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Monument Page 4

by Natasha Trethewey



  Again and again, this constant forsaking:

  my eyes open, I find you do not follow.

  You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning.

  But in dreams you live. So I try taking,

  not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow.

  The Erebus I keep you in—still, trying—

  I make between my slumber and my waking.

  It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow.

  I was asleep while you were dying.

  At Dusk

  At first I think she is calling a child,

  my neighbor, leaning through her doorway

  at dusk, streetlamps just starting to hum

  the backdrop of evening. Then I hear

  the high-pitched wheedling we send out

  to animals who know only sound, not

  the meanings of our words—here here—

  nor how they sometimes fall short.

  In another yard, beyond my neighbor’s

  sight, the cat lifts her ears, turns first

  toward the voice, then back

  to the constellation of fireflies flickering

  near her head. It’s as if she can’t decide

  whether to leap over the low hedge,

  the neat row of flowers, and bound

  onto the porch, into the steady circle

  of light, or stay where she is: luminous

  possibility—all that would keep her

  away from home—flitting before her.

  I listen as my neighbor’s voice trails off.

  She’s given up calling for now, left me

  to imagine her inside the house waiting,

  perhaps in a chair in front of the TV,

  or walking around, doing small tasks;

  left me to wonder that I too might lift

  my voice, sure of someone out there,

  send it over the lines stitching here

  to there, certain the sounds I make

  are enough to call someone home.

  II

  Everybody knows about Mississippi.

  —Nina Simone

  Pilgrimage

  VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI

  Here, the Mississippi carved

  its mud-dark path, a graveyard

  for skeletons of sunken riverboats.

  Here, the river changed its course,

  turning away from the city

  as one turns, forgetting, from the past—

  the abandoned bluffs, land sloping up

  above the river’s bend—where now

  the Yazoo fills the Mississippi’s empty bed.

  Here, the dead stand up in stone, white

  marble, on Confederate Avenue. I stand

  on ground once hollowed by a web of caves;

  they must have seemed like catacombs,

  in 1863, to the woman sitting in her parlor,

  candlelit, underground. I can see her

  listening to shells explode, writing herself

  into history, asking what is to become

  of all the living things in this place?

  This whole city is a grave. Every spring—

  Pilgrimage—the living come to mingle

  with the dead, brush against their cold shoulders

  in the long hallways, listen all night

  to their silence and indifference, relive

  their dying on the green battlefield.

  At the museum, we marvel at their clothes—

  preserved under glass—so much smaller

  than our own, as if those who wore them

  were only children. We sleep in their beds,

  the old mansions hunkered on the bluffs, draped

  in flowers—funereal—a blur

  of petals against the river’s gray.

  The brochure in my room calls this

  living history. The brass plate on the door reads

  Prissy’s Room. A window frames

  the river’s crawl toward the Gulf. In my dream,

  the ghost of history lies down beside me,

  rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.

  Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi

  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. This 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 and 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 call her, say wait.

  But this is history: she can’t linger.

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

  Native Guard

  If this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred what shall men remember?

  —Frederick Douglass

  November 1862

  Truth be told, I do not want to forget

  anything of my former life: the landscape’s

  song of bondage—dirge in the river’s throat

  where it churns into the Gulf, wind in trees

  choked with vines. I thought to carry with me

  want of freedom though I had been freed,

  remembrance not constant recollection.

  Yes: I was born a slave, at harvest time,

  in the Parish of Ascension; I’ve reached

  thirty-three with history of one younger

  inscribed upon my back. I now use ink

  to keep record, a closed book, not the lure

  of memory—flawed, changeful—that dulls the lash

  for the master, sharpens it for the slave.

  December 1862

  For the slave, having a master sharpens

  the bend into work, the way the sergeant

  moves us now to perfect battalion drill,

  dress parade. Still, we’re called supply units—

  not infantry—and so we dig trenches,

  haul burdens for the army no less heavy

  than before. I heard the colonel call it

  nigger work. Half rations make our work

  familiar still. We take those things we need

  from the Confederates’ abandoned homes:

  salt, sugar, even this journal, near full

  with someone else’s words, overlapped now,

  crosshatched beneath mine. On every page,

  his story intersecting with my own.

  January 1863

  O how history intersects—my own

  berth upon a ship called the Northern Star

  and I’m delivered into a new life,

  Fort Massachusetts: a great irony—

  both path and destination of freedom

  I’d not dared to travel. Here, now, I walk

  ankle-deep in sand, fly-bitten, nearly

  smothered by heat, and yet I can look out

  upon the Gulf and see the surf breaking,

  tossing the ships, the great gunboats bobbing

  on the water. And are we not the same,

  slaves in the hands of the master, destiny?

  —night sky red with the promise of fortune,

  dawn pink as new flesh: healing, unfettered.

