I often say that, as the oldest granddaughter in my family, I know where the bodies are buried. This is technically true; I am in fact the keeper of all the paperwork on our ancestral resting place. But, in this case, I mean that I know a lot of family stories. I can tell the grand, sweeping narratives, the ones for simchas and funeral repasts. But I also collect the stories that the grownups didn’t even remember they told me.

This sounds ominous, and my metaphor probably doesn’t help. But I have come to realize, after a lifetime of listening, that you can’t really appreciate the bold, big stories unless you also know those little stories.

When I was an avid photographer, years ago, I discovered the problem with walking around with a gigantic Nikon around your neck at a family function: people expect you to produce family portraits, little clumps of perfectly-composed smiles for social media.

Meanwhile, I was trying to document little stories, catching my grandfather presiding over a domino game with his grand- and great-grandchildren, all with furrowed brows, learning from the master.

My favorite photos capture moments like those. A faded photo from 1978 I will keep to myself—6-month-old me has finally tired herself out playing. I’m asleep, lying across my grandmother’s lap. She’s gently, quietly brushing my hair. Her hair is in a scarf, she’s wearing a housedress, and she is smiling to herself. Her expression tells a whole story I could not possibly remember on my own.

In Maya’s Journey, Maya is a little girl who loves to tell sweeping, imaginary stories. She learns that big stories are really a collection of tiny stories, and that the story of her blended families will always be the biggest story she tells. She collects images: Martha and her own grandmother at the piano, or Essie going into a Settlement House to get out of the rain. All of these little stories become part of a story of danger, migration, and romance that, in its own way, is really just a tiny part of a giant and ongoing story.

Those were the kinds of stories I could hold and understand and retell. Those little moments. They were small enough for me to claim as my own. I still write about them.

When I was an itty bitty person, my uncle Jewel ran the family business from the (slightly illegal) in-law apartment under our house.

The night before I started first grade, I remember going down to the office to see Jewel1. The tiny room was lit by a single large desk lamp; there were cubbies lining one wall, holding stacks of paper including the letterhead he had designed himself. He told me that he'd recently ordered a lot of custom stationery from Los Angeles, and he pulled out a stack to show me. They were a Lisa Frank generation fever dream: black paper with tiny white polka dots, lined teal, lavender with white graph squares, hot pink with white stars, and every conceivable permutation, all with matching envelopes2. I shared his palpable excitement, weighing the heavy paper in my hands.

In retrospect, this is clearly my origin myth. Proust had his madeleine; I have stationery.

I like being organized, I love feeling organized, and I love looking organized more than I love feeling organized. At any time, I will invariably have a wall calendar, a desk calendar and a paper calendar at home and one of each for work, and probably around 40 organizational and productivity apps I'm evaluating or using or trying to get myself to use or trying to make other people use or just haven't deleted yet. I have every color of dry erase pen, Sharpie, and Pilot g2 0.38mm3. Until I got sick, I used these tools to manage a very complicated family with four different personal calendars and again as many extracurricular and sports calendars and my grandfather's calendar and of course my work calendar and at least 8 other sub-calendars I made up.

I complained incessantly about how exhausting it was because it was exhausting but of course I also liked having important things to put into a calendar and cool calendars to put them in. I lived by the lists I drew up--packing lists, grocery lists. When one of my children suddenly informed me in the car at 7:50 AM that today was the day they were supposed to go on a Segway tour of the secret catacombs under Mount Rushmore with Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter and they were going to need two $10 bills, a grappling hook, and a bag lunch by 8:15 I would invariably and tiresomely repeat the sentence if it's not written down, it doesn't exist4. If an event was not on any calendar or on any list, I couldn’t be expected to be in any way prepared. I had not written it down, so it was not happening.

What if I didn’t write anything down because nothing was happening?

I spent a lot of time, after I got sick, making elaborate lists and adding events to calendars. If I added a birthday party to the calendar, would I feel well enough to go? If I created a careful, step-by-step list of what the kitchen needed to get it back on track, would that give me the energy to go clean out the refrigerator?

My day went like this:

1. have coffee5

2. shower and get dressed

3. set up with bed desk and herbal tea

4. write a detailed list in several pen colors of what needs to get done today/this week/this month

5. drowse guiltily for the rest of the day

You'll be seeing a few problems, among them that items 2-4 take a lot of energy and thus were often the only things that happened, and that was on a great day. I didn't want to see these problems. Lists, calendars, post-its—it sounds silly, I know, but they're my operating system. They're how I get things done. And if I'm not getting things done, what am I really doing? What's the sense in writing down the things I'm likely to get done today?

