National Post (National Edition)
‘IT DOESN’T GO AWAY’
AUTHOR’S WORDS DEAL WITH THE PAINFUL MEMORIES OF HER MOTHER’S MURDER
It wasn’t until 2005, 20 years after her mother’s murder, that Natasha Trethewey finally gained access to the relevant court documents.
But at first she found it too painful to examine them. She didn’t want to revisit her 19-year-old self and the frightening stepfather who subjected her to psychological abuse and ended up killing the person who mattered most in her young life.
“I waited a long time before I could open that box and read what was in it,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet says. And when she eventually did, it was with the acceptance that there would be no escape from reliving the trauma of her mother’s final days before her estranged husband shot and killed her.
The documents would become an essential resource when Trethewey set out to write Memorial Drive, a harrowing but exquisitely rendered memoir published recently by HarperCollins.
Trethewey, a two-time American poet laureate, and currently a professor of English at Northwestern University in Illinois, has trouble controlling her emotions when she talks to Postmedia on the phone about the contents of that box.
For example, the transcripts of two telephone conversations between her mother Gwen, a social worker, and the ex-husband who continued to stalk her in defiance of police warnings — and who clearly intended to kill her unless she returned to him. “Those were very hard to read,” Trethewey says, her voice trembling — but she knew they were part of the story she needed to tell.
Even more agonizing was an unfinished handwritten statement police found in Gwen’s briefcase — a 12-page narrative that spelled out, in methodical detail, a chilling chronicle of one woman’s personal hell.
“My physical damage over the years ranged from black eyes, a hairline fracture of the jaw, to bruised kidneys and a sprained arm,” Gwen wrote. “I quickly learned to gauge his moods and became a master at defusing him. One of our problems was my successful employment. While he enjoyed the things my income allowed me to purchase, he was jealous of my success.”
Natasha Trethewey was born in Mississippi in 1966. She was the daughter of an African-American mother and a white Canadian father — the product of a marriage that had taken place in Ohio in order to circumvent the southern state’s racist law against miscegenation. Her parents separated when she was six, and mother and daughter moved to Atlanta where Gwen met and married a Vietnam vet named Joey who proved to be a monster. Gwen was 40 when she died at his hands. Back then, Trethewey was just entering adulthood; now, at 54, she has confronted her past with a book that has received universal acclaim.
“The decision to write it wasn’t difficult,” she says. “But the writing of it — having to go back to those places I’d been trying to forget — was hard. But I felt I had to write the book because — after my increasing success as a writer, and having won the Pulitzer — I was being noticed and written about. My backstory became part of my story, but the death of my mother was being written about as a kind of afterthought, a footnote about a martyred woman. I felt she was being diminished in some way.”
For Trethewey, who continues to miss her mother every day, this was unacceptable.
“I wanted to make it clear that I’m a writer because of her,” she says. “I’ve gone through this tremendous grief but even before she was gone, I was aware of the role she played in my life.” So she didn’t want the long-dead Gwen to become a marginalized figure in her own increasingly public life. “I wanted to be the one to tell the story so that the full context of her role in my life would be recognized.”
There is a warm, elegiac quality to Trethewey’s memories of a loving mother-daughter relationship — and this factor makes the ultimate tragedy, one that might have been averted by a more responsive police force, all the more wrenching.
She doesn’t deny the consolations in her life — her writing and academic career, her 22-year-marriage to historian Brett Gadsden, a continuing warm relationship with her Canadian father, the late Eric Trethewey, also a respected poet and academic. But the pain remains, and she’s tough-minded in talking about it.
“I don’t think I’ve been undergoing a healing process,” she says firmly. She quotes Spanish poet Federico García Lorca who once wrote of the wound that never heals. “All I can do is give my story a kind of palliative care to alleviate some of the pain that I still have to live with. It doesn’t go away.”
An interviewer once suggested to her that it’s sometimes necessary to forget things that are too hard to bear. She tried to go this route “but the forgetting that I tried to undertake all those years helped me lose a lot more.” She realized she was also forcing away memories of the mother she loved.
Her mother’s killer received two consecutive life sentences. Twenty years later, he became eligible for parole, and after several attempts to win release, he was finally freed this past March.
“That was very hard for me,” Trethewey admits. “Even though I had known intellectually that it was a possibility, I had never imagined it would happen. It was one of the reasons I wanted to leave Atlanta and take a job elsewhere — the possibility that he would be released into the place in which I lived. So I feel very lucky that I took this job at Northwestern and left Georgia in 2017.”
On the plus side, the year has also seen the arrival of this book. When asked what she hopes readers will take away from it, Trethewey is immediate with her answer. It is brief.
“I want people to realize how important my mother was to who I am.”