On acknowledging pain without sacrificing hope
The House of Being by Natasha Trethewey. Yale University Press, 2024. 96 pp., $18.00
Sitting in a small café this afternoon, drinking coffee and nodding with tiredness from a weekend of entertaining, I couldn’t be farther away from Natasha Trethewey’s complex Mississippi childhood. Yet as I read the last pages of her new contribution to Yale’s Why I Write series, I find myself completely engrossed and unexpectedly close to crying. How little I have in common with the contexts described within this slim volume, and yet how much. In The House of Being, Trethewey reaches back into the South of her childhood, into her interracial family, and into her grandmother’s shotgun-style house to find there the words she needs to make a permanent connection back to her origins, and thus to her very self.
To Trethewey’s youth belong three periods. First, a mostly secure, though sometimes confusing, few years spent living with her grandmother, her African-American mother, and her white father before her parents’ divorce. Next, a second string of years spent watching her mother sacrifice herself to an abusive second husband. Finally, there is a third, too-brief year of “escape” after her mother’s divorce from this terrible man. At the end of that last year, that same man would find and murder Trethewey’s mother.
Much of this is, of course, tragic, and I was initially caught off guard by Trethewey’s assured certainty that somehow both her selfhood and her writing depend upon making something permanent out of these stories. As Trethewey narrates memories of her young life, however, the reader becomes gradually aware that personal knowledge of the dangers of being a Black girl in a racist society lies at the center of the author’s intellectual life. And yet we see also, as Trethewey learns it herself, that the words that control our worlds can either harm or equip a person, in obedience to that person’s willingness to hold language’s dual powers in tension. Language, Trethewey realizes, has the power both to frame the walls around us and to frame our paths outward.
And so Trethewey draws for us with her words her own house of being, into which we may look as we roll quietly alongside her. In this particular childhood many things are two ways at once: Black and white; formal and familiar; safe and sabotaged. Words themselves are both dangers and gifts, but now Trethewey herself has the pen. So why should not the pacing seem at first like a slow-moving cloud, yet then be broken suddenly by one sharp, essential line: “In only a few more years, my mother would be dead, stalked and shot to death by Joel. . .”
For many years after her mother’s death Trethewey sought to avoid her memories—or at least memories of the time after her parents’ divorce. Over time, however, she began to see that this “willed forgetting” was less a rebirth than a reckless erasure. In turning away from painful memories she was also erasing her beloved mother from herself. Avoiding the “examination of buried history” was a way to cheat grief, perhaps, but it only worsened loss. By contrast, when she began to return to the painful places in her childhood and to remember herself and her mother in verse and prose, she found “a way of creating order out of chaos, of taking charge of one’s own story . . . pushing back against received knowledge and guarding the sanctity of the dwelling place of the imagination, that place of first permission.”
As the author reflects on this growth, she also opens to us the blossoming self-knowledge that she now can see in her own older poetry: In that poem, she had not yet learned to allow herself to remember things fully, for example, but in this poem, the last couplet showed her something new despite efforts at avoidance. The soft brilliance of her poetry, somehow natural even when confined by strict poetic structures, shows something living within the controlled world of her pen.
Flitting back and forth across the boundary between reality and memory, Trethewey’s lines in this memoir are somehow still plumb—for now unto her alone is the privilege and power of building her own “house of being.” But that does not mean that others are excluded or not given the respect of their right to place. Beautifully reconnecting to her memories and experiences of childhood, Trethewey also reanimates, to use her word, her mother (or at least her mother as Trethewey knew her), and recalls her father and grandmother with moderation and insight. Eschewing both idealization and complaint, she keeps her memories honest, at least to themselves, and memorializes rather than rewrites.
As I read the acceptance and freedom in these pages, an echo sounded within my heart, even though Trethewey’s life and my own differ in many ways. I hear in this writer’s words a basic truth that has at some point affected us all: Children are largely without power. They are not, in most cases, the architects of their own lives. Indeed, as Trethewey notes, within the boundaries of child-life, memory and imagination are sometimes the only spaces that offer a child permission to exercise control over her personal story. Thus, in returning to these spaces through her past, Trethewey realizes that her childhood wounds are the “bedrock” of why she writes.
I can say the same. In the short memoir-style essays that I have written, I have been grateful to find that writing from within memory can acknowledge pain without sacrificing either gratitude or hope—as I think Trethewey would agree. But like Trethewey, I did not always know this; I, too, when very young, walked away from my mother’s grave after her burial and tried for a long time not to look back. I, too, gradually lost my memory and sacrificed my imagination, becoming increasingly disconnected from myself.
Recently, however, I visited my mother’s grave independently for the first time, bringing with me only my eleven-year-old daughter.
My mother is buried in a hilltop cemetery in the North Georgia mountains, her headstone only a few yards away from much older graves of dozens of enslaved people. Every previous time that I had been to her grave I have had to put someone else’s grief before my own—the grief of whoever else was present and held some power over me. A child whose protection is gone must perform to the standards that are set for her; she must forget herself and pretend she is without history, or she may find she cannot bear her life.
For many years before this visit I was cut off from my mother’s memory just as Trethewey was cut off from hers. Yet the past few years of more deliberately remembering my mother have surprised me by beginning the healing of some of the most painful of my sore places. And this has, of course, led me to write: of the places and people my mother loved, of the hidden seasons of grief, of the pain and ecstasy of being a mother and yet somehow not being her. It should be no surprise, then, that this most recent visit to my mother’s grave was finally one during which I was able, for the first time, to speak words aloud over her headstone, words that finally feared no judge. “I brought my daughter here to see you, Momma,” I said, shaking with the intense connectedness of it all. “Here she is. Here we are all three together, and known.”
Reading this book hurts, and it may tap into some pain inside of you, too. But it hurts with the pain that is the pathway to peace, just as reading or writing about such things should. For creating from within the place of memory, as Natasha Trethewey elegantly demonstrates, gives our experience and memory purposeful, permanent meaning. Such writing reclaims our past for ourselves. And Trethewey’s example in The House of Being is well worth reading.
Dixie Dillon Lane is an American historian, teacher, and essayist who writes frequently for Current and Front Porch Republic as well as other publications, including her website, TheHollow.Substack.com. She is an Associate Editor at Hearth & Field and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame.Â