Zoey week 11 - pick a poet 3 - History Lesson by Natasha Trethewey

 I am starting to notice a theme in Trethewey’s poetry. A lot of her poetry highlights societal issues regarding racism and discrimination. This poem in particular describes Natasha’s memory of her, at four years old, standing at a beach while her grandmother takes a photo of her. Natasha mentions that the year that the photo was taken was 1970, two years after they opened “the rest of this beach to us.” It was forty years prior when Natasha’s grandmother had stood in the same spot, but it was marked colored. 

I find it interesting that in the first stanza, Trethewey describes herself wearing a flowery bathing suit, posing for the camera. She describes her grandmother, forty years prior, wearing a flowery dress, smiling for the photo. Like Trethewey’s previous poems, this gave me chills. There is something very powerful about seeing two photos taken forty years apart--same family, same beach, flowery outfit--different times in history. So much progress regarding racial justice had been made since the first photo was taken. 

It is also notable that the beach was in Mississippi, one of the most racist states, and one of the last to outlaw racial segregation. Even today, Mississippi has schools that are either all Black or all White. Sometimes it seems that racial segregation ended a long time ago, and it often surprises me to hear that some of our parents lived through segregation. This poem reminded me that even after the civil rights act of 1964, it still took four years for Mississippi to implement those changes in their state. This poem was not only successful in providing a “history lesson” (as the title states) for the reader but also made them FEEL something, which is difficult to get in a basic history textbook.