Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Once, my daughter and I walked into a used bookstore in Chattanooga. The owner took interest in her and asked questions about where she lived. I listened from several aisles over. Anastasia reported she grew up in Knoxville and that her dad lived in Vermont. “So you didn’t grow up with your father?” the woman asked. She turned to her adult son, also working behind the cash register and said, “So what does that tell you? That’s most of them.” It was a hurtful comment. I walked over to my daughter, took the books out of her hand, put my arm around her and walked out.

Part of my journey is overcoming the judgment and shame of being the child of two parents who never married. In the 1980s, conservatives demonized LGBTQ+ communities, divorcees, pro-choice women, and Black women and their children. The divisive rhetoric around traditional family values made a segment of Black and Brown households the scapegoat for ill-conceived social welfare policies. The conversations flattened their humanity and stories.

What the words of the conservatives failed to acknowledge is that all children are the responsibility, too, of caring aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, family, friends, and neighbors. Community sustains and inculcates values that nourish children. When my father could not attend a baseball game, my grandfather sat in the bleachers. My next-door neighbor encouraged learning and financially rewarded my good grades. My teacher Mr. Amos stayed after school to tutor me in advanced mathematics.

But I was not impervious to the alienating speech of politicians. The charge that Black families lacked morals, the rattling off of crime statistics, and the incessant talk about “fatherless boys” reached me in unhealthy ways. I carried shame for many years. The truth is, I was loved and supported by many.

The speaker in today’s poem professes an emotional and physical connection to parents who chose to go separate ways. Understanding the power of sacred love, the speaker in the poem invites a beloved to embark on a shared life together.

Genetics
by Sinead Morrissey

My father’s in my fingers, but my mother’s in my palms.
I lift them up and look at them with pleasure –
I know my parents made me by my hands.

They may have been repelled to separate lands,
to separate hemispheres, may sleep with other lovers,
but in me they touch where fingers link to palms.

With nothing left of their togetherness but friends 
who quarry for their image by a river,
at least I know their marriage by my hands.

I shape a chapel where a steeple stands
And when I turn it over,
My father’s by my fingers, my mother’s by my palms

demure before a priest reciting psalms.
My body is their marriage register.
I re-enact their wedding with my hands.

So take me with you, take up the skin’s demands
for mirroring in bodies of the future.
I’ll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms. 
We know our parents make us by our hands.

“Genetics” by Sinead Morrissey from THE STATE OF THE PRISONS © 2005 Sinead Morrissey. Used by permission of Carcanet Press.