Family Tree

In the beginning there was me. The Negro Spiritual. My voices tired and weak when they arrived on these shores, I was community when they were separated from their tribes. A seed taken from tribal beats and African drums. Brought in underneath fingernails, coiled in hair, underneath tongues, embedded in my voices’ skin. They replanted me in American soil, nourished by their spit and blood. Soon I grew to develop new tune. When my voices were given new language, I learned lyric. I was sustenance when they toiled in the fields, meditation when they were beaten and broken. I was their way toward escape. And until there was an until, I was hope.

My voices walked into the church and I gave birth to Gospel, my oldest child. If I was community, Gospel was gathering and Sunday meals. I was hope in the fields, and Gospel the creation of family. Our voices’ first built home. Gospel grew strong, and our voices became free. They learned to dance and drink, to live and lament. And then I gave birth to my twins, Jazz and The Blues.

Jazz was a wild child who loved to sing. I always thought she would be the first to give me grandchildren, but she traveled the world and taught others her song instead. Grown up from the girl dressed in rags. Now she was all grand concert halls on Broadway, street corners in the South, and juke joints in the Midwest. The way she’d dance and swing to the Big Bands! And oh, how they loved her in Brazil, Cuba, and France! Never fazed, she’d often say “it don’t mean a thing…” In her most melancholy moments she was still… cool.

Blues, on the other hand, stayed closer to home. She was slow and severe, and sang in a drawl so heavy she made the walls shake and the roof leak. She shut her eyes and stomped her feet into the floor and made it quake. She opened her mouth and she screamed. Never a stranger to a slurred word. She loved, and made love, and made loves. And from these loves came our family’s second set of twins. She bore one who was more upbeat. A little rowdy one who was mischievous and fun, loved to play on the radios, and swing just like his aunt. They called him Doo-Wop.

Her other child, she named for herself. We all called this one Rhythm and Blues. She followed the rules and her tone was smooth in her youth. It was all love songs in her spring. She was even sweet when she sang about pain.

The twins grew into their voices, or their voices grew into them. They started to experiment and expand. Doo-Wop became Rock n’ Roll, and little Rhythm and Blues grew to Soul.

Rock n’ Roll was all spit and ambition. He came into his own, and then to me, and said “I’m gonna change the world, gramma. I’m gonna be a legend.” Such a rebellious boy. Absolutely irreverent. Oh, he changed the world. Did exactly what he said. But you don’t become a legend without being changed yourself. We barely recognized him by the time he made it back. He had a hard time connecting to our voices, but that was never his concern. “The world, gramma, the world. I’m bigger than just our voices.” Couldn’t argue with that boy.

Baby R&B had to learn to let go to become Soul. This was the sound she made when she couldn’t be sweet anymore. Couldn’t keep watching our voices being beaten in the streets. Her heart split open and flooded the floor. Refinement, polish, and calm were gone, and she was left foot stomping, screaming, please-please pleasing, pleading until a second wind. Sayin’ it loud. Payin’ the cost. Prepping for the big pay back, and lookin’ just like her mama. Then somewhere in that fight and heartbreak, she had a baby of her own.

Funk. The way he’d tell it, he was born full grown. Straight outta outer space. His science was fiction. Dirty, Bootsy, booty shake. But I remember him as a little boy, always getting into things! Always experimenting. Always going on about alien planets and motherships. How he’d laugh at jokes nobody else understood, and dance to music only Jazz could make sense of. Even then he was nothing but funky. Maybe he looked up, just a little bit, to his uncle Rock n’ Roll. Didn’t reach as far as his uncle Rock, but our voices all loved him at home.

Funk’s younger sister, Disco, was different. Always tried to keep up with her brother, but she just didn’t have the same joy. Too clean. Too polished. Tryin’ too hard to imitate life. Could never tell if she was chasing something, or running away. Poor child got mixed up with the wrong crowd. Just wanted to dance all night. Party all the time. Salacious bunch. Always getting high. Disco didn’t last long in that life. She came in like a wave. But waves break and she died young. Just after giving birth to her son.

House was a mystery to most of us. We let him do his thing. His uncle Funk seemed to understand. To the rest of us, it looked like House was trying to pass. Barely around, us never knowing where he’d go. But we could hear him. We recognized his driving beat at the heart of the Midwest, the same place his mother died, leading our voices—the ones who’d been outcast—to a place they could thrive and writhe, and enjoy all the same freedoms our family had long since strived to provide. He lasted for a little while before he decided to leave. If you put your ear down, when the sun isn’t out, you can hear his hypnotizing heartbeat from all the way across the sea. The way he tells it, he’s always been nearby.

There’s just one more. Born the same way I was, directly from our voices. Baby Hip Hop. Only as old as House, but as cocky as Rock. Little boy thinks he’s a god. He came in syncopation, sneaking in through Funk’s double Dutch, and our voices loved him. Before he made it to the club, they flocked to meet him in the street. There they made him king. As offering, they devoted the rest of our family to his beat. Our voices called him a culture, and he never learned humility. Crass and unapologetic in his poetry. American. Like the rest of us.

I was a seed brought over in old wooden boats. Smuggled beneath the nails of shackled hands and feet. I was placed in the soil and nurtured by the blood of flayed backs, returning strength as I grew to the ones who planted me. Our tree bore fruit in flavors of hope, community, of swing, sadness, of love, and heartbreak, and rebellion, revolution, of anger, and triumph, experimentation, of celebration, and of comfort in exile. My voices spit out the seeds and let the sprouting vines intertwine and wrap me in another tree. Giving back, but taking from mine, making itself a whole ‘nother culture on which our voices could feed. And we fed the world, starting with this country. Gave it an identity everyone would recognize, with roots as Black as the skin of every last one of our voices.

In the beginning, there was me.