Blood (14 page)

Later that day, I found a bachelor apartment to rent. I stayed in Québec for two years, travelled a few times to Africa and Europe, and worked in Winnipeg and Ottawa. With one brief exception, I did not return to live in Toronto until eleven years after finishing high school.

Years later, my novels and non-fiction books began to find a few readers. One never knows who will show up, or not turn up, at a public reading. At my first literary reading in Hamilton, Ontario, four people attended — the event organizer, the bookseller, the bookseller’s assistant, and me. Committed writers just take it and carry on, so I did too. When people heard that I was a writer and knew of my family connections, they would often say: “You come by it honestly” or “It’s in your blood!” If writing is in my blood, my circulation is awfully slow. I had been writing since my childhood, but had no impression that a knack for writing flowed in my veins. To me, it felt like twenty years of effort finally paid off when
Some Great Thing
, my first novel, was published in 1992. Eight books later, I still don’t feel that writing is in my blood. It is in my brain, and in my work, and in the hours I have invested and the hours I have yet to invest in the development of my craft.

People often ask me if any of my five children will become writers. I don’t know. All I really wish is that my children lead rich, fulfilling lives. My own worth and identity are not validated if my children become writers, or negated if the children opt to drive trucks or fly planes. If they do become writers, will it be because the writing gene in my own veins slipped into theirs? I prefer to imagine that it will be because they worked bloody hard at something that they felt was an achievable, ordinary goal. I like to think that they heard me typing late into the night a few thousand times, and that the process of pitching one’s soul onto the page seemed normal to them. If it was part of my daily life, they might think it could be part of their lives too.

Parental expectations can crush the spirits of children. I sometimes jokingly say that as the son of immigrants to Canada, I understand full well that the last thing many immigrants want is to see their son or daughter become a novelist. They are looking for doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects — any professional career that they hope will protect their children from economic and social vicissitudes visited on earlier generations in the family, in other parts of the world. The expectations can be suffocating when expressed along lines of blood.

I want to share one episode from my childhood. My father loved my brother, sister, and me very much. We were lucky to have him, and we loved him too — especially after we hit the magic age of seventeen or eighteen and moved out of the house, which made us free to engage with him on our own terms, and freed him of trying to force-feed professional career ambitions down our throats.

I credit my father’s personality and energy for infecting me with an enthusiasm for life and for writing. But when we were children, Dad never spoke of his own failures, and chose instead to hammer home all of the accomplishments of his ancestors. For example, my great-grandfather, Daniel Hill I, had been born in Maryland in 1860, just a step outside of slavery. He graduated from Lincoln University and went on to become a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal (
AME
) Church. His son (my grandfather), Daniel Hill II, graduated as well from Lincoln, went on to complete graduate studies, and became an
AME
church minister. Following in this tradition, my father earned a doctorate degree and playfully but frequently drove home that he had a “Phud” (Ph.D.) from the University of Toronto. He perceived that ambition and professional success were in the family blood.

My father was also fond of citing the accomplishments of our Flateau cousins. He had an older sister, Jeanne Flateau, who lived in Brooklyn with her husband and their seven children. Jeanne had raised the children and managed to keep up her own career as a social worker. I felt close to those cousins, and still do, but as a child I hated it when Dad rhymed off all of their successes. I felt that he was telling us that we had a super-intelligent, high-achieving strain of blood in one branch of the family, and implying that we — the Hill children in Toronto — were of a lesser branch. The Flateaus, Dad seemed to be saying, were in the family arteries. We were in the capillaries. It was particularly confounding because Dad let us know that he did not expect all that much from us, but that anything less than perfection would be unacceptable. This made me crazy.

One day, while attending Grade 9 at the University of Toronto Schools (a private high school), I came home, swallowed nervously, and told my father that the very next day I expected to fail a biology test.

He looked at me firmly and said, without the slightest hint of irony or playfulness, “Hill kids don’t fail.”

I did fail the exam, and felt all the worse as a result of what he had told me: that this failure violated a rule of my family blood.

HOW DID WE COME
TO EQUATE
blood with the transmission not only of skill and talent but the right to lead and inspire others? How is it that we have bought into the idea so fully that for the longest time we believed that bluebloods had a moral right to rule over others?

Part of the reason may reside in the physicality of blood; the way it moves, circulating through the body, being sent out and returning — unless it is spilled in the drama of an accident, or is made to spill as the result of a purposeful attack. But as we saw in chapter one, we have also held on to some part of the concepts that Hippocrates developed in 400
BCE
, when he theorized that personality and health were determined by the presence and balance of the four humours.

In
The Nature of Man
, Hippocrates wrote: “The body of man has in itself blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile; these make up the nature of his body, and through these he feels pain or enjoys health. Now he enjoys the most perfect health when these elements are duly proportioned to another in respect of compounding, power and bulk, and when they are perfectly mingled.”

Six hundred years later, the Roman physician and philosopher Galen argued that the preponderance of one particular humour determined a person’s basic personality type. Blood was thought to accelerate the spirit, and thus we have come to employ the word
sanguine
to describe fundamentally optimistic people. If you are a positive person, Galen led us to believe, it’s because it is in your blood. It’s not a huge leap to assume that talent, and God-given rights to lead or inspire, might also reside in the blood.

Because of the public successes of my father and brother, I’ve always been intrigued by the lives of people who pursued the same public careers as their famous parents or siblings. When singer-songwriters Julian Lennon and Adam Cohen began to attract attention, I felt that I understood what it might mean to them to have grown up in the shadows of John Lennon and Leonard Cohen, respectively. Their careers might forever be situated in their fathers’ shadows.

