The Americans

1. Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright on Dissecting the White Negro, 1851

To strip from the flesh   the specious skin; to weigh     in the brainpan   seeds of white pepper; to find in the body   its own diminishment—     blood-deep   and definite; to measure the heft of lack; to make of the work of faith   the work of science, evidence     the word of God: Canaan be the servant of servants; thus   to know the truth     of this: (this derelict corpus, a dark compendium, this   atavistic assemblage—flatter feet, bowed legs, a shorter neck) so   deep the tincture     —see it!— we still know white from not.

The Quadroon(1880) by George Fuller. Oil on canvas (h: 50 1/2″ × 40 1/2″). Gift of George A. Hearn, 1910.

Image Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

2. Blood After George Fuller’s The Quadroon, 1880

It must be the gaze of a benevolent viewer

upon her, framed as she is in the painting’s romantic glow, her melancholic beauty meant to show the pathos of her condition: black blood—that she cannot transcend it. In the foreground she is shown at rest, seated, her basket empty and overturned beside her as though she would cast down the drudgery to which she was born. A gleaner, hopeless undine—the bucolic backdrop a dim aura around her—she looks out toward us as if to bridge the distance between. Mezzo, intermediate, how different she’s rendered from the dark kin working the fields behind her. If not for the ray of light appearing as if from beyond the canvas, we might miss them—three figures in the near distance, small as afterthought.

Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, we were not able to acquire permission to reprint the photograph by Robert Frank, which Natasha Trethewey’s “Help, 1968,” part three of her poem “The Americans,” dispassionately describes in stanza two. For Robert Frank’s photograph, we offer the reader a substitution, a blank frame in which the reader, with the power the imagination affords, may insert the image Ms. Trethewey recreates. However, Frank’s photography—like Gone with the Wind, Birth of a Nation, Al Jolson’s “Mammy” in The Jazz Singer, and other expressive forms of White Americana—is available on a number of public sites. To assist our readers in locating a copy of Robert Frank’s photograph, I suggest his book The Americans (introduced by Jack Kerouac) and the following online sites:

http://www.theasc.com/blog/2009/09/21/

http://caraphillips.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/joel-sternfeld-on-robert-frank/ [End Page 848]

3. Help, 1968 After a photograph from The Americans by Robert Frank

When I see Frank’s photograph of a white infant in the dark arms of a woman who must be the maid, I think of my mother and the year we spent alone—my father at sea.

The woman stands in profile, back against a wall, holding her charge, their faces side by side—the look on the child’s face strangely prescient, a tiny furrow in the space between her brows. Neither of them looks toward the camera; nor do they look at each other. That year,

when my mother took me for walks, she was mistaken again and again for my maid. Years later she told me she’d say I was her daughter, and each time strangers would stare in disbelief, then empty the change from their pockets. Now I think of the betrayals of flesh, how she must have tried to make of her face an inscrutable mask and hold it there as they made their small offerings—pressing coins into my hands. How like the woman in the photograph she must have seemed, carrying me each day—white in her arms—as if she were a prop: a black backdrop, the dark foil in this American story.