WE ARE BRIDGES

A prospective mother searches for—and at times invents—a creation story for her family that she can share with her future child.

“This story is a hybrid—a romance and a horror, a memoir and a fiction—forged out of what is known and what is unknown,” writes Lane at the beginning. Even as unknowns become known, however, “we press to silence any and all language that elicits pain. But sometimes, buried in this suppressed language is an ancestor—the power in a name.” In 1904, her great-grandfather Burt was lynched before he had a chance to meet his son, a tragic story that, though largely forgotten in broader historical contexts, is obviously still a wound for the family. In this narrative, Lane seeks an origin story, searching for what facts are available and wondering about the legacy she is passing on to a child she avoided having until she was 36. Always probing, the author casts about for a missing piece of the puzzle—maybe the voice of her grandmother, a picture of her father as a child, or a relic or heirloom—to ground her history in something other than the terrible memory of a lynching. Lane switches between present reflections—e.g., the trauma of seeing a hangman game in a toy store or how she changed her mind about not wanting to have children 20 years after she had an abortion—and a dissection of a past populated with the people who might have witnessed Burt’s last days. Though the interplay between the two voices is sometimes uneven, and the imagined scenes lack some of the poetry of the straightforward memoir sections, the text is still valuable as an investigation of the undeniable force of intergenerational trauma, especially as it pertains to the Black community.

A multiangled exploration of family trauma and the forging of an identity.