The least good days were like this:

• have coffee

• take pain medication at regular intervals

• watch Chopped6

• think irritated thoughts at the Chopped contestants who attempt risotto7

• drowse guiltily for the rest of the day

What would be the point in expending finite energy writing any of that down? Was it any worse to page back through my agenda and see that, no matter what, I definitely accomplished a lot of guilty drowsing?

But, if I didn’t write anything down, was I really doing anything? If I wasn’t doing anything, what was the entire point of me?

My man Prufrock tells us he has measured out his life in coffee spoons. What if you don't have any spoons at all? What are you even measuring?

So I stopped measuring. When things got really real for a minute there, and I left for the emergency room and came back with a terrifying diagnosis and a lifetime of chronic pain, I stopped making lists, which means I stopped really making plans. Just shut down the operating system. You couldn't tell, on the outside, but that's not a good sign. You should have some plans, even if you mostly plan to take enough pharmaceuticals to make life tolerable but not too interesting.

A little bit after that I discovered A New Craft.

Did you know that there are people who buy Filofax planning systems and Day Planners and monthly calendars and other binders/folders/configurations that are equally expensive and decorate the calendars and the to-do lists and the note pages and/or design new ones and/or add photos?

Reader, I bought one without knowing one more thing about this business. And I ordered the sparkliest one I could find. It was basically an absurdly expensive Trapper Keeper8.

However, when once I had my Filofax A5 Saffiano as well as a quantity of supplies and accessories whose dollar value is more than you can imagine, I discovered something interesting. It is actually hard to write down dozens of To Dos and Calendar Appointments and Goals on a piece of paper that has a lot of die cuts or stickers or washi tape or beads or, like, feathers on it.

You could write, let's say, one line item for the day.

The goal you set out at the beginning of the day doesn't have to be what you ended up accomplishing. You can just be glad you made it to the end of the day. You can always move the goalposts. It's your game.

Any discussion of Hamilton, the show currently topping Broadway’s box office, starts with the elevator pitch: a hip-hop musical about the life of our nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury.

It’s important to get that description out of the way, because, if you grew up around the time I did — I’m a child of the 80s, roughly the same age as Hamilton’s star and composer, Lin-Manuel Miranda — you grew up at a time when hip-hop might happen when you least expected it, in the most unwelcome places. You could be minding your own business, watching Saturday morning cartoons or some kid-friendly comedy destined for the bargain bin at Blockbuster Video, when, out of the blue, any cartoon character or respected actor or elected official might break out into shudderingly awkward rhymes.

It was meant to be funny. The joke lay in the perceived contrast between the act of rapping and the person spitting rhymes on the 1 and 3. That person was frequently older, often respectable, and inevitably white, and, if a contrast was to be made, it must mean that rap was young, disreputable, and black. Rap was a signifier for blackness; the performance was a minstrel show, the rap itself a kind of blackface. Suddenly, the performance was a white space, and I was black. The performer was speaking to an audience that suddenly excluded me; the story became a narrative I could only watch from the outside. The joke was on me, and no laugh track could drown that out.

I would come to experience this in real life, too, finding myself suddenly black in white spaces. Often, they were spaces I hadn’t even known were white until a “gotcha” moment invariably left me writhing in silent shame. As a child, I turned a Little House on the Prairie page to find Pa Ingalls in grinning blackface; as an adult, a colleague jokingly called a spreadsheet “ghetto” and a suddenly white room erupted into laughter around me. I came to feel like an unwanted character who kept cluelessly wandering back into the narrative, only to be written out over and over again. I had no place in the story. The feeling of erasure was, at times, unbearable.

If I was reluctant to see and experience Hamilton, at first, it was because Hamilton’s high-concept pitch smacked of a kind of erasure. Rap music was first made by unwanted characters who were brave and talented enough to write their own narratives. Most rappers cast themselves as the lead characters in an ongoing saga that they are constantly writing and rewriting; lyricists have the enormous power to own their own stories, whether on the outskirts of mainstream American culture or close to its acquisitive heart. Hip-hop as a whole delineates a proudly black space where those lyricists’ unique signifiers, references, and vocabulary are shared, valued, and understood. Removing rap from this supportive space can undermine its power. The mainstream culture is then free to impose its own narratives on rap — rap as the music of violence, rap as a harbinger of cultural breakdown, rap as an alien and hilarious sideshow — and those narratives silence the authors. I was concerned to see hip-hop in the most deliberately white space I could imagine — to see Biggie Smalls and Busta Rhymes dropped down in Revolutionary America, before a live, mostly white audience.

