Natasha Trethewey and Native Guard

By michaelbrsf

  • Robert Herrick "To Daffadills" (p 7)

    Robert Herrick (1591-1674) was considered the oldest of the "Sons of Ben" as he was part of a group that idolized Ben Jonson.

  • Poor Wayfaring Stranger (p 3)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBIyaCS6Q6U African American spiritual, first "composed" and published by Bishop Richard Allen. There are many versions of this song in production by artists such as Burl Ives, Johnny Cash, and Dolly Parton. The version here is Natalie Merchant.

  • Louisiana Native Guards

    1st Regiment of "officially sanctioned regiment of black soldiers in the Union Army, and the 2nd and 3rd made up of men who had been slaves only months before enlisting.

  • Union ship North Star

    This ship delivered troops from the 2nd Louisiana Native Guards to Ship Island on this date.

  • Pascagoula, Mississippi

    "180 black men and their officers went onto the mainland to meet Confederate troops...white Union troops on board the gunboat Jackson fired directly at them and not at oncoming Confederates" (Trethewey 48).

  • Battle of Port Hudson

    General Nathaniel P. Banks asked for a truce to care for wounded and bury the dead. The area where the Native Guards had fought was completely ignored and those men were left.

  • Fort Pillow Massacre

    Confederate soldiers gained control of Fort Pillow. The soldiers ignored the attempts of surrender by the black troops and were ordered by Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest to kill the black troops.

  • Leo Tolstoy (p 36)

    In "Miscegenation," Hethewey's father was reading War and Peace when he named her.

  • "Address at the Grave of the Unknown Dead" by Frederick Douglass (p 25)

    This address was made in Arlington, Virginia. It was also quoted in David Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, 2001.

  • Walt Whitman (p 33)

    This epigraph is from O Magnet-South, in Leaves of Grass.

  • Robert Penn Warren (p 35)

    Warren entered Vanderbilt University and became the youngest member of a group of Southern poets called "the Fugitives." Allan Tate and John Crowe Ransom were others in the group. They published a magazine by the same name from 1922 to 1925.

  • Allen Tate 1899-1979 (p 44)

    The epigraph to "Elegy For The Native Guards" is from Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead."

  • Gone With The Wind (p 38)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFu-jemU-bA&feature=relatedIn "Southern History," Hethewey uses the film to describe how history of the South was explained to her.

  • Wiley and Milhollen (p 31)

    The image is a painting by Winslow Homer, The Veteran in a New Field, in 1865. Trethewey quotes Wiley and Milhollen in the epigraph that ties to the painting.

  • Nina Simone (p 17)

    Mississippi GoddamnLines from "Mississippi Goddamn". This was written in response to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed 4 on September 15, 1963.

  • Natasha Trethewey born

    Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough Trethewey. Prior to her starting school, her parents divorced. She and her mother moved to Decatur, Georgia. Her mother married Joel Grimmette.

  • Hurricane Camille (p 42)

    Hurricane Camille hits the Mississippi gulf coast with winds in excess of 200 mph and tides at 20 feet.
  • Period: to

    Schooling

    BA from University of Georgia, MA from Hollins University, MFA in poetry from UMass. She was a member of the Darkroom Collective.

  • Death of Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough Trethewey Grimmette

    Joel Thomas Grimmette, III shoots and kills Gwendolyn Grimmett while Natasha is a freshmen at the University of Georgia in Athens.

  • Charles Wright (first quote)

    The epigraph in Native Guard can be found in Wright’s Black Zodiac.

  • E. O. Wilson (45)

    The epigraph for "South" is from Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge."
  • Period: to

    Works and accolades

    Her text Domestic Work (2000) winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Bellocq's Ophelia (2002) was awarded the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall. She acquired fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  • David Blight

    Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory quoted Frederick Douglass' Address previously cited.

  • Native Guard

    http://www.southernspaces.org/2005/elegy-native-guards Native Guard is published. She wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2007.