A man pining for a woman dead on a slab at St. James

                                By Natasha Trethewey

Geography

1.

At the bottom of the exit ramp

my father waits for us, one foot

on the curb, right hand hooked

in the front pocket of his jeans,

a stack of books beneath his arm.

It's 1971, the last year we're still

together. My mother and I travel

this road, each week, to meet him –

I-10 from Mississippi to New Orleans –

            and each time we pull off the highway

            I see my father like this: raising his thumb

to feign hitchhiking – a stranger

passing through to somewhere else.

2.

At Wolf River my father is singing.

The sun is singing and there's a cooler

of Pabst in the shade. He is singing

and playing the guitar – the sad songs

I hide from each time: a man pining

for Irene or Clementine, a woman dead

on a slab at St. James. I'm too young to know

this is foreshadowing. To get away from

the blues I don't understand, I wade in water

shallow enough to cross. On the bank

at the other side, I look back at him as if

across the years: he's smaller, his voice

lost in the distance between us.

3.

On the Gulf and Ship Island Line

my father and I walk the rails south

toward town. More than twenty years

gone, he's come back to see this place,

recollect what he's lost. What he recalls

of my childhood is here. We find it

in the brambles of blackberry, the coins

flattened on the tracks. We can't help it –

already, we're leaning too hard

toward metaphor: my father searching

for the railroad switch. It was here, right

here, he says, turning this way and that –

the rails vibrating now, a train coming.

From Natasha Trethewy, Thrall (2012).

The words that shadow us

                               by Natasha Trethewey

GRAVEYARD BLUES

It rained the whole time we were laying her down;

Rained from church to grave when we put her down.

The suck of mud at our feet was a hollow sound.

When the preacher called out I held up my hand;

When he called for a witness I raised my hand --

Death stops the body's work, the soul's a journeyman.

The sun came out when I turned to walk away,

Glared down on me as I turned and walked away --

My back to my mother, leaving her where she lay.

The road going home was pocked with holes,

That home-going road's always full of holes;

Though we slow down, time's wheel still rolls.

          I wander now among names of the dead:

          My mother's name, stone pillow for my head.

MISCEGENATION

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;

they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name

begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong -- mis in Mississippi.

A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same

as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.

Faulker's Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name

for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.

My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.

I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.

When I turned 33, my father said, It's your Jesus year -- you're the same

age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.

I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name --

though I'm not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.

SOUTHERN GOTHIC

I have lain down in to 1970, into the bed

my parents will share for only a few more years.

Early evening, they have not yet turned from each other

in sleep, their bodies curved -- parentheses

framing the separate lives they'll wake to. Dreaming,

I am again the child with too many questions --

the endless why and why and why

my mother cannot answer, he mouth closed, a gesture

toward her future: cold lips stitched shut.

The lines in my young father's face deepen

toward an expression of grief. I have come home

from the schoolyard with the words that shadow us

in the small Southern town -- peckerwood and nigger

lover; half-breed and zebra -- words that take shape

outside us. We're huddled on the tiny island of bed,

quiet in the language of blood; the house unsteady

on its cinderblock haunches, sinking deeper

into the muck of ancestry. Oil lamps flicker

around us -- our shadows, dark glyphs on the wall,

bigger and stranger than we are.

From Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard: Poems, 2006.

Great bales of cotton rise up from the ground

SCENES FROM A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF MISSISSIPPI

by Natasha Trethewey

1. King Cotton, 1907

From every corner of the photograph, flags wave down

the main street in Vicksburg. Stacked to form an arch,

the great bales of cotton rise up from the ground

like a giant swell, a wave of history flooding the town.

When Roosevelt arrives -- a parade -- the band will march,

and from every street corner, flags wave down.

Words on a banner, Cotton, America's King, have the sound

of progress. The is two years before the South's countermarch --

the great bolls of cotton, risen up from the ground,

infested with boll weevils -- a plague, biblical, all around.

Now, negro children ride the bales, clothes stiff with starch.

From up high, in the photograph, they wave flags down

for the President who will walk through the arch, bound

for the future, his back to us. The children, on their perch --

those great bales of cotton rising up from the ground --

Stare out at us. Cotton surrounds them, a swell, a great mound

bearing them up, back toward us. From the arch,

from every corner of the photograph, flags wave down,

and great bales of cotton rise up from the ground.

2. Glyph, Aberdeen 1913

The child's head droops as if in sleep.

