Sherry Chandler

Camp Nelson

One of the horrors I discovered in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin 2007) was that the African-American soldiers fighting in the Union Army could be as badly treated by Northern forces as by Southern.

Here, from Helen Deiss Irvin, is a harrowing incident from Kentucky’s Civil War:

In the devastating war it took to free the slaves, many black men were impressed into or enlisted in the Union army, and black women were bystanders who often suffered. . . . black women journeyed in droves to Camp Nelson, where their husbands or sons were trianing as Union soldiers. The Union commander, Speed S. Fry, called this situation the “Nigger Woman Question.” He expelled the women and had those who returned whipped. But the strength of family ties led more black woman and children to Camp Nelson, where they settled in samll huts they themselves put up near the camp. Living conditions were miserable, and most were penniless. One old woman with several sons in the Union army washed and sewed to pay her way.

Without giving these people time to collect their meager belongings, the Union commander evicted 400 of them in late November, 1864. Gutman tells that they were “dumped” from wagons on roadsides “in extreme cold weather.” They suffered intensely. Having no other place to turn, about 250 made their way back to the camp. Of these, 102 died.

Still they came, often turned out by their former owners when slave husbands joined the Union army. By January, 1865, Camp Nelson was the residence of 3,060 slaves, mostly women and children. [pp. 60-61]

From the Camp Nelson website, there is a kinder side to this incident, which states that 10,000 African-Americans enrolled in the Union army there:

The families of the African-American Soldiers attracted the attention of the American Missionary Association, an abolitionist society founded prior to the Civil War. Reverend John Fee, the founder of Berea College, came to Camp Nelson in 1864 to teach and minister to the refugees at Camp Nelson. His efforts eventually led to the founding of Ariel College and church and finally the settlement of Hall. Fee believed passionately in the equality of the races and he sought to educate the freedmen to become independent, self-reliant members of an integrated American society The refugee camp for the families of the African-American soldiers was located near the present day community of Hall west of US 27. This was also the site of Ariel College.

And here:

Fry was severely criticized by the northern press, the U.S. Sanitary Commission and by the missionary to the refugees, Rev. John G. Fee. Fry’s actions also enraged the African-American recruits and undermined the recruitment of African-Americans in Kentucky. Because of the complaints and reactions, Washington directed Fry to establish a camp for the refugees within Camp Nelson

A direct result of Fry’s actions at Camp Nelson and the uproar which followed was the passage into law, in February 1865, of the act which freed the wives and the children of the ex-slave enlistees. This act resulted in an increase in the enlistment of enslaved African-Americans in Kentucky and other border states.

Here is a photo that I stole from the site of the refugee camp. I highly recommend that you go spend some time at the Camp Nelson webpage.

The language of the mother

The latest print issue of Rattle (Winter 2008) has a conversation with Natasha Trethewey in which she says, in answer to the question of how her work has evolved:

I feel like I’m maybe a little bit more daring. I think I’ve always had a kind of restraint that maybe in earlier work bordered on perhaps what some people might see as a distance from the emotional material of the poem. I think that in Native Guard, there’s not a lot of distance between me, or the voice in the poem, and the emotional level of the poem. I gave a reading once and Ellen Voigt came up to me afterwards and said — and I loved when she told me this — that she could just hear the anger seething beneath the surface of those poems. I think it is particularly evident when I started talking about Mississippi. I wouldn’t have allowed myself to be angry in a poem a couple of books back.

Having read that, I revisited my post on Native Guard and sure enough, I make this statement:

Trethewey�s poems confront these violent contradictions with a formal restraint that for me gives them great power.

I may have to re-consider that statement in light of what Trethewey herself says, though I was talking about a different set of poems in the collection.

This morning, reading in Alicia Ostriker’s Stealing the Language. The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (Beacon Press, 1986), I came upon this passage that she quotes for Cherríe Moraga from a piece called “La Guera:”

I went to a concert where Ntozake Shange was reading. There, everything exploded in me. She was speaking language that I knew—in the deepest parts of me—existed, and that I had ignored in my own feminist studies and even in my own writing. What Ntozake caught in me is the realization that in my own development as a poet, I have, in many ways, denied the voice of my brown mother—the brown in me. I have acclimated to the sound of a white language which, as my father represents it, does not speak to the emotions in my poems—emotions which stem from the love of my mother . . . Sitting in that auditorium chair was the first time I had realized to the core of me that for years I had disowned the language I knew best—ignored the words and rhythms that were closest to me. [pp.197-198]

Ostriker herself comments:

For a woman of color, it is clear that the return to the mother makes possible the freeing of the poet’s voice and her ability to speak on behalf of a community which has given her substance as she gives it voice. [p. 198]

It’s tempting to think Trethewey may have had, may be having the same kind of epiphany, given what she said earlier this year at the Women Writers Conference about having to write through some of her issues with the anti-miscegenation laws in Mississippi before she could put a stone on her mother’s grave. It’s tempting to postulate that, her mother having died and Trethewey having followed her father and become a poet, that what you might call the white paternalistic and the brown maternalistic influences were out of balance.

Tempting, but I fear, bordering on stereotype.

Still.

