An Aching Shell Worth Tenderness^{: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Medicine in Contemporary Black Women’s Poetry}

But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration. . . Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination.

– from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV

I have not forgotten my Khoisan clicks. . . . If he were to let me rise up from this table, I’d spirit his knives and cut out his black heart, seal it with science fluid inside a bell jar, place it on a low shelf in a white man’s museum so the whole world could see it was shriveled and hard, geometric, deformed, unnatural.

– from Elizabeth Alexander’s “The Venus Hottentott (1825)”

Mend is the debut collection of poetry by South Carolina native, Kwoya Fagin Maples, a creative writing instructor at the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham. Her collection pays homage to Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy, three enslaved women called by name in Dr. J. Marion Sims’s (1884) autobiography, The Story of My Life. From 1845–1849, Sims, who practiced medicine in Mt. Meigs, Alabama, conducted experiments on these (and other) enslaved women, advancing what would become the field of gynecology. Sims developed the precursor of the speculum used in gynecological exams today and eventually became know as “the father of modern gynecology” (Vedantam, 2017). Scientific inquiry, advancements in medicine, and recognition for groundbreaking research were, no doubt, at the core of Sims’s work, but alongside these components were notions of Black inferiority (white superiority) and the belief in innate “racial” and biological differences that allowed scientists, such as Sims, to experiment on enslaved Black people with impunity.

In Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson (1787) claimed that Blacks were “more tolerant of heat. . . [and] seem to require less sleep. . . “ He referred to their “griefs” as “transient” and attributed their bravery and “adventuresome” nature to their “want of forethought.” He also believed Blacks could remember as well as whites, [but] he claimed “in reason [they were] much inferior. . . [and] in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous”(p. Query XIV ). These attributes assigned to people identified as “Black” became justification for oppression and exploitation that moved beyond plantation slave quarters and cotton fields to unethical scientific experimentation, and dissections into popular culture, circus acts, even family settings.

Charles D. Martin (2017), author of The White African American Body, “observed scientists determined to perform dissections and anatomical studies of the “white Negro” to prove racial inferiority despite their white skin (p. 53). Martin has referred to these men as a “cabal of racial scientists.” Sims was, by extension, a part of this cabal. He was among the scientists who owned enslaved Africans and profited both financially and professionally from the institution of slavery (Washington p.54–55). According to Harriet Washington,

“Owners boarded captive bodies of sick slaves to hospitals or hired well ones to physicians for use in experiments. Sometimes they sold a slave outright for such use, particularly if she had become too old or informed to work or to breed. (p. 54)

Sims acquired Anarcha Wescott, Betsey Harris, and Lucy Zimmerman from their masters for the purpose of medical experimentation, and “eventually hid his subjects’ race and even illustrated reports of experiments on black slaves with illustrations of bourgeois white matrons”(Washington p. 59. 256). The pro-slavery stance of Sims (whether tacit or explicit) and his contemporaries was often reflected in the theories they developed and the scientific methodologies they employed.

Despite meaningful contributions or pioneering research Sims or these scientists might have conducted, their legacies also include the perpetuation of scientific racism, which has contributed to deeply-held beliefs of white racial superiority and black inferiority, beliefs that have spilled over into decisions about medical care and mental or intellectual competencies. Through Sims, and other scientists like him, white supremacy settled into our collective psyche under the guise of objective scientific inquiry, remnants of which permeate our societies today. According to Harriet A. Washington, for example, Sims “cited the popular belief that blacks did not feel pain in the same way was whites (p. 65). While a plantation doctor, he treated a Black infant boy, by trying to “pry [the infant’s] skull bones into new positions.” Washington notes:

Sims relied on the ‘scientific myth that the bones of the black infants’ skulls, unlike white infants’, grew together quickly, leaving the brain no space to grow and develop. This premature closing of the black skull was held to cause low intelligence and perpetual childishness in adult blacks. (p. 63)

Maples’s decision to write Mend and explore the lives of these enslaved women, our “mothers of modern gynecology” (NPR), places her in a harrowing and complicated space where literature and medical malfeasance intersect. This intersectional space is the site of white superiority and black inferiority grounded in so-called scientific evidence. This space has helped to essentialize blackness, ascribe subhuman status to African-descended people, and justify their exploitation. This site often extends from scientific research and medical clinics to circus tents, and at the center of this space are often enslaved women, women of color (and other vulnerable people) whose lack of options and agency propelled them into desperation and misery. In Mastering the Female Pelvis, Terri Kapsalis states, “What might link a surgeon-slave-master to a showman-ringmaster? Both exercise mastery over bodies. . .” (as quoted in Judd, 2014, p 35.) Though the circus is designed for entertainment, it is the ringmaster who leads, directs, profits, and controls, all the while helping (intentionally or not) to exploit and objectify. Thus, the role of the medical researcher and the ringmaster as “[masters] over bodies” clearly overlaps.