Instead I would discover that the ultimate point of Hamilton might be the story of unwanted characters taking control of the narrative and telling the story on their own terms.

I write historical fiction and fantasy, so, to build entire worlds, I study a wide range of history, from ancient Sumeria to Georgian England and beyond. Yet I came to Hamilton with surprisingly little knowledge of American history. I’ve rewritten the story of Creation itself; I could easily have had my revenge on the American past a long time ago, putting myself on Plymouth Rock or electing the first Black president two hundred years before Obama. I didn’t. In America, I felt uniquely constrained by the narrative I’d grown up with, the dominant narrative of American history that began with the Mayflower and proceeded right past me into the present day. I couldn’t engage with it. It didn’t feel like mine to change.

My first traceable ancestor enters the historical record already in chains. Somewhere in South Carolina, sometime around 1790, an unnamed African slave gave birth to my grandmother’s grandfather’s grandfather, Newman Ingram. Meanwhile, Alexander Hamilton and the Founding Fathers were defining what freedom was going to mean in these newly United States, writing an intentionally white narrative that very deliberately erased and excluded people of color. From the beginning, mainstream American history was a carefully-defined white space where Newman Ingram and, by extension, I did not belong. Even in the post-Civil Rights era, when I came of age, black history was taught in periodic asides, as if making it clear that Black History and American History were not the same thing. African-American history was an alternate American story, the narrative of a people in the shadow of Independence fighting for a place in a narrative never meant to include them.

The first history books I acquired outside school were a series of illustrated booklets celebrating famous Black inventors, educators, innovators, and explorers. The Black American narrative — that ongoing struggle — was, I learned, the story of a series of exceptional Black people whose names didn’t make it into American history textbooks: Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, Madam C. J. Walker, Garrett Morgan, Bessie Blount Griffin, Matthew Henson, and dozens more. It was like stumbling on a secret Black history of America. What I learned of the early United States I learned through studying their lives. Their stories were collated into a parallel American narrative in which racial progress — that is, freedom — was driven by greater and greater Black achievement. Invariably, these famous Black people became so important that they were allowed provisional entry into white spaces; by proximity, they brought Black Americans closer to emancipation.

These examples of Black excellence and what it could do were meant to elevate me. If these heroes could survive in an America where they were not regarded as citizens — or just barely — then surely I could be the first person in my family to graduate from college. As Michelle Alexander puts it in her already seminal The New Jim Crow, “Black success stories lend credence to the notion that anyone, no matter how poor or how black you may be, can make it to the top, if only you try hard enough”. And those that try hard enough pave the way for everyone else: by achieving even beyond my potential, I could be personally responsible for Black uplift. The more Black Americans achieved, separately and collectively, the closer the story of Black America would come to merging with the main narrative of American history. While the Founding Fathers and their direct descendants were making a more perfect union, Black people were making themselves worthy of it. In a last-minute twist, it would turn out that we had been Americans all along.

I’ve spent the entire Obama administration trying to reconcile my two American histories. It’s an especially personal project as my children grow older and I begin to see America — both historical and contemporary — through their eyes. On the one hand, they’ve come of age seeing Black exceptionalism’s apotheosis: what could be a greater achievement than the election of the first Black president? On the other hand, they are coming of age at a time when every week seems to bring new evidence that Black people are still not part of the main narrative — not even as it unfolds in real time.

These days, I don’t bother to turn on the television when I want to know what’s happening in Black America. The Ferguson protests taught me that, while news networks were content to regurgitate “official” news filtered through biased sources, Black activists were sharing unedited video footage and on-the-ground reporting through social media channels. On Instagram and Twitter, I saw tanks menacing Black citizens on American streets. On CNN, I saw Black “looters”. Black America is still responsible for telling its own story. Which version of events, I wonder, will join the main narrative in history textbooks? Who will have the right to recount this history, and what story will they choose to tell?

