Blood Kin Research Articles

My Grandmother's Presence

H©k»VOWSVV®H®S»vföHSVV®l-KSVs» ViS)HgVS9V®H®S» *©H«Hg»H©>»«HgJMS^ «HSW®?»» «"©H®*"»«SSHÖ)^«SSH®^«"'©H©''»«N®WS^«"«©H©*' iS2)H®^ «*©?? She was old when I first remembered her and we all called her Mom, that is at least did her children, grandchildren and beyond. To others, she was Aunt Nora. She was both blood kin and communal kin. Kin and kindness are from the same root word and she lived that inter relatedness. She was fiercely independent and prided herself on her ability for self sufficiency. She lived in a little three roomed house right near her oldest daughters big house as long as I had remembered. She had been married twice, outliving both, yet she had never been far from where she spent most of her life. I sometimes become confused with my history line of her, acknowledging early parts of her life before I possibly could have—perhaps re-ordering much of her past through my own present thinking and hearing of her. As much as she denied a need, she did allow one of her grandchildren to often stay over night just to satisfy her own children's peace of mind. Over the years, I reckon that all of us took turns staying with Mom. I was about twelve years old, the winter and spring that I was elected to spend weekday evenings with her; having weekends to go home, since my aunt would be back from teaching in another county. Her little house had all the snugness that a woodland critter's warren would have. Her sleeping quarters doubled as the main sitting room, with the bed in one corner, a dresser along the next wall, the other two corners filled with the great old wardrobe and the pot bellied stove. Ah! that little old Burnside stove: Glowing belly, innards hot with fossiled blacknessfrom earths innards. Radiating warmth and orangeness to darkened corners. 28 Before retiring for the night we had to put in a load of fine coal, pack it down with the shovel and cover slightly with ashes if we expected heat and fire till morning. The big old wardrobe reached nearly to the ceiling, that wasn't so high because the ceilings were low, yet, that whole corner looms large in my remembrances because it was there that Mom concealed all of her treasures: Bundled memories faded inks bits ofquiltlets unstitched. Images ofthe past, giftsforfuture givings. Family; Bibles with recorded genealogies tracing important ancestors Warm woolen winter stockings. I remember her dresser top. She always lived with her few materialisms about her. Every gift from children and kin, no matter how small, was displayed with her kindness. There might have been an appearance of clutteredness, yet, she always knew where things of need could be found: Winters long evenings howled against her snugness as she stitched "flower gardens" and "double wedding rings" ten neat threadings to the inch. Quiltingframes consuming parlor space while herfavorite bobtailed cat, kittened in a box offlower garden prints "Hand me that pencil with the string tied around it, it's there with the needles and thread on the dresser" "Look on the Raymonds calendar and see what sign we're in" Things that mattered, fan shaped patterns and spring garden plannings. The room I slept in doubled as the dining area. But it was the old round table that caught your attention. Mom was a real cook: Remembered days past when hungry loggers atefrom her cooking. Thinking I, a child would also be so famished. 29 Breakfast: cereal, eggs, meat, and huge biscuits, fruit, sassafras tea when the month name had an r in it. "You haven't touched a thing on your plate" gentle coaxing. Her tiny kitchen was almost totally consumed by the huge old cook stove. The tea kettle sang, merrily, no escape from the hickory fire. Mom's presence allowed few secrets; she had a habit of whisper talking her thoughts, if you listened closely you knew what she was thinking. She read letters and her Bible in the same manner : "Now consider the lilies ofthe field. . . " She loved flowers and planted many. When she was a...

The Yoking of "Abstract Contradictions": Clytie's Meaning in Absalom, Absalom!

