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Monument

Page 2

by Natasha Trethewey


  not this all-day standing around,

  not that elevator lurching up, then down.

  3. Secular

  Workweek’s end

  and there’s enough

  block-ice in the box

  to chill a washtub of colas

  and one large melon,

  dripping green.

  After service, each house opens

  heavy doors to street and woods,

  one clear shot from front to back—

  bullet, breeze, or holler.

  A neighbor’s Yoo-hoo reaches her

  out back, lolling, pulling in wash,

  pillow slips billowing

  around her head like clouds.

  Up the block,

  a brand-new Grafonola,

  parlor music, blues parlando—

  Big Mama, Ma Rainey, Bessie—

  baby shake that thing like a saltshaker.

  Lipstick, nylons

  and she’s out the door,

  tipping past the church house,

  Dixie Peach in her hair,

  greased forehead shining

  like gospel, like gold.

  4. Signs, Oakvale, Mississippi, 1941

  The first time she leaves home is with a man.

  On Highway 49, heading north, she watches

  the pine woods roll by, and counts on one hand

  dead possum along the road, crows in splotches

  of light—she knows to watch the signs for luck.

  He has a fine car, she thinks. And money green

  enough to buy a dream—more than she could tuck

  under the mattress, in a Bible, or fold between

  her powdered breasts. He’d promised land to farm

  back home, new dresses, a house where she’d be

  queen. (Was that gap in his teeth cause for alarm?)

  The cards said go. She could roam the Delta, see

  things she’d never seen. Outside her window,

  nothing but cotton and road signs—stop or slow.

  5. Expectant

  Nights are hardest, the swelling,

  tight and low (a girl), Delta heat,

  and that woodsy silence a zephyred hush.

  So how to keep busy? Wind the clocks,

  measure out time to check the window,

  or listen hard for his car on the road.

  Small tasks done and undone, a floor

  swept clean. She can fill a room

  with a loud clear alto, broom-dance

  right out the back door, her heavy footsteps

  a parade beneath the stars. Honeysuckle

  fragrant as perfume, nightlife

  a steady insect hum. Still, she longs

  for the Quarter—lights, riverboats churning,

  the tinkle of ice in a slim bar glass.

  Each night a refrain, its plain blue notes

  carrying her, slightly swaying, home.

  6. Tableau

  At breakfast, the scent of lemons,

  just picked, yellowing on the sill.

  At the table, the man and woman.

  Between them, a still life:

  shallow bowl, damask plums

  in one square of morning light.

  The woman sips tea

  from a chipped blue cup, turning it,

  avoiding the rough white edge.

  The man, his thumb pushing deep

  toward the pit, peels taut skin

  clean from plum flesh.

  The woman watches his hands,

  the pale fruit darkening

  wherever he’s pushed too hard.

  She is thinking seed, the hardness

  she’ll roll on her tongue,

  a beginning. One by one,

  the man fills the bowl with globes

  that glisten. Translucent, he thinks.

  The woman, now, her cup tilting

  empty, sees, for the first time,

  the hairline crack

  that has begun to split the bowl in half.

  7. At the Station

  The blue light was my blues,

  and the red light was my mind.

  —Robert Johnson

  The man, turning, moves away

  from the platform. Growing smaller,

  he does not say

  Come back. She won’t. Each

  glowing light dims

  the farther it moves from reach,

  the train pulling clean

  out of the station. The woman sits

  facing where she’s been.

  She’s chosen her place with care—

  each window another eye, another

  way of seeing what’s back there:

  heavy blossoms in afternoon rain

  spilling scent and glistening sex.

  Everything dripping green.

  Blue shade, leaves swollen like desire.

  A man motioning nothing.

  No words. His mind on fire.

  8. Naola Beauty Academy, New Orleans, 1945

  Made hair? The girls here

  put a press on your head

  last two weeks. No naps.

  They learning. See the basins?

  This where we wash. Yeah,

  it’s hot. July jam.

  Stove always on. Keep the combs

  hot. Lee and Ida bumping hair

  right now. Best two.

  Ida got a natural touch.

  Don’t burn nobody.

  Her own’s a righteous mass.

  Lee, now she used to sew.

  Her fingers steady

  from them tiny needles.

  She can fix some bad hair.

  Look how she lay them waves.

