Review: Any Known Blood

★★★★★

I started this book with some trepidation. I've read Lawrence Hill's Book of Negroes, and while I knew I was reading significant Canadian history, and the story was inspiring, I felt like I didn't connect with it. This story, Any Known Blood, describes a family's journey from Oakville, ON to Baltimore, MD  and back again. It speaks of one man's self-discovery by exploring his family's history across generations. I loved that the characters were flawed and complicated. 

The main character, Langston Cane the fifth is a mid-30s divorcée, unsure of himself, feeling like a failure, "come down in the world.... a most precipitous descent". Langston himself refers to, "it takes something to fall from the treadmill of great accomplishments, to fail, even at the tasks of being a husband and a potential father and a writer to march to the gates of middle age & look ahead and accept you will not change the world." And yet, over and over, the reader is brought face-to-face with Langston's self-reflection, honesty, kindness, determination and persistence.

The book is a series of stories, tied together. There is an incident described with the Ku Klux Klan coming to Oakville to stop the marriage of a Black man and a white woman. Then the story of Langston Cane the first, escaping slavery and fleeing to Oakville. There is a flashback of Langston V's relationship with his wife and their baby.

By the end of the book, I just sat and thought about the cycles of love, loss, and generational trauma that exists in so many Black lives. I thought how, maybe, humanity means that we are always triggered by our parents, and still seeking their approval and approbation. I thought about the patterns of behaviour that we learn by the ways in which our parents learned from their parents. I thought about how sometimes it takes deep honesty and reaching into our stories of the past to change those patterns. 

I anticipate adding this to my perennial re-reads list. I think I connected with this book because my family spends a lot of time celebrating who we came from. To me, Langston's search for family stories and the urge to write about them struck deep to the heart of me. I grew up sitting on the knees of family, and when my parents realized that the tales told were too beyond my understanding, they would suggest I "go play. Then, I listened through stair bannisters, my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles sharing uncensored stories of their aunts, uncles and grandparents. All of the juicy gossip and small (and sometimes not so-small) scandals that made themselves part of our family's story. I related closely with Langston V's yearning to find his place in the annals of the Cane family and understand, more of why and how he is the way he is.