Blood on the Cotton

“The real heroes” of the Lewis and Clark expedition, says York, the speaker of Frank X. Walker’s collection When Winter Come (2008), were “old cowardly Charbono’s young squaw” and “Drewyer, another man full a both French / an Indian blood” and, of course, Sacagawea. All of them did the heavy lifting to keep the 1804–1806 expedition safe, fed, and headed in the right direction. “An then, there was me,” says York, enslaved by Clark and the first African American man to traverse the North American continent, “just along to cook an carry, / to hear them tell it, but there be two sides to ev’ry story / an then there be the truth.”

For the last twenty years, Walker has probed the underexplored recesses of American history and recast some of its better-known episodes in an urgently different light. York is also the central character in Walker’s Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York (2004), a prequel to When Winter Come that similarly recounts the psychic dimensions of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (2013) examines the 1963 murder of the Civil Rights activist from the perspective of Evers’s widow, his brother, and even his assassin, all the while allowing a certain speechlessness to reign over the sequence by refusing to ventriloquize the forever-silenced Evers.

In his latest work, Load in Nine Times (Liveright, 2024), Walker brings us to the battlefields of the American Civil War as he versifies the experiences of Black Union soldiers and their families. These include Walker’s own ancestors: Mary and Randall X Edelen, the latter of whom served in the 125th US Colored Infantry, and Elvira and Henry Clay Walker, the latter of whom served in the 12th US Colored Heavy Artillery. Poems such as “Mother May I?” provide an arresting portrait of what “emancipation”—to use that word in the most technical sense—actually looked like for Walker’s progenitors, in this instance via the words of Randall X Edelen:

    In March of ’65 the gov’ment
    said joining the Union Army
    guaranteed freedom for each new soldier
    and our families too.

    Come April, I found my way to Lebanon
    an signed my mark in ink for my Mary
    and our John, Susan, William, Sallie,
    Daniel, Scott, and Silas.

    I’m sure Miss Jan felt like
    she been robbed
    losing nine slaves all at once
    with the power of my X.

Cinematic in scope, journalistic in its precision of detail, and written to be enjoyed by readers regardless of their knowledge of history, Load in Nine Times features a wide cast of characters, ranging from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to lesser-known figures such as Margaret Garner, a Black mother in Kentucky whose tragic infanticide and attempted suicide encapsulated the suffering of enslaved people. (Garner was the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s Beloved.) Throughout his narrative, Walker also summons the voices of those who were not directly involved in the war but whose lives were inexorably shaped by it, including Paul Laurence Dunbar, born seven years after Emancipation to two formerly enslaved parents, and Charles Young, the highest-ranking Black officer in the US Army until his death in 1922. Sometimes the best lines in the collection belong to people long forgotten—or never remembered—by history. Cornelius Taylor, for example, explains what it felt like for Black Union soldiers forced to endure the abuse perpetrated by white officers, many of whom supposedly supported Emancipation as they nonetheless hurled men of color to their deaths:

    Most colored men done mutinied
    in our minds and in our hearts
    so many times since we joined
    this great unshackling
    it’s a wonder our dress blues ain’t dark gray.

The cornucopia of voices—bold, contemplative, sarcastic, wounded, irrepressible, and never uninteresting—takes us from the antebellum of Walker’s native Kentucky through the war to the demise of Reconstruction. While most poems fit on a single page, others, like “Let My People Go,” are much longer. “Let My People Go” is a sequence of fifteen free-verse sonnets that add up to a poetic sermon spoken by Gabriel Burdett, a minister who was born enslaved in Kentucky, enlisted in the 114th US Colored Infantry during the war, and later worked as an educator. He eventually became one of the earliest Exodusters in the 1870s, when he, along with thousands of other African Americans, migrated from the Mississippi basin to Kansas in the first post-Civil War migration. Obligatory religious overtones and metaphors aside, Walker’s Burdett does not mince his words:

    At war’s end the Union proved more loyal
    to those who fought hard to keep us enslaved,
    sold our children, killed our brothers and sons,
    than those who sacrificed their lives for her.

