Free Thrall by Natasha Trethewey Page B

heads,
    Â 
put something else in place of the child—
a table, perhaps, upon which the man might set
    Â 
his hat, or a dog upon which to bestow
the blessing of his touch—and the story
    Â 
changes. The boy is a palimpsest of paint—
layers of color, history rendering him
    Â 
that precise shade of in-between.
Before this he was nothing: blank
    Â 
canvas—before image or word, before
a last brush stroke fixed him in his place.
    Â 
    3. DE ESPAÑOL Y MESTIZA PRODUCE CASTIZA
    Â 
How not to see
    in this gesture
    Â 
the mind
    of the colony?
    Â 
In the mother’s arms,
    the child, hinged
    Â 
at her womb—
    dark cradle
    Â 
of mixed blood
    (call it
Mexico
)—
    Â 
turns toward the father,
    reaching to him
    Â 
as if back to Spain,
    to the promise of blood
    Â 
alchemy—three easy steps
    to purity:
    Â 
from a Spaniard and an Indian,
    
a mestizo;
    Â 
from a mestizo and a Spaniard,
    
a castizo;
    Â 
from a castizo and a Spaniard,
    
a Spaniard.
    Â 
We see her here—
    one generation away—
    Â 
nearly slipping
    her mother’s careful grip.
    Â 
    4. THE BOOK OF CASTAS
    Â 
Call it the catalog
    of mixed bloods, or
    Â 
    the book of naught:
           not Spaniard, not white, but
    Â 
mulatto-returning-backwards
(or
    
hold-yourself-in-midair
) and
    Â 
    the
morisca,
the
lobo,
the
chino,
           
sambo, albino,
and
    Â 
the
no-te-entiendo—
the
    
I don’t understand you.
    Â 
    Guidebook to the colony,
           record of each crossed birth,
    Â 
it is the typology of taint,
    of stain: blemish: sullying spot:
    Â 
    that which can be purified,
           that which cannot—Canaan’s
    Â 
black fate. How like a dirty joke
    it seems:
what do you call
    Â 
    
that space between
           the dark geographies of sex?
    Â 
Call it the
taint
—as in
    
T’aint one and t’aint the other
—
    Â 
    illicit and yet naming still
           what is between. Between
    Â 
her parents, the child,
    
mulatto-returning-backwards,
    Â 
    cannot slip their hold,
           the triptych their bodies make
    Â 
in paint, in blood: her name
    written down in the
Book
    Â 
    
of Castas
—all her kind
           in thrall to a word.

Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus; or, The Mulata
After the painting by Diego Velázquez, c. 1619
    Â 
She is the vessels on the table before her:
the copper pot tipped toward us, the white pitcher
clutched in her hand, the black one edged in red
and upside-down. Bent over, she is the mortar,
and the pestle at rest in the mortar—still angled
in its posture of use. She is the stack of bowls
and the bulb of garlic beside it, the basket hung
by a nail on the wall and the white cloth bundled
in it, the rag in the foreground recalling her hand.
She’s the stain on the wall the size of her shadow—
the color of blood, the shape of a thumb. She is echo
of Jesus at table, framed in the scene behind her:
his white corona, her white cap. Listening, she leans
into what she knows. Light falls on half her face.

Knowledge
After a chalk drawing by J. H. Hasselhorst, 1864
    Â 
Whoever she was, she comes to us like this:
    lips parted, long hair spilling from the table
    Â 
like water from a pitcher, nipples