It's good to be back, see you all again.
Tyler.
This beautiful building.
Um, yeah, well you know this would not
exist without Wave, Charlie, Matthew, Heidi, Ellen, Joshua,
everybody there.
So what I'm going to do for is going to be pretty
straightforward, I think.
I'm just going to read like the beginning and end of this book
because what's in the middle, I think a lot of the lectures,
maybe, at this point you could probably find online.
And so I did what they ask me to do, do the lectures,
but then I was like but they're going to actually let
me do whatever I really want to do, so, as opposed to just like
coming out with the lectures.
I was like, well, can I put some drawings in it?
They were like yeah.
Can I put like a graphic poem in it?
Can I like draw a poem?
They were like yeah.
Can I put a map-- can I put old poems from old books in it?
They're like yeah.
So either that means that what this
is it'll never exist again, I'll never do it again.
Or it's all I'm going to do from now on,
I'm going to only, like, draw essays.
Anyway, OK.
So if I read what I have in the beginning,
I wrote it so I wouldn't have to talk through all of this stuff,
so I'm going to do that.
But the first thing I'll do, and I
guess I'm going to have to tell you a little bit, so it'll be--
I'll repeat it when I start reading it,
is that the book is kind of like I'm
pretending I'm Charles Kinbote, if you know who that is.
So if you don't, I'll explain it.
But essentially, the essays and lectures and drawings
are kind of down inside this poem, "The Idea of Ancestry"
by Etheridge Knight.
And of course, Matthew started by saying
that if you ask the poet about his poetics, he's going
or she's going to talk about anybody other than herself.
And that was my intention.
That is what I do.
And so, but this, again, with the freedom they gave me,
allowed me to do that and then some other stuff.
So anyway, OK, so now we're going to start.
That's the beginning my 20 minutes.
I'm going to start right now.
So we'll start with this poem that
really frames the whole book.
And I'm going to let you hear him read it.
So this is Etheridge Knight reading "The Idea of Ancestry."
And then I'll read you like some stuff from line one
in the poem taped to the wall of my cell.
And then I'll read you some stuff
from the last line, a phrase in the last line, which
is like I am me.
But this is the poem that I'll be sort of referencing
a lot inside of it.
When I was in solitary one--
I started making up this poem when I was in solitary one
time.
After being called by a number for five years, 30562,
I was beginning to forget who I was.
The idea of ancestry.
Taped to the wall of my cell of 47 pictures: 47 black faces:
my father, mother, grandmothers-- one dead--
grandfathers-- both dead-- brothers, sisters, uncles,
aunts, cousins--
first and second-- nieces and nephews.
They stare across the space at me sprawling on my bunk.
I know their dark eyes, they know mine.
I know their style, they know mine.
I am all of them, they are all of me; they are farmers,
I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.
I have at one time or another been in love
with my mother, one grandmother, two sisters, two aunts--
one went to the asylum--
and five cousins.
I am now in love with a 7-year-old niece--
she sends me letters written in large block print,
and her picture is the only one that smiles at me.
I have the same name as one grandfather, three cousins,
three nephews, and one uncle.
The uncle disappeared when he was 15,
just took off and caught a freight, they say.
He's discussed each year when the family has a reunion,
he causes uneasiness in the clan, he is an empty space.
My father's mother, who is 93 and he keeps the family
Bible with everybody's birth dates and death dates in it,
always mentions him.
There is no place in her Bible for whereabouts unknown.
Each fall, the graves of my grandfathers call me,
the brown hills and red gullies of Mississippi
send out their electric messages, galvanizing my genes.
Last year, like a salmon quitting the cold ocean,
leaping and bucking up his birth stream,
I hitchhiked my way from LA with 16 caps in my pocket
and a monkey on my back, and I almost
kicked it with the kinfolks.
I walked barefooted in my grandmother's backyard.
I smelled the old land and the woods.
I sipped corn whiskey from food jars with the men.
I flirted with the women.
I had a ball till the caps ran out and my habit came down.
That night, I looked at my grandmother and split.
My guts were screaming for junk, but I was almost contented.
I had almost caught up with me.
The next day in Memphis, I cracked a croaker's crib
for a fix.
This year, there is a gray stone wall damming my stream,
and when the falling leaves stir my genes,
I pace my cell or flop on my bunk
and stare at 47 black faces across the space.
