Natasha Trethewey

We mourn the broken things, chair legs wrenched from their seats, chipped plates, the threadbare clothes. We work the magic of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes. We save what we can, melt small pieces of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones for soup. Beating rugs against the house, we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie. I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog, listen for passing cars. All day we watch for the mail, some news from a distant place.

I am four in this photograph, standing on a wide strip of Mississippi beach, my hands on the flowered hips of a bright bikini. My toes dig in, curl around wet sand. The sun cuts the rippling Gulf in flashes with each tidal rush. Minnows dart at my feet glinting like switchblades. I am alone except for my grandmother, other side of the camera, telling me how to pose. It is 1970, two years after they opened the rest of this beach to us, forty years since the photograph where she stood on a narrow plot of sand marked colored, smiling, her hands on the flowered hips of a cotton meal-sack dress.

Here, she said,put this on your head. She handed me a hat. You ’bout as white as your dad, and you gone stay like that.

In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned: his forehead white with illumination — a lit bulb — the rest of his face in shadow, darkened as if the artist meant to contrast his bright knowledge, its dark subtext. By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait, he was already linked to an affair with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out across the centuries, his lips fixed as if he's just uttered some final word. The first time I saw the painting, I listened as my father explained the contradictions: how Jefferson hated slavery, though —out of necessity, my father said — had to own slaves; that his moral philosophy meant he could not have fathered those children: would have been impossible, my father said. For years we debated the distance between word and deed. I'd follow my father from book to book, gathering citations, listening as he named — like a field guide to Virginia — each flower and tree and bird as if to prove a man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision. I did not know then the subtext of our story, that my father could imagine Jefferson's words made flesh in my flesh — the improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites

For my father I think by now the river must be thick with salmon. Late August, I imagine it as it was that morning: drizzle needling the surface, mist at the banks like a net settling around us — everything damp and shining. That morning, awkward and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked into the current and found our places — you upstream a few yards and out far deeper. You must remember how the river seeped in over your boots and you grew heavier with that defeat. All day I kept turning to watch you, how first you mimed our guide's casting then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky between us; and later, rod in hand, how you tried — again and again — to find that perfect arc, flight of an insect skimming the river's surface. Perhaps you recall I cast my line and reeled in two small trout we could not keep. Because I had to release them, I confess, I thought about the past — working the hooks loose, the fish writhing in my hands, each one slipping away before I could let go. I can tell you now that I tried to take it all in, record it for an elegy I'd write — one day — when the time came. Your daughter, I was that ruthless. What does it matter if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting your line, and when it did not come back empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights, dreaming, I step again into the small boat that carried us out and watch the bank receding — my back to where I know we are headed.

Now that the salt of their blood Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea . . . —Allen Tate We leave Gulfport at noon; gulls overhead trailing the boat—streamers, noisy fanfare— all the way to Ship Island. What we see first is the fort, its roof of grass, a lee— half reminder of the men who served there— a weathered monument to some of the dead. Inside we follow the ranger, hurried though we are to get to the beach. He tells of graves lost in the Gulf, the island split in half when Hurricane Camille hit, shows us casemates, cannons, the store that sells souvenirs, tokens of history long buried. The Daughters of the Confederacy has placed a plaque here, at the fort’s entrance— each Confederate soldier’s name raised hard in bronze; no names carved for the Native Guards— 2nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx. What is monument to their legacy? All the grave markers, all the crude headstones— water-lost. Now fish dart among their bones, and we listen for what the waves intone. Only the fort remains, near forty feet high, round, unfinished, half open to the sky, the elements—wind, rain—God’s deliberate eye.

When he tells the story now he's at the center of it, everyone else in the house falling into the backdrop— my mother, grandmother, an uncle, all dead now—props in our story: father and daughter caught in memory's half-light. I'm too young to recall it, so his story becomes the story: 1969, Hurricane Camille bearing down, the old house shuddering as if it will collapse. Rain pours into every room and he has to keep moving, keep me out of harm's way— a father's first duty: to protect. And so, in the story, he does: I am small in his arms, perhaps even sleeping. Water is rising around us and there is no higher place he can take me than this, memory forged in the storm's eye: a girl clinging to her father. What can I do but this? Let him tell it again and again as if it's always been only us, and that, when it mattered, he was the one who saved me.