Thrall Page 4

  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

  we split up. I’ll head around to the back.

  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;

  and then is to recall the permit

  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

  as if I might discern

  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 όptica, 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.