"Plantation Wedding" by Artress Bethany White
from her collection My Afmerica, winner of the 2018 Trio Award in Poetry
2018 Trio Award judge Sun Yung Shin describes My Afmerica as “a restless book, wandering through an America that cannot be separated from its African American people, where to be black is to be considered a body potent with the crimes of treason, with the crime of not being pure/white, traceable longer back ‘than Whitman’s leaves of grass.’ Line by line, the poet brings us on journeys of metabolization, invitations to digest this ultra-real Afmerica, without which un-real America could not exist. This America is haunted by suburban subdivisions, Jaws, AIDS, plantations, Plymouth Rock, bucks and dandies, pressure-cooked pigs’ feet, and much more. The poet’s attitude is curious, sharp, at times elegiac, and engaged. The speaker in these poems is not trying to escape this uneasy world, but the trace its outlines, depths and unfinished business.”
This tone is set in the first poem of the collection:
Plantation Wedding I. In the middle of my lecture on antebellum plantation life abolition Lydia Maria Child and William Lloyd Garrison pronged slave collars hung with iron Christmas bells ringing and Kara Walker’s oeuvre a recasting of slavery for the next generation I finally vocalize a question I’ve suppressed while binge-watching episodes of Say Yes to the Dress An inquiry prompted by southern belles with visions of Scarlett dancing through their heads modeling some confection like the curtain dress admired by Rhett Why would any woman stage her twenty-first century wedding on a plantation where masters slaked their lust on the shivering bodies of black boys and girls? Out in the fields the blood seeps from cowhided backs shouldering rough cotton sacks the ghosts of slaves silent and watching II. Tourist-worthy quarters of whitewashed boards fireplace more than a century cold I revolve in a circle before a pared down slave’s memory this one-room cabin too authentic for packaging III. After the war, The [slaves] left the old plantation one by one until there wasn’t one person in sight: master sitting in a wicker chair in the yard looking out over a field of cotton and corn IV. Come, experience the oldest of love affairs under the Spanish moss Wedding packages on the sweet home plantation start at our nation
My Afmerica by Artress Bethany White is available for 25% off during February, as are our other titles by African-American poets Tara Betts, Tamara J. Madison, and Martheaus Perkins. Buy all four and get a discount of 30%.
Artress Bethany White is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is the recipient of the Trio Award for her poetry collection My Afmerica: poems (Trio House Press, 2019), selected by poet Sun Yung Shin. Her prose, Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity, received a 2022 Next Generation Finalist Indie Book Award. White is co-editor of the new anthology Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters (Pangyrus, 2023), which writer Camille Dungy refers to as "a blessing and a balm." Recent work also appears in the anthology Why I Wrote This Poem: 62 Poets on Creativity and Craft (McFarland, 2023). Her third poetry collection, A Black Doe in the Anthropocene: Poems, is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky in spring 2025 and chronicles her family's history of enslavement in America. She has received scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Tupelo Press MASS MoCA. She is associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University.
A beloved poem from a beloved poet.