Generations by Lucille Clifton

First published: 1976

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: 1822-1969

Locale: Louisiana, Virginia, and New York

Principal Personages:

• Lucille Clifton, an African American poet
• Caroline Donald Sale, her great-great-grandmother
• Sam Louis Sale, her great-great-grandfather
• Lucille (Lucy) Sayle, her great-grandmother
• Harvey Nichols, her great-grandfather
• Gene Sayle, her grandfather
• Georgia Hatcher Sayle, her grandmother
• Samuel Louis Sayles, her father
• Thelma Moore, her mother

Form and Content

Dedicated to her father, Samuel Louis Sayles, Generations: A Memoir is African American poet Lucille Clifton’s story of her family’s genealogy. Written in prose, in five sections each named after a member of the family (“Caroline and son,” “Lucy,” “Gene,” “Samuel,” and “Thelma”), Clifton’s memoir is a celebration of the strength of her family and of family ties, especially of her exemplary great-great-grandmother.

In her memoir, Clifton assumes the role of the griot, the African oral storyteller who passes on the record of the tribal history. She tells much of her family’s story in the words of the original storytellers, her father and her great-great-grandmother. When she first began to think about the family stories, she worried about accuracy and demanded verification of the facts until her husband, Fred Clifton, told her “not to worry. . . . In history, even the lies are true.” This observation is a significant one, for the family legends create their own truths by shaping the responses and beliefs of later generations of family members. Furthermore, history is always open to interpretation; its meanings depend upon the point of view of the historians. The stories of slavery, for example, will be different when told by descendants of slaves or by descendants of slave owners.

Generations starts with Clifton’s conversation with a white collateral descendant of her family, a woman who has collected information about the family history. In this section, Clifton contrasts the position of the African American and white families. There is tension in the conversation: The white woman is puzzled and wary; Clifton is reassuring and conciliatory. The names of Clifton’s branch of the family, the African American branch, are not listed in the white woman’s records: Her slave ancestors are buried in unmarked graves. It reads like a short story which ends in triumphal affirmation: While the white woman is the last of her line, Clifton, on the other hand, is married and has six children. This section sets the pattern of the memoir, a pattern that reiterates the movement from slavery to freedom. In each section, Clifton combines tales of the past with present-tense narration. In all but two of the sections—“Caroline and son,” section 6, ends with her brother whispering “We are orphans”; section 3 of “Samuel” ends with her father’s burial—the movement is from difficulty to affirmation.

Next Clifton describes her journey from Baltimore to Buffalo for her father’s funeral. Interspersed with memories of her father are his heroic stories of the family. The family matriarch, Caroline Donald (her names are slave names, because her real African name is not known) was brought as a slave to New Orleans and walked in a slave coffle from New Orleans to Virginia when she was eight years old. She married Sam Louis Sale, a slave from a nearby household who was forty-five years older than she was, and they had more than seven children. Caroline (known as Mammy Ca’line) became a midwife and was deeply respected by both whites and blacks. She took great pride in her African (Dahomey) heritage and repeated to her children “Get what you want, you from Dahomey women.”

One of Caroline’s children, Lucille (known as Lucy) had a child, Gene Sayle (the family added a y after emancipation), by Harvey Nichols, a white man who came from Connecticut after the Civil War. She shot him at a crossroads one night and waited there until she was found. Because of the whites’ great respect for Caroline, Lucy was not lynched, but she was tried for the murder and became the first black woman legally hanged in the state of Virginia. After Lucy’s death, Caroline took care of her child, Gene, and after Gene’s death, she also took care of his son, Samuel Louis Sayle (Lucille Clifton’s father).

Samuel Louis Sayle had little formal education, but he was an avid reader. After reading about plurals in a textbook, he thought “there will be more than one of me,” and he changed his name to Sayles. He married Edna Bell, who bore a daughter, Josephine. After Edna died at the age of twenty-one, Sayles married Thelma Moore, who became the mother of Clifton and of Sammy Sayles. Thelma also died young, at the age of forty-four.

