History Lesson

“History Lesson” by Natasha Trethewey is written in six stanzas—five tercets (stanzas of three lines) and one couplet (stanza of two lines), for a total of 17 lines. It is free verse, unrhymed and without formal meter, composed from a first-person point of view. The title of the poem suggests the subject will be historical, which is to say it will be about something that happened in the past. It also indicates there is something to be learned or at least that there is an opportunity to learn. The first line of the poem tells the reader that this is an ekphrastic piece—it is a poem inspired by an image, which is, in this case, a photograph of the speaker as a young child: “I am four in this photograph” (Line 1).

The child stands “on a wide strip of Mississippi beach” (Line 2), posed confidently with her “hands on […] hips” (Line 3). She’s a kid on the beach in a floral bikini, digging her toes in the sand as if to root there. Here, the speaker draws the reader’s attention to other elements of the composition of the snapshot—the sunshine as it plays on the water, which moves in its “tidal rush” (Line 7). Silver minnows glint like tiny knives at the child’s feet, which may either be discerned from the photo or an image from the speaker’s memory. The child is the only person in the picture. Her grandmother is the photographer and is not only holding the camera but also instructing the speaker on “how to pose” (Line 10). At this point, the speaker gives some context to the time at which this image and story takes shape: “It is 1970” (Line 11). The speaker tells the reader an historical fact: the beach has only been accessible to “us” (Line 12)—the child and the grandmother—since 1968, the year Mississippi struck down the law that had kept the Gulf Coast beaches of the state segregated.

The speaker then recalls another photograph taken four decades previously. In this snapshot, it is the grandmother that stands, not “on a wide strip” (Line 2) of shoreline, but “on a narrow plot” (Line 14). There is a sign, or else the sand is otherwise “marked” (Line 15), to indicate this is the designated area for “colored” (Line 15). Forty years prior would date the photograph of the grandmother circa 1930, during the Great Depression. The grandmother in the picture is not wearing a bikini but a “cotton meal-sack dress” (Line 17), a garment made from the bags in which flour and other grains were sold.

Within this poem, the speaker creates a kind of infinity symbol in the images, progressing in one way until it turns and heads back to its origins. It is not a circle, per se, as there is some advancement and some change in the shape of things. In this way the poem moves like the Gulf itself, with its “tidal rush[es]” (Line 7). In the beginning, the reader sees a child on the beach in a cute bathing suit and standing with the confidence and defiance of a typical American four-year-old. She can dig into the sand beneath her and claim it as her own. She can stand in the water among the swarming knife-like minnows with no thought of peril.

In the fourth stanza the speaker introduces the grandmother, who is giving the child direction on how to present herself, “how to pose” (Line 10) for a photo other people are going to look at and assess. It is a mere “two years after they opened / the rest of this beach to us” (Lines 11-12), the speaker tells the reader. The child, in this context, is a pioneer of sorts, experiencing the freedom of the open beach and also its perils.

The grandmother posed for her photograph 40 years ago. If her bathing suit was not a bathing suit at all but a homemade dress made from a flour sack, it still had flowers on it. She, too, stood with her hands on her hips. Relegated to a “narrow plot / of sand” (Lines 14-15), she nonetheless stood strong, bearing witness to the moment and documenting segregation in action. She smiled. The word plot can refer to a burial site, but the grandmother is alive in the historical moment when her granddaughter can walk an expanse of beach in a bikini.

“History Lesson” reminds the reader that what feels like ancient history is alive and relevant in the present. History, in fact, can fold back on itself, erasing hard-won civil rights through ignorance and amnesia. A photograph can both document and distort a moment in history, depending on how a subject is posed. An African American woman in Depression-era 1930s may smile for the camera while struggling with racism and all its attendant ills, perhaps because she is a human being capable of joy and dignity despite public treatment of her. A four-year-old child can stand with her hands on her hips, fearless and free, and still be subject to institutional racism and its attendant dangers. In both cases, simply standing on a beach is taking a stand.