Still, as Maples shares in her carefully researched and beautifully written historical poems, the sum total of these women’s lives was not experimental human subject. These women were first of all human beings despite any disrespectful or inhumane treatments they withstood. Consequently, this intersectional space is also a site of recovery and reclamation where the contributions of these women, and others like them, are acknowledged and their dignity reclaimed through the creative musings of sonnets, ekphrasis, historical persona poems, plays, films, and other literary works that honor the memory, sacrifice, resilience of these marginalized or forgotten figures in our history. This space is confrontational. It is intimate. It is necessary. It is healing.

“The morning I was born my mama carried me to an oak tree to let it nurse me while she went back to the fields.”

—“Delia” from Mend

Kwoya Fagin Maples first heard of Dr. J. Marion Sims and his experiments on enslaved women while attending a Cave Canem poetry writers’ retreat a decade ago. Maples’s book includes sonnets, a literary form commonly used during the Antebellum period, yet most of her poems are historical persona poems, which allow the Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy to become the narrators or speakers of their own poems. Maples recognizes poets Cornelius Eady, Cave Canem co-founder, and former Kentucky poet laureate, Frank X Walker, as important influences in her decision to use persona poems, and while Eady’s Brutal Imagination and Walker’s Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers represent this unique literary form, their collections also show how white supremacy has been normalized as notions of racial superiority and inferiority prevail. (K. Maples, personal communication, November 14, 2018).

Cornelius Eady’s profoundly political collection of poetry Brutal Imagination was published in 2001. This collection focuses on the now infamous Susan Smith case. Smith drowned her two young sons but initially claimed that an unknown Black man had carjacked her vehicle and kidnapped her young boys. The first cycle of the collection includes persona poems spoken in the voice of that imagined Black man. In Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, Frank X Walker uses persona poems to discuss the life and assassination of civil rights martyr Medgar Evers. The persona poems are written in the voice of Myrlie Evers, Medgar Evers’s widow, as well as in the voice of Byron de la Beckwith, Medgar’s assassin, and Beckwith’s first and second wife, Willie and Thelma Beckwith respectively. Beckwith internalized beliefs of racial superiority that he learned as a white boy growing up in the south. These white supremacist attitudes were a part of the Jim Crow south that helped de la Beckwith to grow into the man who would murder a Black man seeking social justice and equality. These same beliefs helped de la Beckwith’s wife to stand by him fully aware of his criminal acts directed at Black people (Walker, 2013). Again, these collections are cited because of their shared literary form, yet the subject matter of these collections also represent ways scientific racism and white supremacy have permeated contemporary society.

Poets continue to use creative approaches to address difficult social issues, and the emotional intimacy required to create the persona poem provides an excellent form. Maples follows a rich literary tradition of historical persona poems, poems that are glimpses into history. She provides her readers with a teaching tool used to continue (or begin) conversations about race, gender, medicine, and poetry.

Maples conducted research for six years: she read Sims’s autobiography, Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid, and carefully studied slave narratives to better understand the lives and experiences of enslaved women in the U.S. south. No doubt Maples knew the question of consent would surface as she told these women’s stories, but she understood these enslaved women had no agency. Historian Tiya Miles (2005) told the story of Doll, an enslaved woman purchased by Shoe Boots, a war hero in the Cherokee Nation. After extensive research on enslaved women, Miles asserted:

To be an enslaved woman in America was to be utterly exposed to sustained and systemic personal violation, which was also a sustained and systemic assault on the humanity and self-determination of one’s community. . . To be an en-slaved woman was to be subject, always, to the sexual will of another, a sexual will that when exercised, could serve to increase the master’s property through the reproduction of more slaves (46–47).

So, even before Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy, enslaved girls of childbearing age, became human subjects, they were property, unpaid laborers-for-life, and very likely breeders used to increase profits with the sale or further exploitation of their offspring. Maples’s awareness and sensitivity to the young women’s plight are evident in her poems. Maples’s research took her to South Carolina, New York City, and Mt. Meigs, Alabama, all sites with statues commemorating J. Marion Sims. Maples co-organized a campaign to remove Sims’s statue from the South Carolina State House. The protest included traditional and nontraditional components. In addition to signs and flyers, providing background on Sims, Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy, Maples and members of the University of South Carolina MFA program staged a poetry marathon. All day participants read poems by and about black women. Sims’s statue, formerly located in Central Park (New York), has been relocated to a Brooklyn cemetery, but for now, Sims’s statue remains in South Carolina. In a telephone interview with Maples, she explained that rather than keeping the statue of Sims and adding images of the women, (“even if they were three times his size”) his statue should be replaced, given his cruel legacy (K. Maples, personal communication, November 14, 2018).