Samuel Louis Sayles was a proud man. He was born in Bedford, Virginia, and moved to Depew, New York, when a train came through the South offering jobs to black men. He had to have a leg amputated. Afterward, he “would smile and point to the empty place. Yeah, they got my leg, but they didn’t get me, he would boast.” He once walked twelve miles from his home in Depew to Buffalo to buy a dining room set, and he became the first African American man in Depew to have one. He surprised the family by buying a house. “Every man has to do three things in life,” he said, “plant a tree, own a house and have a son.” He had little education and could only write his name. When Lucille went to college, however, he spent all day writing a short letter to her. She writes, “I cried and cried because it was the greatest letter I ever read or read about in my whole life.”

Thelma Moore was a plain woman. She spent most of her life caring for others: first her brothers and sisters, then her husband and her own children, and then her husband’s daughter by a neighbor woman. She remained devoted to her husband, even though he openly carried on affairs with other women. Clifton describes her as “a magic woman.” She did not go out much, but she used to sit in a rocking chair by the window. She suffered from epileptic seizures, and doctors were never able to determine the cause. The seizures were disturbing to her husband, and he worried that she was crazy. Lucille Clifton writes that facing this conflict in her family, “I wanted to make things right. I always thought I was supposed to. As if there was a right. As if I knew what right was.”

In Generations, Clifton tells the family legends in simple and affirmative language. She regards each family member with a deep and quiet love and respect. She does refer briefly to problems in the family, but always in the context of love: Her father “did some things, he did some things, but he loved his family. . . . He hurt us all a lot and we hurt him a lot, the way people who love each other do, you know.”

The memoir ends with an affirmation that “Things don’t fall apart. Things hold.” Clifton asserts that her six children continue the family tradition of “com[ing] out of it” better than their ancestors. “My Mama told me that slavery was a temporary thing, mostly we was free and she was right.” Clifton imagines her great-great-grandmother Caroline nodding and smiling at her descendants. She then lists her generations, concluding with her own six children, and the promise that “the line goes on.”

Context

Lucille Clifton was named the Poet Laureate of Maryland in 1979, and in 1980 she was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She also received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from both Goucher College and the University of Maryland in 1980.

Clifton’s memoir records her family’s history in simple language, recognizing difficulties and problems, but affirming the strength of family love and connections in spite of hard times. Reflecting Clifton’s affirmative vision, this book is important as a part of the ongoing reevaluation of the meaning of family and motherhood in women’s lives that has been set in motion by the feminist movement.

Elsewhere, Clifton has written poems about her parents and her own children. She writes of her mother who “fell/ tripping over a wire at the forty-fourth lap.” Clifton has also written children’s books that describe the lives of young African Americans. Like her memoir, the children’s books confront real problems with sympathy and love, as when Everett Anderson, who lives with his mother, says a prayer:

Thank you for the things we have,thank you for Mama and turkey and fun,thank you for Daddy wherever he is,thank you for me, Everett Anderson.

In addition to the children’s books Some of the Days of Everett Anderson (1970), The Black BC’s (1970), and Sonora Beautiful (1981), Clifton has written several books of poetry, including Good Times (1969), Good News About the Earth (1972), An Ordinary Woman (1974), Two-Headed Woman (1980), and Next: New Poems (1987).

Bibliography

Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984. Essays in this book discuss the work of Clifton and other African American women writers, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Each writer has written a short personal statement: Clifton’s is “A Simple Language,” which explains her intent in writing. The essays on Clifton are Audrey T. McCluskey’s “Tell the Good News: A View of the Works of Lucille Clifton” and Haki Madhubuti’s “Lucille Clifton: Warm Water, Greased Legs, and Dangerous Poetry.” McCluskey’s article includes references to Generations.

Lazer, Hank. “Blackness Blessed: The Writings of Lucille Clifton.” The Southern Review 25, no. 3 (July, 1989): 760-770. Lazer examines how Clifton’s use of language addresses political and aesthetic concerns, helping African Americans understand themselves.

Middlebrook, Diane Wood, and Marilyn Yalom, eds. Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985. This overview of the work of American women poets includes essays on Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich. The essay on Clifton is Andrea Benton Rushing’s “Lucille Clifton: A Changing Voice for Changing Times.”