Fugitive Negatives

In the “Photography” section in Trethewey’s poem “Storyville Diary,” the speaker describes a photographic negative: “the whole world reverses, my black dress turned / white, my skin blackened to pitch. Inside out, / I said, thinking of what I’ve tried to hide.” In Natasha Trethewey’s poem “Pastoral,” the speaker poses for a photograph with Vanderbilt’s Fugitive Poets, many of whom wrote essays for I’ll Take My Stand, a book promoting racial segregation. In the uneasy dream of the poem, the photographer tells his subjects to “say ‘race,'” and the speaker tries to connect with the Fugitives by telling them that her father is “white . . . and rural.” Black and white are reversed in these negatives of Fugitive photographs.