I am all of them, they are all of me, I am me, they are thee,
and I have no sons to float in the space between.
I realize this is an earlier version of that poem,
because I'm going to talk about this later in the last piece I
read, he eventually changed it to children,
but that is a version where he says
I have no sons to float in the space between.
All right, so let's see.
I'll just read--
I'm trying to figure out how to read
without talking to you all.
Taped to the wall of my cell, so that first section, I, like,
I drew a cell and put some stuff in it.
And I had this excerpt from questions about The Molecular
Biology of a Cell from David A. Shaywitz and Douglas A. Melton.
So this is like, I'm inside that line, taped
to the wall of my cell, but I have
this quote about molecular biology
as they asked a series of questions.
As we study the life and lineage of a particular adult cell,
we ask the same questions that a biographer
asks of her subject: what were the critical decisions that
define the trajectory of this life and when were they made?
What were the contributions of neighbors
and what role was played by more distant influences?
What was the role of chance?
At what point was the final fate initially specified
and when was it ultimately sealed?
In essence, we would like to understand
the molecular biology, the molecular biography,
of the cell.
Have I been saying biology?
The molecular biography of the cell, it's a play on words
that they're doing.
So in this section, I just answered
a few of those questions, and I'll
read like maybe two of them to give you a sense of where
all this is coming from.
So one question, what were the critical decisions
that define the trajectory of this life?
When I began collecting interviews and stories
about Etheridge Knight more than a decade ago,
I said, mostly to the few people I cornered for interviews,
that I'd never write a biography because it would take
more than a decade to do it.
This is not a biography, but perhaps it
will encourage a future Knight biographer.
Consider this a collection of essays as speculative, motley,
and adrift as Knight himself.
His various personae grace the book
covers that are at my side at any given moment.
The bespectacled Knight in a prison
cell on the back of his 1969 book, Poems from Prison,
the nappy, bohemian Knight on the cover of 1973's Belly Song
and Other Poems, the Mississippi Knight in a cap
and overalls on the cover of 1980's Born of a Woman:
New and Selected Poems, and the sober, intellectual Knight
on the cover of 1988's The Essential Etheridge Knight.
Because he has been on my mind for virtually all of my writing
life, he has appeared from time to time among my poems,
influencing perspective, as in the poet
dying at the window from my first book,
influencing voice as in the poem "The Blue Knight"
from my third book, and an influence in form,
as in "Portrait of Etheridge Knight in the Style of a Crime
Report" from my fifth book.
So again, the poems are around there in the books--
and they let me put those poems in the book, too,
so when you get the book, you can see those, too.
Each time I've returned to my work
on Knight between publications of my own poetry,
and only the impossibility of a biography
has remained consistent.
He remains both muse and mystery.
Another question here, what were the critical decisions
that define the trajectory of this life?
At some point, in my years wandering and wondering
in between the lines of The Idea of Ancestry,
I began to think of myself as a real life Charles Kinbote,
the deranged scholar in Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel,
Pale Fire, except where Kinbote is literally a mad professor
unraveling a 999-line poem by his neighbor poet,
the murdered John Shade-- they say maybe he killed him--
I am me, a poet, a brother, a southerner,
unraveling The Idea of Ancestry, a poem by Etheridge Knight.
The distinction between a scholar on the trail of a poet
and a poet on the trail of a poet is an important one.
The scholar looks upon his life--
looks upon his subject as if through a window.
The scholar aims to frame the poet's work
according to things like genre, talent, culture, history.
A clear pane of logic interpretation and appreciation
separates him from this subject.
Conversely, a poet looking upon the poetry of another poet
sees something of himself reflected in the pain.
Process, imitation, competition are reflected in the work.
A poet looks upon the work of another poet
as if it is a mirror.
Please forgive my generalizations.
What's odd about Kinbote is, number one,
he believes the window is a mirror, so he sees only himself
when he looks into it, and two, he means to lift the window
and climb as a peeping Tom or Goldilocks would
into the lives of his subject, if you are following me.
He sees himself everywhere in the poem,
and the interpretation of the poem
is hogtied to the interpreter.
The great distorting power of Kinbote's imagination
gives Nabokov's novel its tension and trajectory,
lampooning the practice of close reading.
