A while back, my husband and I took DNA ancestry tests. When the results come in, they give you a map with circles colored in to indicate where your ancestors came from. My husband’s blue-green circles swallowed almost the entire world. Mine, on the other hand, was a dot above England and Ireland with a small opaque dip down into Germany. One tiny point in the entirety of the world. It reminded me of a Conan O’Brien segment where he did his own test and it came back one hundred percent Irish. I’m not sure if it was a bit but the technician told him it was a certainty that his family was inbred. Joking aside, it struck me then that how we see ourselves and how we understand the past can be, for some people, as simple as looking into a mirror and, for others, as complicated as walking through a hall of mirrors.
As a biracial woman, Lauren Russell examines her history in Descent through many mirrors, from both personal and cultural memories, and through prose, verse, and historical documents, to better understand herself. The title itself suggests a delving, a digging into, and we join Russell as she explores her family’s past like a new land, like something that has long been buried.
In my high school U.S. History class, when we got to the part on the inhumanity of slave holders, I said, “Actually, I am descended from slave holders.” For some reason nobody stated the obvious: that I am also descended from slaves.
This book begins with the sentence: “What happened between or out of or in the holes of the story is the real story.” Later, Russell posits: “History belongs to the victor? Perhaps to the one with the loudest pen.” She acknowledges that she’s piecing together the stories of her ancestors, that she is writing in between the spaces of her family’s history. This book is a marriage of the real world and the imagination, the nexus of nonfiction and fiction. Russell writes, “None may be true but all could have been—climbing a web of omission, legacy, myth.” Through this intertwining of fact and invention, Russell gives a more rounded picture of her family than recorded history alone can provide, and in particular that of her Black great-great-grandmother.