With the publishing of this collection, Maples has joined a cadre of writers who refuse to allow the erasure of enslaved and marginalized people, including those who have been exploited in the name of science. Mend puts Maples in conversation with such contemporary poets as former United States poet laureate Natasha Trethewey (2012), whose ekphrastic poem “Miracle of the Black Leg,” introduces readers to a 14th century legend in which an Ethiop, (Black) male subject becomes a disposable donor for an ailing white patient. The transplanted black leg (cut off of the Black body to the white body) miraculously saves the life of the suffering white male. Trethewey’s (2012) “Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright on Dissecting the White Negro,” also an ekphrastic poem, examines a unique dissection procedure as a scientist attempts to find the empirical evidence that proves innate differences between Blacks and whites. In “Knowledge,” Trethewey, an African-descended woman, inserts her own experiences with her white father as she examines a chalk drawing that captures the dissection of a young white woman, who, like Trethewey, is unable to escape the white male gaze.

National Book Award for Poetry recipient Nikky Finney, whose poem “The Greatest Show on Earth”, dedicated to “Sarji Bartman, Joice Heth, Anarcha of Alabama, Truginini and us all”, unites exploited women from both medical and circus settings”; Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Elizabeth Alexander (1990), whose poem “Venus Hottentot” (1823) explores the life of Saarji Baartman; and Cave Canem fellow, Battina Judd, author of Patient, whose persona poems embolden Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy, and Henrietta Lacks to speak. Judd, a Black woman, also documents her own experiences as a modern-day patient.

When Harriet A. Washington (2008) began research on her book Medical Apartheid, a colleague responded angrily to Washington’s research efforts arguing that no such experimentation existed during slavery. Most people are aware of the unethical experiments done on Jews during the Holocaust and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (I will use the proper title) and more recently of Henrietta Lacks, whose Hela cells have made remarkable contributions to science. Yet many individuals are unaware of the proliferation of unethical treatment prior to this period.

“Bodies above virtue are never black.”

—from Mend (the sonnet corona titled “What Yields”)

In Thrall, Natasha Trethewey introduces readers to “The Miracle of the Black Leg.” According to the legend, Damian and Cosmas, who were twin brothers as well as physiciansaints, performed a posthumous transplant that involved amputating the leg of a black man (an Ethipo) and transplanting it on to the white patient. This miracle has been depicted in paintings and sculptures since at least the 14th century, in European countries including Portugal, Germany Switzerland, France, Belgium, Spain and Italy. As with folklore, there are different versions of the tale. In one version, the Ethiop was already dead and had been buried for four day when he was disinterred and his leg removed. Trethewey’s ekphrastic poem refers to several different artistic renderings of the “miracle,” including a wood carving from circa 1547. Perhaps the first lines are among the most telling as they continue to reverberate, even now: “Always, the dark body hewn asunder; always/one man is healed, his sick limb replaced. . . ” The black man’s life and limb are sacrificed for the white patient’s health and survival. As the poem ends, the narrator asks, “How not to see it—/the men bound one to the other, symbiotic—/, one man rendered expendable, the other worthy of this sacrifice?” In each piece of art, it is the Black man who is on the floor or absent from view, yet his leg, a part of this scientific wonder, this religious miracle, remains.

Just as the Black donor image is central in the miracle of the black leg, images of Blacks as human subjects were a very real part of plantation life in the Antebellum South. Harriet A. Washington posited as “experimental subjects, slaves did not have to be recruited, persuaded, and cajoled to endure pain and indignity; they could not refuse.” 64 Plantation doctors contributed to advancements in medicine while often perpetuating the inferiority of Blacks. In a lecture entitled “American Slave Medicine,” Katherine Bankole-Medina noted that while many of the theories and arguments grounded in scientific racism of the antebellum period have been debunked, contemporary societies should continue to discuss the context and the ramifications these ideas may have had on race relations in the south. Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, for example, was a highly-respected medical doctor, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and an apprentice with Dr. Benjamin Rush, an expert in public health and an abolitionist, who enslaved only one person (an aside Bankole-Medina interjects).

