This piece originally ran in the Are.na Annual vol. 6, themed “document.”
[Two people, one of them a child, sit at a table with only their hands visible. On the table newspaper is laid out and on top of that is a fish and a knife.]
I want you to know that as a child, my hair was a mirror image of my aunt’s: a deep brown-black with flecks of red revealed only in the sunlight. I want you to know that whenever I tell my sister that I’m not sleeping, just resting my eyes, she remarks that I sound just like my mom. I am named after a grandmother I never got to meet. And I think you should know that each time I make a perfect loaf of banana bread I thank my great-grandfather, the baker. None of his recipes are in my possession, yet I feel that some aptitude for baking must exist within me by virtue of my lineage.
I want you to know these things so you understand me when I say that any story I tell about myself is also the story of many others. Let the brief, and incomplete, catalog of inheritances that I’ve offered be a record of history, of culture, of memory. My life is my own, of course, but it would be arrogant to ignore what has been gifted to me by people, place, and time.
Raven Jackson’s film All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023) explores the life of one woman, Mack, over several decades. Despite being the sun around which All Dirt Roads revolves, we do not know Mack’s name or hear her voice until approximately 10 minutes into the film. Instead, our arrival into her world is like that of an infant. First, there is a darkness filled with noise. Then, the light reveals a pair of hands, and eventually, finally, the sound of a father’s voice.
Before we know Mack, we know her people and the place she comes from. Or maybe it’s that when we begin to know Mack because we know these things. Her story is also the story of many others.
**
In re-membering—that is, re-assembling—Mack’s life, All Dirt Roads is not constrained by the limits of linear time. The rhythm of the film and its remembering is like water: fluid and intractable. The vignettes of Mack’s life drift into one another and wash over you, sometimes gently, other times with unsuspecting force.
In one memory, Mack skins a fish under the guidance of her mother Evelyn. “You cut here first,” Evelyn directs, “...just like I taught you.” Intimate moments of instruction like these comprise much of Mack’s life. Her friend teaches her how to kiss, her father shows her how to fish, and her mom demonstrates how to perfectly apply lipstick with an awestruck Mack as audience. The moments that ultimately add up to a life are those instances where someone loved us enough to teach and we loved them enough to remember.
[A woman in a cream blouse and short cropped hair holds a lipstick and purses her lips in the mirror, inspecting its application.]
We think of the historical record as being made up of images or written words. Western scientific ideals have steeped us in a culture of capture that demands everything be documented as proof of its existence. We scour archives for evidence yet seem to forget that “the archive” was built upon a foundation of violence and disproportionate power. My people, Black people, could not always rely on the pen or camera to log our history. All we had was ourselves, and so our bodies became the document. Memory-keeping is an act that we embody, an act that extends far beyond page or picture.
When an adult Mack sits in her childhood kitchen and watches Lily, her daughter-but-not-quite, skin a fish, we know what she is thinking, what memory is running through her mind. No words are necessary. Mack clasps her sister’s hand in gratitude, in grief, in love, and in remembrance. The record continues with Lily, who is loved enough to be taught and hopefully will love enough to remember.
**
An image floats to my mind’s surface of my mother’s hands, fingers long and lean, scrubbing clothes in soapy water. I am eight or nine, and I’m supposed to start taking responsibility for my own laundry. My mom has always been a fan of taking things step by step and so this first lesson of hers was about handwashing delicates.
I remember feeling irritated, taunted by the washer and dryer that were standing right there. Why did I have to handwash anything at all? My mother answered my question with a question in the sweet Caribbean lilt that only appears when she’s talking to family, turning her words to song. “What you gon do when the water stop run”? At the time, it was hard for me to picture this seemingly imminent world where water could stop running unexpectedly but I knew enough, and had heard enough, to call this world Back Home.
In that same Back Home, my great-grandma Mother Dear used to do laundry for the whole house by hand. Tuesdays were for washing and Wednesdays for ironing. She would sit outside with a basin in front of her and clean undershirts, and frocks, and shorts; long fingers swimming in sudsy water. Today there are certain things that I wash exclusively by hand, the way my mother taught me, the way her grandmother used to do it. Yet another entry in my catalog of inheritances.
Laundry may seem like a trivial way to talk about history and heritage but if there’s one thing we know by now it is that the small moments aren’t negligible, are actually what add up to a life lived and spent loving. It’s now clearer to me, as most things are with time, that in teaching me how to wash clothes by hand, my mother was also sharing with me a way of life, a tool for survival, and a piece of her memory.
[Two girls before a window in the kitchen. One is sitting and looking up at the other one standing, who is also braiding her hair.]
Our bodies can only be documents because someone, or some people, took the time to make it so. Black embodied memory-keeping is inextricable from community because there are no lessons, no stories, no history that can be shared in isolation. When history moves from the private sphere to a communal one, it renders each of us keepers of the record.
There’s a scene in All Dirt Roads where Mack and her sister sit at the feet of their grandmother the way one sits in front of an altar. She tells them that they are made from dirt and water, something she learned from her mama and that her mama learned from her mama. Grandma extends a palm full of clay dirt to them as offering and says, “this you.” Mack eventually whispers these same words in awe and reverence to her newborn baby at the hospital. Another lesson passed; another piece of history shared.
And if it’s true that we are dirt and water, and I believe it is, then I know that I am dirt warmed by a tropical sun and water that could stop running at any time. I know that when I wash my clothes by hand it brings my childhood memories alive and with it echoes of things I have not lived or seen but know all the same. I know that much of what I know has been inherited.
And I hope you know by now that each of us is the document. In the words of Alice Walker, “each of us is the proof.”
Yeaye (she/her) is a reader first, writer immediately after, and occasional researcher. Her curiosity leads her writing, most often in the directions of heritage, art, and Black life. She's an East Coast baby, currently based in the South, whose people hail from Antigua, Ghana, and Liberia.