THE YOKING OF "ABSTRACT CONTRADICTIONS": CLYTIE'S MEANING IN ARSALOM, ARSALOM! Thadious M. Davis* A tense combination of kinship and race forms a pivotal theme in Absalom, Absaloml. This double-pronged theme provides a useful key to the central meaning because, on one level, the novel relies on race and kinship as the Southerner's traditional means of identifying himself and defining his place in society. In William Faulkner's novel, the problematical issue of "black" blood in a white family creates an unresolved tension in the general thematic design involving kinship and race. Faulkner questions the accepted cultural assumptions about race in regard to family. He explores the notion that "black" blood in the world of the traditional South automatically excludes the individual from conventional bonds of kinship, whether personal, familial, or societal, simply due to a denial of the basic humanness of "the Negro." Moreover, Faulkner develops in his novel a pattern of symbols which presents "Negro" not merely as a racial distinction but as a metaphorical presence, essentially an antithetical, shadowy force operating within a closed society to challenge the impersonal mechanisms contrived for identifying family members and for defining "the central I-Am" of the individual.1 In considering the race-kinship theme, one might think immediately of Thomas Sutpen's rejection of his mountaineer family after his encounter with the "monkey nigger," a servant in a tidewater mansion , or of Sutpen's subsequent rejection of his own black son, Charles Bon; or one might consider Sutpen's white son, Henry, who kills his brother Charles Bon not because Charles would incestuously marry his sister, Judith Sutpen, but because as a black, Charles would be guilty of miscegenation in marrying his white sister. However, there is another major thread in the theme that has gone virtually unnoticed. It involves the role of Clytie, Sutpen's slave daughter, who remains on the family's plantation in a paradoxical position as member and nonmember of the Sutpen family. 'Thadious M. Davis is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina. Her poetry has appeared in Black Scholar and Obsidian and her scholarship in the CLA Journal and CEA Critic. She is currently completing a book on Faulkner under a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. 210Thadious M. Davis Clytie is the character in Absalom, Absalom! who best sustains the meaning of "the Negro" as both blood kin and fellow human being. Generally dismissed by critics,2 Clytie is a central character in the Sutpen legend, and in the resolution of the narrative tensions created by three of the narrators—Rosa Coldfield, Quentin Compson, and Shreve McCannon. Clytie "in the very pigmentation of her flesh represents that debacle" [the Civil War] (p. 156), and "presiding aloof upon the new, she deliberately remained . . . the threatful portent of the old' (p. 157) . Her skin color manifests both her race and the social environment in which she exists. She encompasses at once the harmony and the antagonism possible in family and race relations in the South. Much more than any other black character in the novel, Clytie is symbolically and literally a fusion of the two worlds of traditional Southern life. Nonetheless, she is a direct contradiction of both: a Black Sutpen. Like the other mixed-bloods in Absalom, Absaloml, Clytie has no simple refuge in a private life as a black person. She is bereft of all that gave meaning to black life: the black family and the black church. Although deprived of the vital sustenance of communal identity, she is far from Elnora, the hymn-singing cook-housekeeper of Flags in the Dust and Sartoris who is also the daughter of a white master. Clytie is even unlike Dilsey of The Sound and the Fury, who remains the Compsons ' servant while symbolically serving on Easter Sunday as the extant possibility for human survival and love. Neither hymn-singing nor church-going, Clytie is not simply a servant member of the Sutpen household; she is a member of the family, marked with the Sutpen face. Legally chattel before the war, and an institution afterward, Clytie is a coffee-colored Sutpen who is defined primarily in terms...

The Family Romance Fantasies of Adopted Children

Despite the absence of psychoanalytic studies to support the position, family romance fantasies have been assumed to be similar in form and function in both the adopted child and the blood kin child. My studies, documented herein from the analyses of three adoptees, reveal that knowing one is adopted results in modifications of the fantasy and that certain types of adoptees seem incapable of effectively creating the paradigmatic family romance fantasy.

A Reinquiry into Marital Disorganization

The issue of marital disorganization is discussed in a context of relationships to external networks. Historically, there appears to be some connection between integration of the nuclear unit into the blood kin, and lower rates of dissolution. Currently, it is suggested that integration with certain kinds of external networks, other than the blood kin, may be inversely related to disorganization of the nuclear unit. To account for differing rates of dissolution, four independent variables are discussed both in their historical and current settings. These variables are then linked to the dependent variable, conflict resolution, in terms of change, institutionalization, or dissolution.