Like Sims, Cartwright practiced medicine in Alabama (Mississippi and New Orleans, Louisiana too), and while his research on cholera and yellow fever was groundbreaking, he also identified several “Negro” or “slave diseases” that were, by today’s standards, laughable and quickly dismissed as quackery. Drapetomania, he discovered, was a “mental disorder” that affected runaways. It caused enslaved Blacks to seek freedom. So, based on his medical theory, Harriet Tubman would have suffered from severe drapetomania. He offered “prescriptions” for this disease including keeping the enslaved person in a “submissive” state so that they could not flee. He also advocated “whipping” as a possible “cure” for the disease. Dysaesthesia Aethiopica, another disease he discovered, affected both the mind and body, and it explained the “lack of work ethic” among enslaved Africans. This condition diminished the intellectual capacity of the sufferer. “Scars on the body” and skin that became “insensitive” were markers for the disease. Bankole-Medina states that Cartwright’s extensive work, often informed by the Bible, made him an “authority on African American health and medicine,” yet it was “rooted in defense of slavery.”

Many southern whites who believe that Blacks are mentally and physically inferior to them have been influenced consciously or unconsciously by the remnants of the antebellum period’s scientific racism that supported slavery and reinforced the inferiority of Blacks. Cartwright had a number of prominent supports even though his theories on Negro diseases were dismissed as “pseudo-science” by the Civil War. James D. B. DeBow, head of the census in New Orleans, published Cartwright’s research in DeBow’s Review. Dr. Josiah Nott, a surgeon who contributed significantly to yellow fever research, studied the effects climate had on race. Dr. Samuel George Morton, father of ethnography, led cranium studies in which Blacks were at the bottom of the chart because of their limited “cranial size and capacity.” Bonkole-Medina also observed that Morton and other scientists of that period believed in polygenism rather than monogenism. Thus, Blacks were inherently and fundamentally different from whites because these scientists believed different races originated from different species (Bankole-Medina).

“The day we were born, we belonged to you. . . . So yours, we wonder if the saliva in our mouths is still ours.” from Mend (”What Yields” (IV) in the voices of the enslaved women/human subjects to Dr. J. Marion Sims)

Mend covers the period from 1845–1849, the years in which Sims conducted experiments of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. This collection of poetry is as much in conversation with contemporary poetry as it is with J. Marion Sims’s autobiography in which he documents, from his perspective, the story of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. Sims chronicles the events that led to his doctor/patient relationship with these enslaved girls. He admits that he “never pretended to treat any of the diseases of women. . . on account of any functional derangement of the uterine system.” In fact, he referred women with uterine problems to other local doctors, insisting, ‘This is out of my line; I do not know anything about it practically. . .’ (p. 226).

In June of 1845, Sims met Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy. These teenager girls were clearly suffering from horrible conditions that developed during childbirth. Fistuals (tears) typically occurred after difficult labor. He learned of Anarcha, an enslaved woman on the plantation of Mr. Wescott, who had been in labor for three days and still had not given birth. He describes Anarcha as “colored, about seventeen years of age, well-developed, [and having] been in labor then seventy-two hours.” He delivered Arnacha’s child using forceps, and several days later learned that Anarcha had “lost control of both the bladder and the rectum.” He later explained, not to the young woman, but to “the master of the servant” that she would be ‘unfit for her duties required of a servant. . . she would not die, but will never get well, and all you have to do is take good care of her so long as she lives’’(p. 227).

Soon after Sims delivered Anarcha’s baby (baby did not survive) and examining her fistula, Tom Zimmerman, master of an enslaved girl named Lucy, insisted that Sims evaluate her. Lucy arrived on a train. She, too, was about seventeen or eighteen-years-old. Lucy also suffered from this incurable condition with “urine run[ning] all the time. . .whether walking or standing, sitting or lying down” (p. 228–230). Sims confesses that he detested conducting vaginal examinations. He asserts, “If it was anything I hated it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis”(p. 231). Of the three girls with fistulas Sims mentions by name, Betsey was the only one of the three referred to as “married.” She was unable to ‘hold a single drop of water’ since giving birth about a month earlier because her “bladder [was] destroyed”(p. 228).

Sims referred to the fistulas as a “surgical curiosity, although a very unfortunate one” (p. 228). He concludes, “. . . [A]side from death, this was about the worst accident that could have happened to the poor young girl”(p. 227). Of course, he had never experienced slavery nor the particular vicissitudes of enslavement for girls and women that often included raped, the removal and sale of children born to them, the separation of families (parents, siblings, children, husbands/ wives), whippings, malnutrition, forced free labor for life, property and subhuman status.

