Excerpt from Domestic Work

Domestic Work, 1937

All week she's cleaned
someone else's house,
stared down her own face
in the shine of copper-
bottomed pots, polished
wood, toilets she'd pull
the lid to --that look saying

Let's make a change, girl.

But Sunday mornings are hers --
church clothes starched
and hanging, a record spinning
on the console, the whole house
dancing. She raises the shades,
washes the rooms in light,
buckets of water, Octagon soap.

Cleanliness is next to godliness...

Windows and doors flung wide,
curtains two-stepping
forward and back, neck bones
bumping in the pot, a choir
of clothes clapping on the line.

Nearer my God to Thee...

She beats time on the rugs,
blows dust from the broom
like dandelion spores, each one
a wish for something better.

Self-Employment, 1970

Who to be today? So many choices
all that natural human hair piled high,
curled and flipped -- style after style
perched, each on its Styrofoam head.
Maybe an upsweep, or finger waves
with a pony tail. Not a day passes
that she goes unkempt --
Never know who might stop by --
now that she works at home
pacing the cutting table,
or pumping the stiff pedal
of the bought-on-time Singer.

Most days, she dresses for the weather
relentless sun, white heat. The one tree
nearest her workroom, a mimosa,
its whimsy of pink puffs cut back
for a child's swing set. And now, grandchildren --
it's come to this -- a frenzy of shouts,
the constant slap of an old screen door.
At least the radio still swings jazz
just above the noise, and

Ah yes, the window unit -- leaky at best.
Sometimes she just stands still, lets
ice water drip onto upturned wrists.
Up under that wig, her head
sweating, hot as an idea.


History Lesson

I am four in this photograph, standing
on a wide strip of Mississippi beach,
my hands on the flowered hips

of a bright bikini. My toes dig in,
curl around wet sand. The sun cuts
the rippling Gulf in flashes with each

tidal rush. Minnows dart at my feet
glinting like switchblades. I am alone
except for my grandmother, other side

of the camera, telling me how to pose.
It is 1970, two years after they opened
the rest of this beach to us,

forty years since the photograph
where she stood on a narrow plot
of sand marked colored, smiling,

her hands on the flowered hips
of a cotton meal-sack dress.

Copyright 2000 by Natasha Trethewey. All rights reserved.