Generación / generation

By: Arianna Morgan

My maternal grandmother used to tell me that our family carried an intuitive gene, but that it skipped every generation. As she handed me my sparkly pink gardening gloves to help her clean up the rose bushes, she confessed that I have it.

For most of my life, I understood that gift as something almost ordinary. In the small circle of Black Indigenous women in Oklahoma who raised me, intuition was not necessarily mystical. It was a language. A feeling in your stomach. A dream you couldn’t shake. A warning that arrived before the thing itself. It lived alongside folklore, church songs, family stories, and all the other ways Black people have carried knowledge that was never written down.

But as I ventured outside that world into communities that had towns named Poughkeepsie but cared very little for Indigenous, much less Black Indigenous culture, I began to distrust it. I learned to explain everything away. Anxiety. Coincidence. Overthinking. I have been diagnosed with clinical anxiety, something that feels strangely adjacent to my grandmother’s bipolar disorder. So I became suspicious of my own instincts, learning to treat my body as an unreliable narrator.

It has made me a foreigner in my own body.

I am slowly beginning to wonder whether every strange sensation deserves to be dismissed. Sometimes there is a feeling in my spine that I immediately label as anxiety, something flippant and inconvenient that I should disregard. Sometimes it becomes so overwhelming that I cannot breathe. But what if some of what I feel is not something to escape, but something to listen to?

I learned this most painfully from my grandmother.

As dementia took her, I watched her worlds blur. During sundowning, she could become violent and childlike, her anger arriving with the bewildering force of a toddler’s tantrum. And then, sometimes, the fog would lift. She would suddenly be there — fully herself. She would take my head in both of her hands and look at me with an intensity that scared me.

Then she would warn me about something that was going to happen.

And she was right.

Every time.

Not in broad, easily interpreted ways, but with a specificity that still unsettles me. Once, she warned me about something that seemed completely random. Days later, I got into a fender bender.

What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?

I don’t know what this intuition gives me. It has not protected me from the horrors of my life, just as it has not guaranteed me its joys. I don’t feel particularly prepared for anything I sense coming. If anything, knowing that something might happen can make waiting for it worse.

Maybe the point was never prediction.

Maybe this inheritance is something older and stranger: a way of remembering.

I am Black Creek, and I come from people who have always made meaning through stories — long-winded folklore, songs, warnings, myths, exaggerations, prayers. We call some of these things myths because we do not know what else to call them. But myths can also be containers for memory. They hold the things generations experienced long before us, the things that could not be documented but were still passed down.

Perhaps that is what my grandmother meant by “the gene.”

Not a supernatural inheritance, necessarily, but a sensitivity to what has already been felt. A body carrying the echoes of people who came before it. A mind that notices something before it knows how to name it.

I don’t know whether I am gifted, anxious, grieving, or some impossible combination of all three.

For now, I am trying to stop treating that uncertainty as a reason not to listen.