Pale Fire shows how expertise slides down a slippery slope
into delusion.
Delusion, depending on how you look at it,
is a form of the imagination.
Can imagination be a form of critical study?
For more than a decade, I have been imagining my way
into the slants and lines of Etheridge Knight.
So that pretty much gives you my premise
for everything in the book.
Like if imagination is a form of critical study,
then I can put drawings in it, I can wander,
and I can do what I'm going to read you all here,
the last two pieces and I'll be done.
So since I drew the cell, the image of the cell
with the parts in it, this would be
me sort of like imagining the link between the actual cell,
the biological cell, and then his cell and the middle ground.
So what was the role of chance?
The nucleolus parts of the cell is
an essential, inexplicable, unadulterated self.
The lover personality, the trickster personality,
the intuitive personality, the multiple true names in a cell--
remember, he's taped to the wall of his cell,
so I'm really thinking about Etheridge Knight.
The nucleus is a sphere of identity-- southerner, black,
son, male, convict, poet--
around the nucleolus.
Identity drifts over the mind and body in a cell.
Loves.
Loves resemble lightning rods, asymmetrical tracks,
slanted crosses, bone tired bones, prostate limbs,
as in the old footpath of a first love,
the barely discernible trail of a crush.
It is easier to love without speaking.
Orpheus dragged long silences around with him.
When I traveled to the smallest part of my body,
I found cytoplasmic space.
I am often a stranger to myself.
It is in the restless wrestling to make a song out
of despair that hope begins to wheel and vibrate.
Family is a vast system of interconnected members
in folded and convoluted sacks of nurture and/or trouble,
located in the cell's cytoplasm.
Some family smoothly transports nostalgia, hope, esteem, love,
and other positive materials through the cell.
Some family is a hive, a rough patch,
an outbreak that gives the appearance of several chips
on the shoulder.
A flattened, layered sac-like sack of fears
hover near the heart of things.
Fuck-ups move fear to other regions.
Regarding love and addiction, it's not the highs that last.
It's that one wants them to end so--
I'm sorry.
It's not the highs that last.
It's that one wants them to end, so nostalgia
can take root in the future.
Memory is more enduring than the event.
The influence of teachers, the influence of friends
who become teachers, as in relationships that convert
the energy found in ignorance to the energy
found in acquaintance, benevolence, fellowship.
I'm still mulling the multiple dimensions of a cell.
Biology is chance.
Biographer is chance.
OK, so look, let me just get to this last part.
This is what I want to read you all.
So I just thought I would read some stuff
I hadn't read before.
So I don't know what this is.
All right.
Later, OK line 38.
This is I and me.
This is like the last line of the poem
and I'm just sort of inside of it,
riffing on some of the stuff that happens in that last line.
As I said, if he later edited the poem, and that's just--
it's a blip in this piece, but I'll bring it up anyway
to give you a sense of how I'm dealing
with the book and the poem in general.
So knowing that he had that poem, "Idea of Ancestry"
and at one point, it was I have no sons
to float in the space between and it
became I have no children, so a little bit of mulling on that.
And maybe that comes up in the more serious lectures
and essays, but here, it's just a blip.
OK, I am me.
Later, I dreamed I was on a night plane somewhere
between the stars and Indianapolis.
It was the crows' sky, ominous, black, sparkling.
The man across the aisle, he sounded African,
talked to a drowsy white woman about something
that frequently featured the words Obama and oh mama.
It was none of my business.
When I looked down from the plane window,
I saw cemetary shapes.
The African said to the drowsy woman,
it is not often an African marries
an American white woman, but when it happens,
our offspring rules the free world.
I heard him say cost of living and yeah,
and then thank you Lord when our plane touched the ground.
I visited Indianapolis once in my waking life.
Nearly 15 years after Etheridge Knight's death
I'd arrived with a satchel of books and questions,
invited by Knight's sister Eunice
to read my poems at the Etheridge Knight festival.
When I spoke with her about her brother
a few hours in a downtown hotel, she
let me record our conversation.
She wore a blue headscarf and shared her cigarettes with me.
I'd already decided a biography needed to be written
and that I would not be the one to write it.
My aim was to gather stories some future biographer could
use.
I know I should not admit I was dreaming in the dream, vision
being what it is in a dream.
