Counting Descent

Clint Smith

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Quantifying Family History

“Counting Descent” is full of numbers that quantify different aspects of the family history as it is told. Some of these figures are ordinary, expected features of certain facts. It’s fairly standard for the speaker to quantify how many aunts and uncles or siblings he has, and how many boys and girls there are in that number. The fact that his grandparents moved once across the Mason-Dixon line is crucial to the story because it gives the reader more information about their geography. The length of the speaker’s parents’ marriage and the age of his sister also give the reader useful information by giving them an impression of how old the speaker is.

Other figures are more specific than they need to be for the reader to understand the story. The speaker tells the reader that he and his siblings live “1,517 miles apart” (Line 30). This number is large enough that the tens place or the ones could have been rounded and the reader would still have a fairly accurate impression of the distance. The same goes for how long the speaker’s mother was in labor: “twelve hours, forty-three minutes” (Line 31) is needlessly precise. By including these extraneous details, the reader demonstrates his care for the topic at hand. He took the time to calculate these figures before he told the story, and this shows how important the smallest details are to him. It shows his gratitude and care for his family members as well. Counting the minutes his mother was in labor is a way to give credit for every moment she spent bringing him into the world. The precision of 1,517 miles implies that the speaker would consider one more mile of distance or closeness to be a significant figure.

Joy as Inheritance

The family history in “Counting Descent” is a story of joy that the speaker inherits from previous generations, a story he might possibly pass on to his children one day. His family members have a history of joy. His grandparents may have been poor by some people’s standards, but their children didn’t notice, and their parents didn’t go out of their way to tell them. “Poor / ain’t poor unless you name it so” (Lines 13-14), the speaker affirms, and children don’t care to name these things. What the family lacked in money, they made up for in other riches; they didn’t “wallow in anything but laughter” (Line 16). Like his grandparents, the speaker’s parents have a long and happy marriage. Times have changed, but “[Mom] loves Pops, they’ve been married // for thirty-one years and have three kids” (Lines 28-29). The speaker defines his siblings by their best qualities. He calls his sister “twenty-four years of loyal / & eight years of best friend” (Lines 47-48), demonstrating how important she is to him. His brother is “taller & knows more about / numbers” (Lines 45-46), both ways in which he surpasses the speaker. The speaker is even joyful in his flaws.

The speaker uses this inheritance to understand his own identity and make sense of his future. In a comic realization, he understands his mother forgave him for his so-called big head because he needed it to pursue his love of reading and knowledge (Lines 34-35). The speaker underscores this comment, remembering that the number of books in the library seemed endless. He didn’t have a good grasp of what infinity was as a child, but he knew it had something to do with the universe, and “books felt like the universe to me” (Line 40). The speaker’s mother built his love of reading into the family history, both describing the supportive environment in which he was raised and creating that environment through her supportive actions. He describes himself as more naïve than anyone else in his family for believing “we can build this world into something new” (Line 50). This foolhardy belief shows what an impact the inheritance of joy has had on him, making him optimistic in spite of his surroundings.

Familial Cycles and Patterns

The speaker illustrates a few patterns in “Counting Descent.” One pattern is resilience in the face of hardship. For the speaker’s grandparents and their children, living in small homes didn’t matter “most days” (13). The word “most” is key; it suggests that there were days when it was hard, and they may have wished for different circumstances. Despite this, their lives were characterized by the good days. The speaker’s grandmother chanced into having an extra day off of work to give birth to his mother. This one day was not only sufficient for her needs but a blessing. She wouldn’t have been working that day anyway, so the family didn’t lose any money in the process. This anecdote sharply illustrates just how hard the grandparents had to work to support their family. The speaker’s grandmother expresses no anger or shame about this time in her life. Rather, she compares herself to God, likening the miracle of birth to divine creation.

The speaker is aware of other, more dangerous cycles outside of his family dynamic. He doesn’t disclose any hardships from his youth as he tells this story, but he is aware of the systemic violence he may be subjected to as a young Black person in America. He “celebrate[s] every breath, tried to start counting / them so I wouldn’t take each one for granted” (Lines 53-54). The cycle looms large enough that the speaker is grateful for every day that he evades it. In fact, the cycle of violence has been turning over often enough recently that he changed tactics and stopped counting altogether.