ASHLEY C. FORD

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“Ford powerfully captures the complicated mix of meanness, frustration, and obsessive mothering familiar to so many Black daughters. Her mother is ever vigilant, fearing for Ashley out in a world that doesn’t value Black women and girls. At the same time, her mother has a short fuse, exacting physical punishment on Ford (slaps, kicks, ‘whuppings’) for any transgression real or imagined. In these moments of maternal rage, ‘it was not my mother,’ Ford says, ‘it was the Mother,’ one who never offers the apologies her daughter so desperately craves.”

My oldest memory is of my younger brother, R.C., eating a smashed overripe tomato. I remember the way he grabbed at the pulpy red flesh, and the way he could only hold it one way: as tightly as he possibly could. This is normal for small children who have not yet mastered their motor skills. There is no difference between holding and squeezing. They don’t know any better. He didn’t know any better, and neither did I. Of course, the guts of the fruit broke free into the spaces between his small fingers, and made a mess on the white tray top surrounding him. By the time he opened his hand to take a bite, there were only cold strings of bright skin and small white seeds.

My brother was too young to walk, but I wasn’t. It was I who rooted around in the bottom of the refrigerator, found the food, and attempted to slice it for him with a butter knife. He’d been crying in his walker, the little wheels scooting back and forth across the floor as he flung himself from side to side. My mother slept so hard his wails didn’t stir her. I didn’t want her to wake up. I wanted her to sleep, and I wanted to help. My brother and I were fourteen months apart in age, so I must have been around three years old. I don’t remember a time before him. I was supposed to have been a miracle baby for my mother. She’d had an ovary removed as a teenager, and her doctor told her the other one didn’t work. It worked enough for me apparently. Then R.C. came along, and I was not a miracle anymore. I was a big sister, and to me, that was better. I loved him too much right from the beginning.

I saw my mother go to feed him each time he cried, so I thought food would make him happy. He was my best friend. I would take care of him. I rubbed his head and whispered, “Don’t cry, baby. Don’t cry.”

When I was in college, one of my therapists at the on-campus counseling center told me I shouldn’t remember any of this because I was too young. He told me most people don’t have memories of themselves or their experiences at two and three years old. He asked me when I started speaking. I told him that I could speak in sentences before I could walk, a fact I’d been reminded of by my grandmother every chance she got.

“You couldn’t walk straight for nothing. We called you Stagger Lee!” She’d say, laughter ripping through her entire body, infecting anyone else in the room, even me, often at my own expense. “But you’d point at something you wanted and say, ‘I want that!’ I thought, what kind of child is this?” She’d shake her head, recreating the same confused look she’d apparently worn all those years ago.

I told him my grandmother had a tendency to oversell my childhood intellect, so I couldn’t be sure if it was accurate information. He wrote it down on his notepad, and I continued to tell him my stories, or what I remembered of them. My earliest memories are sunburnt Polaroids, frozen moments gone blurry at the edges and spotted all down the middle. Then, at four, the pictures become clearer and clearer, as do the voices within them. The loudest voice belongs to my brother, before he could properly pronounce my name, calling for me. “Hashy? Where are you? Where is my Hashy?” My brother loved me and made it so easy to believe I was good. I was a child, unspoiled in a certain way. I didn’t doubt myself. I decided and I tried. Then I’d fail and try again. Or I would succeed and go on to try something new. I was not always as afraid of the world or as nervous about the other people living in it alongside me, or what they might do to me. When my life was new, I understood in my bones how little it mattered what anybody else was doing, or what they thought about what I was doing. I believed my bones then.

When I was four years old, I taught myself to lie awake until morning. I wanted the sunrise, and I only had to stay awake to have her. When children are small, our desires seem small, even if we want the sky. Anything we want seems to be only a matter of time and effort away. It’s too early to imagine what’s already holding you back.

— Excerpted from by Ashley C. Ford. Copyright 2021 by Ashley C. Ford. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.

— Bridgett M. Davis, The New York Times

Somebody’s Daughter: A Memoir by Ashley C. Ford, Flatiron Books, 224 pages, $14.39 Through poverty, adolescence, and a fraught relationship with her mother, Ashley C. Ford wishes she could turn to her father for hope and encouragement. There are just a few problems: he’s in prison, and she doesn’t know what he did to end up there. She doesn’t know how to deal with the incessant worries that keep her up at night, or how to handle the changes in her body that draw unwanted attention from men. In her search for unconditional love, Ashley begins dating a boy her mother hates. When the relationship turns sour, he assaults her. Still reeling from the rape, which she keeps secret from her family, Ashley desperately searches for meaning in the chaos. Then, her grandmother reveals the truth about her father’s incarceration ... and Ashley’s entire world is turned upside down.

Somebody’s Daughter steps into the world of growing up a poor Black girl in Indiana with a family fragmented by incarceration, exploring how isolating and complex such a childhood can be. As Ashley battles her body and her environment, she embarks on a powerful journey to find the threads between who she is and what she was born into, and the complicated familial love that often binds them.

Ashley C. Ford is a writer, host, and educator who lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, with her husband, poet and fiction writer Kelly Stacy, and their chocolate lab, Astro Renegade Ford-Stacy. Ford is the former host of The Chronicles of Now podcast, co-host of The HBO companion podcast Lovecraft Country Radio, seasons one and three of MasterCard’s Fortune Favors The Bold, as well as the video interview series PROFILE by BuzzFeed News, and Brooklyn-based news and culture TV show, 112BK. She was also the host of the first season of Audible’s literary interview series, Authorized. She has been named among Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Media (2017), Brooklyn Magazine’s Brooklyn 100 (2016), Time Out New York’s New Yorkers of The Year (2017), and Variety’s New Power of New York (2019).