Meditation at Decatur Square
1
In which I try to decipher
the story it tells,
this syntax of monuments
flanking the old courthouse:
here, a rough outline
like the torso of a woman
great with child—
a steatite boulder from which
the Indians girdled the core
to make of it a bowl,
and left in the stone a wound; here,
the bronze figure of Thomas Jefferson,
quill in hand, inscribing
a language of freedom,
a creation story—
his hand poised at the word
happiness. There is not yet an ending,
no period—the single mark,
intended or misprinted, that changes
the meaning of everything.
Here too, for the Confederacy,
an obelisk, oblivious
in its name—a word
that also meant the symbol
to denote, in ancient manuscripts,
the spurious, corrupt, or doubtful;
at its base, forged
in concrete, a narrative
of valor, virtue, states’ rights.
Here, it is only the history of a word,
obelisk,
that points us toward
what’s not there; all of it
palimpsest, each mute object
repeating a single refrain:
Remember this.
2
Listen, there is another story I want
this place to tell: I was a child here,
traveling to school through the heart of town
by train, emerging into the light
of the square, in the shadow of the courthouse,
a poetics of grief already being written.
This is the place to which I vowed
I’d never return, hallowed ground now,
the new courthouse enshrining
the story of my mother’s death—
her autopsy, the police reports, even
the smallest details: how first
her ex-husband’s bullet entered
her raised left hand, shattering the finger
on which she’d worn her rings; how tidy
her apartment that morning, nothing
out of place but for, on the kitchen counter,
a folding knife, a fifty-cent roll of coins.
3
Once, a poet wrote: Books live in the mind
like honey inside a beehive. When I read
those words to my brother, after his release,
this is what he said: Inside the hive of prison
my mind lived in books. Inside, everything
was a story unfinished: the letters he wrote
for inmates who could not write, who waited
each day for an answer to arrive; the library
with too few books, the last pages ripped out
so someone could roll a cigarette. To get by,
he read those books, conjuring new endings
where the stories stopped. Inside, everything
was possibility, each graving a pathway, one
word closer to the day he’d walk out of prison
into the rest of his story—a happy one or not,
depending on where you marked the ending.
4
I have counted the years I am
a counter of years ten twenty
thirty now So much gone and yet
she lives in my mind like a book
to which I keep returning even
as the story remains the same
her ending the space she left
a wound a womb a bowl hewn
Transfiguration
Today, it is not the shape of a bell, though I think of bells sounding
somewhere in the distance as we left you—each sound wave rippling
to the next: the shape of singing. Nor is it round, though round
is an echo: shape of the chamber, the bullet, the hole bored through skin.
It is not, now, the sign you drew across your body, your hands tracing—
again and again—a prayer: Deliver me, Lord, from mine enemies.
And though it haunts me, the shape of loss is not the chalked outline,
simulacrum on the pavement, on the report—an X each place
your life seeped out. Today, the fig tree in winter stopped me.
Limned in snow, the dark tree mimicked its shadow, twinned
branches curving inward, a nest of bones. For a moment I watched
the bright cardinal perch there, then beat its wings in flight.
Articulation
AFTER MIGUEL CABRERA’S PORTRAIT OF SAINT GERTRUDE, 1763
In the legend, Saint Gertrude is called to write
after seeing, in a vision, the sacred heart of Christ.
Cabrera paints her among the instruments
of her faith: quill, inkwell, an open book,
rings on her fingers like Christ’s many wounds—
the heart emblazoned on her chest, the holy
infant nestled there as if sunk deep in a wound.
Against the dark backdrop, her face is a wafer
of light. How not to see, in the saint’s image,
my mother’s last portrait: the dark backdrop,
her dress black as a habit, the bright edge
of her afro ringing her face with light? And how
not to recall her many wounds: ring finger
shattered, her ex-husband’s bullet finding
her temple, lodging where her last thought lodged?
Three weeks gone, my mother came to me
in a dream, her body whole again but for
one perfect wound, the singular articulation
of all of them: a hole, center of her forehead,
the size of a wafer—light pouring from it.
How, then, could I not answer her life
with mine, she who saved me with hers?
And how could I not—bathed in the light
of her wound—find my calling there?
Notes
Bellocq’s Ophelia
Ophelia is the imagined name of a prostitute photographed around 1912 by E. J. Bellocq, later collected in the book Storyville Portraits. A white-skinned black woman—mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon—she would have lived in one of the few “colored” brothels, such as Willie Piazza’s Basin Street Mansion or Lula White’s Mahogany Hall, which, according to the Blue Book, was known as the Octoroon Club.
Native Guard
Epigraph (page 53)
From “Meditation on Form and Measure,” in Black Zodiac by Charles Wright (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).
“Genus Narcissus”
Epigraph from “To Daffadills” by Robert Herrick (1591–1674).
Epigraph (page 71)
From “Mississippi Goddamn,” on In Concert by Nina Simone. Verve Records, 1964.
