"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.