In this Rattle interview Trethewey says:

When I first set out to write [Native Guard], I thought that it was only going to be about the Native Guards, because that’s the thing that struck me, that this was a lesser known history that doesn’t get mentioned when you go out to Ship Island, that you wouldn’t know anything about because there’s no monument out there or anything that tells you this part of the story. And so, historical erasure and historical memory are things that I think probably undergird just about everything I write; I mean, I can’t imagine ever turning away from that as one of my obsessions. And so, this became a good way to investigate that again but specifically with the Native Guards.

But Mark Doty says that our metaphors go out ahead of us, and what I didn’t find out until much later on, was that the book was very much also about my mother, and that what my mother had in common with the Native Guards was that she has no monument on her grave, that I had not yet properly done the work of memorialization that is my responsibility as daughter, as native guardian of her memory. That’s the point at which I realized that all this belonged in the same book . . .

Ideas to play with but reductive. Trethewey’s poetry is complex. It contains multitudes.

She is a poet of great empathy and she credits her father for developing that in her.

Formalism can sometimes help a poet control great emotion, can push her into language and realizations that she would not otherwise find if she let emotions roll out in full spate. Some poets can open the floodgates, others can’t.

I think I appreciate that which is restrained in Trethewey because it gives me room to find my own empathy.

__________
Here is sad news. Odetta has died.

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.

Poetry and History

Natasha Trethewey, in her forum on “Poetry and History” at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, said that she is interested in the problem of “historical erasure” or what gets left out of the historical record.

This erasure, I think, will be familiar territory to those of us who have tried much in the way of roots research, but it is even more problematical for minority groups, those who were not part of the dominant culture. Trethewey said that any of us who are American citizens have a responsibility to remember the stories that are handed down to us. Stories that often reflect a truth somewhat at odds with the official text.

In her last column, Writing Our Stories, Georgia Green Stamper writes that as she travels around the state reading from her new book, You Can Go Anywhere from the Crossroads of the World (Wind, 2008), audience members often approach her to tell her their own family stories. “But,” they say, “I’m not a writer. I can’t write my stories.”

Similarly, Jeannie Williams, who is compiling a family history book for the Owen County Historical Society, has told me that while people have all kinds of family stories that they love to tell, few have been willing to try to write entries for this book.

But I learned from Joanie DiMartino, who is not just an excellent poet but also a public historian, that these written records don’t have to come in the form of a polished narrative. Journals, letters, calendars, ledgers, there are many ways to preserve the record. You can also talk to a tape or digital recorder.

Some one I ran into this weekend said, when she has ideas for a poem/story while driving, she calls herself on her cell phone and leaves the line as a message. So there are all manner of ways to “write.”

So if you know stories, throw the things your English teacher taught you out the window and record them somehow.

But I digress. Trethewey is interested in doing more than simply recording this history. Her goal is to turn it into poetry, to use events that are actual to create characters who are fictional. To do this, she said, she looks for the “luminous details,” details that she described as “transcendentals among the facts.”

In describing her work from historical photographs, she used the term punctum, Latin for point, to describe “a point in a photograph that sparks your imagination to consider everything outside the photograph.” In Bellocq’s Ophelia, she talked of seeing, in one photograph, a spittoon in the corner of a bedroom. Or it might be the print of a woman’s dress or the curl of a man’s hand. Anything that allows the writer “to access the human in the facts.”

One last point, Trethewey said that historians now use imaginative writing in their classes, to fill in the personal and keep the documentary stuff “right.”

This point sort of leads me to Ginger Strand, who in talking of the research into her book Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, & Lies (Simon & Schuster, 2008), spoke of running into a librarian who said “They’ve poured all this stuff down the memory hole and they’re not letting it out.”

Native Guard

I would love Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) if it only had this one great poem, “Pastoral,” in which she takes on the icons of southern poetry in a modified sonnet:

In the dream, I am with the Fugitive
Poets. We’re gathered for a photograph.
Behind us, the skyline of Atlanta
…
We’re lining up now — Robert Penn Warren,
his voice just audible above the drone
of bulldozers, telling us where to stand.
Say “race,” the photographer croons…

But then, on the very next page, she takes on Faulkner in a ghazal.

Miscegenation

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

…

Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus…

Native Guard takes its title from am elegant crown of sonnets concerning the Louisiana Native Guards, regiments of black soldiers who served with the Union Army. According to the end-notes, seven companies of the Second Louisiana Native Guards were sent to Fort Massachusetts, on Ship Island, to act as guards for Confederate prisoners confined there.

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…

As those last words hint, Trethewey’s is not a tale of south bad/north good. It’s more north bad/south worse.

December 1862

…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…

These soldiers are fired on in retreat by Union soldiers after one battle and after another, their white commanders refused to look for their wounded or bury their dead. When they were defending Fort Pillow in 1864, Bedford Forrest refused to acknowledge their flag of surrender and instead mowed them down. In a final insulting irony, their graves on Ship Island are washed away by Hurricane Camille while the Daughters of the Confederacy put up a plaque naming the Rebel soldiers who died there.

The poem that conveys this last information, “Elegy for the Native Guards,” is headed by an epigraph from Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”

Trethewey’s poems confront these violent contradictions with a formal restraint that for me gives them great power.

Native Guard won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2007. A nice interview from the Online Newshour on that occasion.

Natasha Trethewey is coming to the Kentucky Women Writers Conference this weekend. She will read at 4:30 Friday afternoon in the Young Library on the University of Kentucky campus. The reading is free and open to the public.