My daughter could do her best to outrun it. Here was my choice: I could continue down the well-trod path upon which I’d been running for so very long and pass along this inheritance like a baton, as blithely as I did my light hair and fair skin. Malabar was the only mother I had, but she was not the mother I wanted to be. But our collective history would shape my daughter, and there was something noxious in our matrilineal line. The specifics of their lives would remain unknown to me, as mine would be to the baby I held.

What little I knew about my grandparents and great-grandparents had been constructed around a sturdy fact or two, embellished perhaps by a shy smile in a grainy photograph or an underlined sentence in a book or letter. I had started out as an egg inside Malabar, just as she had begun as an egg inside Vivian, and so on, each of our fates charted from the depths of our mothers. There was no escape their collective weight would crush me and my baby. I was at the front of this row of human dominoes, my infant in my arms, and as my forefathers and -mothers toppled behind me, they pushed the next generation into motion. I saw a long line of people, faceless in the distance, familiar as they got closer: my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents. For one brief second, it was as if a curtain had been lifted. I had a vision like the kind people describe when they’re near death. “lay there fresh and raw from having been carved open to bring her granddaughter into the world-the past ran me down.

Man camp a novel adrienne brodeur