Memorial Drive
Trethewey, Natasha. Memorial Drive. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2020.
I love memoirs. I love watching how someone frames their life’s story, what they remember, what they don’t remember, and most importantly, what they choose to tell and what they choose to omit. It took many years for Natasha Tretheway to decide to share this story about her mother’s murder; her mother was only 40 years old, and she was just 19. In the ensuing years, she has obviously thought hard about how to tell this story and deciding when was the right time to do so. Tretheway writes of “rehearsing the memory” (63), of recognizing that even at an early age, she “was already beginning to put into words what I thought then I needed to keep from losing” (63).
Tretheway has indicated in interviews that her 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning book of poetry, Native Guard, was meant to stand as a memorial to her mother, and her 2012 poetry collection, Thrall, was meant as a monument to her white father.[1] And yet, she clearly needed to say more about both her parents in this memoir, especially with regard to her mother’s murder. The form of memoir allows her to tell the story in a different way, but always with a poetic specificity of language.
The memoir begins with a dream sequence that ends with Tretheway’s mother posing the question: “Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?” This is, of course, a question directly related to Tretheway’s retelling of her personal history, but can also extend to the much larger question of race. Thus from the very first page, Tretheway’s memoir is also a profound meditation on race, the South, and American history. Her language, even in prose form, is still poetry. When she describes early on returning to view the building where her mother was murdered, she writes: “That’s what’s drawn me back: the hidden, covered over, nearly erased. I need now to make sense of our history, to understand the tragic course upon which my mother’s life was set and the way my own life has been shaped by that legacy” (11). It is tempting, especially in light of the deep and necessary unrest sparked by George Floyd’s murder (yet another in a long line of murders of Blacks in this country), to read this not only on the very personal level in which it is intended, but through a much wider scope. By the end of the memoir, when Tretheway returns to Stone Mountain, it is clear that national and personal wounds are joined.
Some of us are drawn to memoir because we too are parsing through our own stories, figuring out new ways to frame them, returning to some of the same stories over and over again. When Tretheway wrote, “I remember long walks with my father along the railroad tracks” (24), I sucked in my breath, because I have written that same sentence in a variety of ways for 40 odd years. I carry those walks with my father on Saturday afternoons in my body. But my walks with my father were on the tracks of railroad in the North, not those of Mississippi; the history of the South pervades this memoir. The significance of the fact that Tretheway’s parents were in an interracial relationship in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s cannot be forgotten. Tretheway writes about the KKK burning a cross in her family’s driveway – an event that she doesn’t actually recall, but is one that “lives in my memory as experience” (35). This is trauma lived in the body. It also makes me think of Toni Morrison’s use of the term rememory when discussing her novel Beloved, “as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative. The effort to both remember and not know became the structure of the text” (Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard, 324). It strikes me that Tretheway has brought some of this rememory into her memoir, especially with regard to how she addresses her mother’s early trauma (including being abandoned by her father) and her own. As Tretheway puts it, “to survive trauma, one must be able to tell a story about it” (208).
In part 6, titled “You Know,” Tretheway switches to the second person to recount the trauma of learning that her step-father was beating her mother. “You are in the fifth grade the first time you hear your mother beaten” (101). This line occurs almost exactly half-way through the text, and Tretheway addresses the change of voice head on: “Look at you. Even now you think you can write yourself away from that girl you were, distance yourself in the second person, as if you weren’t the one to whom any of this happened” (104). This insertion of the adult writer witnessing not only her child-self, but her writer-self, along with the writerly and psychological technique she uses to address the primal weight of this early childhood trauma, is profound. Poetry therapists will recognize this tool of moving from the first person to a different voice as a way of navigating grief and loss. Writing is Tretheway’s way of confrontation, and there is a double meaning to her statement “I had begun to compose myself” (109). She is her own witness over and over again. Very near the end of the memoir Tretheway writes, “This is where it begins, our estrangement. For several minutes I watch her, the girl I have left behind, stepping again and again into the last time I saw my mother alive” (197).
Tretheway’s mother’s voice also appears in these pages – in an evidentiary journal-like note where she documents her abuse; in the police report; and in the intensity of the transcript of a recording of a phone call her mother had with step-father just a few hours before he killed her. Quite a few years ago now, I wrote an unpublished novel based on the true story of a friend of mine whose brother killed both their parents. I was given permission by my friend to read the full police transcript, and even with the distance I had from the case, it was harrowing. Like Tretheway, I was also taken aback by errors in the record, including on the death certificate. It seems fair to expect to see facts recorded with exactitude, that there should not be a question that the official police record reflects truth. I felt Tretheway’s pain over the fact that her mother’s date of death was inaccurate, and how awful a mistake that is, especially for someone vested in tracking and treasuring time.
Memorial Drive is an incredibly rich memoir. It navigates the truth behind the personal is political (and Tretheway cites Adrienne Rich at one point). It is a story of the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship, especially one severed as Tretheway’s was; and it is a testimony of grief and resilience. I hope some of the questions below allow you to inquisitively engage with this text, as well as with your own memories and storytelling. Pick one or two, or, if none of these questions call out to you, please just share your thoughts on the book!
[1] https://therumpus.net/2012/11/thrall-by-natasha-trethewey/
questions:
o Why do you think Natasha Tretheway chose to write this story in prose?
o What do you make of Tretheway’s descriptions of photographs in her memoir?
o How should schools today address the fact that Black students are literally growing up in the shadow of Stone Mountain, “the nation’s largest monument to the Confederacy” and as Tretheway describes, “a lasting metaphor for the white mind of the South” (9). White people need to recognize the weight of that on a young Black person forging her identity and seeing that every day. [I cannot, for instance, conceive, of being a young Jew growing up with a monument to Nazism hovering daily above my head].
o Pay some attention to the chapter headings, beginning with Another Country, the title, of course, of one of James Baldwin’s novels. Can you elaborate on why Tretheway may have chosen these particular titles?
o Tretheway marks time in her mother’s life with historical events, e.g, the murder of Emmett Till, Bloody Sunday, the Watts riots, the murder of Medgar Evers. What events in your life mark time for you like this?
o What part does superstition play in this memoir?
o Tretheway weaves mythology into her story, citing Cassandra and Orpheus and Eurydice. Elaborate on why you think she chose these particular myths.
o At the end of the memoir, Tretheway addresses Lorca’s idea of duende: “a demon that drives an artist, causing trouble or pain and an acute awareness of death. Of the demon’s effect on an artist’s work, Lorca wrote, ‘in trying to heal the wound that never heals lies the strangeness.’” (209). How does this strangeness affect your own work?
o I’m intrigued by how Tretheway’s memoir engages in dialogue with other writers. For example, when speaking about memory, Tretheway quotes Faulkner: “Memory knows before knowing remembers” (211). This made me think of two other quotes by Faulkner that I often use in my own work: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” and “Between grief or nothing, I will take grief.” In The Paris Review interview (see sources below), Tretheway says, “I feel that having known so much despair teaches me so much about hope. That’s one of the weird gifts of suffering. If you can make it through, it’s redemptive.” Please offer a reflection on this based on your own experiences of grief.
o Tretheway also quotes Joan Didion: “the way you got sideswiped was by going back” (201), and ends her memoir with the line, “It is the story I tell myself to survive.” How does this compare to Didion’s famous quote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”?
action:
Please consider making a donation to Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence, or to a similar organization in your community.
links to further discussion of Natasha Tretheway & Memorial Drive
Atlantic Monthly article, August 1, 2020
Chicago Magazine article, August 3, 2020
Chicago Tribune article, July 29, 2020
New Yorker article, August 12, 2020
Paris Review Interview, November 15, 2018