trap door hidden by alluvium, freeways, and sprawl. These mountains continue to lift at rates among the fastest on the continent. But as they grow, they weather away, grain by grain, the residue carried downward to spread around their base like a fallen skirt. The daily business here is uplift and erosion, mountain-making and decay.
The nearby Devil’s Punchbowl consists of sandstone and conglomerate, once sands and pebbles of ancient mountain streams that flowed millions of years ago, now upended into rocky tablets.
What to take from this?
Each grain, each pebble embedded in Punchbowl rock, began as detritus from the denuding of ancestral highlands. Now-vanished cascades once conveyed sand and gravel down now-vanished mountains. If you and I were to examine the pieces, consider their texture and makeup, we could deduce much about their places of origin, about climate through time. But the Punchbowl as a place of tilted rock also means later shifting and deforming. Earthquake after earthquake dragged and shoved this terrain against the San Gabriel Mountains like a crumpled carpet shoved into a wall.
Origin and material source. Warping displacement. We can still detect both kinds of provenance even though most of what once existed long since eroded away.
What of us? What of who we are is owed to memories of blood or culture, custom or circumstance? To hardness? What makes an individual in a sequence of generations?
These questions simmered on my drive east from the Punchbowl. June edged toward its longest days as I followed Pacific-bound streams to their source, then across the Continental Divide. It did seem easier to piece together the geologic history of almost any place on Earth than to recover my ancestors’ past. Easier to construct a plausible narrative of a long-gone mountain range from the remnant pieces than to recognize the braiding of generations into a family. Than to know my parents’ reasons for turns taken.
FROM WHAT DO we take our origin? From blood?
I am the child of a woman with deep brown skin and dark eyes who married a fair-skinned man with blue-gray eyes. Yet as a little girl in California I never knew race. Skin and eye color, hair color and texture, body height and shape varied greatly among relatives. Like the land, we appeared in many forms. That some differences held significance was beyond me. Instead I devised a self-theory that golden light and deep blue sky made me. Sun filled my body as it seemed to fill dry California hills, and sky flowed in my veins. Colored could only mean these things.
On that drive east from the Punchbowl I realized how little I knew of my family as an organic unit held together by shared blood, experience, or story. I was born to parents already in middle age. They had come into the world before moving pictures talked, before teamsters drove only horseless trucks, before the iceman had to find a new profession. And they’d lived with elders who could recall life before the Civil War, memories lit by lantern light. Though nearly palpable, their pasts never spoke to me. Dad died before I had the questions. In response to them, Momma said she couldn’t remember. She wondered why I wanted to know.
FROM WHAT DO we take our origin? From incised memories?
Near the end of her life my father’s mother visits us in California, sharing my room. I’m nearly five years old. Slow, tidy with words and her things, ancient to me, Gu-ma brushes her graying chestnut hair each day. It falls below her knees. I like to lean into the back of her thighs, grasping her legs to feel her flesh warm my face. Gu-ma’s hair covers me, hides me. Each night I pray for long straight hair like hers, and for her eyes—my father’s eyes—so I might see through sky, too.
Second-grade recess, Campus School playground, Washington, D.C. I stand by empty swings. A classmate walks up to say “You’re colored, aren’t you?” I nod yes to what really isn’t a question. Troubled by how ugly Bobby Kane could make sun-light and sky-blue sound, I run to Sister Mary Richard Ann. That evening I ask my parents.
Home, many a workweek night. My father sits in his easy chair, alone in the back room, a glass of gin or scotch in one hand, cigar or cigarette in the other. The only light the inhaling burn. What he sees or thinks, I don’t know. What I remember? Smoke. Silence.
Lessons in fifth-grade social studies, Dunblane Catholic School.
One: Our textbook describes the unsuitability of Indians, who wasted away, and the preference for Africans, who thrived as slaves and by nature want to serve. I ask my teacher, Mrs. Devlin, if I might become a slave.
Two: We read in class that Indians are savages who had to give up the land and their wasteful way of life for the sake of civilization. The book calls this part of Manifest Destiny. Confused again, I ask what made the “five civilized nations” civilized?
Imagine searching for self-meaning in such lessons. Am I civilized? Will I be a slave? The history taught wasn’t the history that made me, but I didn’t know this. Any language to voice who I was, any knowledge of how land and time touched my family, remained elusive.
Once we moved to Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s, I came to learn how “race” cut our lives. Black, Negro, nigger! came loud and hard after the 1968 riots. Words full of spit showed that I could be hated for being “colored.” By the age of eight I wondered if I should hate in return.
WHAT I COULDN’T grasp then was that twining roots from different continents could never be crammed into a single box. I descend from Africans who came in chains and Africans who may never have known bondage. From European colonists who tried to make a new start in a world new to them. As well as from Native peoples who were displaced by those colonists from homelands that had defined their essential being.
As the nineteenth century ended, family members by blood and marriage had dwelled in rural Virginia, Maryland, Alabama, perhaps Oklahoma, and Montana ranchland along the Yellowstone River. They came to live in cities like Washington, D.C., and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. But how they experienced the world or defined themselves in it remained unknown. Forced removal, slavery, and Jim Crow were at odds with propertied privilege. Forebears had likely navigated a tangled mélange of land relations: inclusion and exclusion, ownership and tenancy, investment and dispossession. Some ancestors knew land intimately as home, others worked it as enslaved laborers for its yield. What senses of belonging were possible when one couldn’t guarantee a life in place? Or when “freed” in a land where racialized thinking bounded such freedom?
As I crossed the Continental Divide, the questions became so urgent they soon composed the journey. High in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, where the Arkansas River rises, I decided to try to trace family, and myself, from storied places and recorded history. But where to start?
Watching the Arkansas’s headwaters begin to carry mountain detritus toward the plains, I suspected this river could guide me. So by its drainage I plotted a meandering course toward Oklahoma, where an elderly cousin of my mother’s had once told me some ancestors might have lived.
SAND CREEK. THE name-shadow long pulled, its memory contested since November 29, 1864. As that dawn broke, several hundred volunteer soldiers led by John Chivington attacked a large Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment along its waters. Black Kettle and other leaders had thought they were under U.S. Army protection by land reserved for them. Most of the troops and Colorado territory settlers would memorialize what happened as a glorious battle against hostile foes. To survivors it was a massacre of about two hundred companions, most of them women, children, and elderly. On Chivington’s alleged orders—“Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice”—attackers mutilated corpses, taking scalps and other body parts as trophies. Heads shipped to the Army Medical
