Thrall (6 page)

 

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.

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.

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.

. . . 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.

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

“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
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 (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).

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
.”