Race

Sometimes I thinkSometimes I think In a 2001 interview, Elizabeth Alexander noted, “As for the ‘banner headline’, ‘Race’, I always loved the way that my grandfather, and to a lesser extent my parents, used the word race to talk about ‘the race’ — meaning, of course, black people — as a thing that they could imagine, a body of people that we could imagine, that you could almost get your arms around, that the race was something tangible and palpable.” about Great-Uncle Paul who left Tuskegee,

AlabamaTuskegee, Alabama A small town where in 1881 Booker T. Washington developed a school (now known as Tuskegee University) to provide superior educations to African Americans. to become a forester in Oregon and in so doing

became fundamentally whitebecame fundamentally white That is, Paul passed willingly as a Caucasian person. The poem continues, “Paul never told anyone / he was white, he just didn’t say that he was black.” For more on the social concept of “passing,” read Stephanie Burt’s poem guide to the poem. for the rest of his life, except

when he traveled without his white wife to visit his siblings—

now in New York, now in Harlem, USA—just as pale-skinned,

as straight-haired, as blue-eyed as Paul, and black. Paul never told anyone

he was white, he just didn’t say that he was black, and who could imagine,

an Oregon forester in 1930 as anything other than white?Oregon forester in 1930 as anything other than white? Oregon’s Constitution had still banned “free Negros” from settling in the state up until 1926, when the ban was lifted.

The siblings in Harlem each morning ensured

no one confused them for anything other than what they were, black.

They were black! Brown-skinned spouses reduced confusion.

Many others have told, and not told, this tale.

When Paul came East alone he was as they were, their brother.

The poet inventsThe poet invents echoes Emerson’s essay, “Poetry and Imagination”: “But there is a third step which poetry takes, and which seems higher than the others [...] when the poet invents the fable, and invents the language which his heroes speak” heroic moments where the pale black ancestor stands up

on behalf of the race. The poet imagines Great-Uncle Paul

in cool, sagey groves counting rings in redwood trunks,

imagines pencil markings in a ledger book, classifications,

imagines a sidelong look from an ivory spouse who is learning

her husband’s caesuras. She can see silent spaces

but not what they signify, graphite markings in a forester’s code.

Many others have told, and not told, this tale.

The one time Great-Uncle Paul brought his wife to New York

he asked his siblings not to bring their spouses,

and that is where the story ends: ivory siblings who would not

see their brother without their telltale spouses.

What a strange thing is “race,” and family, stranger still.What a strange thing is “race,” and family, stranger still For construction, compare Lord Byron’s lines: “What a strange thing is Man! and what a stranger / Is woman!” (Don Juan, canto IX, stanza LXIV). See also the earlier note about the title in the first line of the poem.

Here a poem tells a story, a story about race.