Chapel Hill, North Carolina 2018
Today I sift through the names of 30 enslaved
and pause over the sum of $1000
to see what I imagine a planter might see
a Black man full of genetic seed
and future saleable progeny.
No wait, it’s the price of John[s] Daughter,
zeros now plain as lust’s desire.
I record each name, history’s syllabic lathe cutting me.
When I get to Dolly $600, I see a chubby-cheeked woman
can cook like nobody’s business. When the prices lower
to $100 or so, I see old age. Pleasant $325
is named like an epiphany. Citizen $600,
a bad joke or history’s irony.
Sam $650, Lizzy $600, and Aggy $650
suddenly proclaim gender equity.
Provenance accounts for something, I think,
when I see Bill Bradley $850. Not everyone
has this last name or a price so high;
it may be literacy or some other skilled pedigree.
I sadden over Cecilia $175—old now
once a maid to her mistress in the early days,
when this colony was new for everyone.
The bookeeper’s pen struggled on the “g” in Agnes $400,
the ovaled top of this single letter bowed
like her head before him. America Perkins $600.
Well, what was more American than this?
Contributor’s Notes
Artress Bethany White is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University. She received the Trio Award for her poetry collection, My Afmerica (Trio House Press, 2019). Her book Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity (New Rivers Press) received a 2022 Next Generation Finalist Indie Book Award. Her prose and poetry have appeared in such journals as POETRY, Harvard Review, Ecotone, Birmingham Poetry Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Pleiades and is forthcoming in the anthologies Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa (Wesleyan UP, 2024) and Why I Wrote This Poem: 62 Poets on Creating Their Works (McFarland, 2023). The poem “A Creased Page from a Plantation Ledger” is from a forthcoming poetry collection based on her family’s history of enslavement in the U.S.
