Clifton’s generations, “In contrast to the bold, novelistic storytelling of the 688-page Roots, Clifton’s 54-page narrative of her paternal family lineage is meditative, elliptical, and elegiac” (Holladay, 163).
In her own review of Roots, Clifton does begin by commenting on its length, saying, “It is a big book. It costs more than some of the family can afford to spend for a book. It seems at first to have too many pages, too many words,” but eventually she concedes, “The accomplishment of finding and assigning true names is one beyond words… it is what the poet spends her/his life trying for. The naming of things; I spend my life. Alex Haley took only 12 years and did it truly. Not so long, not too big, not too expensive.” (Ms., February 1977). Of the inevitable comparisons with generations, which came out earlier in the same year, Clifton says, “The difference between the two names is simply the difference between two names—Haley and Sayles; both names illuminating the who. I hope that generations has helped in Alex Haley’s knowing, certainly Roots has helped in mine.”
In fact, generations creates particular pictures of Clifton’s great-great-grandmother Caroline, her great-grandmother Lucy, and her own parents that are sometimes later belied by poems about them which appear elsewhere in her body of work. As I mentioned, Caroline Donald does appear in Clifton’s earlier poems, as does great-grandmother and namesake, Lucy Sale. Additionally, the memoir offers clear biographical sketches of the various members of Clifton’s family, including her sisters and brother, and tells of their lives in Buffalo, NY and of Clifton’s time at Howard University. As Tracy K. Smith mentions, in her introduction to the reissue, its structure is very formal and specific and one might best have encountered it and understood it as an extended prose poem rather than what memoirs and autobiographies looked like at the time it was published. Of course, in the contemporary moment the field of “nonfiction” has experienced a sea change, and memoirs now appear in various forms: in fragments, as autofiction or autotheory, investigative memoirs, memoirs-in-essays, and even in the form that generations anticipated by more than twenty-five years, a more poetic and poem-like structure. Scholar Cheryl Wall wrote of generations, “Representing a past that is largely unwritten, caught in photographs, and remembered only in fragments of music demands of writers both a visionary spirit and the capacity for dramatic revisions of form” (Wall, 553).
The book is built in five parts; the first four of these each covers one generation of Clifton’s patrilineal family and is titled with that person’s name, beginning with her great-great-grandmother Caroline (“born free in Afrika in 1822/died free in America in 1910”), followed by sections treating her great-grandmother Lucy, her grandfather Gene, and her father Sam. The final chapter is called “Thelma” and depicts both the early life of Lucille Clifton’s mother and then the family’s life in Buffalo, NY and afterwards, up until Thelma’s death and, briefly, the birth of Lucille Clifton’s six children. While the book moves from history to the present moment, the present continues to appear in the past and the historical tales continue to recur throughout the book as well. Critic Hilary Holladay calls this motion “concentric circles,” but it is not really a spiraling or circular movement from one to the other—rather it seems to me that Clifton means the “past” is always part of the present and the present gives meaning to the events of the past, such as Caroline’s enslavement or the death of Lucy. The past, for Clifton, might even explain (though never justify) Sam’s abusive behavior toward his family that comes to light rather obliquely and late in the book.
The text begins in conversation: between Clifton and a woman she has contacted through a newspaper advertisement looking for information on the Sale/Sayle family, the original forms of Clifton’s maiden name Sayles. There is a moment of confusion because the woman on the phone, who is white, does not recognize the first names Clifton is reciting to her, until she comes to the name Caroline, whom the white woman does recognize: she knew her as “Mammy Ca’line.”
“Who remembers the names of slaves?” Clifton asks herself.
When she explains to the woman that her family were enslaved by the white Sale family, the woman reacts immediately with pity, “and there is silence.” She promises to send Clifton the written history of the family, “But I never hear her voice again” (12). This emotional reaction coupled with the (useful) provision of written archive from the white woman plus her ensuing silence speaks to the dual problematic condition of Black history: scantily recorded or ignored, except for an early offhand remark from Clifton about the woman, “I see she is the last of her line. Old and not married, left with a house and a name.” It is a remark of pity for the older woman as Clifton follows the comment by saying, “I look at my husband and our six children and I feel the Dahomey women gathering in my bones.”