Even if he had compassion for these enslaved young women, he knew to negotiate with their masters. He also knew that if these enslaved workers were unable to perform, the landowner/ slave master would lose money, and profiting from free labor was at the crux of the system of slavery. Sims made it clear that Anarcha would not be able to work, and Wescott would have to take care of her for the rest of her life. The economic component, essential to the master/slave relationship, was being gravely compromised. So, neither Sims nor the “masters” had much to lose. Given that these enslaved girls had little, if any, power or say-so over their daily lives, their bodies, and their reproductive health, it is unlikely they had the power or agency to make decisions about whether to have surgery or serve as human subjects in medical experiments. This is in no way is dismissive of the pain and agony associated with fistulas, but it illustrates the physical, emotional, and social quagmire that confronted these women. Soon Sims proposes to the enslaved women’s owners that he keep them so that he could experiment and operate on them, but he promises not to “endanger their lives.” He adds that he would “not charge a cent for keeping them.” However, the original owners would be responsible for taxes and the women’s clothes (236). With this background material in mind, we enter the pages of Mend.

Alongside Sylvia Plath’s poem Fever 103 are words of advice to slave masters regarding “distinctive diseases of the negro.”(no page number). These epigraphs set the stage for the inevitable tension that exists between the enslaved women represented in the collection and the human subjects they became. Plath’s poem begins, “I am too pure for you or anyone./Your body/Hurts me as the world hurts God. . . .” The poems to follow show the reader that this is also true for the enslaved teenaged girls, Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. They were “too pure . . .for anyone.”And their pain is akin to a cosmic pain that telling their stories will help to elucidate.

The collection is divided into four sections. “The Door” is the introductory poem to the first section. It begins with powerful imagery: “a naked/woman/on knees/and hands” (3). The reader is able to immediately visualize this vulnerable and submissive posture. At first glance, the girl might have been a prostitute or a maid, had she not been naked. The woman is “in the backyard of things past telling.” Whether this reference is to the area surrounding the “shack” Washington used to describe the medical facility in which Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy lived or a metaphoric backyard (back alley) that holds secrets and memory, the woman in the poem is privy to information and experiences that are “past telling” because they have been held on to for far too long. The next eight lines that are intermittently indented read: “her odor/ closing the space/he taps apart her inner/ thighs/her used belly/hangs/like a sow’s. Fistulas carried with them an offensive odor as women suffering with this condition were often unable to control their bladder or their bowels. In the collection are comparisons to the black female body with, the sow, farm animals, fruit, water, even butcher’s meat on steel. Sims has control of their ailing young bodies and is free to prod and poke and pull apart their legs.

Unlike white female patients whose examinations were done more modestly, the woman in this poem is fully exposed. The poem ends with the lines, “then two new/ pewter spoons/and she knows/she’s not here/for mending.” The “two pewter spoons’ refers to the rudimentary medical equipment Sims used to examine the enslaved women. Similar, perhaps, to the “Door of No Return, in Senegal, West Africa, where Africans left for the Middle Passage, the door to medical experiments and surgical procedures has been opened for these young frightened female captives. Any dignity for the patient has been thrown out of the door. The naked woman realizes “she’s not [there] for mending.” In fact, she and her fellow enslaved human subjects, held at the Sims’s plantation, are in for four years of unanesthetized surgical procedures and opium addiction in which other doctors and spectators could attend.

Maples has included five excerpts from Sims’s autobiography, The Story of My Life that are scattered throughout the collection. To date, there are no letters, diary entries, or other written records from Anarcha, Betsey, or Lucy, but through these historical persona poems, the young enslaved women are able to respond to, contradict, and talk back to Sims, sharing their perspectives and experiences, at least for the literary record. Betsey “speaks” in the first section. The epigraph from Sims’s autobiography in this section includes the passage, “She [referring to Betsey] willingly consented,” and it describes the procedure:

I. . . mounted her on the table, on her knees, with her head resting on the palms of her hands. I placed two students, one on each side of her pelvis, and they laid hold of the nates, and pulled them open. Before I could get the bent spoon handle into the vagina, the air rushed in with a puffing noise, dilating the vagina to tis fullest” (p. 5).

