I have greedy eyes. They scan photographs hungrily, brown irises flaring while trying to determine whether an unusual color or angle is new. When they realize that what they have found is something they’ve seen before, something that belongs in the picture, they drop back into shallow pools. These eyes don’t look; these eyes search.
When they move across the photo taken on the day of my Christening, they hunt for what they can’t see. They register the flush of youth on my parents’ cheeks, the creased gown shrouding my new body, and the cake with buttery layers promising to announce my entry into the world, but they aren’t finding what matters. Tucked into corners, and folded behind furniture are people in shadow. I suppose it doesn’t matter that I can’t see their faces, because I wouldn’t recognize them if I could. I like to imagine there would be a fuzzy sense of familiarity, but I know better than to believe we’d look alike. For the visitors in this photo all that matters is their sense of purpose, which I know is to claim me.
On this day, they pressed a stain of black into the soft skin on my forehead. I know it now to be an ‘x,’ because there’s nothing else this mark can be. It reminds me of the greasy cross I received each year as a child on Ash Wednesday. This sign transformed me for the duration of its wear and even now, privilege and responsibility smell to me like heavy incense and palm ashes.
The ‘x’ is thick and heavy in its certainty. No delicate lines form my obligation to them. Perhaps the shape lies so deep because its outline was traced numerous times by their dirty fingers. I choose to believe, however, that in death they no longer feared their own hands, and found the confidence to push into my flesh.
They made this ‘x’ with coal––the ink that has stained generations of Scottish bodies––when they smeared their signatures across my head. Coal has filled the creases of their skin with grime, and smudged the lines of my ancestry. It has branded them as mothers, fathers, husbands, and wives by settling comfortably into pores, and outlasting the life of any traditional ink found on a decaying page.
Their labor created a cloud of dirt: a bitter wave of black coal dust, which followed them out of the mines and encircled their legs. Polluted lungs tried to expand their chests to prevent spluttering and choking when the cold air hit, but this storm swirled and pushed against their pale and tired bodies. Its heavy winds tugged at them and toyed with their uncertainty. It left them disoriented and covered in dark wetness, reminding them that their escape was but temporary and that they were bound below.
The mines swallowed my grandfather when he was fourteen. At fourteen, I was playing tennis and learning to speak French in school. How do I make sense of this? How do I justify my easy life to him? Yes, I may stand on my ancestors’ shoulders, but in doing so my heels push them back into the sepulchral pits.
I think they knew I’d feel shame when I was old enough to care, but I don’t believe this mark to be an infliction upon me. It would have been easier not to think about their grimy faces and bent bodies, but they knew I’d have eyes that would seek them out.
They gave me the ‘x’ because we parted one week after the Christening when I left Scotland. Without it, they knew I would wander through my childhood alone. We were born of the same cold earth and will return to it together when I lie beside them, but I was so young when I went away that they needed me to know I belong. They knew I’d come back––that I would try to find them in the strange land and would worry, as I do now, that their bones lie blanketed in soot.
When my eyes found them, I cried. They were everywhere; their ‘x’s staining generations of family records, labeling them as illiterate. These marks meant that not only were they incapable of forming the letters of their names, but the illegible, crooked, and shaky imprints revealed that they couldn’t even hold a writing instrument between their fingers.
I cannot distinguish my life from theirs, because in the dismal documentation of their history I find myself. This legacy forces me to imagine the shame they faced in representing their existence with such fragility and defeat. They were illiterate on their wedding day, and they were illiterate when their last child was born. The ‘making of their marks’––on the records and on my face––tells the story of the blurry boundaries of our lives.
I will write for them. The ‘x’ assures it.
My eyes leap when scanning the picture of me, two years old and chubby, sitting with my legs outstretched on our brown carpet. My face is peering up to the camera with what I know now to be the search for validation. There is a book on my lap. It covers my legs to the knee and is backwards and upside down, but it rests in my firm grasp. “Can you see me?” my young self wants to know.
I lift my right hand and can see the impression of a lifetime of coloring pencils, markers, and pens that have rested in my grip. How does it feel to not recognize this crease? I look at words on street signs and try to walk backwards through their window of meaning but can never stop knowing, because my eyes refuse to lie.
My fingers skim the keyboard. A face is always peering over my shoulder as I write. I know there’s no hiding from them. Their eyes may rise in flames as they watch, but they are also confident that this ability was no fluke. I came into this world with the purpose of using the ‘x’ to locate them and to then give their lives value by using the letters I love.
I hear sentences I know don’t belong to me. Their words sometimes drown out my own, and I disappoint when I refuse to write them. When ignored, these relatives find my mother in her dreams. They gather at the foot of her bed in angled rows, the imploring tall man in front holding his cap to his chest.
They know it was she who pulled them from the mines by researching the family and finding their ‘x’s on documents. Because of my mother, I have the dates of when they were born; when they died. What I don’t know, and what they want from me, is to find the stories they lived between those significant days.
Their eyes blink against a brightness which some of them haven’t experienced for three hundred and fifty years, while their marks lay forgotten in the dusty vaults of churches. These eyes, however, refuse to close because they are searching for something. They are searching for me.
I will write for them because I can. I will tell the sad, beautiful stories of their lives. They have the answers to my questions; they simply wait to be asked. Ink fades, and they know I cannot always write of them. The coal on my forehead may have led us to one another, but what pumps in my heart was theirs first. This blood expects me to live the life they couldn’t, and it will surge through my veins even when the only words I hear whispered are my own.
They simply want me to write. Style or tone or the success a piece may find doesn’t matter to them because when I write, I write them. The roundness of the letters I sweep across the paper gives these ancestors shape, gives them form. They wriggle in my poems, and stretch in my stories. Someday, they will dance in time to the rhythm of my fingers tapping the keys. They will twirl around letters, leap through words, and glide across pages of print that tell the story of our lives.
