Ground Truth

Essay and Poems by Natasha Trethewey

Images courtesy of  Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections & University Archives Repository.

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When I was a few months old, my parents and I lived with my maternal grandmother in Gulfport, Mississippi. It was less than a year after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had been signed into law and a year before the Supreme Court would rule, in Loving v. State of Virginia, that laws prohibiting interracial marriage—like that of my black mother and white father—were unconstitutional. My grandmother’s house was just across the street from the Mount Olive Baptist Church, at the intersection of Jefferson Street and Highway 49. Years before I was born, the pasture that had abutted my grandmother’s property had been paved over to construct the new highway, a major throughway and hurricane evacuation route connecting I-10 to US 90, the beach road. The only thing separating us from the regular traffic of locals and commercial vehicles—18-wheelers that rattled our windows—was a small driveway made of crushed oyster shells. Mount Olive didn’t have its own driveway, so on Sundays during worship hours my grandmother let the deacons park the church bus in hers. For a few weeks that summer, the church elders had been holding a voter registration drive, signing up citizens in the community, an enclave that had been home to black Americans since the end of the Civil War.

It would have been easy for someone driving by to think our driveway was church property, and for this reason, we never knew if the act of domestic terrorism—a cross burned in that driveway only feet from our house—was directed at us, the interracial family living inside it, or at the church for conducting the drive, registering black voters. I grew up hearing the story of the night the Klan arrived, eight or so of them bearing a man-sized cross. Members of my family told it often, in order to remember—a necessary act—and to remind me of what we had once endured, the way that our personal history was part of a larger pattern of racial violence and intimidation in America, and of the ongoing struggle for justice that lay before us.

I was too young to remember the events of that night myself. The cross burned until the flames died; whatever ashes remained would have washed away or dissolved with time, the tufts of grass between the shells springing up green again each season. Nature’s way of erasing evidence of what happened. Only our memory served to keep an awareness of this troubling history alive, which is why—years later—I decided to write a poem about that night, our constant retelling, so that the story would be inscribed into our cultural memory: a written record for the archives of our shared American past.

It occurred to me while working on the poem that in order to inscribe—or reinscribe—those aspects of our history that had been erased, forgotten, or left out of the historical record, it was necessary not only to say it, but to say it again. Thus, the poem is structured as a pantoum, a form that requires repetition, echoing my family’s repeated telling of the event. In the poem’s obsessive returning, each line is repeated in an interlocking pattern such that the first and last lines are the same: We tell the story every year.

I hadn’t been thinking of the event in my family history while beginning to write about the Tulsa race massacre—at least not directly. I’d been thinking about the cultural amnesia that often surrounds events from our past that are difficult, traumatic, and that show the manifestations of white supremacy—the brute and incontrovertible facts of an American history of injustice. Growing up in the Deep South, I was accustomed to the usual erasures: the way that a preponderance of monuments to the Confederacy and Lost Cause ideology inscribed the landscape with a particular narrative rooted in willed forgetting and selective remembering.

“Who controls the past controls the future,” George Orwell wrote. “Who controls the present controls the past.” Just over a century ago, in the last two decades of the 19th century and the first two of the 20th, the United Daughters of the Confederacy set out to inscribe a dominant narrative on the landscape and in the minds of schoolchildren—indeed into the American imagination. Through the erecting of monuments and the naming of roads, bridges, and other public works, they constructed a physical and psychic landscape that promoted white supremacy, memorialized the myth of a virtuous Confederate cause, and wrote black Americans out of the story—despite, for example, black soldiers’ role in the Civil War, in preserving the Union. The history textbooks commissioned by the UDC—ones I’d later read in school—glorified the institution of slavery and devoted little time to Reconstruction and the horrors inflicted upon African Americans throughout the Jim Crow era.

Now, even as monuments to the Confederacy—the attempt to destroy the Union in order to maintain slavery and white supremacy—are coming down, new legislation across the country threatens to continue the pattern of erasure begun by the UDC. The justification, as enshrined in the text of Oklahoma’s House Bill 1775: that schoolchildren should not have to encounter the facts of history that might cause them discomfort or anguish or feelings of guilt over the actions of people in the past. Some proponents are most certainly motivated by a desire to falsify the history of the nation so as not to feel in any way responsible for ongoing oppression, inequality, and injustice that are linked to the past—and the ways they are the beneficiaries of it now. Some might only want to protect their children from difficult knowledge, an attempt to maintain an idea of “innocence”—American or their own—as if the loss of it is somehow harmful to the sense of self rather than emotionally and civically instructive. I’m reminded of novelist Pat Conroy’s words: “There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.” To lose the idea of American innocence is to begin to understand just how far we’ve come and how far still we must go to reach the highest ideals set forth in our founding documents. A path toward the greatness we have yet to achieve. Erasure gets in the way of progress. It blurs the facts, flattens history, renders innocuous the actions of people in the past and abandons the possibility of redemption.