However, Betsey’s recollection of her first day as a human subject provided another perspective in “The Doctor Asks If I Want to Go Home the Way I Come,” a historical persona poem written in narrative form. Betsey has recalled:

“. . . His cold hands make my spine shiver and he tells me you’re gonna have to learn to keep still. My behind is up in the air. Naked as the day I was born, like when the overseer turned my skirts up over my head to give me lashes. I just sit on the table and cry. . . and in walks a pack of white men. I jerk up, clawing at the sheet. . . pulling down my skirts. . . [He] tells me this is purely scientific. A few men place their handkerchiefs over their noses. Excuse the odor, gentlemen, he says. Seems like tears were coming up from out of a well. . .” (p. 7)

Human emotions were not always attributed to enslaved Black people, but strong emotions are indeed a part of this experience. Betsey is aware of Sims’s “cold hands.” She is haunted by memories of an overseer beating her as her skirts are raised above her head again at the hands of a powerful white man. The italicized words are direct quotes from Sims: learn to keep still, this is purely scientific and excuse the odor suggest that he is detached, and she is fungible. Sims is clearly more concerned about the white male spectators who are offended by the odor than Betsey, who suffers with the fistula. Harriet Washington notes in Medical Apartheid:

Betsey’s voice has been silenced by history, but as one reads Sims’s biographers and his own memoirs, a haughty, self-absorbed researcher emerges, a man who bought black women slaves and addicted them to morphine. . . to perform dozens of exquisitely painful, distressingly intimate vaginal surgeries (p. 2).

The other poems in this section express different emotions and reactions. In “Wool Door” Betsey exclaims, “They cut me open/like a great watermelon./I am ripe and yellowbellied/ and black seeds crack in their mouths” (Maples, 2018, p. 9). In “Unfolded” she is bold and determined, trying to keep herself together: “the closer/he comes/I ball my fists/tight,/if I could ball my body up/ this tight/he’d never pull me/apart./he’d never/eye what/I’ve never/ seen myself ” (Maples, 2018, p. 12). In “To Bear Witness” evidence of her opium addiction appears in a hallucination:. . . “I see the cow with no head./I swear it was just as real as you and me; it walked in this here room hooves clicking, a black soot hole for a neck . . (13). Maples noted that this reference has come directly from the slave narratives she read. Questions about conjuring and magic were often asked in the interviews she studied. Seeing a cow with no head was a “bad omen” or a sign of impending “bad luck,” similar to hearing the hoot owl or the appearance of a black cat (K. Maples, personal communication, November 14, 2018). In another narrative poem, “So Familiar He Is with Parting Her Brown Legs”, Betsey observes, “The bowls of two pewter spoons are pushed in my body, yet they are kinder than his hands. . . I uncurl dizzily. . .I no longer bother to cover up.” By this time, Betsey is possibly already addicted to opium. Her defenses are down. She is physically, mentally and emotionally drained, so much so that she lives “dizzily” in and out of consciousness (K. Maples, personal communication, November 14, 2018).

In the final poem of section one, “Fresh Sheets” Betsey says . . . he no longer talks,/ just waves his hand toward the table/ I lay myself in the center,/part like the red sea-/I drift” (Maples, 2018, p. 20). She has surrendered to the routine and accepted her plight. Prolonged opium use, excruciating pain, and years of medical experimentation on an already worn body have led to exhaustion, yet the reference to the Red Sea is a biblical and triumphant one. Here parting like the “red sea” was no doubt exhausting. It took every ounce of strength she had to open her legs day-after-day, year-after-year. The children of Israel spent forty-years in the wilderness. During their wilderness experience, they confronted the Red Sea, a seemingly impassable obstacle that stood between them and their journey to the Promised Land. It was Moses who parted the Red Sea, leading the children of Israel closer to freedom. And like Moses, Betsey did not complete the pilgrimage to freedom, but her contributions to the field of gynecology will not go unnoticed. Her daughter-poets will see to that.

“These lips only move when I tell them to, if I want them to. There is so much my body can still do. Plus, I’ve got these eyes for watching you.”

—from Mend (the sonnet corona titled “What Yields”)

Among the daughter-poets already mentioned is Natasha Trethewey, the daughter of poet Eric Trethewey, a white man from rural Canada and social worker, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, an African American woman from Mississippi. The couple met in the 1960s at Kentucky State College (later Kentucky State University), a historically Black college in Frankfort. When they decided to marry in 1965, anti-miscegenation laws made it illegal for them to do so in Turnbough’s home state of Mississippi (Wilson, 2008). Racist science clearly extended into marriage beds and influenced family dynamics, even in otherwise loving families. In “Knowledge” an ekphrastic poem inspired by J.H. Hasselhorst’s 1864 chalk drawing, Natasha Trethewey inserts herself, a 21 century woman of African descent, into a drawing that features the dissection of a young white woman from the 19th century, who, even in death, is unable to escape the white male gaze. The drawing features the dissection of a young white woman led by German anatomist Johann Christian Gustave Lucae. The deceased is lying naked on a table in a cold, dimly-lit room with her “lips parted, long hair spilling from the table. . . /nipples drawn out for inspection” (28). Foiled against four inquisitive white men, representing science and scientific discovery, she is surrounded by “objects she’ll become”— a skeleton, skulls, books. The woman, identified in the poem as “young and beautiful and drowned,” has committed suicide, and the scientists are using this opportunity “[t]o make a study/of the ideal female body. . . .”(28). Thus, her premature death provides an excellent opportunity to probe her young body, cut her flesh, and fetishize the female anatomy. The scientists, dressed warmly “in coats, trimmed in velvet or fur- soft as the down of [the young woman’s] pubis” seek not to understand a pathology or eliminate human suffering—but they desire to know the proportions of ideal beauty. Trethewey notes:

