Descent

About this book

In 2013, poet Lauren Russell acquired a copy of the diary of her great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of those children was the poet's great-grandmother. Through several years of research, Russell would seek the words to fill the diary's omissions and to imagine the voice of her great-great-grandmother, Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. The result is a hybrid work of verse, prose, images and documents that traverses centuries as the past bleeds into the present. "I am not writing a history of what happened, which I cannot know. I am writing into the silences, the omissions, what has been left out either intentionally or because by its nature it defies legibility... beyond what some might have thought, and what they dared to utter, or beyond what no one was sure of but everyone recollected, or within what only I imagined, bent over a photocopy of a photocopy of my great-great-grandfather's diary and a stack of books and records, trying to fill in the letters between H and P. This is not a history or a fiction. I would like to invoke Audre Lorde's term "biomythography" and puncture its seams, pull out its hem, and make "biomythology" from the swaying threads." -- Adapted from page 8-9 of text.