Not long ago, a friend of mine sent my poem about the necessity of remembering and the cross burning in my grandmother’s driveway back to me with some significant changes. It had been given as an “erasure” assignment by a junior high school teacher. Often, poets will take official documents and “erase” them in such a way as to reveal a larger truth embedded in the words. It’s an act of excavation, of signifying and showing the possibility of redress by illuminating what is not readily apparent in the text. In this case, students were instructed to take an existing poem and erase it—redacting in bold black lines enough of the words so that another meaning, another poem, arises from within it.

I don’t know if the lesson included a discussion of my poem, the event described in it, and the relevant historical context (domestic terrorism, the KKK), or my goal as its author—evident in the language—in writing it: to inscribe a traumatic event that otherwise might be forgotten. Staring at the nearly black page, I couldn’t help thinking of the irony in assigning an erasure of a poem by a black woman poet trying to inscribe an experience—an act of necessary articulation—against the landscape of erasure that already exists around certain historical facts. Still, I am not without compassion, and I can see why someone might be pleased that the student found a happy, innocent recollection within the words comprised by my poem: a memory only of Christmas. Perhaps what was erased was a feeling of pain or anguish at the actions of people in the past—something that might lead to empathy for the people terrorized by those actions.

What, then, is the message to take from this? That we can redact the past and find something completely without injustice? That history can simply be covered over and hidden or buried—as in the unmarked graves of Tulsa’s cemeteries? That the idea of innocence still lies at the heart of ongoing American racism? To get to an alternate version, innocent and unreckoning, nearly the whole poem had to be erased: the page dark as night, framing now a story about angels, lights, a green Christmas tree. Nothing burning, no flaming cross, no Klansmen anonymous in all their white.

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Ground Truth

1. Inner Dispersal Loop, I-244, Greenwood

Here is your road, tying / you to its meanings…
—Muriel Rukeyser

Not just through, but over, above: as if to show
there is something that matters more, inscribe it
on the landscape—a message in concrete and rebar, 
monument to the nation’s ideals. Which is why 
these roads always cut through the heart of—, why 
officials will say blight, urban renewal, eminent 
domain, name them MLK, Jr. when they mean
demolish, isolate, divide. Here, you can stand

beneath it, look up, hear the rumbling,
roar of engines—as during the invasion: how
survivors recalled planes flying low, surveying
the burning—the citizens of Greenwood
as they fled—and the National Guard overseeing 
that first dispersal, that first destruction. 

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2. Notes for a Poem on the Tulsa Race Massacre

Veterans Day, November 11, 2022

We return fighting.
—W.E.B. DuBois, 1919

The first day I spent in Tulsa I woke that morning 
to a parade gathering outside my window—
a commemoration begun in 1918 as Armistice Day, 
marking the end of the Great War. At Elgin and Archer, 
I was just blocks from the place I’d come to see—
the heart of it, Black Wall Street—yet another site 
steeped in the residue of history, of white mob violence 
settled down in the soil. Watching the staging area, 
the flatbed trucks lining the route, I couldn’t stop seeing 
scenes of the invasion, massacre in Greenwood: the dead 
hauled away; black men paraded through the streets, 
women and children rounded up for internment, carted 
through town, through the jeering, cheers of whites—
some of them, survivors recalled, boys, young 
as ten years old. Call it coincidence, or synchronicity—
the term Carl Jung gave to the phenomenon of events 
coinciding as if related, but with no causal connection. 
The morning of the parade, I wasn’t thinking of Armistice,
that you could trace the events of 1921 back to the war, 
to black soldiers returning determined to end Jim Crow, 
to fight for democracy at home. I was thinking only
of how many times I’d heard a similar story, the same 
equation: whites incited to violence by an accusation, false 
or not—a through line across time and space—as far north 
as Duluth, Minnesota, 1920, where a white mob abducted 
three black men from jail and hanged them from a lamp post,
all the way south to my home state, Mississippi, 1955, 
the seed barn where two white men tortured Emmett Till, 
a black child, for whistling at a white woman; the bridge 
over the Tallahatchie where they put a bullet in his head, 
tied him with barbed wire to a fan and dumped his body 
in the river. Days later—a ripple—a snag in the water 
where he would not be held down, his body come back—
a single toe rising above the surface as if to signal: I am here, 
you will not erase me—my body of evidence. Some say 
coincidence is pattern revealed. Decades before Till 
would become another item in our national ledger, 
the citizens of Greenwood were reading the papers, 
watching the patterns emerge: white mob violence—
lynching and “Negro Drives”—blacks run out of town, 
their homes looted and burned in Wilmington, NC, 1898, 
Springfield, IL, 1908, Forsyth County, GA, 1912, East 
St. Louis, 1917, Chicago, 1919…; they were watching 
patterns of rhetoric, language, evidence of thought—as in 
Nab Negro, the headline in the Tulsa Tribune that day in May.
How not to read in it the syntax of the imperative? As in 
a thing still to be done, a call to action. One witness swore 
he saw the words “Lynch Negro” that day in the paper, 
where there was only “Nab Negro” and a poem, “Do It Now,” 
about swatting flies: We must show no ruth or pity, / to the fly: /
In the country or the city, / he must die…. From this distance 
I can still see the connections, the inference: like the rhyme 
I heard a white boy chant when we were children in school—
Niggers and flies I do despise. Nab Negro; Do it now. In Tulsa,
on the TV news, a retired army officer was talking about unity, 
saying brothers and sisters, saying those who served 
can come together, show support, share commonalities, love 
each other. But I don’t know. After January 6th, it’s hard
to believe those words. It took 120 years for Congress to pass 
an antilynching law, named for Emmett Till. The year before 
he was murdered, Eisenhower changed the name Armistice 
Day to Veterans Day—a way to include more veterans, more 
wars. But I can’t help thinking in metaphor: how it replaced 
a word that meant suspension of fighting, hostile behavior. 
That was 1954, the same year as Brown v. Board of Education, 
the Supreme Court decision ending segregation, advancing 
civil rights—the kind of change in America that has always led 
to rage, recalcitrance. To send a message, new monuments 
to White Supremacy went up around the country: a bronze 
Robert E. Lee in Montgomery, AL, a Robert E. Lee Elementary 
in Washington state, the Confederate battle flag raised 
again on the flagpole in Georgia, statues mustered as far 
north as Maine, as far West as Oregon. Continuity, too, 
is pattern. In Tulsa, on Veterans Day, nearly as many people
participated in the parade as descended on Greenwood.
Imagine the possibility of that much remembering, 
reckoning, armistice. Watching the news, I wondered 
how many of them, so close to the massacre—the ground
on which they paraded—remembered it, or recalled 
the service of black soldiers in WWI: how one black unit, 
the 369th, spent more time at the front, suffered more 
casualties than any other American troops; how some 
black soldiers returned and were lynched in uniform—
sometimes by white brothers—because they were in 
uniform. Even now, they get lost in our national memory—
gaps and erasures: a Whites Only version of a segregated war. 
Think of it, 1921, those black veterans in uniform, marching 
to the courthouse to prevent a lynching—uphold the rule 
of law—and the white mob they faced. I keep thinking 
how much it would matter if this history were part of our 
American curriculum, if every child learned it in school—
all of it—even if it made them feel bad for the actions of people 
in the past: a feeling akin to empathy. A generous thought, 
my father always said, is the idea of justice taking root. 
A kind of redress. Which is why I go back to one postcard 
of the burning, how the photographer must have shot from high 
above, a God’s-eye view, words forming in his mind as if 
he’d been deputized to write the scripture of this scene: 
a long road upon which a few people have gathered, perhaps 
to take a last look, smoke darkening the distant sky, and 
above them, in white, the words “Runing the Negro Out 
of Tulsa.” Coincidence, his misspelling, heavy with meaning 
for someone like me, who can’t help seeking it everywhere—
a way to make order out of the chaos of this world. Runing: 
word for making a song of lamentation, a poem of mourning—
which is what this is. What I’m trying to say is that to understand 
America, I spent the day in Tulsa thinking about democracy, 
standing on Greenwood, sifting through the archives—postcards 
of the destruction—and watching, from a distance, the slow 
unearthing of history settled down in the soil: resurrection 
of the long buried in a mass grave at Oaklawn—an aperture, 
waiting room of the lost—evidence of the nearly erased rising 
now to the surface like a reckoning, a toehold on the truth.

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