Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir

Natasha Trethewey was born one year before the Supreme Court’s landmark Loving v. Virginia decision, which legalized interracial marriages throughout the country. Her parents conceived her and married a short while before, which made her existence in Mississippi both illegal and an affront to the legacy of White supremacy that the South steadfastly held on to, despite the numerous advances made during the Civil Rights era in which Trethewey was born.

Natasha explores what her birth meant to each of her parents. Both Gwen and Rick believed that she had the best of both worlds—Black and White, American and Canadian, Southern and Northern—but, they had different ideas about what her racial identity would mean in the post-Civil Rights world. Rick rightly believed that her identity would give her a great deal to say, in writing, about the nature of race in the United States. He erroneously believed that her existence marked a new era, one in which the idea of race would become meaningless, particularly as a determinant in people’s lives. Gwen, knowing that her daughter would be regarded as Black, as children with diverse racial backgrounds had always been, had no such delusions.

After Rick divorced Gwen and became less present in their lives, Gwen and Natasha immersed themselves in Black life in Atlanta, which also meant observing the ways in which White people reacted to their recent presences in the city’s expanding suburbs.