In March 2013, the young Canadian singer-songwriter Zoe Sky Jordan gave an interview on
CBC
Radio about the release of her new album,
Restless, Unfocused
. The interviewer noted that Sky Jordan is the daughter of musicians Amy Sky and Marc Jordan, both of whom have had successful careers performing their own work and writing songs for other recording stars. Early in the interview, Sky mentioned that in her high school years, she had resisted following in her parents’ footsteps, choosing instead to explore other art forms, such as pottery and dance. However, after graduating, she did not feel the call to go to university and chose instead to launch her own career in music.

“People, especially in Toronto, are always coming up to me and talking about my blood,” she said in the interview.

Just as music lovers pay attention to family ties among recording stars, voters follow family dynasties in politics. There were U.S. senators Bobby and Ted Kennedy, brothers of President John F. Kennedy. Cuban president Raúl Castro is the younger brother of the famous revolutionary and the country’s former, long-time leader Fidel Castro. Indira Gandhi, the third prime minister of India, was the daughter of her country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The current leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, is not just the son but also the grandson of his country’s previous leaders. Since the founding of the North Korean state in 1948, Kim Jong-un, his father, Kim Jong-il, and grandfather Kim Il-sung have been the only leaders. As North Korea escalated its bellicose anti-Western rhetoric in 2012 and early 2013, some Western observers wondered if the newly appointed supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army was trying to climb out from under the weight of his family dynasty and create his own identity as North Korea’s new leader.

When Justin Trudeau was elected to serve as a Liberal member of Parliament in Canada, and again when he won the leadership of the Liberal Party in April 2013, I could not help but wonder how he would hold up when constantly compared to his father. The late Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the flamboyant political superstar who was adored by some electors and detested by others, served as Canada’s fifteenth prime minister from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984. In the barrage of news coverage about Justin’s march toward the leadership of the Liberal Party, it became virtually impossible to read or hear any detailed news report that did not mention his father, and many speculated about the idea that politics ran in the younger Trudeau’s blood.

Perhaps some part of the contemporary voter’s soul longs to be ruled by dynasties. Even in anti-monarchist countries such as the United States, dynasties (think of presidents John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, and George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush) represent a sort of security, and harken back to ancient kingdoms in which a family could be counted upon to rule for generations.

Bloodlines formally ensure and dictate the continuation of royal families. You cannot aspire to be the queen or king of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth countries unless you are born or marry into the right family. Until recently, even if you had the requisite bloodlines, you could not be first in line to the throne if you were a woman who had a brother — regardless of your age or competence, or his.

The fixation on blood — be it in the realm of political dynasties or musical stardom — detracts from a level-headed analysis of the quality of a person’s leadership or art. By assuming that the traits of leadership or artistry are in the blood, we assume that the people so venerated have a right to lead (or sing), that we should pay attention to them, that they “come by it honestly,” that their extraordinary and individual hard work counts for less than their placement inside a family, and that they deserve to be elevated to a godlike status.

And what about the siblings and children who do not climb onto the same podium as their celebrated relatives? Have they disappointed us? Is there something deficient in their characters? What if you attempt to pursue the passion that made your parent or sibling famous, but you turn out to be not very good? There can be the sense that you have somehow violated or disrespected the dictates of your own blood. You have shamed yourself and your family, or so it is felt, and it would have been better if you had not undertaken the endeavour at all. On the other hand, one might say that an untalented child or sibling (or one with a different talent) might have been betrayed by his or her own blood, in that the family magic skipped over that person.

In my opinion, it is smug and self-satisfying to declare oneself special because of family blood. One is no more special because of the blood in the family than one is special by dint of the accident of one’s country of birth. Does being a Canadian, or being a member of the Hill family, make me more special — more deserving of privilege, more entitled to comfort, more valuable as a human being, than any person in any country? Of course not. The flip side of egregious pride in one’s family blood or luck of citizenship is the sense that others are less human, less valuable, less deserving than you.

Is a person entitled to lead a country because of his or her bloodline? No. The bloodline is a figment of our imagination. A president, prime minister, or dictator’s blood does not recirculate in the veins of his or her daughter or son. It’s time to move beyond our blood-based obsession with dynasties in politics, and genius in art. Roll over Hippocrates, and tell Galen the news.

ONE NIGHT, WHILE PREPARING
to go to bed, my stepdaughter Beatrice Freedman — about six years old at the time — was discussing her own identity with her mom (my wife, Miranda). I was not in the room, but was told that the conversation first touched upon whether Beatrice was Jewish, given that her father was. This is a tricky issue, because Jewish ancestry is traditionally determined by matrilineal descent. Still, Miranda reiterated that Beatrice was related, through her family, to Jewish people. After pondering this for a moment, Beatrice — who had been in my life for about three years at this point — said: “And I’m a little bit black, right?” Miranda asked what Beatrice meant to say. Beatrice replied, “Well, Larry is black and I’m his stepdaughter, so that makes me a little bit black too.”

“No, that’s not how it works,” Miranda replied. She went on to explain that a person’s biological parents generally determine black identity. In other words, along lines of family blood.

Eight years have since passed, and in my family we have all had occasion to chuckle about that conversation. But it was more than merely funny. I find it touching to think of Beatrice identifying with people she loved — her father, and me — but running into social rules and barriers every step of the way. Who is to say that Beatrice could not be black or Jewish, if she wanted, and who can argue that others have not done so previously? Is one’s identity an absolute function of one’s family blood? Can one not create an identity for oneself? Given that identity arises largely from social (as opposed to biological) functions, who is to say that one’s identity cannot change — temporarily or permanently? Who is in charge of a person’s identity?