Stripped to the waist, in profile, he's balanced

on the man's lap.  The man, gaunt in his overalls,

cradles the child's thin arm -- the sharp elbow, white

signature of skin an bone -- pulls it forward

to show the deformity -- the humped back, curve

of spine -- punctuating the routine hardships 

of their lives: how the child must follow him

into the fields, haunting the long hours

slumped beside a sack, his body asking

how much cotton? or in the kitchen, leaning,

into the icebox, how much food? or

kneeling beside him at the church house,

why, Lord, why? They pose as if to say

Look, this is the outline of suffering:

the child shouldering it -- a mound

like dirt heaped on a grave.

3. Flood

They have arrived on the back

of the swollen river, the barge

dividing it, their few belongings 

clustered about their feet. Above them

the National Guard hunkers

on the levee; rifles tight in their fists,

they block the path to high ground.

One group of black refugees,

the caption tells us, was ordered

to sing their passage onto land,

like a chorus of prayer -- their tongues

the tongues of dark bells. Here,

the camera finds them still. Posed

as if for a school-day portrait,

children lace fingers in their laps.

One boy gestures allegiance, right hand

over the heart's charged beating.

The great river all around, the barge

invisible beneath their feet, they fix

on what's before them: the opening

in the sight of a rifle; the camera's lens;

the muddy cleft between barge and dry land --

all of it aperture, the captured moment's 

chasm in time.  Here, in the angled light

of 1927, they are refugees from history:

the barge has brought them this far;

they are waiting to disembark.

4. You are late

The sun is high and the child's shadow,

almost fully beneath her, touches the sole

of her bare foot on concrete. Even though

it must be hot, she takes the step; her goal

to read is the subject of this shot -- a book

in her hand, the library closed, the door

just out of reach.  Stepping up, she must look

at the two signs, read them slowly once more.

The first one, in pale letters, barely shows

against the white background.  Though she will read

Greenwood Public Library for Negroes,

the other, bold letters on slate, will lead

her away, out of the frame, a finger 

pointing left.  I want to caller, say wait.

But this is history: she can't linger.

She'll read the sign that I read: You Are Late.

Thrall

               

Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaeus;

or, The Mulata

                  After the painting by Diego Velásquez, c. 1619

                                                by Natasha Trethewey

She is the vessels on the table before her:

the copper pot tipped toward us, the white pitcher

clutched in her hand, the black one edged in red

and upside-down. Bent over, she is the mortar,

and the pestle at rest in the mortar -- still angled

in its posture of use. She is the stack of bowls

and the bulb of garlic beside it, the basket hung

by a nail on the wall and the white cloth bundled

in it, the rag in the foreground recalling her hand.

She’s the stain on the wall the size of her shadow --

the color of blood, the shape of a thumb. She is echo

of Jesus at table, framed in the scene behind her:

his white corona, her white cap. Listening, she leans

into what she knows. Light falls on half her face.

 

