Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
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I exercise the horses, rushing like wind until trees blur and heartbeat and hoofbeat become one pounding, resounding rhythm. If not for family, I would gallop, gallop far away.
catalogue poems and lyrical rhymes to narrative and persona poems. She not only enters the minds of her ancestors but slaveholders as well – even taking on the persona of a 205-year-old clock, a hunting dog, and a slave ship named Rachel. “What the Lloyds’ Ledger Reveals,” for example, imagines an exhaustive list of slave names arranged alphabetically: “Every last one, with a mind of their own / and a story that ain’t been told yet.” Weatherford speaks to yearning hopes and haunting horrors of men, women, and children trapped in slavery. “The only thing greater than this house, / is my hope to someday leave it,” she writes in “Nan” from the perspective of a sevenyear-old enslaved at the Lloyd house. “I work harder than these beasts,” one house servant attests in “Barnett.” “If the horses give Master any problem . . . Young Barney and I get blamed. / Master whips us before he will a horse.” The (il)logic of slavery is so simply laid out with words that might normally carry the connotation of ease, comfort, and care but are reserved for horses while the agony, uncertainty and anxiety are the burdens slaves carry with each waking hour. Yet even in this trauma-inducing world, Weatherford includes lyrical lines to show how enslaved people found inspiring moments, little glimpses of joy:
With rhyme, repetition, and alliteration, Weatherford distills a drop of serenity from an ocean of adversity. Note how human and beast fuse into one as similar-sounding words – “heartbeat” and “hoofbeat” / “pounding” and “resounding” – connect rider and horse, freedom and fantasy, the galloping speed of a horse and the racing mind of the rider. As brilliantly as this collection imagines the “what ifs” of Weatherford’s family heritage, the tragic truth is that there are still so many unanswered questions. In “Questions for Doctor and Minister Isaac Copper,” Weatherford fires off a litany of questions for her ancestor, each more elusive than the next. But there is courage in the question, dignity in the mystery, hope in the unknowable. In “Between Rivers,” Weatherford finds a physical and emotional link between her African ancestors, relatives once enslaved, and her own childhood. The rhythm, once again, leaps with anaphoric phrasing that echoes across the centuries: We were swimmers: enslaved fishermen, pearl divers, and deep-sea treasure hunters. . . We were swimmers, baptized in creeks: the currents, a barrier and a blessing. If blood is thicker than water, then our faith is deeper than fear.
With the wonder of a poet and the tenacity of a researcher, Weatherford takes it upon herself to be the griot of her family’s history. When she speaks in the voice of her ancestor Issac Copper, she could also be calling any writer or storyteller to take on the responsibility of carrying the family’s legacy into the future: “When you are the keeper of stories, cures, and rituals, / you must tell your children about their heritage. / You must summon the power of shamans / and healers and the ancient wisdom of the elders.” In these quatrains that each begin with the anaphoric phrase, “When you . . .”, Weatherford’s words are a commitment to remember, to resurrect, and honor the past, to act against cultural erasure.