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Monument Page 7

by Natasha Trethewey


  pulled above the knee. Here the patient 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.

  The Americans

  1. Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright on Dissecting the White Negro, 1851

  To strip from the flesh

  the specious skin; to weigh

  in the brainpan

  seeds of white

  pepper; to find in the body

  its own diminishment—

  blood-deep

  and definite; to measure the heft

  of lack; to make of the work of faith

  the work of science, evidence

  the word of God: Canaan

  be the servant of servants; thus

  to know the truth

  of this: (this derelict

  corpus, a dark compendium, this

  atavistic assemblage—flatter

  feet, bowed legs, a shorter neck) so

  deep the tincture

  —see it!—

  we still know white from not.

  2. Blood

  AFTER GEORGE FULLER’S The Quadroon, 1880

  It must be the gaze of a benevolent viewer

  upon her, framed as she is in the painting’s

  romantic glow, her melancholic beauty

  meant to show the pathos of her condition:

  black blood—that she cannot transcend it.

  In the foreground she is shown at rest, seated,

  her basket empty and overturned beside her

  as though she would cast down the drudgery

  to which she was born. A gleaner, hopeless

  undine—the bucolic backdrop a dim aura

  around her—she looks out toward us as if

  to bridge the distance between. Mezzo,

  intermediate, how different she’s rendered

  from the dark kin working the fields behind her.

  If not for the ray of light appearing as if from beyond

  the canvas, we might miss them—three figures

  in the near distance, small as afterthought.

  3. Help, 1968

  AFTER A PHOTOGRAPH FROM The Americans BY ROBERT FRANK

  When I see Frank’s photograph

  of a white infant in the dark arms

  of a woman who must be the maid,

  I think of my mother and the year

  we spent alone—my father at sea.

  The woman stands in profile, back

  against a wall, holding her charge,

  their faces side by side—the look

  on the child’s face strangely prescient,

  a tiny furrow in the space

  between her brows. Neither of them

  looks toward the camera; nor

  do they look at each other. That year,

  when my mother took me for walks,

  she was mistaken again and again

  for my maid. Years later she told me

  she’d say I was her daughter, and each time

  strangers would stare in disbelief, then

  empty the change from their pockets. Now

  I think of the betrayals of flesh, how

  she must have tried to make of her face

  an inscrutable mask and hold it there

  as they made their small offerings—

  pressing coins into my hands. How

  like the woman in the photograph

  she must have seemed, carrying me

  each day—white in her arms—as if

  she were a prop: a black backdrop,

  the dark foil in this American story.

  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 h
im, 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

  Call it the catalog

  of mixed bloods, or

  the book of naught:

  not Spaniard, not white, but

  mulatto-returning-backwards (or

  hold-yourself-in-midair) and

  the morisca, the lobo, the chino,

  sambo, albino, and

  the no-te-entiendo—the

  I don’t understand you.

  Guidebook to the colony,

  record of each crossed birth,

  it is the typology of taint,

  of stain: blemish: sullying spot:

  that which can be purified,

  that which cannot—Canaan’s

  black fate. How like a dirty joke

  it seems: What do you call

  that space between

  the dark geographies of sex?

  Call it the taint—as in

  T’aint one and t’aint the other—

  illicit and yet naming still

  what is between. Between

  her parents, the child,

  mulatto-returning-backwards,

  cannot slip their hold,

  the triptych their bodies make

  in paint, in blood: her name

  written down in the Book

  of Castas—all her kind

  in thrall to a word.

  Thrall

  JUAN DE PAREJA, 1670

  He was not my father

  though he might have been

  I came to him

  the mulatto son

  of a slave woman

  just that

  as if it took only my mother

  to make me

  a mulatto

  meaning

  any white man

  could be my father

  ❖

  In his shop bound

  to the muller

  I ground his colors

  my hands dusted black

  with fired bone stained

  blue and flecked

  with glass my nails

  edged vermilion as if

  my fingertips bled

  In this way just as

  I’d turned the pages

  of his books

  I meant to touch

  everything he did

  ❖

  With Velázquez in Rome

  a divination

  At market I lingered to touch

  the bright hulls of lemons

  closed my eyes until

  the scent was oil

  and thinner yellow ocher

  in my head

  And once

  the sudden taste of iron

  a glimpse of red

  like a wound opening

  the robes of the pope

  at portrait

  that bright shade of blood

  before it darkens

  purpling nearly to black

  ❖

  Because he said

  painting was not

  labor was

  the province of free men

  I could only

  watch Such beauty

  in the work of his hands

  his quick strokes

  a divine language I learned

  over his shoulder

  my own hands

  tracing the air

  in his wake Forbidden

  to answer in paint

  I kept my canvases secret

  hidden until

  Velázquez decreed

  unto me

  myself Free

  I was apprentice he

  my master still

  ❖

  How intently at times

  could he fix his keen eye

  upon me

  though only once

  did he fix me in paint

  my color a study

  my eyes wide

  as I faced him

  a lace collar at my shoulders

  as though I’d been born

  noble

  the yoke of my birth

  gone from my neck

  In his hand a long brush

  to keep him far

  from the canvas

  far from it as I was

  the distance between us

  doubled that

  he could observe me

  twice stand closer

  to what he made

  For years I looked to it

  as one looks into a mirror

  ❖

  And so

  in The Calling of Saint Matthew

  I painted my own

  likeness a freeman

  in the House of Customs

  waiting to pay

  my duty In my hand

  an answer a slip of paper

  my signature on it

  Juan de Pareja 1661

  Velázquez one year gone

  Behind me

  upright on a shelf

  a forged platter luminous

  as an aureole

  just beyond my head

  my face turned

  to look out from the scene

  a self portrait

  To make it

  I looked at how

  my master saw me then

  I narrowed my eyes

  ❖

  Now

  at the bright edge

  of sleep mother

  She comes back to me

  as sound

  her voice

  in the echo of birdcall

  a single syllable

  again

  and again my name

  Juan Juan Ju
an

  or a bit of song that

  waking

  I cannot grasp

  Calling

  MEXICO, 1969

  Why not make a fiction

  of the mind’s fictions? I want to say

  it begins like this: the trip

  a pilgrimage, my mother

  kneeling at the altar of the Black Virgin,

  enthralled—light streaming in

  a window, the sun

  at her back, holy water

  in a bowl she must have touched.

  What’s left is palimpsest—one memory

  bleeding into another, overwriting it.

  How else to explain

  what remains? The sound

  of water in a basin I know is white,

  the sun behind her, light streaming in,

  her face—

  as if she were already dead—blurred

  as it will become.

  I want to imagine her before

  the altar, rising to meet us, my father

  lifting me

  toward her outstretched arms.

  What else to make

  of the mind’s slick confabulations?

  What comes back

  is the sun’s dazzle on a pool’s surface,

  light filtered through water

  closing over my head, my mother—her body

  between me and the high sun, a corona of light

  around her face. Why not call it

  a vision? What I know is this:

  I was drowning and saw a dark Madonna;

  someone pulled me through

  the water’s bright ceiling

  and I rose, initiate,

  from one life into another.

  Bird in the House

 

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