Thrall

             Juan de Pareja, 1670

         He was not my father

though      he might have been

         I came to him

the mulatto son

                   of a slave woman

        just that

as if       it took only my mother

       to make me

                    a mulatto

meaning

                   any white man

could be my father

            *

In his shop     bound

       to the muller

I ground his colors

       my hands dusted     black

with fired bone     stained 

      blue     and flecked

with glass     my nails

edged vermilion     as if

     my fingertips bled

In this way     just as

     I'd turned the pages

of his books

    I meant to touch

          everything he did

          *

With Velásquez     in Rome

     a divination

At market     I lingered to touch

     the bright hulls of lemons

          closed by eyes until

    the scent was oil

and thinner     yellow ocher

    in my head

         And once

the sudden taste of iron

         a glimpse of red

   like a wound-opening

         the robes of the pope

a portrait

         that bright shade of blood

         before it darkens

purpling nearly to black

           *

Because he said

        painting was not

        labor     was

the province of free men

       I could only 

watch     Such beauty

      in the work of his hands

               his quick  strokes

     a divine language I learned

over his shoulder

               my own hands

tracing the air

     in his wake     Forbidden

              to answer in paint

I kept my canvases secret

              hidden until

     Velásquez decreed

              unto me

     myself     Free

I was apprentice     he

             my master still

         *

How intently at times

      could he fix his keen eye

              upon me

though only once

     did he fix me     in paint

my color a study

     my eyes wide

             as I faced him

a lace collar at my shoulders

     as though I'd been born

             noble

     the yoke of my birth

gone from my neck

     In his hand     a long brush

            to keep him far

     from the canvas

far from it     as I was

     the distance between us

           doubled     that

he could observe me

     twice     stand closer

           to what he made

For years     I looked to it

     as one looks into a mirror

     *

                  And so

  in The Calling of Saint Matthew

     I painted my own

likeness     a freeman

     in the House of Customs

           waiting to pay

my duty     In my hand

     an answer     a slip of paper

           my signature on it

     Juan de Pareja     1661

Velásquez     one year gone

     Behind me

            upright on a shelf

a forged platter     luminous

            as an aureole

     just beyond my head

            my face turned

to look out from the scene

     a self-portrait

To make it

           I looked at how

my master saw me     then

     I narrowed my eyes

     *

Now

     at the bright edge

of sleep     mother

She comes back to me

    as sound

           her voice

in the echo of birdcall

    a single syllable

           again

and again     my name

    Juan Juan Juan

or     a bit of song    that

          waking

I cannot grasp 

 

 Natasha Trethewey, Thrall: Poems. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

See also Blacks in Renaissance Painting.

Natasha Trethewey: Poet Laureate

 

February 1911

There are indeed all sorts of men

who visit here: those who want

nothing but to talk or hear the soft tones

of a woman's voice; others prefer

simply to gaze upon me, my face

turned from them as they touch

only themselves. And then there are those,

of course, whose desires I cannot commit

to paper

You ask me how I can do this —

In those moments I am again

a young girl, just past thirteen, seeing

for the first time, the luxurious curve

beneath my own breasts. So taken

with this view of myself, I sit too long

staring at my revlection in the bathwater,

the tin tub growing cold as I look

through myself to the gray bottom,

to nothing. Only my shivering

and the chattering of my teeth

jar me back, my skin gooseflesh,

the Braille text of my future.

Or I am back at the farm store,

the man leaning over me, pinching

the tiny buds of my new breasts,

sneering, calling me womanish

as I stare at the lines in the floor

until they blur into one smooth path

leading away from that place —

I am then nothing

but the light I see behind my shut eyelids.
 

Blue Book  — June 1911 

I wear my best gown for the picture — 
white silk with seed pearls and ostrich feathers — 
My hair in a loose chignon.  Behind me,
Bellocq's black scrim just covers the laundry  —
Tea towels, bleached and frayed, drying on the line.
I look away from his lens to appear
demure, to attract those guests not wanting
the lewd sights of Emma Johnson's circus. 
Countess writes my description for the book — 
"Violet," a fair-skinned beauty, recites
poetry and soliloquies; nightly
she performs her tableau vivant, becomes
a living statue, an object of art — 
And I fade again into someone I'm not.

 

Photograph of a Bawd Drinking Raleigh Rye  — E. J. Bellocq, circa 1912

The glass in her hand is the only thing moving —

too fast for the camera — caught in the blur of motion.

She raises it toasting, perhaps, the viewer you become

taking her in  — your eyes starting low, at her feet,

and following those striped stockings like roads,

traveling the length of her calves and thighs.  Up then,

to the fringed scarf draping her breasts, the heart

locket, her bare should and the patch of dark hair

beneath her arm, the round innocence of her cheeks

and Gibson-girl hair.  Then over to the trinkets on the table

beside her: a clock; tiny feather-backed rocking chairs

poised to move with the slightest wind or breath;

the ebony statuette of a woman, her arms stretched abover

her head.  Even the bottle of rye is a woman's slender torso

and round hips.  On the wall behind her, the image again  —

women in paintings, in photographs, and carved in relief

on an oval plane.  And there, on the surface of it all, a thumb-

print  — perhaps yours?  It's easy to see this is all about desire.

Disclosure  —January 1912

When Bellocq doesn't like a photograph

he scratches across the plate.  But I know

other ways to obscure a face — paint it

with rouge and powder, shades lighter than skin,

don a black velvet mask.  I've learned to keep

my face behind the camera, my lens aimed

at a dream of my own making.  What power

I find in transforming what is real — a room

flushed with light, calculated disarray.

Today I tried to capture a redbird

perched on the tall hedge.  As my shutter fell,

he lifted in flight, a vivid blur above

the clutter just beyond the hedge — garbage,

rats licking the insides of broken eggs.

Poems taken from Natasha Trethewey, Bellocq's Ophelia, pages 18, 34, 40, 44.