his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.
By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait,
he was already linked to an affair
with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue
and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems
to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out
across the centuries, his lips fixed as if
he’s just uttered some final word.
The first time I saw the painting, I listened
as my father explained the contradictions:
how Jefferson hated slavery, though—out
of necessity, my father said—had to own
slaves; that his moral philosophy meant
he could not have fathered those children:
would have been impossible, my father said.
For years we debated the distance between
word and deed. I’d follow my father from book
to book, gathering citations, listen
as he named—like a field guide to Virginia—
each flower and tree and bird as if to prove
a man’s pursuit of knowledge is greater
than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.
I did not know then the subtext
of our story, that my father could imagine
Jefferson’s words made flesh in my flesh—
the improvement of the blacks in body
and mind, in the first instance of their mixture
with the whites—or that my father could believe
he’d made me better. When I think of this now,
I see how the past holds us captive,
its beautiful ruin etched on the mind’s eye:
my young father, a rough outline of the old man
he’s become, needing to show me
the better measure of his heart, an equation
writ large at Monticello. That was years ago.
Now, we take in how much has changed:
talk of Sally Hemings, someone asking,
How white was she?—parsing the fractions
as if to name what made her worthy
of Jefferson’s attentions: a near-white,
quadroon mistress, not a plain black slave.
Imagine stepping back into the past,
our guide tells us then—and I can’t resist
whispering to my father: This is where
When he laughs, I know he’s grateful
I’ve made a joke of it, this history
that links us—white father, black daughter—
even as it renders us other to each other.
How the Past Comes Back
Like shadow across a stone,
gradually—
the name it darkens;
as one enters the world
through language—
like a child learning to speak
then naming
everything; as flower,
the neglected hydrangea
endlessly blossoming—
year after year
each bloom a blue refrain; as
the syllables of birdcall
coalescing in the trees,
repeating
a single word:
forgets;
as the dead bird’s bright signature—
days after you buried it—
a single red feather
on the window glass
in the middle of your reflection.
On Happiness
To see a flash of silver—
pale undersides of the maple leaves
catching light—quick movement
at the edge of thought,
is to be pulled back
to that morning, to the river where it flashes still:
a single fish
breaking the water’s surface,
the almost-caught taunting our lines
until we give up, at last, and turn
the boat toward home; is
to see it clearly: the salmon
rolling, showing me
a glimpse of the unattainable—happiness
I would give my father if I could;
he paid for that morning, see it
creased in my back pocket—how
he’d handed it to me
and I’d tucked it there, as if
a guarantee.
Vespertina Cognitio
. . . the knowledge of man is an evening knowledge . . .
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
Overhead, pelicans glide in threes—
their shadows across the sand
dark thoughts crossing the mind.
Beyond the fringe of coast, shrimpers
hoist their nets, weighing the harvest
against the day’s losses. Light waning,
concentration is a lone gull
circling what’s thrown back. Debris
weights the trawl like stones.
All day, this dredging—beneath the tug
of waves: rhythm of what goes out,
comes back, comes back, comes back.
Illumination
Always there is something more to know
what lingers at the edge of thought
awaiting illumination as in
this secondhand book full
of annotations daring the margins in pencil
a light stroke as if
the writer of these small replies
meant not to leave them forever
meant to erase
evidence of this private interaction
Here a passage underlined there
a single star on the page
as in a night sky cloud-swept and hazy
where only the brightest appears
a tiny spark I follow
its coded message try to read in it
the direction of the solitary mind
that thought to pencil in
a jagged arrow It
is a bolt of lightning
where it strikes
I read the line over and over
the little fires set
the flames of an idea licking the page
how knowledge burns Beyond
the exclamation point
its thin agreement angle of surprise
there are questions the word why
So much is left
untold Between
the printed words and the self-conscious scrawl
between what is said and not
white space framing the story
the way the past unwritten
eludes us So much
is implication the afterimage
of measured syntax always there
ghosting the margins that words
their black-lined authority
do not cross Even
as they rise up to meet us
the white page hovers beneath
silent incendiary waiting
V
Notes
“Miracle of the Black Leg”
The texts and images referred to in the poem are discussed in The Phantom Limb Phenomenon: A Medical, Folkloric, and Historical Study, Texts and Translations of Tenth- to Twentieth-Century Accounts of the Miraculous Restoration of Lost Body Parts, by Douglas B. Price, M.D., and Neil J. Twombly, S.J., Ph.D. (Georgetown University Press, 1978), and in One Leg in the Grave: The Miracle of the Transplantation of the Black Leg by the Saints Cosmas and Damian, by Kees W. Zimmerman (The Netherlands: Elsevier/Bunge, 1998). Representations of the myth appear in Greek narratives, in a Scottish poem, and in paintings and altarpieces in Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Portugal, Switzerland, France, and Belgium.
“Taxonomy”
Casta paintings illustrated the various mixed unions of colonial Mexico and the children of those unions whose names and taxonomies were recorde
d in the Book of Castas. The widespread belief in the “taint” of black blood — that it was irreversible — resulted in taxonomies rooted in language that implied a “return backwards.” From Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, by Ilona Katzew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
“Mano Prieta”
The term mano prieta (dark hand) “refers to mestizos, coyotes, mulattos, lobos, zambiagos, moriscos.” From Descripción del Estado político de la Nueva España, anonymous, 1735; quoted in Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, by Ilona Katzew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
“Thrall”
Juan de Pareja (1606–1670) was the slave of the artist Diego Velázquez until his manumission in 1650. For many years Pareja served Velázquez as a laborer in his studio and later sat for the portrait Juan de Pareja, which Velázquez painted in order to practice for creating a portrait of Pope Innocent X. Pareja was also a painter and is best known for his work The Calling of Saint Matthew. From El Museo pictórico y escala Ďptica, volume 3, by Antonio Palomino (Madrid, 1947, p. 913; this volume was originally published in 1724).
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the editors of the following journals in which these poems, sometimes in different versions, first appeared: Callaloo, “Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus; or, The Mulata” and “Mano Prieta”; Cave Wall, “Bird in the House”; Charlotte: Journal of Literature and Art, “The Americans (2. Blood)”; Chattahoochee Review, “How the Past Comes Back” and “Torna Atrás”; Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, “Fouled”; Ecotone, “On Happiness” and “Thrall”; Five Points, “Geography,” “On Captivity,” and “Rotation”; Fugue, “Illumination” (as “Afterimage”); Georgia Review, “Mythology”; Green Mountains Review, “Artifact”; Gulf Coast, “Taxonomy (3. De Español y Mestiza Produce Castiza and 4. The Book of Castas)”; Hollins Critic, “The Americans (3. Help, 1968)”; New England Review, “Knowledge,” “Elegy,” and “The Americans (1. Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright on Dissecting the White Negro, 1851),” and “Taxonomy (2. De Español y Negra Produce Mulato)”; Ploughshares, “Taxonomy (1. De Español y de India Produce Mestiso)”; Poetry Northwest, “De Español y Negra; Mulata” and “Calling” (as “Mexico”); Tin House, “Miracle of the Black Leg”; Virginia Quarterly Review, “Enlightenment”; Waccamaw, “Vespertina Cognitio.”
“On Captivity” also appeared in American Poet, Fall 2008, and in Best American Poetry 2008, edited by Charles Wright and David Lehman. “Elegy” also appeared in Best American Poetry 2011, edited by Kevin Young and David Lehman. “The Americans (1. Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright on Dissecting the White Negro, 1851)” will appear in Best American Poetry 2012, edited by Mark Doty and David Lehman. Best American Poetry is published annually by Scribner.
My gratitude as well to the Emory University Research Committee and to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Department of African American Studies at Yale University for fellowships that allowed me time to complete this book. For their thoughtful comments and support, I am indebted to Elizabeth Alexander, Claudia Emerson, Ben George, Shara McCallum, Rob McQuilkin, Rhett Trull, C. Dale Young, Kevin Young, and—most of all—Michael Collier. To Brett Gadsden, my deepest thanks.
About the Author
NATASHA TRETHEWEY is the current U.S. Poet Laureate and is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University. Native Guard, her third collection of poetry, received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast was published in 2010.