Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey is Just Gorgeous

 

 “In 1959 my mother is boarding a train.

she is barely sixteen, her one large grip

bulging with homemade dresses, whisper

of crinoline and lace, her anme stitched

inside each one. She is leaving behind

the dirt roads of Mississippi, the film

of red dust around her ankles, the thin

whistle of wind through the floorboards

of the shotgun house, the very idea of home” 

-The Southern Crescent, 1

God.

Native Guard is gorgeous.

I’m going to see if I can be articulate here, because I haven’t read a volume of poetry in years and I’m always worse at explaining why I love the things I love.

Reading Native Guard, a collection of poems by former Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, is like discovering footprints on a wrecked coast. It’s got everything—not “everything” in the sense that it’s stuffed with tropes, or even that it’s a particularly large volume, but that reading it reveals an ethereal, historical world that two centuries of white supremacy have tried to repress.

“Before the war, they were happy, he said,

quoting our textbook (this was senior-year

history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed,

and better off under a master’s care.

I watched the words blur on the page. No one

raised a hand, disagreed. Not even me”

-Southern History, 38

This half-dissolved memory animates Native Guard. Its titular poem, the palimpsestic record of a black Union soldier stationed off the Mississippi coast, handles the erasure of African-American history with heartbreaking subtlety and even a little hope. “Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi,” meanwhile, peers into early 20th-century photographs to paint a broader picture of southern life.

If historians don’t love Trethewey already, they should. She’s a necromancer.

And if the distant dead aren’t your thing, Native Guard also concerns itself with a more intimate history. The first section of the book is dedicated to her late mother, who is also a central figure in Memorial Drive, her only nonfiction work. She was born in 1966, on the centennial of Confederate Memorial Day (I had no idea that was a real holiday), and came of age as a biracial child in a state synonymous with Deep South racism. “Miscegenation,” which I first read years ago during a great poetic winter, recalls her parents’ secretive marriage: defying Jim Crow-era laws against interracial relationships, “they crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city/whose name begins with a sound ike sin” in order to formalize their union (36). I was so excited to find her poems again, and I sincerely hope they aren’t forgotten.

Her creation—whether that’s her origin story or her literary work—feels like a miracle. I wish I could tell you better how it came about. But perhaps it’s better for you to read it on your own, and to submerge yourself among the unburied dead.

“I want to call to her, say wait.

But this is history: she can’t linger”

-You are Late, “Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi