“Native Guard” by Natasha Trethewey

September 2, 2007
Betty Moore

New at Rowan Public Library is Natasha Trethewey’s “Native Guard,” winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Now a teacher of creative writing at Emory University and the winner of numerous awards for her poetry, the author was born in Gulfport, Mississippi in 1966.

Trethewey’s slim volume of poems explores both her personal history and Southern history. Her writing reflects on her own experiences of growing up biracial in the South, having both a blond doll and a crèche with a dark baby, seeing a cross burning in her family’s yard. She explores the history of her black mother and white father, who traveled to Ohio to marry, since it was illegal where they lived, in Mississippi. She delves into the history of her feelings of loss and grief at her mother’s death. And one group of poems looks at the Civil War from the point of view of black Union soldiers.

The ten-section title poem looks back to the time during the Civil War when former slaves, members of the Louisiana Native Guards of the Union Army, manned Fort Massachusetts on Ship Island, in the Gulf of Mexico near Gulfport and Biloxi.

“We know it is our duty now to keep/ white men as prisoners—rebel soldiers,/ would-be masters. We’re all bondsmen here, each/ to the other. Freedom has gotten them/ captivity. For us, a conscription/ we have chosen—jailors to those who still would have us slaves.

“Elegy for the Native Guards,” takes the poet by boat to today’s Fort Massachusetts, now part of Gulf Islands National Seashore. “We leave Gulfport at noon; gulls overhead/ trailing the boat….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--/ 2^nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx./ What is monument to their legacy?”

She uses language to reinforce her meanings: layers of repetition, phrases mirrored at beginning and end.

Throughout the book, Trethewey sifts through layers and contradictions of the South, bringing up what has been buried. Her mixed feelings stand out in the last lines of the volume: “I return/ to Mississippi, state that made a crime/ of me—mulatto, half-breed—native/ in my native land, this place they’ll bury me.”