Jackie's rootstock

 

Length: 3:02

 

Jackie speaks:

 

I was born in the 1960s in eastern Washington, the second of four, my mother’s only daughter. I am the daughter of Dorothy, daughter of Doris, daughter of Clara, daughter of Margaret, daughter of Katherine. I emerged from a long line of working-class Irish immigrants, farmwives, mountain women. Women who, until my grandmother, didn’t finish eighth grade. Who, until my mother, didn’t graduate from high school. Women who, until me, didn’t identify as feminist. Women who were not “political.”

 

I come from the white working poor, the daughter of a secretary and a truck driver, the granddaughter of poor farmers on both sides. From the time I was very little, I heard stories about my family, its places of interest, its long-standing feuds, its tall tales. I heard about my mother’s second cousin who died suddenly in her flowerbed (long before I was born); of my great-uncle Charles, who died at twenty-one in a logging accident up 8-Mile Creek, and whose death my grandfather never really got over; I heard about my great-aunt Roberta and great-uncle Roddy, who drank and got in fistfights with each other; at the beginning of World War II, Roberta went down to the draft board and signed Roddy up. I heard about my father’s twelve brothers and sisters, a raucous family in which the boys shot guns at each other and also rode homemade whiskey across the Canadian border. This was, in the first half of the twentieth century, a better source of income than sheep farming. It was also, perhaps, a marker of the alcoholism and violence that plagued different parts of my family.

 

I learned these stories looking through family photo albums; over long evenings of pinochle, where the kids watched and listened as our parents and grandparents played; over weekend-long family gatherings, where the Irish hillbilly side of the family (or, on some weekends, the Danish cowboy side of the family) would smoke and swear and dance polkas and schottisches and waltzes together; over many Memorial Day weekends, when my great-aunts and uncles would appear from out of state and help us pick armfuls of lilacs to take to our family graves.

 

What I learned implicitly from family stories was the idea that one does what one has to; you plug along, even when violence or bad fortune or poverty make the world seem too much to bear. One has family; one belongs, even if not by choice, and even if that belonging is tinged by both love and a very real hatred. . . . These incommensurable emotions, these differences that cannot be overcome, are somehow celebrated through the act of belonging through . . .

 

But what happens when you can’t?

 

While Jackie speaks, a series of old black-and-white family photographs appear on the screen: her maternal grandmother, at fifteen, crouching down behind five black-and-white puppies; a family of women including mothers and daughters; then three young girls; then two older women standing outside a wooden house; then again three young girls in swimming clothes on the bank of a river; then two girls in cowboy clothes and hats with a baby boy between them standing outside a wooden house; then several girls and two young boys in front of two old cars; then two girls and a boy between them astride a horse; then Jackie's great-uncle Charles, outside, atop a dirt mound with a dog to the side; then two young woman outside in front of house and a bicycle; then an old woman outside a wooden home; then a Rhodes family portrait taken outside on an eastern Montana prairie, men, women, children, and an infant, including a soldier, all the men in hats and all the women in dresses; then a man and a woman (Jackie's paternal grandparents) outside in winter clothes, both in hats, the man smoking a pipe; then two adults and three children posing in the snow; then a young girl, probably two years old, sitting on a wooden porch with a small dog; then an older woman holding up a piece of paper; then a group portrait of five adults and an infant posing outside in cold weather in and around a car; then two young women in dresses sitting on each side of the trunk of an old car; then a picture of six young people, posing outside in front of a wooden home and standing up in a horse-drawn wagon; then an older woman in a dark dress and hat reading a newspaper; then a girl in a light dress, looking away from the camera while a dog drinks from a glass bottle she is holding down to it; then two young women posing, clearly dressed up in good clothes and with bouffants; then two women, a man, and a baby (Jackie's mother), held by one of the women, with the other standing in the center, arms folded, starting straight ahead—all standing outside and posing for the camera in front of a log house and a background of pine trees on a mountainside by Kellogg, Idaho. This was Jackie's great-grandparents' homestead.

 

At the very beginning of the video, the following text appears: I was born in the 1960s in eastern Washington, the second of four, my mother’s only daughter.

 

At the very end of the video, the following text appears: But what happens when you can’t?