My only sister is the baby of the family. And in a hospital in Nashville, I heard her middle name for the first time— Ashanté.

I’m unsure if she knows, but she shares her namesake with the Ghanian Ashanti people, a matrilineal society in West Africa that centers its women in inheritance and familial leadership. The Ashanti culture specifies tradition, family identity (like surnames), property, and power pass through the mother. In this cultural structure, the grandmothers are paramount and some of the most important people in the family. And as a Black woman from the south, I also see my grandmothers as pillars of the family itself.

We are first children, then too quickly adults. But we always find ourselves back at our grandmama’s doorstep, waiting to hear her voice. There are some traditions the mind just knows.

01. our grandmothers & an imbalance of DNA

My grandmothers raised children, grandchildren, and children that aren’t even related to them by blood. They have cooked, cleaned, wiped s**t off babies, cooked and cleaned again. When I think of my family, I think of my grandmothers. Though we live in a patriarchal society that primarily focuses around the father and his kin, I have only ever lived near my mother’s people. Perhaps that was because there was more help in Tennessee with my parent’s three young children, but it could also be because many Black people inherently align to the matrilineage of the mother, the grandmother.

Today is November 26, 2025. Thanksgiving is tomorrow. I will be driving to my mama’s mama’s house to cook and clean and maybe wipe s**t off babies. It is simply what is done, and what we always do.

As a daughter, I’ve inherited so much from my mother. Her face, for one. Her smile. Her poor eyesight. I inherited her zodiac sign. We share a love for information. I believe my love for reading came from her, too. I would also say my addictive personality was inherited from her, as well.

She is also the eldest daughter, and it shows in how we both refuse to be wrong. There is no other way than our own, no other path need be taken. Even when we know we are wrong, there is rightness in our acknowledgment.

The connection a (good) mother has with her daughter is something that can only be written about in poetry, or seen in art. Notice I say “good.” That is an important qualifier.

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Research states that we are all more related to our mothers than our fathers. Our mitochondrial DNA is passed down only from our mothers. This means that we all could, in theory, trace our mitochondrial DNA from our mothers to our grandmother and great-grandmother and so on, until we reach our first maternal ancestor. There’s no real way to follow this line for our fathers— and maybe that’s why men wish to tack their name over ours, to forever stake patriarchal claim to a woman’s biological heritage.

That’s a bit presumptuous. But I didn’t stutter.

The X chromosome from the mother also carries more DNA than the Y chromosome from the father, which means that even men are more closely relate to their mothers than their fathers. Even without any scientific explanation, this makes sense.

Women raise children. Women bring life. Women have always, always created and carried and cared for.

No angel stretched protecting wings

above the heads of her children,

fluttering and urging the winds of reason

into the confusions of their lives.

They sprouted like young weeds,

but she could not shield their growth

from the grinding blades of ignorance, nor

shape them into symbolic topiaries.

She sent them away,

underground, overland, in coaches and

shoeless.

When you learn, teach.

When you get, give.

As for me,

I shall not be moved.

—Maya Angelou, “Our Grandmothers”

02. matrilineal themes in books, in life

I’ve read two (very different) books this year that explicitly relate back to a Black woman’s matrilineage— and what our mothers’ ancestors give us. In both of these stories, though varied and not even slightly similar, I found that within all our mothers’ familial lines, there is trauma, as there is always trauma stored within the bodies of Black women. And this affliction is stamped onto our genealogy like livestock branding.

Share with me your maladies, and I can tell you of your mother’s past. As an example, autoimmune diseases are disproportionately found more in women than men, and Black women comprise an even higher percentage of that rate as we are more likely to develop Lupus and Multiple Sclerosis than other race. So-and-so’s mama had this affliction, and her mother before her. Years of ailments passed on from mother to child, mother to child.

Again, I say— share with me your suffering, and I might tell you where it started.

In Tracy Deonn’s fantasy series The Legendborn Cycle, we follow a North Carolinian young girl named Bree that inherited novel powers from an ancestral grandmother named Vera. Bree’s story is told through a distinct YA fantasy lens, filled with romance and the hero’s journey, but her connection with her mother’s ancestry is a constant and unwavering undercurrent throughout the series. This lineage carries a real presence of power, but as she succumbs to its might, she falls deeper into the curse that binds every woman on her mother’s side. It’s a tragic and complex tale of birthright and magic told through a retelling of King Arthur’s knights at the round table.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ epic novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois is a tale of matrilineal ancestry from the first chapter. The protagonist Ailey finds herself at first detached, then mystified, and ultimately curious to the point of study about` her mother’s Georgian family line. In her research, and through the passage of time within the book, we follow her journey of understanding why her family is, as the reader observes the how. Often, I found myself deeply saddened by the woes of heritage throughout the book. It is a heavy read. I loved it.

“We are the earth, the land. The tongue that speaks and trips on the names of the dead as it dares to tell these stories of a woman’s line. Her people and her dirt, her trees,”

― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

03. where our before-mothers go

I do not know.

I think sometimes they get lost in creating a new life for themselves with their new families. Our mothers became mothers and many stop being who they were before motherhood, though maybe that’s intentional. They lose their names, or their mother’s names. They are sometimes found with a new name entirely, or perhaps it’s hyphenated. Either way, our before-mothers are mostly lost to us.

I know I hear my before-mother in my voice, and the way I talk. She exists in every blurry photo I take of myself. She’s in my hair. Her mother’s mother is still etched in my memory, a tiny woman that always had her gums lined with snuff. Always smelled faintly of tobacco. When I was younger, we lived with my great-grandma for a couple years. It was a household of three distinct generations of women— me and my sister, my mama, and our mama’s grandmama. Most days, my grandma would come over and we would fulfill a partial line of Bullock women, the matrilineal surname that goes back to my great-great-great grandmother’s mother born in or around the year 1834.

We haven’t been able to confidently trace our familial heritage before then. There simply wasn’t any consistent documentation of slaves in West Tennessee and Virginia. Though the women in my family are making a valiant effort, it’s difficult. Not to mention, all our ancestors are hidden behind paywalls and geo-mapped proverbial tape… I digress.

I sometimes envy those that can trace their ancestry back to a crest, or a name, or a time in history. I can only confidently name my great-great-grandmother’s mother, then vaguely gesture towards census data that spells her mother’s name differently on every document.

It is no small task, to research your Black foremothers. To find documentation they existed and laughed and fought and cried and loved and cursed and watched their children grow up.

But I know they did all these things, because I am here. And I’m every woman, ain’t I?

04. a conclusion

Though you may try to pry off your mother’s mother’s mother’s ironclad grip on your marrow, it will be in vain. She, an eternity of She’s, will be with you always. They will follow you to the birth of your own children, through heartache, through love, through pain.

You inherited guardians, as well. Women that will forever be found in your DNA, down to the microscopic levels of you.

05. poem called Sacrament

It’s about the deity our mothers worship.

Man made God, a man-made god

Once revered, never removed

Spiritual, and yet so corporeal

Sabotaged by Hubris

Too large to carry on the back of man alone

So He created God

To share the weight

Hedonistically affixed to His likeness

Staring back at Himself

To a God that Hisses

Good boy, take Heed

Take a wife, take a lover

Take the land

Take the world!

—KJM

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