While Load in Nine Times dives deep into family lore and psycho-cultural ancestry, it also serves as an oral history rooted in primary sources. The book features an extensive timeline, notes, and bibliography, and even reproduces contemporaneous illustrations, such as posters calling for the capture of runaway slaves, broadsides rousing men of color to arms, and missing-person newspaper ads. That said, making an archive sing is a difficult task for any writer. This is where Walker’s humor proves helpful in moving the narrative along. “Ain’t No Plantations in Kentucky,” for example, opens with the line “. . . unless you count” and then proceeds to list the names of more than seventy such plantations in alphabetical order.

Walker’s poems are arguably at their best when they slip behind the scenes of the official written record. “Teamster,” for instance, tells us that “Six months after so-called emancipation, / the Union ordered the impressment, / the hired labor / of 6,000 male negroes” in Kentucky. “They didn’t want us to shoot they guns,” the teamster concludes, “but didn’t mind if we carried the bullets.” Nonetheless, Walker also captures adeptly the tonalities of speech one expects from the better-known cast-members of Load in Nine Times, including Lincoln, who says here, “I hope to have God / on my side, but I must have           Kentucky.”

While several of Walker’s eleven collections can be characterized as lyrical explorations of his own experience or that of his immediate relatives, he nonetheless remains consumed by the larger dramas of history, as evidenced by his work on the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Load in Nine Times represents his powers as historical storyteller at their height—and one can’t help but wonder what the sequence might sound like performed by a polyphonic ensemble.

***

If Load In Nine Times is a concert of voices, then “The Accounts of Mammy Pleasant,” the eighteen-page centerpiece poem of E. Hughes’s outstanding debut Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water (Haymarket Books, 2024), assumes the focused force of a soliloquy. Inspired by the life of Mary Ellen Pleasant, possibly the first self-made African American millionaire and the chief financier of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, the poem traces Pleasant’s whirlwind biography in the form of a dramatic monologue: her early years of bondage in whaling-era Nantucket in the 1820s to her days as the richest Black woman in the west. Her move to Gold Rush California proved pivotal, as it did for many Black people lucky enough to make the journey. “In my grief, / I amassed a fortune and was changed,” Pleasant says, despite later adding, “Even in San Francisco, a Negro could be / dragged back south in chains,” referring to the Golden State’s Confederate roots, a side of its history often neglected or even willfully ignored.

Ironically, given the poem’s historical antecedents, Hughes’s Pleasant doesn’t seem to care much for history. In fact, she’s wholly focused on the future and how she can play a part in building it, as one could imagine the real Pleasant might have felt. She puts it like this: “Despite all those years / I spent fighting, there is nothing new / I can tell you of the horrors of captivity.” Nevertheless, I wager that Hughes’s rendition of Pleasant’s voice is perfect: fearless, pragmatic, and with a penchant for righteous, lapidary statements. From the poem’s beginning, she makes no apologies:

    Call me a great financier, a witch, Queen
    Esther—whatever you need to justify
    my longstanding status as a free woman
    and why I was the one who possessed all
    that money. It does not matter how
    I got here—I am.

“The Accounts of Mammy Pleasant” occasionally drifts into the diaristic, but never without a gem of a line here and there: “By December, they hung John—made / him an argument against war, against freedom. Yet, / what was he to me but an example of the collapse / of love?” Yet all this adventure and excitement belie the bleakest of realities. As Pleasant says in the poem’s thirteenth and penultimate section: “Once I was / a slave and then I was free, and it wasn’t // a miracle.” A miracle it certainly wasn’t—and “No amount of tears will reverse this. So many / thousands gone — Isn’t that how the song goes? / The blood on the cotton is the only record.”

Sadly, the poem doesn’t cover much of Pleasant’s later life: her years as a civil rights activist in San Francisco and the complex tangle of legal battles, love interests, and bad investments that left her destitute and in and out of courtrooms by the time she died in 1904. Pleasant’s story is still relatively unknown, overshadowed by the far more famous Madam C.J. Walker: a beauty products magnate whose philanthropic and political work paled in comparison to Pleasant’s.

However, Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water considers much more than Mary Ellen Pleasant. The collection’s opening poem, “Black Women Standing Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water,” is an ekphrastic exercise inspired by a visit to the African American Museum and Library in Oakland, California, where the author finds a photograph depicting four Black women “in the 1920s or 30s.” The image sets Hughes on an investigative journey into their own history as a daughter and a Black person living in California, a state that has fooled itself into thinking it had little or nothing to do with the nation’s troubled legacies of slavery. As the poem unfurls, we see Hughes growing all-too-rightly skeptical of the black-and-white image in the museum—Black women clutching their hats against their heads to keep them from flying into the San Francisco Bay—and what the bleaching effects of time may have done to the context behind that photograph:

    Each’s happiness seems simple — a warm day 
    by water miles from Jim Crow and history.

