Natasha Trethewey's Memorial Drive is a moving tribute to her mother's life
CBC Radio | Posted: October 16, 2020 6:17 PM | Last Updated: October 19, 2020
Warning: This story and accompanying audio includes details of domestic violence
Natasha Trethewey is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and two-time Poet Laureate of the United States.
After six acclaimed collections of poetry, her latest book is a work of nonfiction called Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir. It engages with the trauma of her mother's murder by an abusive ex-husband when Trethewey was 19 years old.
In this powerful book, Trethewey revisits her early life as a biracial child in Mississippi — her mother was Black, her father was white, at a time when her parents' marriage, and the registration of her birth, were illegal in the state. She focuses on her mother's second marriage to a controlling man who later fatally shot her, leaving an emotional wound that Natasha has carried all these years.
Trethewey alluded to her family tragedy in her books Native Guard, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and Monument: Poems New and Selected. With Memorial Drive, she has created a work that honours her mother's memory and celebrates the life of a vibrant and resilient woman.
Trethewey spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from her home in Evanston, Ill., where she teaches at Northwestern University.
What my vivid dreams tell me
"I have always had vivid dreams. There are a few that have stayed with me all these years that I revisit again and again — for what they tell me about my life at any given moment.
"I've had plenty of other vivid dreams throughout the years, but after that initial dream, three weeks after my mother's death, there were very few, if any, appearances of my mother in my dreams. I'd wanted to dream of her. But she wasn't there in my dreams most of the time.
"Someone asked me, if I could go back and say anything to my younger self, my 19-year-old self, what would it be?
I'd wanted to dream of her. But she wasn't there in my dreams most of the time.
"I'd say the thing I said then, 'Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?'"
The wounds that made me a writer
"My existential wounds — there were two of them that made me a writer. Losing my mother was the main one.
"The other one is the wound of history, of being born in a country that has a violent and brutal history of racism and oppression. It is woven into the fabric of the United States, with slavery as its original sin.
My existential wounds — there were two of them that made me a writer.
"The wound of that — the wound of being born in Mississippi, where my parents' marriage was still rendered illegal and illegitimate in the eyes of the law — rendering me illegitimate in the eyes of the law, persona non grata."
Who my mother was
"My mother was born in Jim Crow Mississippi, which was very much a world for Black people that was circumscribed by Jim Crow laws and the oppression that came along with that.
She grew up in North Gulfport, Mississippi, which was a community that had been inhabited by former slaves. It was founded after the Civil War.
My mother was born in Jim Crow Mississippi, which was very much a world for Black people that was circumscribed by Jim Crow laws and the kind of oppression that came along with that.
"It was a community that the city of Gulfport often seemed to forget. They didn't have the same kind of civic services that white communities had — paved roads, for example, or proper sewage and running water. It was a place that was forgotten in many ways. The people made the best of the community that they could.
"And the best of that community was the close-knit groups of people who were like extended family. Who looked after her and then, later on, me, and made me feel safe within that tight-knit enclave."
How my parents met
"Both my parents finished high school when they were 16 and wanted to go off to college. My Nova Scotian father got out a guide to American colleges and universities to find one that he could afford and that would give him a track scholarship. He landed on Kentucky State College, not realizing that it was an HBCU, a historically Black college and university. But he got in and made his way down there.
I always tell the punchline — he knew then that he'd entered heaven. But my mother's story of meeting him was a little different.
"He tells a story about hitchhiking most of the way because he didn't have enough money. He saved his money just to be able to ride the bus through New York City.
"But the rest of the time, he was hitchhiking. He arrived and he had on a big fisherman sweater that his mother had knitted for him, but he didn't have on a T-shirt underneath it. As he stood in line at the bursar's office, it was so hot in Kentucky that he fainted. When he woke up, he was surrounded by a circle of Black faces.
"I always tell the punchline — he knew then that he'd entered heaven. But my mother's story of meeting him was different.
"They actually met in a drama class. My mother had seen him on the campus because it was the year that the Righteous Brothers came out. They had that song, You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'.
"My mother and all the women in her dorm, after hearing the voices of these men, thought they must be Black. Their deep, soulful voices, the way they sang that song, suggested to my mother and her dorm mates that these were Black men. They were coming on television one night on some variety show.
My mother and all of her dorm mates gathered around the television in the common room to see the Righteous Brothers. When they came on singing that song, my mother said, that's the same moment that my father jogged past the window. It was love at first sight."
My mother and Big Joe
"After my parents separated, Big Joe became my mother's boyfriend and then, later on, her second husband. He was a Vietnam vet. He was back from Vietnam when she met him. She met him in Underground Atlanta.
"She was studying for a master's in social work at Atlanta University and she worked at night in a restaurant called the Mine Shaft.
He struck me as peculiar and vaguely frightening from the very moment I met him.
"It always seems to me that children have some extra sense about people. He struck me as peculiar and vaguely frightening from the very moment I met him.
"I know from other people who knew him, he was perceived by a lot of people as charming. He was tall and slender and, I suppose, likable to a lot of people, from whom he could hide a darker side of himself."
Not to be erased
"Because of my increasing popularity as a writer, reporters would write about me."
I decided if she was going to be mentioned, that I was going to be the one to tell the story.
Often my mother would just be mentioned as a footnote, part of my back story as a victim or a murdered woman, and not the remarkable, vibrant and resilient person who made me.
"I decided if she was going to be mentioned, that I was going to be the one to tell the story — her story, our story — so that she'd be understood in her proper context."
Natasha Trethewey's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
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