History Lesson

The poem “History Lesson” appears in Natasha Trethewey’s debut collection, Domestic Work, published by Graywolf Press in 2000. It is composed of free, unrhymed verse in 17 lines consisting of five tercets, or three-line stanzas, and one couplet, a two-line stanza. As part of her first full-length collection, the poem represents the early work of the poet. The poem is narrative in that tells the story of a memory the speaker has, which is inspired by a photograph of herself as a child on a beach in Mississippi. In the course of the poem, the speaker presents two pictures of the beach—the first is the photograph of the speaker as a child, soon after the beach is desegregated; the second is the image of her grandmother on the small section of the beach to which people of color were restricted, four decades in the past, enacting the same pose as the child—“hands on the flowered hips” (Line 16).

Poet Biography

Former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey is the author of five collections of poetry, as well as Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010) and Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020). “History Lesson” is from Trethewey’s first book, Domestic Work (2000), her debut collection and winner of the prize for a first book by an African American poet from Cave Canem, the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry, and Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize. Additional accolades include fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Rockefeller Foundation, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Trethewey received the Mississippi Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and was named 2008 Georgia Woman of the Year. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2007.

Trethewey’s poetry embodies both free verse and traditional forms to create an interplay between personal and historical narratives. Often rooted in the South, the poems consider race and culture through memory and in the present tense, collapsing the space between generations to note the difference and/or lack of difference over time.

Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, on the 100th anniversary of Confederate Memorial Day. Her mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, was a social worker. Her father, Eric Trethewey, was a poet and a professor of English. Her parents married in Ohio due to the anti-miscegenation laws that were in place at the time in Mississippi. They divorced when Trethewey was six. Her mother remarried and was murdered by her second husband when Trethewey was 19, which was a moment Trethewey has said had a deep impact on her decision to become a poet.

Trethewey earned an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Georgia, an MA in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The poet has taught at Duke and Yale Universities as well as at Emory University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Trethewey now serves as the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. In addition to serving from 2012-2014 as the 19th US Poet Laureate, Trethewey held the position of Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2012-2016.

Poem Text

Trethewey, Natasha. “History Lesson." 2000. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

In Natasha Trethewey’s “History Lesson,” the speaker considers a photograph of herself at four years of age. She is on a beach in Mississippi in 1970, a beach that was desegregated in 1968. In the speaker’s recollection, her grandmother is the one taking the photograph and telling her “how to pose” (Line 10). The speaker wears a floral two-piece bathing suit.

In the second half of the poem, the speaker takes the reader back in time four decades, via a photograph of her grandmother on a much smaller section of the same beach, the “narrow plot” (Line 14) of shoreline to which African Americans were relegated. In this older photograph, circa 1930, the grandmother wears a floral “meal-sack dress” (Line 17) and smiles.