- Welcome back.
I hope everyone had a good lunch.
And we are ready to continue with our program.
I'd like to invite Vincent Brown to the podium,
and he will introduce our wonderful poet for the day.
Vincent Brown is a Professor of African American studies
and of History at Harvard University.
He's also the Director of the History Design
Studio at Harvard.
And he writes and teaches on the African diaspora.
Vincent.
[APPLAUSE]
- Thank you, Evelyn, for that, and thanks too to the President
Faust and to Dean Cohen and everyone at Radcliffe who
helped make this possible, this very timely
and I think important symposium.
Thanks too for inviting me to introduce the brilliant poet
Natasha Trethewey this afternoon.
We've been gathered to consider how we live with the past
so that we can better envision our future.
We cannot undo what has been done.
We must remember it all, putting our recollections together
in ways that allow us to live our values,
and to enact them for common benefit.
Now, I'm not a poet, and nor am I particularly poetic,
but as a historian, I'm humbled by the way Natasha Trethewey
engages so deeply with history.
And I'm intrigued by the differences in the ways poets
and historians work with the past.
Historians tend to follow chronological genre rules.
We like time lines then move our stories and arguments
along direct pathways.
We hold on to the arrow of time, pulled
along its fateful trajectory toward what
we hope is the truth.
Who owned slaves?
What work did they do?
How much profit did they yield for their exploiters?
How did legacies of privilege and loss
accumulate between then and now?
Now, Professor Trethewey would probably
be too polite to say it, but in some ways,
the chronological vectors employed by historians
run parallel to the typological classifications
of racial thinking.
We mark clear distinctions where there are only overlaps,
intersections, and blurs.
A thing happened in this place on this day in this year
and we can tell you how it changed
into that thing on another day years later.
But of course, this isn't generally
the way people experience the past,
any more than it is the way they experience
belonging and connection.
Instead, most people look backward, leap forward,
or enter fugue states where we can be every win at once.
I am a slave.
I suffer those lacerations.
I endure the humiliations.
I continue to service a debt for credit I never received.
This kind of experience isn't easily represented
within chronology.
Temporal life makes a more aesthetic and poetic claim
to the truth.
So rather than showing how to write history,
poets teach us how to live with history.
And in this, Natasha Trethewey is a marvelous guide.
She leads us into history as participants,
drawing us close to the past, its aspirations,
predicaments, and struggles.
Alongside her, perhaps we can see that better future.
Her work certainly shows it to me.
So please join me in welcoming the former 19th Poet
Laureate of the United States of America, and former Radcliffe
Fellow, Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Professor
of English and Creative Writing and soon
to be professor at Northwestern University,
because she says she likes the cold, Natasha Trethewey.
[APPLAUSE]
- Thank you.
Good afternoon.
I am honored and delighted to be at this wonderful conference.
I'm going to read a poem very much
about historical memory and historical erasure, what
gets told, recorded, passed down, who
does the telling, and recording, and what's
left out of our national memory about slavery, the Civil War,
and the aftermath in which we are now living.
This is the imagined journal of a former slave who
has enlisted in the Union Army.
The first regiments of the Louisiana Native Guards
were mustered into service in September, October,
and November of 1862, and the second and third,
made up of men who had been slaves only a few months
before enlisting.
During the war, the Fort at Ship Island,
Mississippi called Fort Massachusetts,
right across from my hometown, Gulfport, Mississippi,
they served as guards to Confederate soldiers,
military convicts, and prisoners of war.
One of the men on the island, an Officer, Francis Dumas,
the son of a white Creole father and a mulatto mother who
had inherited slaves when his father died.
And although Louisiana law prohibited him
from manumitting those slaves, after the preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation, he freed his slaves
and encourage those men of age to join the native guards.
The poem begins with an epigraph from Frederick Douglass that
reads, "If this war is to be forgotten,
I ask in the name of all things sacred.
What shall men remember?"
Native Guard, 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 33 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 was someone else's words, overlapped now,
cross-hatched beneath mine, on every page, his story
intersecting with my own.
January, 1863.
Oh, how history intersects my own birth
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 had 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 the 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,
jailers 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 hard tack.
April, 1863.
When men die, we eat their share of hard tack,
trying not to recall their hollow sockets, the worms
stench 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 thought the fighting over, then watched a man fall
beside me, knees first as in prayer, then
another, his arms outstretched as if born 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 are 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 Core
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.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]