J. Nicole Jones’s Family Preservation
I’ve never cared much for family heritage. Does this mean I’d make a bad mother?
I have never cared where I came from. My family, like all families, has a history, and a not-undistinguished one at that: my father’s mother could trace her ancestry to an original settler who came to America on The Mayflower; my mother, for her part, came from a large and messy family, the kind with an endless litany of crazy stories—things you can’t make up, done by people you wouldn’t expect.
And yet I have never felt particularly interested in the lore of my own personal clan; never hungered to know about my grandparents or great-grandparents; never listened at some relative’s knee to any stories of old. When I met my fiancé, whose grandmother died recently, and whose mother spent the weeks before her death painstakingly recording the elder woman’s family memories, I must admit I was flabbergasted. I love my mother, and I want to know her, but I have no interest in her family mythology, no investment in her family tree. When she is on her deathbed, I hope I can ask her what she is thinking and feeling, what she has done and who she has been. I would, I think, contentedly allow her family stories—the aunts and uncles and cousins I never knew, and all of their trials and foibles—to die with her.
I suppose this will sound surprising and even callous to some readers, but I can’t remember ever feeling differently. I never wanted to be tied to anyone else’s stories; never was interested in hearing the prologue. I’ve always been jealous of my own narrative, and I know the power of a good story: once people write you into their account, it can be hard to find your way back out. It’s difficult to forge your own path when you’re busy navigating around other people’s underbrush.
I think about this a lot since I moved to the South, a place where the notion of family commands unique meaning—where people are contextualized and situated according to the recognition of their last name. In some ways the communal nature of this seems idyllic; it’s restful, in a way, to know exactly who you should be. But then I wonder: who might you become if the horizons were cracked open? Having a path to follow can mean missing a trail to blaze.
It makes a certain sense: the comfortable are living their lives, not analyzing them. Those who feel they fit within the stories they’ve been given are not trying to write their own.
I often ask myself, too, whether it’s irresponsible to bring a child into the chaos of experience without promising her a comfortable familial bosom to call home. Is this, when it comes right down to it, the difference between creating a family and creating a piece of art? Does art rely upon individuality while family-making siphons from it?
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J. Nicole Jones’s recently-released memoir Low Country recounts the history of her upbringing in a prominent South Carolina family, and in a recent interview about the writing of the book, she draws upon these two connected yet conflicting impulses. The impulse, on the one hand, to preserve the family and the impulse, on the other, to escape it, to exist outside it in order to observe it more objectively.
When asked whether one “has to be a tourist to write,” Jones responds, “I think so . . . I probably had to physically become a visitor to write this.” But then she goes on to suggest that perhaps her outsider status was really a precursor to the writing—that she was always an outsider, and that this, indeed, is what enabled her to write her story. She says:
“I think a lot of writers of any genre often feel like outsiders, from a young age, for whatever reason. I always felt like an outsider looking in, or like I didn’t fit.”
Finally, she doubles down on her outsiderness, saying, “I like looking at it both ways. I always felt like an outsider, but then I also had to become an outsider to really see my place there, too.”
What she’s saying strikes a chord with me: to write about the place where you come from you have to leave it behind. That’s the only way to see it properly. But perhaps it is the placeless, the misplaced, or—in Jones’s case—the uneasily placed who feel compelled to write to begin with. It makes a certain sense: the comfortable are living their lives, not analyzing them. Those who feel they fit within the stories they’ve been given are not trying to write their own.
But Jones also admits to a desire to preserve, to being prompted to write the story so that it would not be lost. She tells her interviewer that she was moved to write the memoir when her grandmother died, saying,
“She died sort of suddenly, and I sat down not long after that and the first few pages came out. I started thinking, well, what have I preserved? What do I want to preserve?”
The book she wrote does, I think, preserve her grandmother, a complicated Southern woman whose loyalty to her family threatened to erase her individuality in her lifetime. And yet, in the void where her independence lay, a large, complex family grew: according to Jones’s narrative, her grandmother succeeding in shepherding a bevy of children into the world, and helping them to survive the natural and unnatural disasters of Southern life. In a way, then, the writer’s ability to see beyond the narrative she was given also allowed her to preserve her grandmother’s contribution, one that might otherwise have been rendered invisible by patriarchal history books.
What does this mean for me? How skeptical can a person be of the meaning of family and lineage and still have children? Is there some necessary level of buy-in? Or is my dubiety about family history a sign that the contribution I really wish to make is that of the outsider, the writer and chronicler. The destroyer of received stories. Jones proves that is possible to stand outside and simultaneously preserve, to participate in history-making even as one feels disconnected from the stories that came before. Perhaps if I want to destroy the old stories, it will make me free to tell my children new ones.