May 2022
Bio Note: The news from the war in Ukraine on many days brings me to my knees, raw. For these submissions about the impact of war, I go back my three-year effort to write How I Learned To Be White -- which examines what I know of white privilege and its impact on my life. I delved deeply into the 62 letters written to my great-grandmother Annie Dunn from her brothers and would-be husband William Lewis from the front lines of their service in the Union army during the Civil War as part of a volunteer Indiana regiment. They lost many friends and acquaintances, stood sentry in freezing mud, slept on the ground covered with straw, were wounded, worried if they would ever get paid, suffered from the cold and much more. These two poems are part of that work in preparing How I Learned To Be White which received the 2018 Human Relations Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry.
Whose Am I?
Today when the winter creek overwhelms its banks,
sloughing off mud and rolling rock,
I cannot be a rippled pond,
ring inside ring. Too turbulent.
Today I can only be vestigial stuck mud
in the Union soldier letters in my hat box. Mired
in DNA. Heritage. The way I kick my legs
is that the revolutionary Jabez’ fifer jig?
My five rocking chairs –
am I my great-grandmother staying home
from the Civil War?
Annie Dunn read all those letters,
dreaded what she didn’t know.
My women saved the letters.
I barely know my father’s side, Germans on the boat,
diamonds in their hems, mine cut in South Africa.
I wear one now. I write below the Rulach portrait,
those who left to avoid the Prussian draft.
Whose am I? Who accounts to who?
My mother’s side – the American revolutionaries,
the Webbs of Braintree, Mass.
Then the Union’s William Lewis
and the Dunns.
Between first dust and end dust,
how long they walked in mud.
Originally published in How I Learned To Be White
Wade In The Water
“Wade in the water. God’s going to trouble these waters.” – From a traditional spiritual
The genealogist found a photo online of my great-grandfather’s gravestone, a six-foot obelisk with a ball on top. White marble etched in dry moss.
tone deaf history
no way to know
their voices
We have one blurry oval photo of William Lewis that goes pink around the edges. He of haystack hair – compressed on top but fluffy through the ears and beard. Maybe the photographer suggested he remove his hat. He was shot once in the shoulder.
that stranger
in a black suit
could be anyone
He survived the Civil War. In 1865, he survived the boiler bursting on the steamship S. S. Sultana when two-thirds of the 2,100 passengers did not. Like others onboard – the emaciated Union POWs held to the end of the war in Confederate prisons and a few worn-out mules – he had to swim to escape the burning wreckage or hold onto some plank torn from the ship – a door, ladder or guardrail – and drift downriver. Or grab onto a tree trunk on the flooded banks.
a flood
never knows riverbanks
from the woods
He went on to father my grandfather Carl Lewis, the prison warden. Census records show William had another son first, a boy he named Wade. Wade was a drifter, moving from rooming house to rooming house all the way to Las Vegas. The Census followed Wade until his death in Florida in a small town near where Carl managed the citrus orchard.
mockingbird
named for a spring night
song he heard pass by
Wade. I would think my great-grandfather had had enough of water. Maybe this was the only spiritual he knew.
Originally published in How I Learned To Be White
©2022 Tricia Knoll
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