  January 1863

  Today, dawn red as warning. Unfettered

  supplies, stacked on the beach at our landing,

  washed away in the storm that rose too fast,

  caught us unprepared. Later, as we worked,

  I joined in the low singing someone raised

  to pace us, and felt a bond in labor

  I had not known. It was then a dark man

  removed his shirt, revealed the scars, crosshatched

  like the lines in this journal, on his back.

  It was he who remarked at how the ropes

  cracked like whips on the sand, made us take note

  of the wild dance of a tent loosed by wind.

  We watched and learned. Like any shrewd master,

  we know now to tie down what we will keep.

  February 1863

  We know it is our duty now to keep

  white men as prisoners—rebel soldiers,

  would-be masters. We’re all bondsmen here, each

  to the other. Freedom has gotten them

  captivity. For us, a conscription

  we have chosen—jailors to those who still

  would have us slaves. They are cautious, dreading

  the sight of us. Some neither read nor write,

  are laid too low and have few words to send

  but those I give them. Still, they are wary

  of a negro writing, taking down letters.

  X binds them to the page—a mute symbol

  like the cross on a grave. I suspect they fear

  I’ll listen, put something else down in ink.

  March 1863

  I listen, put down in ink what I know

  they labor to say between silences

  too big for words: worry for beloveds—

  My Dearest, how are you getting along—

  what has become of their small plots of land—

  did you harvest enough food to put by?

  They long for the comfort of former lives—

  I see you as you were, waving goodbye.

  Some send photographs—a likeness in case

  the body can’t return. Others dictate

  harsh facts of this war: The hot air carries

  the stench of limbs, rotten in the bone pit.

  Flies swarm—a black cloud. We hunger, grow weak.

  When men die, we eat their share of hardtack.

  April 1863

  When men die, we eat their share of hardtack

  trying not to recall their hollow sockets,

  the worm-stitch of their cheeks. Today we buried

  the last of our dead from Pascagoula,

  and those who died retreating to our ship—

  white sailors in blue firing upon us

  as if we were the enemy. I’d thought

  the fighting over, then watched a man fall

  beside me, knees-first as in prayer, then

  another, his arms outstretched as if borne

  upon the cross. Smoke that rose from each gun

  seemed a soul departing. The Colonel said:

  an unfortunate incident; said:

  their names shall deck the page of history.

  June 1863

  Some names shall deck the page of history

  as it is written on stone. Some will not.

  Yesterday, word came of colored troops, dead

  on the battlefield at Port Hudson; how

  General Banks was heard to say I have

  no dead there, and left them, unclaimed. Last night,

  I dreamt their eyes still open—dim, clouded

  as the eyes of fish washed ashore, yet fixed—

  staring back at me. Still, more come today

  eager to enlist. Their bodies—haggard

  faces, gaunt limbs—bring news of the mainland.

  Starved, they suffer like our prisoners. Dying,

  they plead for what we do not have to give.

  Death makes equals of us all: a fair master.

  August 1864

  Dumas was a fair master to us all.

  He taught me to read and write: I was a man-

  servant, if not a man. At my work,

  I studied natural things—all manner

  of plants, birds I draw now in my book: wren,

  willet, egret, loon. Tending the gardens,

  I thought only to study live things, thought

  never to know so much about the dead.

  Now I tend Ship Island graves, mounds like dunes

  that shift and disappear. I record names,

  send home simple notes, not much more than how

  and when—an official duty. I’m told

  it’s best
to spare most detail, but I know

  there are things which must be accounted for.

  1865

  These are things which must be accounted for:

  slaughter under the white flag of surrender—

  black massacre at Fort Pillow; our new name,

  the Corps d’Afrique—words that take the native

  from our claim; mossbacks and freedmen—exiles

  in their own homeland; the diseased, the maimed,

  every lost limb, and what remains: phantom

  ache, memory haunting an empty sleeve;

  the hog-eaten at Gettysburg, unmarked

  in their graves; all the dead letters, unanswered;

  untold stories of those that time will render

  mute. Beneath battlefields, green again,

  the dead molder—a scaffolding of bone

  we tread upon, forgetting. Truth be told.

  Again, the Fields

  AFTER WINSLOW HOMER

  the dead they lay long the lines like sheaves of Wheat I couldhave walked on the boddes all most from one end too the other

  No more muskets, the bone-drag

  weariness of marching, the trampled

  grass, soaked earth red as the wine

  of sacrament. Now, the veteran

  turns toward a new field, bright

  as domes of the republic. Here,

  he has shrugged off the past—his jacket

  and canteen flung down in the corner.

  At the center of the painting, he anchors

  the trinity, joining earth and sky.

  The wheat falls beneath his scythe—

  a language of bounty—the swaths

  like scripture on the field’s open page.

 

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