watching a production of The Tempest after a colleague asked about my relationship with white women
she said my poetry made her surprised I had ever dated
or been married to one. I said my poetry proves I had,
then made a joke about reparations. I wondered if she felt more
than challenged reading my words. if something stronger
than white guilt and her glasses of wine caused the brown contact
of wide eyes, the hand which slid toward my wrist.
that night a white boy played Caliban. without dirt or bronzer,
only his words framed our focus on the “thing of darkness”—
the beast of Blackness, the Blackness of the beast. the opposite
of what makes Ferdinand—the suitor of perfect form and shape
and breed and hue—“so fair a house.”
robbed of his land, his music, a slave to their language,
Caliban is forced to serve from a crag within his own kingdom.
is forced to skulk and scrape and sulk across the stage. and yet,
cast as the arch defiler, he knows his place—the dark
white daughters fear, their fathers must defend against. later,
I’m struck by how much hinges on the choice of manuscript,
of accuser. if Miranda remains silent in the scene.
we know the master’s daughter must be honored. know how a glance,
a smile, a whistle, a word of interest, or even silence is enough
to breach a maiden’s purity in the eyes of God, her father.
how, given the lie, what can she do but speak it into truth?
ask Mabel Crowder, Carolyn Donham, Breana Harmon,
and Alice Sebold. ask Jeremiah Reeves and Emmett Till,
Ronnie Long and Anthony Broadwater what every house, field,
and random nigger knows. what Caliban knows. we saw
how quickly they hung him for an impossibly sarcastic reply—
a line more anger than admission, but still coiled round his neck.
poor Caliban. how little respect he held for himself,
even in his scheming. how quickly he traded one cruelty
for another. bore the lash of “monster” for so little reward.
under cabined houselights I watched her—ringless
beside me—steal glances at my midnight scribbling.
wondered what she saw as I crafted the very sort of dark
lines she meant.
Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is the author of six poetry collections, most recently said the Frog to the scorpion (Harbor Editions, 2024). He is editor-in-chief of TThe WEIGHT Journal, the CNF editor at Porcupine Literary, and an associate editor at Rise Up Review. MEH’s poetry and prose appears in Anti-Heroin Chic, ASP Bulletin, Had, Massachusetts Review, Mayday, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, and Redivider among others. MEH is an educator who can be found at www.MEHPoeting.com writing about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground.
Read other Letters to America online or in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published in partnership with Trinity University Press.
Header photo by P Stock, courtesy Shutterstock.
