History Lesson by Natasha Trethewey (2000)

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Natasha Trethewey’s History Lesson tells about an important relationship, memory, history, culture, as well as race. [1]

Poetry

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. [2]

Author

Natasha Trethewey is a daughter of a mixed-race marriage to a poet, professor, and Canadian emigrant Eric Tretheywe and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, a social worker. Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, winning the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Native Guard (2006). [3]

Racism Issue

References

  1. History Leson. June 9, 2012. Retrieved January 16, 2021
  2. Poetry and the Civil Rights Movement. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved January 16, 2021
  3. History Lesson. Poetry out Loud. Retrieved January 16, 2021