Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive, a journey of understanding her mother’s life and violent death
Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive is a journey of understanding her mother’s life and violent death and her own life as a black woman in the deep south.
Natasha Trethewey’s poems distil Black America. They are deeply political, based on first-hand witness and exhaustive study, but they are also warm, elegiac, and even forgiving in a way. She has a distinguished lineage as a poet of race and of women, of work and of the black working class – her father was a poet and, in conversation, she quotes often from other poets who were formative in her development.
Her 2006 book of poems, Native Guard, centred on the black Union soldiers who guarded Confederate prisoners of war during the civil war, won her a pulitzer prize for poetry. She has been twice named Poet Laureate of America, in 2012 and 2013, and has been given a slew of other awards and acknowledgments.
Her new book is a book of prose, her second. called Memorial Drive, it is the context to her mother’s slaying in 1985 by her second husband, after the marriage was over. Trethewey herself was only 19 at the time and still in college.
“Nearly 30 years after my mother’s death,” she writes in the prologue, “I went back for the first time to the place she was murdered … When I left Atlanta, vowing never to return, I took with me what I had cultivated all those years: mute avoidance of my past, silence and willed amnesia buried deep in me like a root.”
She is now 54 and Memorial Drive is named for a major arterial in Atlanta and the last street on which her mother lived. The book is permeated with grief and with righteous anger. It is both softened and galvanised by the poetic language in which it is written and by Trethewey’s use of symbolism and metaphor and portent, from accidents of timing to the meaning of birthmarks to the content of dreams. She insists it is not a New Age leaning.
“I don’t think it’s mystical at all!” she says with some surprise when I suggest it. “I am someone who is research-based. On one hand, emotion, yes, but ‘the wise heart seeks knowledge’.” She is quoting again, this time from the Book of Proverbs. “I’m interested in evidence, and reading deeply and widely, and spending time in the archives doing research. “
She does admit, though, that she and her father would often discuss the scientific cast of the Enlightenment and that race coloured her view: “I had to push back against the knowledge production across centuries that would degrade and demean my humanity.”
The political is utterly personal in Memorial Drive, and the murder is less the denouement of the book and more the trigger for understanding her mother’s and her own life, existing as black women in the deep south.
Her “existential wounds”, as she calls them, permeate her writing. “The wounds are the black subjugation and oppression that are woven into the fabric of this country and inscribed on the landscape in the monuments and memorials,” she says by phone from Chicago, where she now lives. “And the greater wound was losing my mother when I was 19.”
The trigger for Memorial Drive, however, came not from these internalised demons, but from the response when she won the pulitzer and became Poet Laureate. The people who wrote about her apropos of those things always mentioned her father, who was also a poet and an academic – and white.
He was presumed to be her great influence and everything she achieved was thought by a certain sort of person to stem from him. Her mother, she says, “was always a footnote or an afterthought, this murdered woman”.
“People didn’t quite seem to understand that she indeed is why I’m a writer. That loss, that deepest wound, that wound that never heals, is why I have had to make my way in language. And I knew that, if she was going to get mentioned, I had to be the one to tell her story. And to place her in her proper context as the person who made me.”
She pauses, and quotes Shakespeare in her soft, precise voice:
“Thou are thy mother’s glass and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime”
Trethewey’s mother, a social worker born Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough in New Orleans, met her father, the Canadian-born poet Eric Trethewey, when they were both still students. Turnbough came from a black family in Gulfport, Mississippi, and the sections in which she describes an idyllic childhood in the turbulent sociopolitical era of the civil rights movement are both lyrical and compelling.
Her people were decent and upright. Her grandmother was a strong and comforting presence. Her great-uncle Son was tall and handsome and had perfect teeth, as she describes him in the book. She remembers him mowing his lawn in “lace-up shoes, finely ribbed undershirts, and creased trousers”. Great-aunt Lizzie was motherly, with her powdered bosom and her Bible on a stand beneath portraits of Jesus, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Aunt Sugar was a little wilder: she chewed tobacco and taught little Tasha how to catch crawfish.
Those early years honed her resilience, she says: “Even in the midst of despair, I knew how loved I was by all of those family members and that mattered.”
Her father, by contrast, was a huntin’ and fishin’ woodsman from Halifax, Nova Scotia. He hitchhiked to Kentucky State University when he was 17 after being offered a scholarship there for track and field. He would work as the lead singer of a band, as a reporter, a longshoreman, and he joined the Royal Canadian Navy at one point and cruised the world on a destroyer through much of 1967-68 to commemorate Canada’s hundredth anniversary. He was a Golden Gloves boxer. His wife, deploring any kind of violence, refused to watch his fights. It may seem an unusual curriculum vitae for a man who was an intellectual and a university professor, and yet his poetry is full of realism, of connection to nature, to the material world and to work.
He and Trethewey’s mother met in a literature course at Kentucky State, fell in love and “eloped” across state lines to Cincinnati where their marriage was legal. “Only my mother fully understood what this might mean for me, the child she was already carrying,” Trethewey writes in the book.
Trethewey was born on Memorial Day 1966. Her mother was just 22. “On her way to the segregated ward,” Trethewey writes, “she could not help but take in the tenor of the day, witnessing the barrage of rebel flags lining the streets: private citizens, lawmakers, clansmen (often one and the same) raising them in Gulfport and small towns all across Mississippi.”