  Light, slight, and polite.

  Not a one out of place.

  9. Drapery Factory,

  Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956

  She made the trip daily, though

  later she would not remember

  how far to tell the grandchildren—

  Better that way.

  She could keep those miles

  a secret, and her black face

  and black hands, and the pink bottoms

  of her black feet

  a minor inconvenience.

  She does remember the men

  she worked for, and that often

  she sat side by side

  with white women, all of them

  bent over, pushing into the hum

  of the machines, their right calves

  tensed against the pedals.

  Her lips tighten speaking

  of quitting time when

  the colored women filed out slowly

  to have their purses checked,

  the insides laid open and exposed

  by the boss’s hand.

  But then she laughs

  when she recalls the soiled Kotex

  she saved, stuffed into a bag

  in her purse, and Adam’s look

  on one white man’s face, his hand

  deep in knowledge.

  10. His Hands

  His hands will never be large enough.

  Not for the woman who sees in his face

  the father she can’t remember,

  or her first husband, the soldier with two wives—

  all the men who would only take.

  Not large enough to deflect

  the sharp edges of her words.

  Still he tries to prove himself in work,

  his callused hands heaving crates

  all day on the docks, his pay twice spent.

  He brings home what he can, buckets of crabs

  from his morning traps, a few green bananas.

  His supper waits in the warming oven,

  the kitchen dark, the screens hooked.

  He thinks Make the hands gentle

  as he raps lightly on the back door.

  He has never had a key.

  Putting her hands to his, she pulls him in,

  sets him by the stove. Slowly, she r
ubs oil

  into his cracked palms, drawing out soreness

  from the swells, removing splinters, taking

  whatever his hands will give.

  11. Self-Employment, 1970

  Who to be today? So many choices,

  all that natural human hair piled high,

  curled and flipped—style after style

  perched, each on its Styrofoam head.

  Maybe an upsweep, or finger waves

  with a ponytail. Not a day passes

  that she goes unkempt—

  Never know who might stop by—

  now that she works at home

  pacing the cutting table,

  or pumping the stiff pedal

  of the bought-on-time Singer.

  Most days, she dresses for the weather,

  relentless sun, white heat. The one tree

  nearest her workroom, a mimosa,

  its whimsy of pink puffs cut back

  for a child’s swing set. And now, grandchildren—

  it’s come to this—a frenzy of shouts,

  the constant slap of an old screen door.

  At least the radio still swings jazz

  just above the noise, and

  ah yes, the window unit—leaky at best.

  Sometimes she just stands still, lets

  ice water drip onto upturned wrists.

  Up under that wig, her head

  sweating, hot as an idea.

  Gesture of a Woman in Process

  FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY

  CLIFTON JOHNSON, 1902

  In the foreground, two women,

  their squinting faces

  creased into texture—

  a deep relief—the lines

  like palms of hands

  I could read if I could touch.

  Around them, their dailiness:

  clotheslines sagged with linens,

  a patch of greens and yams,

  buckets of peas for shelling.

  One woman pauses for the picture.

  The other won’t be still.

  Even now, her hands circling,

  the white blur of her apron

  still in motion.

  II

  from

  Bellocq’s Ophelia

  Nevertheless, the camera’s rendering of reality

  must always hide more than it discloses.

  —Susan Sontag

  Bellocq’s Ophelia

  FROM A PHOTOGRAPH, CIRCA 1912

  In Millais’s painting, Ophelia dies faceup,

  eyes and mouth open as if caught in the gasp

  of her last word or breath, flowers and reeds

  growing out of the pond, floating on the surface

  around her. The young woman who posed

  lay in a bath for hours, shivering,

  catching cold, perhaps imagining fish

  tangling in her hair or nibbling a dark mole

  raised upon her white skin. Ophelia’s final gaze

  aims skyward, her palms curling open

  as if she’s just said, Take me.

  I think of her when I see Bellocq’s photograph—

  a woman posed on a wicker divan, her hair

  spilling over. Around her, flowers—

  on a pillow, on a thick carpet. Even

  the ravages of this old photograph

  bloom like water lilies across her thigh.

  How long did she hold there, this other

  Ophelia, nameless inmate of Storyville,

  naked, her nipples offered up hard with cold?

