Summary Of Native Guard By Natasha Trethewey

Native Guard Analysis
Natasha Trethewey is an American poet that was born in Gulfport, Mississippi in 1966 (Kuiper). She is known for many works that are about both her family’s history and the American South’s history (“Natasha Trethewey”). Trethewey often wrote about history due to the fact that she was a biracial girl growing up during one of the most racist times that America has ever gone through. One can just imagine the struggles and the sufferings a mixed girl went through during those awful times. Native Guard is a book of poems written by Natasha that expressed what it was like during these tough times. Every poem reveals something about her personal experience in the past in relation to the public’s history (De Cenzo). This Pulitzer

The poem focuses on Trethewey’s storytelling about a scarring event that occurred to her family during a time when being black caused agony. Trethewey describes it and says, “We peered from the windows, shades drawn, / at the cross trussed like a Christmas tree, / the charred grass still green” (“Incident,” 5-7). The simile, “cross trussed like a Christmas tree”, indicates that there was a cross burning happening in their yard. The “angels in gowns”, which she uses to symbolize the Ku Klux Klan, are the men that burned these crosses (“Incident,” 10). It was near their home because the author is biracial, and it was their way of showing them a silent threat. These cross burnings are an example of historical violence as a result of intolerance racial differences. Trethewey lived in constant fear and anxiety, and it is what shaped her writing, especially the poems towards the central section of Native

A poem titled “Pilgrimage” is towards the central section of the Native Guard which focuses on African American History and the southern past. The poem is mainly about the history that occurred at Vicksburg, Mississippi. Also, the poem shows the struggles and the emotions that the Civil War had in the South. In the beginning of the poem, Trethewey writes an imagery, “Here, the Mississippi carved / its mud-dark path, a graveyard / for skeletons of sunken riverboats” (“Pilgrimage,” 1-3). The readers can picture Mississippi at its lowest. Trethewey is also referring to the hardships she went through due to her mother’s death. Her mother’s death itself had a large impact on who she is. She then continues and says, “Here, the river changed its course, / turning away from the city / as one turns, forgetting from the past — / the abandoned bluffs, land sloping up above the river’s bend — where now / the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed” (Trethewey, “Pilgrimage,” 4-9). This quote shows how Trethewey was moving on with her life when she moved and left Mississippi. One can assume that the constant struggles of being biracial in the state of Mississippi are one of the reasons she left and moved to Georgia. Although this is still in the South, it much better than the life she lived in Mississippi. She expresses, “Here, the dead stand up in stone, white marble, on