mention of another battle, this one at Port Hud-
son, which is located in Louisiana not far from
Baton Rouge, along the Mississippi River.
Around 5,000 Union soldiers and some 700 Con-
federate soldiers died in this battle. Black regi-
ments were involved in this battle, but,
according to the poem, the commander in
charge, a General Banks, paid little attention to
the black soldiers who died there. The narrator
remembers them in his mind, imagining a battle-
field scene where a black soldier laid unburied.
Despite the prejudice and the dismissal of
the sacrifices that the black soldiers are making,
more black recruits come to the island, ready to
give their lives. They do this because their lives
are nothing but suffering anyway. They are
starving and are willing to take their chances
on the battlefield. The narrator closes this stanza
by repeating his earlier claim that whether pris-
oner or guard, whether white man or black,
whether free black or slave, they all share the
same lot. They all will soon face their deaths.
August 1864
The name of Francis Dumas is mentioned in the
opening lines of this stanza, as the narrator was
once a slave of Dumas’s. This master—also a
black man—was good, the narrator states.
Dumas is the one who taught the narrator to
read and write, and he also learned about nature
from Dumas, who, in other words, helped the
narrator to open his mind to other possibilities
beyond labor and slavery. The narrator claims
that while he lived as a slave, he focused most of
his thoughts on life. But his life has drastically
changed: Now that he is a free man, all he deals
with is death. He buries the dead and tends to
their graves, which the wind is constantly dis-
rupting. He writes letters to the wives and fami-
lies of the men who are dead, keeping the horrid
details to himself, though he senses that the fam-
ilies crave more information. He considers that
the things the families are not told are like other
details about the war that will not be expressed.
It is as if the narrator already knows that the
black regiments, in particular, will be forgotten.
1865
Possibly a year has passed. The Civil War is
either over or at least near its end. The narrator
takes the time, then, to list the things that need to
be said about the war and his experiences. He
wants to be the voice for those things that he has
been told not to say. He talks about mass killings
and about the maimed. He wonders what will
happen to the black soldiers who are now freed
but have no homes. He mentions the dead black
soldiers who were left on the battlefields to rot or
to be eaten by wild animals. Soldiers missing
limbs still feel them as if they were still attached,
just as the soldiers who were not killed remember
those who were. Missing are not just the bodies
but also the memories of those soldiers, who, if
they were lucky enough to be buried, do not have
names on their graves. No one has time to record
their stories, so who will remember them? Their
bodies have now turned the battlefields green,
and traces of their lives have been all but erased.Themes
Death
The theme of death permeates Trethewey’s
poem. Beyond the death that symbolizes the
inevitable end that everyone must eventually
face, there is also the senseless death that comes
from war, prejudice, and negligence. With the
setting being the Civil War, one would expect
the topic of death to be present, and Trethewey
indeed goes far with this theme, talking about
massacres and slaughter—huge losses that insin-
uate overkill. There are men who die on the field
of battle as well as men who die of disease
because they have been locked up in cells that
are unfit for living. The men are cramped into
spaces that are poorly ventilated, and they are
poorly fed; sanitation is lacking, and the heat is
sweltering and suffocating. There are also the
deaths of soldiers shot by their own comrades.
A presence of psychological death can also
be found in this poem. As Confederate soldiers
rot away in prison, they lose hope of ever return-
ing to their families. They write letters home and
have visions of their wives while strongly sensing
that they will never see them again. Hints of the
death of dignity can also be found, as the black
soldiers realize that their names will not be
remembered because they are discounted as
humans, deemed unworthy of even a body
count when they fall dead in the fields.Prejudice
Prejudice as a theme is apparent throughout the
poem. The black men in the regiment might be
freed slaves, but they have not escaped the prej-
udice that was partially responsible for theirNative Guard