Catherine Sasanov
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Catherine Sasanov is the author of three poetry collections, Traditions of Bread and Violence (Four Way Books), All the Blood Tethers (Northeastern University Press), and the forthcoming Had Slaves, a finalist for the National Poetry Series and winner of the Sentence Book Award. Had Slaves will be released by Firewheel Editions in late December/early January. Catherine is also the librettist for Las Horas de Belén: A Book of Hours, a theater work commissioned by New York’s Mabou Mines Theater Company. She has received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. Her recent work is written out of her discovery in 2005 of slaveholding among her Missouri ancestors. More information on this and her other interests can be found at her website.
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Three Poems from Had Slaves
Sitting at the Mouth of the Great Slave Trading Route,
the Slaveholder’s Great-Great Granddaughter
Pens Her Preface to the Text
Dear Reader,
to mistake these words
for the literacy of
the unlettered dead
would be to work me
like a Ouija board: alphabet
as parlor game,
candlelight
for ambiance.
No grease-light, pine-knot,
illumination.
Nothing of
the slave-lit life:
from can to can’t
(see?)
I scraped
the bottom of a cooking pot, listening
for words,
for voices
spilled across a floor
that no longer exists.
Watch how in lieu of herding slaves,
my hands herd words
across the page,
and I hold back
whole trains of thought
with just a speck of ink.
No.
No,
I’m a beetle
rolling tiny balls of shit
up against a few ideas.
Call each stop
a period. Each stop
my place to breathe.
Steele
for Easter, Eliza
Township 28 North
Range 22 West
Section 29 –
Consider the whole square mile as cemetery,
the rough border of two graves.
Somewhere on 90 acres of it: Ex-slaves. Two sisters
on their backs, straddled
by a subdivision.
I just want to pull down their skirts.
The dead man’s surname hounding them –
It’s no cadaver dog.
No hellhound, bloodhound
on their scent.
No lapdog, pull toy
on a string.
Just a purebred mongrel
with all its shots
gnawing at the bones of their given names.
His Personal Property:
Inventory and Appraisal Sheet, 1860
Henry, Henderson; Flora, Eliza, Easter; Ben, Alex, George, Edmund
At the tail end of beasts of burden. Just before the household goods. Group shot of what $6000 looks like: Two children. Three women. Four grown men. The holiday not quite right in the head. Three-year-old willed to a ten-year-old boy. A man who gets to be mulatto once but never will again. The information comes down white (so a four-year-old is clearing land, raising up the master’s house). The information comes down white (so my cousin rides the holy day mistaken for a horse).
Did Emancipation swallow you?
Did you walk out into a choice of surnames never to be found?
Dug out of a probate file, buried in a drawer –
My family stands around your paper grave, pretending that it’s dirt –
Owned by the blood that owned you once, what right do I have to track you down?
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