Hamilton, as it turns out, also tells the story of how history is made. We watch as competing perspectives are curated into one single, coherent story — the story of a past that continually shapes what comes next.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPrAKuOBWzw?t=9m4s

In the opening number, we learn that the dominant narrative of American history as we know it is wrong; Alexander Hamilton’s enemies sullied his reputation and diminished his out-sized role in creating American institutions. Hamilton goes on to challenge that narrative, redeeming the story of one of history’s underdogs. It does by telling the story from a new perspective, the perspective of someone disenfranchised.

Whoever tells the story, Hamilton teaches us, holds an almost incalculable power to rewrite the past and the future. But, first, that person must take charge of the narrative. That person must be empowered to tell the story. Then they can make the narrative their own. And, when the narrative is the story of an entire nation, the person who tells the story has the power to change the present around us.

In Hamilton, the “Founding Father without a father” believes himself the hero of a story he must finish before it’s too late. Aaron Burr, his historical nemesis, struggles along, railing against being dragged in Hamilton’s wake. In the end, not even killing Hamilton in that infamous duel frees Burr from the narrative. Yet, when the tale has been told, we realize that the historical record was actually preserved by Alexander Hamilton’s wife Eliza, someone who had even less agency — far less — than Burr. She is the one who has written the story Burr is narrating; by claiming the right to tell this story, even though she had little power to affect the ongoing events, Eliza has ultimately made it her own.

Casting almost every part in Hamilton — including Eliza, played by Phillipa Soo — with an actor of color draws sharp attention to who is currently telling Eliza’s story: a company of young and talented people, mostly of color, many of whose ancestors would not have felt like full citizens in 1776. They create an implicitly colored space, placing American history in a new context. Using hip-hop’s inherent power, they build an America the Founding Fathers would not recognize on sight, narrated in verse intricately layered with rap and hip-hop references they would not understand. People who would have been marginalized when America was being born impose their own narrative. And, as with Eliza, as soon as they begin to tell the story — as soon as actor Leslie Odom, Jr. opens his mouth — it is already their story.

Watching Hamilton, I was deeply emotional, and not merely because it is a gripping and moving story. I realized, sitting there, that claiming the story as your own can be as radical and empowering an act as declaring war on a major foreign power and then having the audacity to create a new country whole-cloth. In its casting, in its deft use of uniquely American art forms, in its rich symbolism, Hamilton claims the story of America as every American’s story. My ancestor Newman Ingram’s story is my story and Alexander Hamilton’s story is also my story because they are both Americans and I am an American. The Founding Fathers are mine after all; the story of the founding of America is inextricable from the story of slavery. The story of America is every American’s story, and we should all feel empowered to read it, write it, and tell it, from whatever perspective. We’ve always been part of this story because it’s our story. It turns out we really were Americans, all along.

Image by Detroit Publishing Company — http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-36f7-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47047742

Originally published at www.marcellawhitecampbell.com

For a time, there was also a home in Albany, CA, literally straddling the border between Alameda and Solano counties. It was married student housing for U.C. Berkeley, somewhere between low-income-housing and dormitories. The shabby, two-story buildings had been military barracks, more or less like the Double Rock housing my grandparents fled in 1956 to plant their flag in Cole Valley. It straddled Cordonices Creek; in fact, you could look down on the creek from the living room window.

It was a safe place, a self-contained community just off San Pablo. It was a free zone, where we kids did things we knew we were not supposed to do in the City, like walk over to the snack bar alone and buy a pizza bagel to share…or walk over to the Oakland Tribune newspaper machine in front of Church’s Chicken and buy a Sunday paper for my father, a graduate student in rhetoric, inhaling smoggy San Pablo Avenue air, perfumed with the heavenly scent of mass-fried chicken thighs.

We’d play with an ever-changing roster of neighborhood kids on the soggy lawns, under big leafless trees. One of them gave me a book: A Seed Is A Promise. We were all the children of dirt-poor graduate students; no doubt, all of us went on to get graduate degrees of our own.

It couldn’t possibly last. So it didn’t.

Sometime in my early teens, I discovered another home, just as idyllic: 221B Baker Street. I lived there, too, I promise you. I could still draw you a map. The VR pockmarks on the wall, the correspondence affixed to the mantlepiece with a penknife, the deal-topped table, the photograph of The Woman. Each landmark was a fixed place in my mind, furnishing my apartment with The Detective. Most had real-world analogues.

There were seventeen steps at my other Home, too, but, unlike Mrs. Hudson, my grandmother found them harder and harder to climb.