From a distance, I thought the driver
awaiting me near the baggage claim
was none other than three time NCAA
championship coach Bobby Knight.
When I saw-- when I neared, I saw
he was actually James Whitcomb Riley, the 19th century
poet from the age of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, something
sumptuous in a three-word name.
Old James Whitcomb Riley shrugged a bit,
dragging my book-heavy bags to the trunk of a sedan, longer
and blacker than a hearse.
That shouldn't be, that should be--
is that right, James Whitcomb Riley?
OK.
During my first trip to Indy, Eunice told me Junior--
the family's nickname for Knight--
loved no one more than his mother.
Eunice also took me to Crown Hill Cemetery.
As the third or fourth largest cemetery in the country,
it is a storehouse, a ghost archive,
to more than 190,000 names.
This will help me get my bearing,
Eunice said from the top of the hill,
where the grand, white columns of James Whitcomb Riley's tomb
loomed at the highest point in the city.
She scanned the acres of headstones around us,
adjusting her eyeglasses like binoculars
as she looked for the vicinity of her brother's plot.
She was happy, I think, that I had come,
maybe the first to ever come asking her brother's story.
My bags waited downhill in a pickup truck
with an obese, melancholy white woman,
Eunice's daughter-in-law.
The plump, biracial girl in the black seat was Eunice's--
the plump, biracial girl in the backseat
was Eunice's grandchild.
Eunice called out plot numbers, swinging her cigarette
in various directions like a smoldering conductor's wand,
like she was casting some sort of spell.
And I could see she was proud to show me the Riley tomb.
It's possible any out-of-towner visiting
Crown Hill for the first time is shown the Hoosier poet's
resting place.
It's possible countless Indiana children have taken field trips
to visit the Hoosier poet every year since his death in 1916.
In the dream, I'd already decided a biography
of Etheridge Knight needed to be written,
and I flew to Indianapolis-- one of his haunts--
to begin it, I'd need to fact check everything
about a man with a slippery relationship to facts.
In the bags with me in the dream were
flyers, files, outlines, interviews, books, journals,
essays, and essay fragments.
My life was always interrupted when I turned to Knight's life.
Plus, whenever I thought about the specter
of writing a biography, I was overcome with fear.
Knnight was a good talker.
I am a good talker, but I have no sense of plot, really,
and I generally prefer imagination over research.
I had not visited Kentucky, where
a biographical plot featuring the young Knight
as a runaway, a black Huck Finn, could be researched.
I had not visited Korea, where a biographical plot featuring
the young Knight as a 17-year-old soldier and runaway
could be researched.
I had not visited Indiana State Penitentiary,
where a biographical plot featuring
the young Knight as an inmate could be researched.
And most significantly, I had not
visited Corinth, Mississippi, where Knight had been born.
The various plots of Corinth include in its namesake
the Greek city-state destroyed by Rome in 146 BC.
The plots of Corinth include the year 1854,
when a railroad town development called
Cross City was renamed Corinth.
The plots of Corinth include the ghosts
of the 473 rebel soldiers killed in the second battle of Corinth
during the American Civil War.
Sometimes, you can have no more than an idea
of history's plots.
Plots are filled with dirt and antiquated clothes,
the black landowners just out of earshot.
What did this just do?
The Black landowners just out of earshot
of the trains's whistles and dereliction.
The various plots of Corinth include
Knight's mother, Belzora, breathing
the wide, free, green air at the turn of the century.
My mother always wore shoes, Eunice told me.
They raised everything they needed.
Even the whites called her grandfather Mr. Cozart.
This, Eunice said, was the privilege
her brother was born into in 1931, the privilege he'd
wanted all his life, she says.
On the back of Etheridge Knights, Born of a Woman:
New and Selected Poems, published
on Houghton Mifflin in 1980, Knight
grins from a porch in Mississippi.
Gray-haired Mr. Pink Knight and Etheridge Knight wear overalls.
Mr. Pink Knight stoops behind three young girls
peering at the camera.
Etheridge Knight seems to be looking off,
across the field perhaps, caught in mid-sentence.
The light reflected in the wide lenses of his eyeglasses
make his eyes two white bursts below his newsboy cap.
The three girls pose exactly as they would have
for an elementary school photo.
Mr. Pink Knight seems to be rising
from the porch behind him.