    Now, as I stand, my neck craned for my need,
    looking toward this past, I want

    these women to tell me something new of survival —
    of the cruel way light obscures pain. In this photo,

    I see mostly my dispossession—the buried story 
    of the West’s fathomless past—ordinary, opaque

    with all of it rupturing.

Here Hughes begins to unearth the painful shards of shattered childhood memories—memories that also trace the migration of their southern Black family to the San Francisco Bay Area. Dealing with abusive and absent parents, running away from home, building dollhouses out of books, and fighting with their equally scarred siblings are just some of the subjects Hughes deals with in their poems, all of which can prove emotionally challenging, but equally cathartic. “Aporia,” which concludes the book’s first section, aptly sums up Hughes’s exploration of personal and familial tragedy:

    I have made a small world of this loss—          
        my mother’s hand raising—not to strike—
    but to smooth the edges of my hair          
        with a toothbrush. The pyrite and bones 
            
    uncovered in the yard, the walls scarred          
        by the force of my body, the memories
    hooking down the chest of my mind. Grief          
        is a culture, a collection of fragments,

    firmament of matter, manner by which I           
        become a mosaic of my losses.

This is where we see the exposed joinery between the autobiographical poems in the collection’s first and third sections and the historically based “The Accounts of Mammy Pleasant.” Indeed, Mary Ellen Pleasant proves to be the perfect foil for Hughes. Her suffering becomes a mirror of Hughes’s own, and Hughes makes the connection explicit via the reappearance of the word mosaic in the following lines, excerpted from the fifth section of “The Accounts”:

                                      Slavery refused to wash down
    the river of my need—just because someone
    scratched what I thought was my name and some
    odd praises down on paper—Its traces are everywhere.
    I learned this in a new way, a mosaic of suffering,
    new scars forming at the base of my back by
    the force of Mistress’s lash.

Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water stings from the force of that lash in both its historic and contemporary manifestations, as Hughes versifies abuse to startling, almost distressing effect. We see the author’s mother “clutching a belt like a horse breaker,” or “holding / the larynx of a broom” (“Rippling Through the Dark”) and lunging at her child as if they were “a grown man” (“Even Now”). Hughes doesn’t just catalogue the processes and legacies of trauma; they also skillfully position the reader to experience the boundlessness of a child’s love for their parent despite—or even sometimes because of—the violence they have endured. Consider this heart-wrenching scene of the speaker’s sister intervening in their mother’s brutality:

   the memory of my sister peeling               our mother off of me,      
            begging Mommy! Please! Stop!—        the memory
    of the way I loved my mother,     would offer
           the weight of myself         at the altar of her chest
    when she was too tired to push me away.

While equally situated in their historical moments, Load in Nine Times and Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water differ drastically both stylistically and philosophically—but it is nonetheless interesting to read them alongside each other. Both books are rooted in the African American experience in the United States at key moments in the country’s history, endowed with research-heavy architectures and extensive timelines. Most importantly, they speak to the power of documentary poetry to place us inside the minds and hearts of real individuals long since anonymized by history. Arguably rivaled only by film, poetry achieves an emotional resonance that usually eludes more traditional, nonfiction approaches of animating the past. Both books also make fine additions to a growing corpus of recent docu-historical poetry that includes Eve L. Ewing’s 1919: Poems (2019) and Paisley Rekdal’s West: A Translation (2023), to name two prominent examples. These books neatly slide into the tradition of demotic, investigative American poetry imbued in the live drama of the American Republic’s unfolding history, a tradition built on the backs of Walt Whitman, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Lowell, Ed Sanders, and M. NourbeSe Philip, among many others. (And since grappling with history involves dealing with the dead, one can’t help but think that James Merrill may have played a small part.) These are the “song[s]” of “America’s promise” as Charles Young says in the final poem of Walker’s Load in Nine Times, and the reason we versify the past to better understand our present, even though, as Hughes writes in their own “Epilogue”: “we might not survive the span” of our “need to say this.”