17 pages • 34 minutes read
History Lesson
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Background
Authorial Context
While it can be problematic to associate the artist’s personal life too closely with their work, Natasha Trethewey weaves personal and broader histories with lyric virtuosity. It is often said that a poem stands separate from the poet—hence, the use of the word “speaker.” Nonetheless, Trethewey’s experience is both visible and deeply embedded in her work, braided with a long and learned view of racial histories in the United States from before the Civil War through the present.
Trethewey’s parents went to Ohio to get married, as their union was in violation of the miscegenation laws in Mississippi at the time. They divorced when Trethewey was six. She grew up spending time with her mother in Mississippi and her father in New Orleans. Much of her work explores the experience of growing up mixed-race in the South. As a historian, Trethewey incorporates research of not only her own experience but also that of African American and mixed-race families and individuals throughout US history.
In keeping with the idea of multiplicity, Trethewey writes in a mix of free verse and traditional forms, including the pantoum, villanelle, ghazal, and sonnet.
Marilyn Nelson says of Trethewey’s work that “Trethewey encourages us to reflect, learn, and experience delight. The wide scope of her interests and her adept handling of form have created an opus of classics both elegant and necessary” (Academy of American Poets). “History Lesson” encapsulates both the simple and the profound in that it illustrates photos of two days at the beach 40 years apart that also happen to mark the progress of race relations between those 40 years.
Socio-Cultural Context
Born in 1966 in the American South, Trethewey came into the world at the apex of the civil rights movement. It would be two years before the beaches in Biloxi, Mississippi would open to African Americans, partly in response to persistent protests—or wade-ins—staged from the late 1950s until the mid-1960s. It was two years before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and two years after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act. It was one year after the assassinations of Malcolm X and Jimmy Lee Jackson.
“History Lesson,” then, is a reflection on a photograph taken in 1970 as well as a remembrance of the racism the speaker’s grandmother was subjected to in the 1930s. The poem is also an acknowledgment of ongoing racial tension and the strength one generation can impart to the generations that follow. Change can happen, and it is often hard won and as shifting as the tides. Dig into the ground that is gained, as the four-year-old digs into the wet sand.
Both the year the speaker speaks from and the year the photograph of the child is taken seem a long way from 1930, the year the grandmother is photographed on the “narrow plot / of sand” (Lines 14-15). The economic struggles of the Great Depression are not only deftly illustrated but also documented by the “cotton meal-sack dress” (Line 17). Photographs help to reconstruct a sense of what past generations experienced and to make that experience more real across the expanse of time. In “History Lesson,” the grandmother is not only accessible through a photo but is alive to stand on the open beach with her granddaughter, so creating a living bridge to the past.
Oral histories and first-person accounts—otherwise known as primary sources—provide a bridge when no one is left living to tell the stories. These accounts and narratives are all the more vital to understanding the course of racism in the US—past, present, and future—and integral to Trethewey’s work.
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By Natasha Trethewey