It was, she continues, “a holiday glorifying the old South, the Lost Cause and white supremacy.” Her mother could not have missed the irony that this was to be the birthday of her child, the product of miscegenation from an interracial marriage still illegal in Mississippi and in 20 other states.
Her mother, she continues, “had come of age in 1965, turning 21 in the wake of Bloody Sunday, the Watts riots, and years of racially motivated murders in Mississippi”. Unlike her father who had been born “free to roam the open woods”, her mother had “come into being a black girl in the deep south, hemmed in, bound by a world circumscribed by Jim Crow”.
Her father revelled in living dangerously, taking risks; her mother had grown up learning to dissemble: “the art of making one’s face an inscrutable mask before whites who expected of blacks a servile difference”.
Eric Trethewey moved to New Orleans for his MA and the couple took turns at making the hour-long trip between them on weekends. In the book, Trethewey writes: “It seems to me now that my parents were visiting each other mostly for my benefit, trying perhaps to prepare me for their impending separation.”
In our conversation, she says that her father told her, shortly before he died in 2014, that if her mother had lived they might have got back together. She admits that might have been nostalgia for his lost youth, and there is certainly a note of nostalgia in her own voice as she mentions it.
Her parents gave her different things. Her father would quote Robert Frost on the necessity of figurative language. “How would you like that ball to play with,” he would say, pointing to a huge red sun in the sky. “Don’t be silly,” her mother shot back. “You know she’d burn her hands.” Her father told his daughter that she must become a writer: because of the nature of her experience she would have important things to say.
She had always written as a child and her father persuaded her to apply to graduate school as a fiction writer after college. A friend, mucking about, challenged her to write a poem in their first year and the result wasn’t so bad. She put it in her fiction professor’s mailbox. “And next time I saw her she came running to me and said, ‘Oh, Tasha, you’re a poet!’. I think it was because I wasn’t much of a fiction writer she was encouraging me to follow this other path.” She laughs the self-deprecating laugh that women do when they’re making light of their talents.
In 1972, Trethewey and her mother left Mississippi for good. They moved to Atlanta, in Georgia. There Gwendolyn met someone new: a Vietnam veteran, Joel Grimmette, who was both uneducated and deeply damaged. They married and a new baby came along. He wanted to adopt Trethewey so she would have his name and the family would be a unit: less out of love, she says, than for a sense of total ownership. He was deeply jealous and suspicious. It wasn’t long until his mental games turned physical and Trethewey would hear their rows and see her mother’s injuries: a black eye, a fractured jaw, bruised kidneys, a sprained arm.
It wasn’t till she told her mother that Grimmette had been abusing her too for years – not physically but mentally, by extreme gaslighting, threats, expressions of dislike – that her mother summoned the will to leave him.
They spent some time moving between domestic violence shelters. When the divorce was final, Gwendolyn and her two children moved into the apartment in Memorial Drive. Joel tracked them down and months of stalking ensued. He phoned; he visited. He threatened her. He was always trying to get her back.
His mental state deteriorated. He made a first attempt to kill Trethewey’s mother on Valentine’s Day, 1984. Trethewey, more than an hour’s drive away at university in Athens, Georgia, was alerted by her little brother. The police arrived before the Grimmette managed to inject her with the syringe he was wielding. He was convicted and briefly jailed. The following year the stalking resumed. The police needed hard evidence and installed surveillance in the family house. The transcripts make for frustrating and frightening reading: Grimmette needy, twisting her words, threatening; she reasoned and calming.
A warrant was issued for his arrest and a police guard posted. He was voluntarily checked in to a veteran’s hospital when he visited again with a stolen gun. He struck in the early morning when her police guard took a break they shouldn’t have. He killed his ex-wife with two bullets fired at close range.
“On the surface of things I told myself that I was going to forget this past, to abandon it, and in a literal sense I was never going to return to this place. I was going to bury as much of the memory of it as I can and just move forward,” Trethewey says now.
And yet, she took a job in Atlanta despite herself. She was writing Native Guard at the time and was working on a group of elegies for the black Union soldiers. She started to write about her mother too, but thought they were too personal to publish.
Driving through a graveyard she saw monuments to the Confederate dead and decided she should write a poem about them too. She quotes another poet, Mark Dotie: “Our metaphors go on ahead of us, they know before we do.”
“The poem that came out was a poem called Graveyard Blues, about the day that I buried my mother,” she says. “It was my metaphor going ahead of me. The last lines of that poem are, ‘I wander now among names of the dead/My mother’s name, stone pillow for my head’.
“My mother did not literally have a tombstone. I had not put one on her grave.
“So that metaphor, the idea of the cold comfort that you would have if you could go and lay your head down on the stone of your beloved, was an emotional truth, not a literal truth.
“I realised that what my mother had in common with the black soldiers that I was researching and trying to write about, was that no monument had been erected to her. My metaphor had gone on ahead of me – and somehow I was working back to it, I was catching up to it, by writing about something else.”
Her next project was Memorial Drive.
Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey will be published by Bloomsbury on August 18, $27.99.
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