On the Brink: “Kentucky 1833”

Rita Dove’s “Kentucky 1833,” from The Yellow House on the Corner,¹ presents a cameo portrait of a group of slaves on Sunday, enjoying their day off as they lie in the sun, the younger ones indulging in energetic horseplay while their Massa comes to heighten the entertainment. There are games and music and stories here. There are also overt images of the master and the mastered; it appears on a first reading that this short prose poem perpetrates the commonplace and overworked theme of victimage. Commenting on this theme in a review of Dove’s poem “Parsley,” Helen Vendler says: “Poems of victimage, told from the viewpoint of the victim alone, are the stock-in-trade of mediocre protest writing, and they appear regularly in African-American literature. The position of victimage, and victimage alone, seems imaginatively insufficient to Dove, since it takes in only one half of the poem’s world.”² If this is so, why does Dove choose to present the “position of victimage” in “Kentucky 1833,” apparently highlighting the plight of the slave as victim of circumstances orchestrated by the white Massa, speaking exclusively through the voice of the slaves and writing out of their viewpoint alone? Does the slave speaker in this text argue solely for the victimized position of African-American slaves at that time? And if so, does this text then become just one more exposition of “mediocre protest writing”? For the text does appear to set up, and then undermine, the white slave-owner’s perception of his African-American slaves; below the apparently stereotyped portrayal of the master-slave relationship runs a counter-current which subverts white colonial culture and the mastery of the white man over his black servants, raising the age-old and exhausted question of whether the powerful are also the just. Dove’s concerns, however, are not only with the issue of the victim’s proper rights, nor with the mishandling of power. This text engages, ultimately, with the question of self-realization and how it is attained. Embedded in the text are the implications of the title: 1833 was the year in which Kentucky passed an amendment to the laws of the state, prohibiting the importation of slaves into Kentucky–implications not fully realized at the time, but already stirring into life.

The text begins, beguilingly, in an overtly positioned manner: “It is Sunday, day of roughhousing,” perhaps borrowing the slave-owner’s term for what the slaves do on their day off. The loud, unbridled connotations of “roughhousing” appear to be borne out in the next line, as the “young boys wrestle and butt their heads like sheep,” validating the reason for the slaves being “let out in the woods.” In the ensuing wrestling match, in which bets are placed on the boys by “Massa and his gentlemen friends” (we hear the slave’s artlessly respectful voice in this phrase), the reader finds “more kicking, butting and scuffling.” One of the young slave boys is “bucking and prancing about.” Throughout this whole scene, the slaves are depicted in animal terms, befitting their nature, perhaps, in the eyes of their Massa; as he would almost certainly phrase it, slaves are untamed by culture, and lack the refinement of their white owners. The young boys’ unruly energy is captured in the phrase “butting their heads together like sheep,” the sheep arousing images not only of the traditional docile farm animals, (incidentally, providers of wool and meat), but also of wild mountain sheep who are free to defend their territory and their independence, as the young boys claim their sliver of freedom on this Sunday morning. Their animal-like energy then becomes an innocent expression of the joy of release from the tethers of their hard everyday lives. In contrast, the behavior of Massa and his “gentlemen friends” carries more sinister undertones: they “guffaw and shout, taking sides, red-faced” as they urge the young slaves to display their prowess at wrestling. Then, in an apparently magnanimous gesture, Massa not only rewards but also reinforces this display of unbridled behavior by offering a shot...