White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

Every story has a beginning, and mine starts in Virginia. My book, White Blood, is a work of documentary poetry, taking as the starting point my own genealogical roots in the Commonwealth. My ancestors belong(ed) to the Black communities of central and northern Virginia. They survived centuries of enslavement and went on to raise their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in freedom. Because many of my Black Virginian ancestors were denied literacy, they left behind few written records of their lives prior to the twentieth century. I began writing these poems by conducting archival research, in person and online, to gain some sense of who they were. I visited libraries, museums, and historical societies. I also traveled to specific sites in Virginia where my ancestors may have lived. Far from "solving" the mysteries of my ancestors' origins, my search often led me to ask new questions about the past, and about how we tell stories. These poems come from a section of the book called "Louisa," after the county in central Virginia. Harriett and Butler Smith, mother and son, are two ancestors of mine who resided there. They, and the collective ancestral voice I call the “Free Smiths,” are inspired as much by the documentary silences in their histories as by the existing records of their lives. The poem “Mrs. A. T. Goodwin’s Letter to the Provost Marshal, 1866” takes its title and reformulates individual phrases from a handwritten letter filed at the Virginia Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office in Louisa. The Bureau was established in 1865 to aid newly freed Black Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War.