[T]he artist entombs her body in a pyramid/of light, a temple of science over which/ the anatomist presides. In the service of beauty-/to know it-he lifts a flap of skin/ beneath her breast as one might draw back a sheet. . . . (p. 28–29)

In this instance, scientific discovery, a site for empirical data and reason, becomes a frivolous patriarchal quest for beauty, not unheard of during this period. Trethewey, using her own experiences as an African-descended woman, shows that the consequences of scientific experiments, dissections, and discoveries are not confined to morgues or hospital and medical school labs, and certainly not to young white women as reflected in the poetry upon which this discussion centers. Trethewey identifies this dissection as “a delicate wounding” and admits “the anatomist’s blade opens a place in me,/like a curtain drawn upon a room in which/each learned man is my father” (30). The painting about which she speaks in the poem hits home, for she continues her poem with lines from a poem her father wrote that refers to her as his “crossbreed child.” She is understandably hurt when he refers to her in what she calls “the language of zoology” (30). Referring to his brown daughter in words used to classify animals is not only insulting but dehumanizing. His word choice is grounded, perhaps unconsciously, in the notion of racial purity and suggests offspring of “mixed-race” couples are inherently different, a different breed, perhaps similar to the antebellum scientists’ belief in polygenism, in which human beings were created, not with a common ancestry, but with separate racial origins. Trethewey illustrates that the family unit, a microcosm of society, is not immune from racist thinking or language as it is deeply ingrained in our culture and lexicon. In this case, Trethewey, representing the Black female of the 21th century is linked to the past through the young white female of the 19th century as they are both subjected to the white male gaze, still representing power and authority over the gendered (female) body. Trethewey’s presence, however, brings both gender and race to this poem. Trethewey’s pain is personal. It is generational. She says her father becomes all of the men in the painting, “even /the dissector—his scalpel in hand like a pen/poised above me aimed straight for my heart” (p. 30).

In Trethewey’s next poem, “Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright on Dissecting the White Negro,” gaze shifts from race and gender to race and color, with the foundations of racist science connecting these poems. Unlike the cadaver in the poem “Knowledge” that is dissected to identify a standard of beauty, this poem focuses on a dissection to confirm perceived racial differences between Blacks and whites. Trethewey stated in an interview with Charles deNiord, “. . . Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright. . . is dissecting a white-skinned Negro to ‘prove’ the essence of black inferiority that he is sure is there. (World Literature today.org online 5/27/2015 interview accessed November 14, 2018). The poem identifies important anatomical markers such as skin, brain, blood, feet, neck that some scientists have used to confirm differences among the “races.” The poem begins with the words, “To strip from the flesh/the specious skin. . . ” (italics mine). Specious is significant since it is defined as misleading or false. Thus, the ability to identify blackness based on skin color was not accurate. Some individuals read as black, for example, “passed” and became a part of white communities, enslaved African-descended women bore children sired by their white slave masters, and black (white, “mulatta,” Indigenous, or “othered”) women partnered with white, (black, “mulatto,” “othered”) men, so phenotype and a lack of color or melanin were not necessarily reliable enough to determine race. Plus, persons with albinism, born lacking melanin pigment, have “white” skin as do individuals with vitiligo, who lose pigment producing cells over parts or most of their bodies. Since determining race, and ultimately the worth and character of an individual, based on skin color could be deceiving, Cartwright investigated beyond the epidermis.

The poem continues with buzz words used to confirm scientific racism, including weight and size of the brain/skull, blood that can be tainted with one drop, according to the the notion of hypo-descent. There are even references to “flat feet” and a “short neck,” which apparently help to determine race as well. Trethewey also acknowledges the partnership many scientists had with religion. For example, Christian racists have justified enslavement and other atrocities through their faith (God/Bible). Science (based on logic/reason/empirical data) and religion have been manipulated to perpetuate notions of racial inferiority. The poem references Canaan “. . . to make of the work of faith/the work of science, evidence/the word of God: Canaan/be the servant of servants. . . (p. 33). This reconfirms the almost preordained status of Blacks, as, for example “hewers of wood.” The poem ends with the words, “ thus/to know the truth/of this:(this derelict/carpus, a dark compendium, this/atavistic assemblage—flatter/feet, bowed legs, a shorter neck) so/deep the tincture/—see it!—/we still know white from not”(30). The scientist is relieved that he is able to distinguish, through this meticulous dissection, the difference between Black and white. The “white Negro” phenomenon was a popular one, and these “freaks of nature” often ended up in the circus as side-shows.

