Thrall (3 page)

    the anatomist's blade opens a place in me,

 

like a curtain drawn upon a room in which

    each learned man is my father

 

and I hear, again, his words—
I study

    
my crossbreed child
—misnomer

 

and taxonomy, the language of zoology. Here,

    he is all of them: the preoccupied man—

 

an artist, collector of experience; the skeptic angling

    his head, his thoughts tilting toward

 

what I cannot know; the marshaller of knowledge,

    knuckling down a stack of books; even

 

the dissector—his scalpel in hand like a pen

    poised above me, aimed straight for my heart.

 

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.

 

The green drapery is like a sheet of water

    behind us—a cascade in the backdrop

of the photograph, a rushing current

 

that would scatter us, carry us each

    away. This is 1969 and I am three—

still light enough to be nearly the color

 

of my father. His armchair is a throne

    and I am leaning into him, propped

against his knees—his hand draped

 

across my shoulder. On the chair's arm

    my mother looms above me,

perched at the edge as though

 

she would fall off. The camera records

    her single gesture. Perhaps to still me,

she presses my arm with a forefinger,

 

makes visible a hypothesis of blood,

    its empire of words: the imprint

on my body of her lovely dark hand.

After the painting by Miguel Cabrera, c. 1763

 

What holds me first is the stemmed fruit

    in the child's small hand, center

of the painting, then the word nearby:
Texocotes,

    a tiny inscription on the mother's basket—

 

vessel from which, the scene suggests, the fruit

    has been plucked. Read:
exotic bounty

of the new world—
basket, fruit; womb, child.

    And still, what looks to be

 

tenderness: the father caressing

    his daughter's cheek, the painter's light

finding him—his profile glowing as if

    lit beneath the skin. Then, the dominion

 

of his touch: with one hand he holds

    the long stem gingerly, pressing it

against her face—his gesture at once

    possessing both. Flanked by her parents,

 

the child, in half-light, looks out as if

    toward you, her left arm disappearing

behind her mother's cloak. Such contrast—

    how not to see it?—in the lush depths

 

of paint: the mother's flat outline,

    the black cloak making her blacker still,

the moon-white crescent of her eye

    the only light in her face. In the foreground,

 

she gestures—a dark signal in the air—

    her body advancing toward them

like spilled ink spreading on a page,

    a great pendulum eclipsing the light.

 

1.  NOSTOS

 

Here is the dark night

of childhood—flickering

 

lamplight, odd shadows

on the walls—giant and flame

 

projected through the clear

frame of my father's voice.

 

Here is the past come back

as metaphor: my father, as if

 

to ease me into sleep, reciting

the trials of Odysseus. Always

 

he begins with the Cyclops,

light at the cave's mouth

 

bright as knowledge, the pilgrim

honing a pencil-sharp stake.

 

2.  QUESTIONS POSED BY THE DREAM

 

It's the old place on Jefferson Street

I've entered, a girl again, the house dark

and everyone sleeping—so quiet it seems

 

I'm alone. What can this mean now, more

than thirty years gone, to find myself

at the beginning of that long hallway

 

knowing, as I did then, what stands

at the other end? And why does the past

come back like this: looming, a human figure

 

formed—as if it had risen from the Gulf

—of the crushed shells that paved

our driveway, a sharp-edged creature

 

that could be conjured only by longing?

Why is it here blocking the dark passage

to my father's bookshelves, his many books?

 

3. SIREN

 

In this dream I am driving

a car, strapped to my seat

 

like Odysseus to the mast,

my father calling to me

 

from the back—luring me

to a past that never was. This

 

is the treachery of nostalgia.

This is the moment before

 

a ship could crash onto the rocks,

the car's back wheels tip over

 

a cliff. Steering, I must be

the crew, my ears deaf

 

to the sound of my father's voice;

I must be the captive listener

 

cleaving to his words. I must be

singing this song to myself.

 

1.

 

At the bottom of the exit ramp

my father waits for us, one foot

on the curb, right hand hooked

in the front pocket of his jeans,

a stack of books beneath his arm.

It's 1971, the last year we're still

together. My mother and I travel

this road, each week, to meet him—

I-10 from Mississippi to New Orleans—

and each time we pull off the highway