Thrall Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I

  Elegy

  II

  Miracle of the Black Leg

  On Captivity

  Taxonomy

  Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus; or, The Mulata

  Knowledge

  III

  The Americans

  Mano Prieta

  De Español y Negra; Mulata

  Mythology

  Geography

  Torna Atrás

  Bird in the House

  Artifact

  Fouled

  Rotation

  IV

  Thrall

  Calling

  Enlightenment

  How the Past Comes Back

  On Happiness

  Vespertina Cognitio

  Illumination

  V

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2012 by Natasha Trethewey

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Trethewey, Natasha D., date.

  Thrall : poems / Natasha Trethewey.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-57160-7

  I. Title.

  PS3570.R433T47 2012

  811'.54—dc23

  2012017321

  eISBN 978-0-547-84042-0

  v1.0812

  To my father

  What is love?

  One name for it is knowledge.

  —Robert Penn Warren

  After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

  —T. S. Eliot

  I

  Elegy

  For my father

  I think by now the river must be thick

  with salmon. Late August, I imagine it

  as it was that morning: drizzle needling

  the surface, mist at the banks like a net

  settling around us—everything damp

  and shining. That morning, awkward

  and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked

  into the current and found our places—

  you upstream a few yards and out

  far deeper. You must remember how

  the river seeped in over your boots

  and you grew heavier with that defeat.

  All day I kept turning to watch you, how

  first you mimed our guide’s casting

  then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky

  between us; and later, rod in hand, how

  you tried—again and again—to find

  that perfect arc, flight of an insect

  skimming the river’s surface. Perhaps

  you recall I cast my line and reeled in

  two small trout we could not keep.

  Because I had to release them, I confess,

  I thought about the past—working

  the hooks loose, the fish writhing

  in my hands, each one slipping away

  before I could let go. I can tell you now

  that I tried to take it all in, record it

  for an elegy I’d write—one day—

  when the time came. Your daughter,

  I was that ruthless. What does it matter

  if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting

  your line, and when it did not come back

  empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights,

  dreaming, I step again into the small boat

  that carried us out and watch the bank receding—

  my back to where I know we are headed.

  II

  Miracle of the Black Leg

  Pictorial representations of the physician-saints Cosmas and Damian and the myth of the miracle transplant—black donor, white recipient—date back to the mid-fourteenth century, appearing much later than written versions of the story.

  1.

  Always, the dark body hewn asunder; always

  one man is healed, his sick limb replaced,

  placed in the other man’s grave: the white leg

  buried beside the corpse or attached as if

  it were always there. If not for the dark appendage

  you might miss the story beneath this story—

  what remains each time the myth changes: how,

  in one version, the doctors harvest the leg

  from a man, four days dead, in his tomb at the church

  of a martyr, or—in another—desecrate a body

  fresh in the graveyard at Saint Peter in Chains:

  there was buried just today an Ethiopian.

  Even now, it stays with us: when we mean to uncover

  the truth, we dig, say unearth.

  2.

  Emblematic in paint, a signifier of the body’s lacuna,

  the black leg is at once a grafted narrative,

  a redacted line of text, and in this scene a dark stocking

  pulled above the knee. Here the patient is sleeping,

  his head at rest in his hand. Beatific, he looks as if

  he’ll wake from a dream. On the floor

  beside the bed, a dead Moor—hands crossed at the groin,

  the swapped limb white and rotting, fused in place.

  And in the corner, a question: poised as if to speak

  the syntax of sloughing, a snake’s curved form.

  It emerges from the mouth of a boy like a tongue—slippery

  and rooted in the body as knowledge. For centuries

  this is how the myth repeats: the miracle—in words

  or wood or paint—is a record of thought.

  3.

  See how the story changes: in one painting

  the Ethiop is merely a body, featureless in a coffin,

  so black he has no face. In another, the patient—

  at the top of the frame—seems to writhe in pain,

  the black leg grafted to his thigh. Below him

  a mirror of suffering: the blackamoor—

  his body a fragment—arched across the doctor’s lap

  as if dying from his wound. If not immanence,

  the soul’s bright anchor—blood passed from one

  to the other—what knowledge haunts each body,

  what history, what phantom ache? One man always

  low, in a grave or on the ground, the other

  up high, closer to heaven; one man always diseased,

  the other a body in service, plundered.

  4.

  Both men are alive in Villoldo’s carving.

