Natasha Trethewey on the recent election

From the Atlanta Journal Constitution, a personal essay by Natasha Trethewey. She begins thus:

A few years ago, when I was working on the poem, �My Mother Dreams Another Country,� I was compelled to consider what my mother must have been thinking �- in 1966 �- about the biracial child she and my father were bringing into the world. The year before, my parents had broken two laws of the state of Mississippi by traveling to Ohio to marry and then returning to my mother�s home state. It was just after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but still before the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. State of Virginia in which state anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional. And it was years before those unconstitutional state laws were no longer enforced �- by custom, by intimidation, and by other deterrents imposed upon couples seeking marriage licenses. Barack Obama was just 5 years old when my mother was contemplating another country �- another America �- in which interracial marriage would be legal in the entire country. In 1961, when Obama was born, 21 states still had laws forbidding the marriage of his parents �- of blacks to whites.

I met Natasha Trethewey, who has Kentucky ties, this fall at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. I was impressed with her work but also with her great generosity of spirit.

I urge you to read this whole essay, which includes the poem “My Mother Dreams Another Country,” from her collection Native Guard. If you have not read that collection, you have missed something important, especially if you’re a southerner. My “review” is here.

Oh, and there’s an audio file of the essay but I found it robotic and preferred to stick with the written text.

Link courtesy of David Graham.

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