Quotes from Natasha Trethewey

The servant, still a child, cranes his neck, turns his face up toward all of them. He is dark as history, origin of the word native: the weight of blood, a pale mistress on his back, heavier every year.

We take those things we need from the Confederates' abandoned homes: salt, sugar, even this journal, near full with someone else's words, overlapped now, crosshatched beneath mine. On every page, his story intersecting with my own.

I'd follow my father from book to book, gathering citations, listen 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.

Now the house is a museum of everything she can't let go

When I think of this now, I see how the past holds us captive, its beautiful ruin etched on the mind's eye

How not to think of loss, how it takes hold and grows: like lacuna snails, slow and deliberate, on a reed? Why is everything I see the past I've tried to forget?

Always there is something more to know

Waking, I am freighted with memory: my mother's last words spoken--after her death--in a dream: Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?

the little fires set the flames of an idea licking the page how knowledge burns

How can I see anything but this: how trauma lives in the sea of my body, awash in the waters of forgetting.

What does it mean to be safe in the world?

As the smoke rose from the car toward the skyline, I couldn't help thinking that, at any moment, everything we had would be consumed by flames.

Before the war, they were happy, he said, quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed, and better off under a master's care. I watched the words blur on the page. No one raised a hand, disagreed. Not even me.

If not immanence, the soul's bright anchor--blood passed from one to the other--what knowledge haunts each body, what history, what phantom ache? One man always low, in a grave or on the ground, the other up high, closer to heaven; one man always diseased, the other a body in service, plundered.

Geography is fate.

you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul: that one does not bury the mother's body in the ground but in the chest, or--like you-- you carry her corpse on your back.

It's as if what was to come was already laid out before us, that our fate lay in the geography toward which we were blithely driving.

But the photograph hints, too, at another story. I can see it in the tall grass brushing her ankles, the blades bent as if moved by wind.