“Pilgrimage”
The question What is to become / of all the living things in this place? is from My Cave Life in Vicksburg by Mary Webster Loughborough (New York, 1864).
“Native Guard”
Epigraph from the “Address at the Grave of the Unknown Dead” by Frederick Douglass, Arlington, Virginia, May 30, 1871; quoted in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight (Belknap Press, 2001).
The first regiments of the Louisiana Native Guards were mustered into service in September, October, and November of 1862—the 1st Regiment thus becoming the first officially sanctioned regiment of black soldiers in the Union Army, and the 2nd and 3rd made up of men who had been slaves only months before enlisting. During the war, the fort at Ship Island, Mississippi, called Fort Massachusetts, was maintained as a prison for Confederate soldiers—military convicts and prisoners of war—manned by the 2nd
Regiment. Among the 2nd Regiment’s officers was Francis E. Dumas—the son of a white Creole father and a mulatto mother—who had inherited slaves when his father died. Although Louisiana law had prohibited him from manumitting these slaves, when he joined the Union Army, Dumas freed them and encouraged those men of age to join the Native Guards. From The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience During the Civil War by James G. Hollandsworth (Louisiana State University Press, 1995).
“Native Guard,” January 1863
The Union ship Northern Star transported seven companies of the 2nd Louisiana Native Guards to Fort Massachusetts, Ship Island, on January 12, 1863. The lines “. . . 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?” are borrowed, in slightly different form, from Thank God My Regiment an African One: The Civil War Diary of Colonel Nathan W. Daniels, edited by C. P. Weaver (Louisiana State University Press, 1998).
“Native Guard,” April 1863
On April 9, 1863, 180 black men and their officers went onto the mainland to meet Confederate troops near Pascagoula, Mississippi. After the skirmish, as the black troops were retreating (having been outnumbered by the Confederates), white Union troops on board the gunboat Jackson fired directly at them and not at oncoming Confederates. Several black soldiers were killed or wounded. The phrases an unfortunate incident and their names shall deck the page of history are also from Thank God My Regiment an African One: The Civil War Diary of Colonel Nathan W. Daniels.
“Native Guard,” May 1863
During the Battle of Port Hudson in May 1863, General Nathaniel P. Banks requested a truce to locate the wounded Union soldiers and bury the dead. His troops, however, ignored the area where the Native Guards had fought, leaving those men unclaimed. When Colonel W. B. Shelby, a Confederate officer, asked permission to bury those putrefying bodies in front of his lines, Banks refused, saying that he had no dead in that area. From The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience During the Civil War.
“Native Guard,” 1865
In April 1864, Confederate troops attacked Fort Pillow, a Union garrison fifty miles north of Memphis. One correspondent, in a dispatch to the Mobile Advertiser and Register, reported that, after gaining control of the fort, the Confederates disregarded several individual attempts by the black troops to surrender, and “an indiscriminate slaughter followed” in which Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest purportedly ordered the black troops “shot down like dogs.” From “The Fort Pillow Massacre: Assessing the Evidence” by John Cimprich, in Black Soldiers in Blue: African-American Troops in the Civil War Era, edited by John David Smith (University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
“Again, the Fields”
After Winslow Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field, 1865.
Epigraph quoted in Bell Irvin Wiley and Horst D. Milhollen, They Who Fought Here (Macmillan, 1959).
“Pastoral”
The final line—“You don’t hate the South? they ask. You don’t hate it?”—is borrowed, in slightly different form, from William Faulkner’s character Quentin Compson at the end of Absalom, Absalom!: “I don’t hate the south. I don’t hate it.”
“Elegy for the Native Guards”
Epigraph from “Ode to the Confederate Dead” by Allen Tate, 1937.
“South”
Epigraph from Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E. O. Wilson (Knopf, 1998).
Thrall
“Miracle of the Black Leg”
The texts and images referred to in “Miracle of the Black Leg” 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 (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 in colonial Mexico and the children of those unions, whose names and taxonomies were recorded 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 (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 óptica, volume 3, by Antonio Palomino (Madrid, 1947, p. 913; originally published in 1724).
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the editors of the following journals, in which these poems, sometimes in different versions, first appeared.
Academy of American Poets, Poem-a-Day, poets.org: “Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath.” The Atlantic: “Articulation.” The Georgia Review: “Letter to Inmate #271847, Convicted of Murder, 1985” and “Meditation at Decatur Square.” Margie / American Journal of Poetry: “Transfiguration.” The National: “Reach.” The New Yorker: “Repentance.” Poet Lore: “My Father as Cartographer” and “Shooting Wild.” Poetry London: “Waterborne.” Time: “Duty.”
“Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath” was reprinted in The Pushcart Prize Anthology: Best of the Small Presses 2017. “Shooting Wild” was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2018.
Visit www.hmhco.com to find more books by Natasha Trethewey.
About the Author
Natasha Trethewey, two-term US poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and 2017 Heinz Award recipient, has written four collections of poetry and one book of nonfiction. Trethewey also held the position of poet laureate of Mississippi from 2012 to 2016. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University.
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