  In twinned relief, they hold the same posture,

  the same pained face, each man reaching to touch

  his left leg. The black man, on the floor,

  holds his stump. Above him, the doctor restrains

  the patient’s arm as if to prevent him touching

  the dark amendment of flesh. How not to see it—

  the men bound one to the other, symbiotic—

  one man rendered expendable, the other worthy

  of this sacrifice? In version after version, even

  when the Ethiopian isn’t there, the leg is a stand-in,

  a black modifier against the white body,

  a piece cut off—as in the origin of the word comma:

  caesura in a story that’s still being written.

  On Captivity

  Being all Stripped as Naked as We were Born, and endeavoring to hide our Nakedness, these Cannaballs t
ook [our] Books, and tearing out the Leaves would give each of us a Leaf to cover us . . .

  —Jonathan Dickinson, 1699

  At the hands now

  of their captors, those

  they’ve named savages,

  do they say the word itself

  savagely—hissing

  that first letter,

  the serpent’s image

  releasing

  thought into speech?

  For them now

  everything is flesh

  as if their thoughts, made

  suddenly corporeal,

  reveal even more

  their nakedness—

  the shame of it:

  their bodies rendered

  plain as the natives’—

  homely and pale,

  their ordinary sex,

  the secret illicit hairs

  that do not (cannot)

  cover enough.

  Naked as newborns,

  this is how they are brought

  to knowledge. Adam and Eve

  in the New World,

  they have only the Bible

  to cover them. Think of it:

  a woman holding before her

  the torn leaves of Genesis,

  and a man covering himself

  with the Good Book’s

  frontispiece—his own name

  inscribed on the page.

  Taxonomy

  After a series of casta paintings by Juan Rodríguez Juárez, c. 1715

  1. DE ESPAÑOL Y DE INDIA PRODUCE MESTISO

  The canvas is a leaden sky

  behind them, heavy

  with words, gold letters inscribing

  an equation of blood—

  this plus this equals this—as if

  a contract with nature, or

  a museum label,

  ethnographic, precise. See

  how the father’s hand, beneath

  its crown of lace,

  curls around his daughter’s head;

  she’s nearly fair

  as he is—calidad. See it

  in the brooch at her collar,

  the lace framing her face.

  An infant, she is borne

  over the servant’s left shoulder,

  bound to him

  by a sling, the plain blue cloth

  knotted at his throat.

  If the father, his hand

  on her skull, divines—

  as the physiognomist does—

  the mysteries

  of her character, discursive,

  legible on her light flesh,

  in the soft curl of her hair,

  we cannot know it: so gentle

  the eye he turns toward her.

  The mother, glancing

  sideways toward him—

  the scarf on her head

  white as his face,

  his powdered wig—gestures

  with one hand a shape

  like the letter C. See,

  she seems to say,

  what we have made.

  The servant, still a child, cranes

  his neck, turns his face

  up toward all of them. He is dark

  as history, origin of the word

  native: the weight of blood,

  a pale mistress on his back,

  heavier every year.

  2. DE ESPAÑOL Y NEGRA PRODUCE MULATO

  Still, the centuries have not dulled

  the sullenness of the child’s expression.

  If there is light inside him, it does not shine

  through the paint that holds his face

  in profile—his domed forehead, eyes

  nearly closed beneath a heavy brow.

  Though inside, the boy’s father stands

  in his cloak and hat. It’s as if he’s just come in,

  or that he’s leaving. We see him

  transient, rolling a cigarette, myopic—

  his eyelids drawn against the child

  passing before him. At the stove,

  the boy’s mother contorts, watchful,

  her neck twisting on its spine, red beads

  yoked at her throat like a necklace of blood,

  her face so black she nearly disappears

  into the canvas, the dark wall upon which

  we see the words that name them.

  What should we make of any of this?

  Remove the words above their heads,

  put something else in place of the child—

  a table, perhaps, upon which the man might set

  his hat, or a dog upon which to bestow

  the blessing of his touch—and the story

  changes. The boy is a palimpsest of paint—

  layers of color, history rendering him

  that precise shade of in-between.

  Before this he was nothing: blank

  canvas—before image or word, before

  a last brush stroke fixed him in his place.

  3. DE ESPAÑOL Y MESTIZA PRODUCE CASTIZA

  How not to see

  in this gesture

  the mind

  of the colony?

  In the mother’s arms,

  the child, hinged

  at her womb—

  dark cradle

  of mixed blood

  (call it Mexico)—

  turns toward the father,

  reaching to him

  as if back to Spain,

  to the promise of blood

  alchemy—three easy steps

  to purity:

  from a Spaniard and an Indian,

  a mestizo;

  from a mestizo and a Spaniard,

  a castizo;

  from a castizo and a Spaniard,

  a Spaniard.

  We see her here—

  one generation away—

  nearly slipping

  her mother’s careful grip.

  4. THE BOOK OF CASTAS