A woman stands over his shoulder,
peering down from the porch with the hand resting
on her rotund waist, a pose that is both maternal and amused.
A few feet behind her, a second, much thinner woman
stands with her arms crossed.
Her face is washed out by the shadows.
She seems headless, apparitional,
a slightly perturbed ghost in a white dress.
We've got ghost theme going tonight.
They are, perhaps, the two aunts Knight mentions
in "The Idea of Ancestry."
The photo was taken by Ellen Slack.
In the 1988 issue of Painted Bride Quarterly dedicated
to Knight, Slack writes Etheridge
had heard that his relative Pink Knight was staying with family,
and he wanted me to take some photographs.
No birth records existed for Pink Knight,
but by all accounts, he had to be at least 110 years old,
meaning he was born in Mississippi shortly
after the Civil War.
This is what the photographer said.
Knight wanted to record the plots and plights of his oldest
living ancestor.
He wanted more than an idea of ancestry.
A Corinth Mississippi plot includes Etheridge Knight
smiling in the photograph.
I thought once a life was simply an accumulation of details.
Maybe, I think this even now.
Knight was often blowing smoke over details,
and to write a biography, one would
need to gather all that smoke into something solid, something
you could hold and turn over in your hands.
Time, patience, and discipline are irrelevant in a dream.
I should not admit it was a dream.
I reached the same hotel I stayed at to interview
Eunice years before.
I arrived after midnight with a satchel of books,
seeking stories of the poet's life on Earth.
I did not sleep.
There was an old but functional typewriter in my room.
The housekeeper said each room had paper and a typewriter.
We like to call them pianos, she told me.
The first time I stayed there when I was awake and real,
Eunice said the hotel had been the haunt
for many Black writers, including Mari Evans.
Mari Evans, born the summer of 1923, author of several poetry
books, children books and plays, was and is still
alive somewhere in Indianapolis.
I actually think she died last year, you know, at like 500.
And really, like, recently.
As further evidence of my lousy research biographer skills,
I didn't meet her.
But in a dream, she worked the desk
wearing an ornate watercolor dress
while reciting her best known poem,
"I am a Black Woman" to anyone who
looked like the wrong sort of hotel guest,
anyone who was used to talking more than listening,
anyone who did not look you in the eye
when looking you in the face.
She did not hand me my room key until the poem's
dramatic ending, beyond all-- this
is her poem-- beyond all definitions still,
defying space and time and circumstance, assailed,
impervious, indestructible, look on me and be renewed.
I did not sleep.
Each time I closed my door or eyes,
someone showed up to offer a tale about Knight.
A woman who looked no more than 25 years old
wanted to tell me about the day she spent with Knight in 1956.
One of my own teachers, Ed Ochester,
appeared with the tale of big Beefeater bottles
and a whole pig roasting in a spit at the wake
Knight held for himself.
Poets Robert Bly, Sharon Olds, Christopher Gilbert
showed up to share poems.
Jeanne D'Amico stopped by to tell me
a version of the story she had told me when I interviewed her
in my waking life.
Knight's leg had been--
Knight's leg was amputated after a car wreck in Philadelphia
in 1988.
In the dream, she told me the tracks and scars
glowed like half-lit embers in the darkness of his body.
His face was swollen and more than half dead,
but he still had that voice, like burlap soaked in molasses.
She handed me a small, silver ring,
and made me promise to place it on the shy, black pinky
toe of Knight's remaining foot when I met him.
An old man named Houndmouth promised
I'd be taken to Knight after undertaking a special task.
Houndmouth had spent years gathering the piles
of butts left by Etheridge.
He organized them into cigarette, into categories.
Cigarettes smoked in prison, cigarettes
smoked after making love, cigarettes smoked in Memphis
and Massachusetts and Minnesota, cigarettes smashed under boots,
cigarettes tossed in rivers.
He had no research to prove they should
have been ordered in this way.
He just held each button to his nose or to the light
and then let his own intuition decide its place.
My task was to match specific butts to specific poems.
I sat with him for what felt like half an eternity just
looking at it all on my first visit.
I had a little tape recorder with me.
I ate a little corner of Houndmouth's ham and cheese
sandwich.
I sat twice as long the next day.
Eventually, Houndmouth gave up on me.
In the dream, he confessed Knight was still
alive and incarcerated in an assisted living
facility across town.