In the days before a functional Amazon.com, I scoured used bookstores, reading each and every book spine, searching for every pastiche, every scholarly work featuring Sherlock Holmes. I read each week’s TV Guide so I could program our VCR to tape every Granada Series episode, every random Sherlock Holmes Movie Of The Week at 2 AM on a Tuesday. I populated my personal 221B, tome by tome, video by video, when my peers deserted me and the heart of my real Home sickened and died. It was a safe space, as so many imaginary spaces are. Like my Albany house, it was always the same. I could always go back.

The one constant, I find, is that Things Change and you cannot go back.

Craving Home, I went back to Albany in June of 2011. I drove across the Bay Bridge alone, hoping, I think, for some kind of Instagram moment, a snapshot of rickety buildings with a backdrop of creek water. (Hefe filter, definitely.) I could condense that longing into one square image and return to the place my children called Home, refreshed.

This is what I saw:

It was an overgrown field. The buildings, long unsafe on the banks of a creek, lead paint and all, had been demolished. Made gone. All that was left was the space where my Home once had been.

It made me think of abandoned playgrounds. This was our playground. This was our home. How could it not be here? How could it be just as ephemeral as I had found 221B to be?

I guess I thought I’d climb the rickety stairs and peer in the windows past cheap bamboo blinds? At myself, comfortably asleep on a mattress on the floor, neatly twisted hair protected by a scarf, jelly bracelets up one arm? The air would smell like bacon grease and coffee beans and fried chicken and my father’s Canoe. I would hear West End Blues on repeat.

The best blues is a longing for something that can’t be had. There’s a sweetness in wanting. I want to go back home. I can’t go back home. The creek sounds the same, but the home is gone. It occupied that space. It’s a space I used to live in, a space in which I was safe.

The quiet summer creek sounds like the moment before the blues is sung.

Originally published at www.marcellawhitecampbell.com

It was unseasonably hot.

That must have been the reason my grandmother walked down the aging basement stairs and out of the open garage door and traveled a block to the corner store, holding my three-year-old hand in hers. The giddy excitement of the moment still stays with me; the black night sky, like a stage backdrop, the garage brightly lit and curiously empty, and — most amazing — my grandmother walking, out of doors, all alone, with me.

My grandmother was an inside person. Rare it was, on the sunniest of days, to find her anywhere other than the square footage of her Cole Valley four-bedroom; my sister and I were in her care, so we stayed inside with her, all summer break, other than the rare occasions when she permitted us to explore the overgrown backyard. We played fervently, imagining we were orphans running our own farm. We harvested sour grass and thought mosquito larvae were tadpoles. At the very best moment in any game, she would call us indoors and we would not go out again for weeks.

The house was hers; the house was her. She could protect us, inside, so we roller skated down the hall, bumping on the tattered green carpet and stopping with our hands against the heavy oak front door, climbing from coffee table to velvet couch when the green carpet was hot lava, sliding down the fifteen stairs from the upstairs hall, each rug-burned drop, from step to step, a tooth-jarring earthquake. The house was our world; she was our world, and she knew it, warm, and soft, her pillowy lap a place to lay a drowsy head, her soft heavy arms carrying a pot of spaghetti and dumping it, steaming, into a green plastic colander.

I remember, dimly, being awakened in the night to take a dose of bitter-sweet cough syrup. Her bedroom was next to mine. She must have heard me coughing in my sleep, and walked downstairs in the middle of the night to fetch the medicine from the kitchen. The little light over the stove stayed on all night against the dark. Each room in that house holds the ghosts of a hundred loving gestures, performed as naturally as breathing.

Outdoors was my grandfather’s world, a world of hard men and backbreaking work, spat insults and bitter choices, where money was grasped and held by the man with the strongest fist. Even the backyard was his, the kettledrum barbecue dominating the concrete deck under the hopelessly overburdened yellow plum tree. They would barbecue, on the 4th and on Labor Day, and our big uncles and little cousins and the smell of roasting meat filled the house. My grandparents marinated the meat in beer and lemon juice and soy sauce in a huge enameled washpan; she would hand the raw meat to him through the basement door, both slippered feet firmly in the house, as if the doorframe was the border of a friendly but alien country.

The house, it bears repeating, was hers, and my grandfather knew it, deferring to her when he deferred to no one else.

Why, then, would she walk outside, when she never did? And at night? Why would she leave her sanctuary on a whim, when walking was so hard for her? Did I fantasize that we went for an improbable jaunt in the heat of Indian summer? Why wouldn’t I imagine her, then, at my school’s yearly Grandparents’ Day, or on a field trip to the museum — places where my gregarious grandfather always represented them both – instead of a five-minute walk uphill and around the corner?

