Artress Bethany White

Bio: Artress Bethany White is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is the recipient of the Trio Award for her poetry collection, My Afmerica (Trio House Press, 2019) and author of the essay collection Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity (New Rivers Press, 2020). Her prose and poetry have appeared in such journals as POETRY, Harvard Review, Solstice, Poet Lore, Ecotone, Birmingham Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Hopkins Review, Green Mountains Review and Tahoma Review. White has received fellowships and residencies at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Writer’s Hotel, and the Tupelo Press/MASS MoCA studios. She is associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University and teaches poetry and nonfiction workshops for Rosemont College Summer Writer’s Retreat in Pennsylvania. She is nonfiction editor at the Boston-based literary magazine Pangyrus.

Dear Ancestors: On The Occasion of Visiting the Plantation Which Once Governed Your Lives North Carolina Summer 2021

Four generations past calling anyone master and this word alone would make you spin in a grave, enraged gyre at the promise threatened but not broken to never see your children’s children bound and beholden to any man or soil once calling them slave. Free, I see more than you thought would endure amid Piedmont pines and plantation shrines. Driving to Cooleemee on Peter Hairston Road, a new gated walk to bar my way, I realize more than one tourist gathers here today when a family thrusts a 10-year-old child my way. My forebears once worked this land, I say. They call it luck and serendipity And rush to arrange a photo op including me. I become the project on the Civil War; a book holding the names of my family as property gripped in a 10-year-old’s freckled arm. I wonder how the school report will go, after a panicked look when I utter I was a blood relative of the planter you know, not just chattel abiding in slave quarters gathered round its stately manor.
I am glad to leave behind the house and the touristy tangle of cotton vine at the end of that rutted, mile-long drive. The bump of road kill beneath my wheels I pass a flagpole three banners deep American, Confederate, and Trump emblazoned on blue declare what you already knew; healing this generation’s troubles is long overdue.
O, America, you are such a dreamer. I am related to a nineteenth-century man who took a black “wife” and whose descendants would go on to be enslaved for life. To have and to hold till narratives do us part fragments forever refusing alignment beginning, ending, or arc.

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