attention away from those national and regional
stories and toward your private stories as we’ve
just been talking about. I’d like to return us to that
public story that you started with, the Louisiana
Native Guards. Can you tell us a bit about Francis
E. Dumas and how you discovered and perhaps
identified with him?
Trethewey:He was mentioned in James Hol-
landsworth’s book, and the interesting story that
Hollandsworth points out about Major Dumas
is that as the son of a white plantation father and
a mixed race mother, he inherited his father’s
slaves and plantation when his father died.
Apparently he did not want slaves, didn’t believe
in slavery, but it was illegal to manumit his slaves
in Louisiana at the time, so he had them. When
the Union was enlisting men for the Native
Guards and he joined, he freed his slaves and
encouraged those men of age to join as well. And
I found that that was a compelling story because
it represented what was perhaps a very personal
dilemma for him. He and several other free men
of color had actually been part of the Native
Guards first when it was a Confederate Regi-
ment. I think Hollandsworth mentions that
some of the men felt coerced to join, that they
felt like they would lose their property if they did
not support Louisiana as Confederate soldiers.
Perhaps there were some of them that were so
into protecting their own and seeing themselves
as so distant from the blacks and the slaves that
they didn’t care, but Dumas was one who did feel
differently about slavery and so became a mem-
ber again when it was resurrected as a Union
Regiment.
McHaney: How do you see these ambiguities
of Dumas’s and of the other Native Guards that
had been slaves but now were not slaves and who
found themselves guarding the white Confederates,
dying at the guns of their fellow Union soldiers?
Trethewey:I think that what Dumas repre-
sents, being of mixed blood, is the larger meta-
phor of the collection that the cover suggests,
and that is the intersections of white and black,
north and south, slave and free. I was taken by
that idea when I found that Colonel Daniels had
confiscated a diary from the home of a Confed-
erate and cross-wrote in it because there was a
shortage of paper. That intersection was a gift.
Native Guardsis a book about intersections.
Those very intersections are in me, in my very
blood, they’re in the country, they’re in the very
nature of history.
McHaney: Tell us about the metaphorical
meanings of your title,Native Guard.
Trethewey:The literal is obvious: it is after
the Louisiana Native Guards. But, I started
thinking about what it means to be a native
guardian, of not only personal memory but
also of collective memory—and that is certainly
what poets are often charged with doing, repre-
senting the collective memory of a people. And
as a native daughter, a native guardian, that is
my charge. To my mother and her memory,
preservation.
McHaney: The first O.E.D. definition of
‘‘guard,’’ that is said now to be obsolete, is...
Trethewey:...‘‘to take care.’’ I knew imme-
diately that the title was going to beNative
Guard,and I thought it was such a gift that
these soldiers were actually named that.
McHaney: What is the relationship between a
photograph and a poem? You’ve pointed out else-
where that you were the first poet at the Duke
University Center for Documentary Studies that
usually brings historians and documentary film-
makers and photographers together. You said that
the director, Tom Rankin, ‘‘believes that poetry
can do the work of documentary and history.’’ You
studied photography and theory of photography at
the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. How
do you see those two things coming together?
Trethewey:I think again that it is a neces-
sary intersection. I had two quotations. Lewis
Hine said, ‘‘If I could tell the story in words, I
wouldn’t lug a camera.’’ But Susan Sontag
reminds us that ‘‘Nevertheless, the camera’s ren-
dering of reality must always hide more than it
discloses.’’ What this suggests to me is the need
for both photograph and story to work together.
What has always interested me about a photo-
graph is that even though it seems to capture and
elegize a particular moment, there are all the
things that swirl around it, things that are
cropped out of the frame, that which was just
behind it that we don’t see. And there is always a
fuller version of the story that needs to be told. I
believe the photographic image is a way to focus
our attention, and it can be the starting point for
a larger exploration of what else is there. As
much as a photograph is about seeing what is
there, it is equally about seeing what has been left
out as it points in some way to what we might
know if we are willing to imagine or to think
about. What’s been cropped out or what’s not
there—words are like that too.Native Guard