  The small mound of her belly, the pale hair

  of her pubis—these things—her body

  there for the taking. But in her face, a dare.

  Staring into the camera, she seems to pull

  all movement from her slender limbs

  and hold it in her heavy-lidded eyes.

  Her body limp as dead Ophelia’s,

  her lips poised to open, to speak.

  Letter Home

  NEW ORLEANS, NOVEMBER 1910

  Four weeks have passed since I left, and still

  I must write to you of no work. I’ve worn down

  the soles and walked through the tightness

  of my new shoes, calling upon the merchants,

  their offices bustling. All the while I kept thinking

  my plain English and good writing would secure

  for me some modest position. Though I dress each day

  in my best, hands covered with the lace gloves

  you crocheted—no one needs a girl. How flat

  the word sounds, and heavy. My purse thins.

  I spend foolishly to make an appearance of quiet

  industry, to mask the desperation that tightens

  my throat. I sit watching—

  though I pretend not to notice—the dark maids

  ambling by with their white charges. Do I deceive

  anyone? Were they to see my hands, brown

  as your dear face, they’d know I’m not quite

  what I pretend to be. I walk these streets

  a white woman, or so I think, until I catch the eyes

  of some stranger upon me, and I must lower mine,

  a negress again. There are enough things here

  to remind me who I am. Mules lumbering through

  the crowded streets send me into reverie, their footfall

  the sound of a pointer and chalk hitting the blackboard

  at school, only louder. Then there are women, clicking

  their tongues in conversation, carrying their loads

  on their heads. Their husky voices, the washpots

  and irons of the laundresses call to me. Here,

  I thought not to do the work I once did, back-bending

  and domestic; my schooling a gift—even those half days

  at picking time, listening to Miss J—. How

  I’d come to know words, the recitations I practiced

  to sound like her, lilting, my sentences curling up

  or trailing off at the ends. I read my books until

  I nearly broke their spines, and in the cotton field,

  I repeated whole sections I’d learned by heart,

  spelling each word in my head to make a picture

  I could see, as well as a weight I could feel

  in my mouth. So now, even as I write this

  and think of you at home, Goodbye

  is the waving map of your palm, is

  a stone on my tongue.

  Countess P—’s Advice for New Girls

  STORYVILLE, 1910

  Look, this is a high-class house—polished

  mahogany, potted ferns, rugs two inches thick.

  The mirrored parlor multiplies everything—

  one glass of champagne is twenty. You’ll see

  yourself a hundred times. For our customers

  you must learn to be watched. Empty

  your thoughts—think, if you do, only

  of your swelling purse. Hold still as if

  you sit for a painting. Catch light

  in the hollow of your throat; let shadow dwell

  in your navel and beneath the curve

  of your breasts. See yourself through his eyes—

  your neck stretched long and slender, your back

  arched—the awkward poses he might capture

  in stone. Let his gaze animate you, then move

  as it flatters you most. Wait to be

  asked to speak. Think of yourself as molten glass—

  expand and quiver beneath the weight of his breath.

  Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.

  Become what you must. Let him see whatever

  he needs. Train yourself not to look back.

  Storyville Diary

  1. Naming

  EN ROUTE, OCTOBER 1910

  I cannot now remember the first word

  I learned to write—perhaps it was my name,

  Oph
elia, in tentative strokes, a banner

  slanting across my tablet at school, or inside

  the cover of some treasured book. Leaving

  my home today, I feel even more the need

  for some new words to mark this journey,

  like the naming of a child—Queen, Lovely,

  Hope—marking even the humblest beginnings

  in the shanties. My own name was a chant

  over the washboard, a song to guide me

  into sleep. Once, my mother pushed me toward

  a white man in our front room. Your father,

  she whispered. He’s the one that named you, girl.

  2. Father

  FEBRUARY 1911

  There is but little I recall of him—how

  I feared his visits, though he would bring gifts:

  apples, candy, a toothbrush and powder.

  In exchange, I must present fingernails

  and ears, open my mouth to show the teeth.

  Then I’d recite my lessons, my voice low.

  I would stumble over a simple word, say

  lay for lie, and he would stop me there. How

  I wanted him to like me, think me smart,

  a delicate colored girl—not the wild

  pickaninny roaming the fields, barefoot.

  I search now for his face among the men

  I pass in the streets, fear the day a man

 

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