Rebecca Blevins attempts to wrestle with her opaque family legacy in her essay “Ella: Family Stories, Family Secrets.” Blevins examines in minute detail the events of her forebears’ lives, all the while conjecturing possible versions of the past in order to construct a narrative of her own family history. The central mystery Blevins grapples with, a mystery which ultimately unanswerable, is the question of precisely why her great-grandmother Ella abandoned her respectable life (and most crucially, why she left her husband and child) and disappeared. Blevins is preoccupied to the point of obsession with these questions, for good reason, for she wants to better understand herself and what she has inheritanced from her great-grandmother, by better understanding Ella : these questions are ones the author has asked herself “again and again about this woman whose genes I carry within me, from whom I have perhaps inherited some traits.” Within the frameworks of race, gender, culture, history and economics, Faery explores these ancestral mysteries, so that the number of possible family narratives proliferate, each with its own distinct nuances.
Blevins’s questions about Ella are primal and elemental, yet well-reasoned and contemplated with care. I have certainly had similar thoughts about my genetic antecedents in my own family: How much have I inherited from x? What percentage of y constitutes the very formation of me?
