Speaking of Lineage

Abstract

Speaking of Lineage Jackson Connor (bio) Don’t mention the rest of us punched silent rivets in his cell walls, us proteins that rebar his brickface, that buttress his architecture now warm, now capable, now built of the junkyard dead. —Jaswinder Bolina It’s hard to wake in the morning to poverty and despair and not want to blame our fathers. Look at mine, for instance, handsome enough, fit, smart as all hell, his own hands the size of God most of my life, and just happy to be here. Him, wrapped up in country music, and just fine with the way things are. If the sun don’t come up tomorrow, Mom made him [End Page 56] a t-shirt when I was eight, people I have had a good time, a Hank Williams Jr. song. Other phrases come to mind, lines that define his character, tell me how tough he is, how tough his mother was, how no matter how bad times got, she could always find a way to smile through things. All of this, too, is at the heart of my approach to the world, never necessarily concerning myself with home equity or a retirement plan, never fully understanding the difference between escrow and a bridge loan, never thinking beyond the day’s concerns as long as there was something to laugh about come evening. The t-shirt has long since become a household rag, then a shop rag, and then lining for the trash can, and I doubt my folks have thought of it for some time, but if my family had a crest, if my dad had a tombstone, if our collective unconscious had a tattoo, no doubt, they would all be etched thick with those Hank Jr. lyrics. He and his two sisters used to carry chunks of cast iron to bed with them, heated in the wood stove, actual irons Grandma Ruby used to smooth strangers’ laundry. A non-electric iron—something entirely foreign to me—in a house without electricity, even into the 1950s. He never complained about this, but speaks of it with that restfully tilted head and scrunched cheek one has during a nostalgic fit, not quite smiling, not quite longing, not quite in this moment. Nostalgia is the damnedest part about being human, always telling us who we are, often keeping us from what we want to be. Grandma Ruby pulled the irons from the woodstove, snugged them up in towels, tucked the towels to her kids’ chests, and layered them with blankets. This on the coldest, most tightly snowed-in days. If Dad and his sisters had had a television at moments like that, they could have tapped into Leave It to Beaver. They could have watched Father Knows Best. Instead, they had the smoky [End Page 57] glow of oil lamps, a fifty-yard trudge through the muddy yard to the outhouse, a crossword puzzle book, sometimes a jigsaw puzzle. Suburbia was supposed to be everywhere. The very word America meant a cul de sac and a station wagon to much of the country, but, truth be told, Dad never thought of himself as poor either. The poor kids at his school sometimes had shoes, sometimes had no shoes. They lived in lean-tos or an abandoned bus, one family in a cave—a mother, three kids, the products of broken promises, some kind of mental illness, and hard luck; the mother had no idea where to seek help or even what to ask for if she had. But Dad could always find something to smile about, despite this backdrop of actual poverty, of barely human, entirely un-American lives. He played baseball, of course, made the wrestling team, had this kind of attitude—I’ll do this homework if it don’t waste my time—all the way through high school, and some teachers respected that, while others wanted the world to be my way or the highway, and they, after all, held the gradebook and were not interested in blind justice nearly as much as dumb obedience and mute conformity. He’s a smart dude, no doubt about that, but he had no practical...