The Sunday Poem

Our story

The Gilbert Stuart portrait, which Thomas Jefferson called “the best which has been taken of me.”

I was 27 years old before I had ever heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

I remember the exact moment. I was reading a book by an English historian, Paul Johnson, called Modern Times, published in 1983. In the first chapter, Johnson describes the cultural upheavals caused by the vast, insane, and pointless violence of World War I, which looks now to have been a kind of suicide attempt by Europe itself, a collective, continental act of self-harm that forever changed the culture of the West. The horrific violence of the war subconsciously spawned civil violence across the world, Johnson argued in that opening chapter.

“New-style outbreaks of violence were to be found almost everywhere immediately after the formal fighting ended,” he wrote. Then he offered a list of examples: The Winnipeg general strike; a violent uprising in Glasgow; paramilitary violence in Hungary, and then, “…at Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 31 May 1921, fifty whites and two hundred blacks were murdered.”

I was stunned. Not just by the killing—though that was awful enough, and recent research has shown far more Black Tulsans were killed—but by the embarrassing fact that I had never heard of what happened in Tulsa in 1921. How could that be? American history was something I thought I knew and understood pretty well. Since I was a boy, it had been one of my favorite subjects, and I read eagerly outside of school—the Landmark Books series, the American Heritage Junior Library, and later the great 20th Century historians, Samuel Eliot Morison, Daniel Boorstin, so many more. None of them ever told me about Tulsa. I learned about it from an Englishman.

One of the great intellectual and cultural achievements of my lifetime is the opening of our study of American history to the experiences and contributions of all Americans. To me, this movement marks a genuine advance in how we tell our story to ourselves and our children, even though it has not come not without sharp controversies, new mistakes and distortions, and rigid conformities of its own. Among some progressives, American history seems to have become a kind of cartoon of unrelieved and irredeemable sin, a half-informed viewpoint as myopic as the one that erased Tulsa from the history books. But that’s just how the study of history has always progressed, as arguments over new interpretations hone and lead to fresh inquiries that rise up to challenge orthodoxies that were themselves once radical. The goal is always the same, and simple: Tell the truth; tell it all; tell it straight.

From 1999 to 2005, I covered the White House on a daily basis for ABC News. It was an intense job, especially in those years. But when you are assigned to the White House, you get to go to all kinds of events and ceremonies. Many are dull; some are truly special. In April of 2001, President George W. Bush held an event in the East Room of the White House to celebrate the birthday of Thomas Jefferson. The East Room is the grandest state room of the White House, and that day it was full of elected officials, cabinet members, and invited guests. Which was odd to me; it was Jefferson’s 258th birthday, hardly a number that warrants a grand commemoration. But Bush was up to something. There were dozens of Black Americans in the audience that day. And in the president’s first words of welcome, it became clear why.

“I want to thank all the descendants of Thomas Jefferson who are here,” Bush said with emphasis and a slightly mischievous smile. “Welcome to the White House.”

It was so strangely moving to me. I looked out at all the faces in the East Room, all the beautiful shades of skin color, and it was as if they were, the Jeffersons and the Hemmingses together there, inscribing necessary emendations in the pages of our history through their presence in the White House at the invitation of the president, and through their consanguinity with each other. It was a profoundly eloquent moment.

Now comes President Donald Trump with his own approach to American history. I would call Trump’s views reactionary, but that word suggests thought. What Trump is doing to our government’s presentation and memorialization of American history, and to its support for the teaching of the subject, is visceral, ignorant, and cowardly. Trump, who has welcomed white supremacists into his administration, is trying to suppress those stories, viewpoints, and voices that make some white people uncomfortable. It is a re-falsification of American history. It is a whitewashing of our shared story.

And, again, it is utter cowardice. Take the famous 1863 “Scourged Back” photo of a black man; “Peter” is how he has been identified.

Last month, the Interior Department instructed National Parks and Monuments to remove the image as part of a broader purge of material officials called too “negative.” Fort Pulaski National Monument in Georgia is among the sites impacted.

The image of “Peter” is deeply disturbing. It also tells a truth about our history in a way few other artifacts can. Some people just can’t handle the truth.

There have been so many similar incidents. Harriet Tubman’s personal hymnal has been removed from display at the National Museum of African American History & Culture. This, after a photo of Tubman and a quote from her were removed from the National Park Service webpage about the Underground Railroad. They were restored after a public outcry about the move.

This particular stupidity proves one thing: While Harriet Tubman—arguably the bravest, toughest, baddest-ass American in history—has been dead for 112 years, she apparently still has the power to scare the sh*t out of some white people.

A nation’s history is like a family’s history. There are comforting stories we treasure and hard stories we have trouble talking about. We often remember events differently. In every family, the meanings of the chapters of family life through the decades are constantly contended, always understood differently with the passing of time, and with the way time works to change our hearts and minds. In a very real sense, a family consists of those stories, and the way they change over time.

Our poem this week beautifully captures these national and personal forces. Natasha Trethewey is one of America’s greatest living poets. Her collection, Native Guard won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, and she has twice served as Poet Laureate of the United States. This poem is from her 2012 collection, Thrall. It tells the story of a visit to Monticello with her dad, a white man. The portrait of Thomas Jefferson she references is shown above.

Enlightenment

by Natasha Trethewey

In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs

at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned:

his forehead white with illumination —

.

a lit bulb — the rest of his face in shadow,

darkened as if the artist meant to contrast

his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.

.

By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait,

he was already linked to an affair

with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue

.

and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems

to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out

across the centuries, his lips fixed as if

.

he’s just uttered some final word.

The first time I saw the painting, I listened

as my father explained the contradictions:

.

how Jefferson hated slavery, though — out

of necessity, my father said — had to own

slaves; that his moral philosophy meant

.

he could not have fathered those children:

would have been impossible, my father said.

For years we debated the distance between

.

word and deed. I’d follow my father from book

to book, gathering citations, listening

as he named — like a field guide to Virginia —

.

each flower and tree and bird as if to prove

a man’s pursuit of knowledge is greater

than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

.

I did not know then the subtext

of our story, that my father could imagine

Jefferson’s words made flesh in my flesh —

.

the improvement of the blacks in body

and mind, in the first instance of their mixture

with the whites — or that my father could believe

.

he’d made me better. When I think of this now,

I see how the past holds us captive,

its beautiful ruin etched on the mind’s eye:

.

my young father, a rough outline of the old man

he’s become, needing to show me

the better measure of his heart, an equation

.

writ large at Monticello. That was years ago.

Now, we take in how much has changed:

talk of Sally Hemings, someone asking,

.

How white was she? — parsing the fractions

as if to name what made her worthy

of Jefferson’s attentions: a near-white,

.

quadroon mistress, not a plain black slave.

Imagine stepping back into the past,

our guide tells us then — and I can’t resist

.

whispering to my father: This is where

we split up. I’ll head around to the back.

When he laughs, I know he’s grateful

.

I’ve made a joke of it, this history

that links us — white father, black daughter —

even as it renders us other to each other.