Since I was a child, my family has felt like an expanding universe — a mosaic of non-biological and biological people from all corners coming together. The non-biological ones weren’t revealed as such until I was much older, and none of the step or half relatives I refer to in terms of portions.
At family gatherings there are always more and more people to meet and the “how” of which we’re related is least important to the fact that we are family.
This is not particular to my experience, but rather a very ordinary part of Black families. The Black family cannot be fit into fixed, connected family trees, but rather is a dynamic growing amorphous, undefinable force.
In Hortense Spillers’ essay, “Mama’s baby, Papa’s Maybe: an American Grammar Book,” she talks about the construction of the Black family speaking of the violence endured on the Black body during the transatlantic slave trade; how from the coast of West Africa to the shores of the Americas one was peeled as an onion — lost their language, land, religion, names and family. This depersonalization led to non-traditional attachments with other enslaved Africans.
She writes, “The destructive loss of the natural mother, whose biological/genetic relationship to the child remains unique and unambiguous, opens the enslaved young to social ambiguity and chaos: the ambiguity of his/her fatherhood and to a structure of other relational elements...”
This “natural mother” is a literal biological mother, as well as a figurative symbol of Africa as mother, and Spillers makes the point that the trade rendered Blacks as orphans in the New World. This orphanhood forced enslaved Africans to improvise non-biological familial attachments as a form of survival.
She goes on to say, “It must be conceded that African-Americans, under the press of a hostile and compulsory patriarchal order, bound and determined to destroy them, or to preserve them only in the service and the best of the ‘master’ class, exercised a degree of courage and will to survive that startles the imagination even now... the captive person developed, time and again, certain ethical and sentimental features that tied her and him, across the landscape to others, often sold from hand to hand, of the same and different blood in a common fabric of memory and inspiration.”
Spillers highlights how plantations functioned to reduce the enslaved solely to property — tools productive for white capital. This reduction led to the understanding of self as collective, self as a multiplicity.
Today improvised Black families are still assembling as a means of survival and moreover this is pivotal to the rejuvenation of the Black spirit. It is within the family, the first unit of knowledge transmission and acquisition, that the complexity of self and the Black spirit is to be re-stored and reimagined.