I believe it happened. It is clearly an early childhood memory, more light and sound than action, the astonishing feeling of traveling into the outside world with its endless black sky while still being surrounded by my grandmother’s protection. I am far from home, now – home being the place where my grandmother washed dishes at the sink or sat on the couch watching her stories – and I can never go back again. Even if the situation was strange, even if the whole thing was a dream, who would not treasure the memory of exactly what it felt like to be loved?

This is how to make collard greens. First, my grandfather drives his truck to the Alemany Farmer’s Market. My grandfather chooses a bunch of taut, bitter leaves, and he puts money in the dirt-caked, stubby-fingered hand of the farmer who planted the seeds, and he brings home the collards to my grandmother to cook.

But where does my grandfather get the money to buy the collards? Well, first, my grandfather buys a ticket on a slow bus from outside Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He sits in the back because it’s 1943, and he’s leaving Arkansas because he has to sit in the back of the bus there. The bus takes him to San Francisco, and he gets a job mixing concrete, and then another, better job, and a foreman’s job, and one day it is 1985 and he is a senior supervisor for the Department of Public Works who makes more money than he has ever made, and he has a wife who has never had to work, who makes the very best collard greens.

But, then, where does his wife come from? It starts with a man named Newman Ingram, whose face I have never seen, who is born in South Carolina of two slaves born in Africa. Newman begets a son whose name I do not know with another slave named Chaney, and that son begets another son named Terrell, whose face I have never seen, with a woman named Charlotte, and they have a son, Neely, the first one of these born a free man. (I have seen Neely’s weary, broad face in his sole surviving photograph.) And Neely and his wife, the haughty creole Amanda Duncan, have a son, Augusta, who will break his mother’s heart and his wife’s heart and his daughter’s heart.

Augusta and his several brothers are high-yellow men, some of whom can get by riding the front of the bus in cities where no one knows about their dark-skinned father, some of whom disappear forever and are presumed to be passing. That magic high-yellow skin supposedly makes Augusta better than his dark-skinned wife Mary and his pretty little brown daughters, but when his liver fails and he turns a deep golden yellow from the bile it just makes him dead. And that is how you get my grandmother, who takes the train to San Francisco with her aunts after every last one of those people dies before she is sixteen.

Maybe Martha’s aunt Irene, who will one day own a restaurant, will teach her to make good collards. That will be later, after Irene and her sisters abandon their teenaged niece in San Francisco, after sixteen-year-old Martha changes her name to Barbara and marries her hard-working boyfriend, who had been a concrete mixer operator and will one day buy her a big house at the base of Twin Peaks with a kitchen just right for making collards.

The kitchen has a big window over the double sink, framed with frilly curtains. My grandmother will soak the collards well in the left-hand sink. My grandfather is peeling and cutting up potatoes with a huge sharp butcher knife, so he’ll just go over and drain the collards and cut the rubbery leaves from their thick stems while my grandmother blanches the ham hocks for the greens.

My grandmother will put the collards in one of the bigger pots, and they will cook down slow with the ham hocks. When the collards are tender and limp, my grandmother will make cornbread and an iceberg salad with apples and carrots, and my grandfather will have turned the potatoes into thick, soft home fries in the same skillet where he has just fried some pieces of chicken. And I will sit down at the kitchen table, my melamine plate piled high with food, and tear at a chicken drumstick and home fries and cornbread with margarine and grape jelly, and pause at the collards only to carefully pick out and devour all the little shreds of ham hock and completely ignore the bitter, wilted, silky greens, luminous with pork fat.

And when I am done there will be a sad lonely pile of collard greens on the plate, but my grandparents won’t make me eat them.

I tried to explain how to make collard greens but it may be impossible. My grandmother is gone forever and my grandfather doesn’t eat pork anymore. And, worst of all, I rarely ate collards when given the opportunity, being in it for the ham hocks. Still, I am going to blanch some ham hocks and pile some wilted greens in a pot and try my best. I will serve them on a melamine plate to my son and daughter, who have never seen my grandmother in the flesh, who have never been to Pine Bluff but are of Pine Bluff, not Ingrams but of Ingrams, have washed their hands in my grandparents’ double sink, and meet their hard-working great-grandfather in his truck all over San Francisco. They will probably not like collards yet but that is probably beside the point.