We came to a security guard at a small desk in the building's
cavernous lounge.
When Houndmouth told me the guard was Knight's only son,
Isaac Bushie Blackburn Knight, I blurted,
almost without thinking, I like sons better than children.
Yeah, me too, he said, looking down.
During my waking visit in Indianapolis,
Eunice told me someone casually suggested children
for the end of "Idea of Ancestry"
so Knight had changed it from sons to children.
Sons is not the same as children.
Sons are not soft, amorphous offspring.
Sons are born with knives or pistols, pissing and pointing,
because they are sons.
God only had sons, according to Christians.
That tells you some of the trouble with God.
Sons are both old and brand new.
Sons are miniature men.
But children are as generic as people,
sometimes horribly innocent, sometimes horribly attractive,
sometimes horrible.
Children have no gender.
It is false, but widely believed,
children are universal.
It is only true children are universal if universal
means full of space.
Space is expansive, impermanent, and mysterious.
Knight lived with children who were not his children.
They had names and nicknames before he met them.
But there is little on record about the children
because they are thought of as children.
Children become invisible, because the adults are looking
elsewhere, but also because the children do not
wish to be seen.
They were sons before they were children in the poem "The Idea
of Ancestry."
Farmers, soldiers, preachers wearing Knight's name
with the princely carriage.
He dreamed of them inside that cell.
He sat in the dark with the premonition of the damage that
would befall his sons.
He would have to abandon them to make them stronger.
He would have to change them to children.
The suggestion to change the line from I have no sons to I
have no children came before Knight had a son,
but now, here was his son, half black, half white,
a lobby guard with the goatee thick and woolly
as a surgical mask.
I could not see his face.
In my waking life, I'd wondered often about the boy's
appearance and whereabouts.
Did he have his mother's mouth and nose?
Did he have siblings?
Did he imagine his father's ghost was with him
when he graduated from high school or college
or is admitted to an emergency room for a broken bone?
Did he know he was the son of a poet?
Had he grown up reading his father's books?
Had he shunned the books stacked tall and smelling
of difficulty and tobacco?
Had the son seen the photograph of his father in the half lotus
tree yoga pose in the Las Vegas tuxedo shop before the 1987
American Book Awards.
So those pictures that I talk about are in here.
Did the son possess photographs of his father's dark sleeping
head and unzipped, oblivious mouth?
Did the son rage and weep in his sleep?
He'd be a man now, with children of his own,
but I had done none of the research to find him.
In the dream, the watchman was Knight's only son,
Isaac Bushie Blackburn Knight.
He nodded and let me pass.
The building had more floors than there
were stars over the city.
The elevator ride up was so long that I
dozed off and dreamed I was being driven
north by my little brother.
He was telling me a tale about a soldier who
had given a testimony in church one Sunday.
He'd been a prisoner of war, bound
in the cellar of a farmer and his wife.
I was saved by a big, black dog, a hound whose master had
probably been killed in the war, the soldier
told the dumbstruck congregation,
my brother among them.
For a moment, I thought the dog was
no more than a lean shadow in the corner, a darkness
slipping over the antiques and contraptions of my captors.
But then, the dog pulled the rope from my wrist and ankles.
When he touched his cool muzzle to my jaw,
I knew he wished to lead me away.
I crawled through the cellar window behind him
and then tried to rise.
And I'm sorry--
I crawled through the cellar window behind him and then,
too tired to rise, followed on my hands and knees
to the fields and into the deep, dark forest.
Had anyone seen me, they would have thought
a dog was following a dog.
We were between borders on a mountain highway
when my brother told me this story.
Before this trip, I had not been alone with him for more--
before this trip, I had not been alone with him
for that long since our childhood.
In the dream, there was a black train in the distance.
I pray for you, my brother said to me.
After a year of marriage, he had changed
as a man bound by love or grief is bound to change.
Their first child had not survived.
He had laid his sorrows down and put on a new name.
Sundays now, the preacher came to dine.
I wanted to ask a few questions.
White fog covered the nose of the car.
I was falling into the kind of sleep
that requires no darkness.
He reached our church with the look that reminded me of you,
my brother said to me in the dream.
We thought he'd come that day to give thanks to God,
but he'd only come to ask, who among us was his kin.
That's it, y'all.