Poetry Thursday, with a little history lesson

Governor’s Mansion Hands

~Sean Hill

                              —Milledgeville, Georgia 1858 (note 1)

The hand(note 2) in which the laws of the land(note 3)

were penned was that of a white man.

Hand, servant, same as bondsman, slave,

and necessarily a negro(note 4) in this context,

but not all blacks were held in bondage

though bound by the constructed fetters

of race—that expedient economic tool

for making a class of women and men

kept in place based on the color writ

across their faces—a conservative notion

for keeping power in the hands of the few(note 5).

It kept the threat held over the heads of all

negroes, including those free blacks,

who after the coming war would be

called the formerly free people of color

once we were all ostensibly free.

Hands, enslaved, handled clay

and molds in the making of bricks

to build this big house for the gathering

of those few men with their white faces

who hold power like the end of the rope.

Hand, what’s needed to wed, and a ring

or broom. Hand, a horse measure, handy

in horse-trading(note 6). We also call the pointers

on the clock that go around marking time

in this occidental fashion, handy for business

transactions, hands.

Notes

1 Milledgeville, my hometown, touts itself as the Antebellum Capital and it was that, but it was also, for the duration of the Civil War, the Confederate Capital of Georgia, and where Joseph Emerson Brown, the governor of Georgia from November 6, 1857 till June 17, 1865, lived with his family in the Governor’s Mansion. Governors brought enslaved folks, folks they held as property, from their plantations to work as the household staff at the Governor’s Mansion.

2 Hand as in handwriting, which is awful

in my case, so I type, but way back when,

actually, only 150 years ago—two long-lived

lives—by law few like me had a hand.

3 What’s needed is a note on the laws that constructed race in the colonies and young states, but that deserves a library’s worth of writing.

4 Almost a decade after reading the typescript of a letter written by Elizabeth Grisham Brown, Gov. Joseph Emerson Brown’s wife, I finally got to read the original letter written in her hand; I got to touch it with my hand. I got to verify that she’d written what I’d read in the typescript. I’d thought about this letter she wrote home to her mother and sister at their plantation for near a decade because of its closing sentences: “Hoping you are all well, we will expect to hear from you shortly. Mr. Brown and the children join me in love to you all.” And caught between that and her signing “Yours most affectionately, E. Brown” she writes “The negroes send love to their friends.” Those words in that letter struck me when I first read them and have stuck with me since. There is so much there that speaks to the situation those Black folk were in then and the situation Black folk are in now. I intend for the title of my next book to be The Negroes Send Love to Their Friends.

5 And this arrangement also served the rest

who would walk on the white side of the color

line, so they would readily step at the behest

of that narrative of race and their investment

in what is white and Black.

6 Prospective buyers would inspect Negroes like horses or other livestock and look in their mouths.

Copyright © 2020 by Sean Hill. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 9, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.