The brilliantly crafted poem,“The Greatest Show on Earth” was published in Nikky Finney’s (2013) The World is Round. This poem’s title immediately grabs the reader’s attention with the provocative words “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Hearing these words often elicits excitement, bright colors, a cacophony of accordions, horns, laughter, clowns in floppy shoes, or lion tamers defying death as they bravely put their heads into the mouths of ferocious lions. Circus goers might think of cotton candy and bearded ladies, the ringmaster wearing his top hat with whip-in-hand as he commands some dangerous animal to sit or stand and do tricks. As soon as the title invites the reader to recall fond circus memories from childhood, Finney’s poem begins with a sobering dedication “for Saartjie Baartman, Joice Heth, Anarcha of Alabama, Truginini and us all.” It is possible that readers are unfamiliar with these women. Saartjie Baartman Joice Heth, for example, is mentioned in memoirs of P.T. Barnum, circus owner known for the greatest show on earth. Joice Heth was a part of a side-show. She was billed as the 161-year-old nursemaid of George Washington. Barnum says of Heth, “Joice Heth is not a human being. What purports to be a remarkable old woman is simply a curiously constructed automation, made up of whalebone, india-rubber, and numberless springs ingeniously put together, and made to move at the slightest touch, according to the will of the operator” (from P.T. Barnum’s memoirs as quoted in Judd, 2014, p. 42).

Regardless of prior knowledge, curious readers enter the poem as if walking into the fun house at a circus, unaware of what awaits. Finney grapples with the exploitation of women and opens the first stanza of the poem without equivocation: Under glass and tent/floating in formaldehyde jelly/curled in a deadman’s float/live the split spread/unanesthetized legs/ of Black women/broken like the stirrups/of a wishbone. . . .” Saartjie Baartman, known as the Hottentot Venus, was not only caged and on display in Europe, but she was dissected upon her death. Finney’s acknowledgment is not limited to Baartman, but she includes Black women, the known and unknown, the ancestors and the descendants. She speaks in a language of science: formaldehyde jelly, unanesthetized, stirrups, genitalia, vagina, pathology, protruding mass steatopygia, speculum, operation. She speaks in the lexicon of the circus: “and the normal pay their fifty cents/to see what makes a freak a freak. . . . ” She brings the words—modern medicine and the circus— together with the lines: “The side show/was pitched on our backs/the speculum hammered/out between our legs/modern medicine was founded/on the operation of our hips/.” She includes a direct reference to Baartman: “Go ahead/walk around her/she won’t bite/see her protruding mass/steatopygia (Finney, 53).

She speaks to women remembering “The lilac plumage/ of our petaled genitalia/in all its royal mauve/and plum rose/with matching eggplant hips/that pull the ocean/across itself each night/” and mourns being “cut away/by pornographic hands/ fascinated with difference/ and the spectacle/of being a Black woman” (Finney, 53).

This poem is painful, beautiful, and honest. It is both a praise poem and an indictment. Finney, prophetic in her work, dedicates this poem to Saartjie Baartman, Joice Heth, Anarcha of Alabama, Truginini, and us all (italics mine). Within this space is room for Henrietta Lacks, Serena Williams, unknown transgender women of color, or non-binary people whose lives have been or will become spectacles of modern medicine.

The poem ends with the same serious tone woven throughout each line: “Our opened pirouetting vaginas,/our African music boxes/are whittled down to perfect/change purse size,/ For the normal/who will always pay/their fifty cents/to be sure and see/what makes a freak/a freak” (Finney, 53). The poem ends with some consternation, as well it should.

The Preface to Kwoya Fagin Maples’s Mend, published in October 2018, ends with this appeal:

Dear reader, here is my wish: that you would consider how this story relates to now. Presently in 2018, black women are three times more likely to die after childbirth than white women, regardless of ability to pay and regardless of prenatal care. Biases toward black bodies still exist within the medical profession that lead to such an imbalance in medical care. Fistula is still pervasive in impoverished countries, and the women who are suffering from it are often ostracized by their families and communities. Maybe, reader, . . . you will see how you are connected to this story. Maybe you will honor what you come to know by sharing it (xi).