Interior, 1917
The dining hall for instance: open roof beams,
open screens, and yard upon yard
of clean swept hardwood flooring, it
might almost be a family camp.
And likewise in the sleeping room: expanse
of window, paneled wall, and the
warmth implied by sunwash, only softened
here by half-drawn shades. You know
the kind?—dark canvas on a roller, in my
memory the canvas is always green. What I
couldn’t have guessed, except for the caption:
the logic behind the double row of well-
made beds. I’d like just once to have seen
his face, the keeper of order who
thought of it first: a prostitute on either side
of each of those women demanding
the vote. And “Negro,” to make the point perfectly
clear: You thought
your manners and your decent shoes would
keep you safe? He couldn’t have known
how much we’d take the lesson to heart.
At the workhouse in Virginia they’d started
the feedings with rubber tubes. Not here.
Or not that we’ve been told. The men
all dying in trenches in France. A
single system, just as we’ve been
learning for these hundred years. Empty
of people, the space looks almost benign.
Copyright © 2020 by Linda Gregerson. This poem was co-commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and the New York Philharmonic as part of the Project 19 initiative and published in Poem-a-Day on March 14, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
“Archived in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress is a collection of photographs from the Records of the National Women’s Party. Most are portraits of suffragists; some document scenes of protest or civil disobedience. The captions are alternately stirring, amusing, or discomfiting to a twentieth-first century viewer: ‘Inez Milholland Boissevain [on horseback] preparing to lead the March 3, 1913, suffrage parade in Washington, D.C.’; ‘Helena Hill Weed, Norwalk, Conn. Serving 3 day sentence in D.C. prison for carrying banner, “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”’; ‘Madame Alla Nazimova, the great Emotional actress, picks up the Purple White & Gold Banner of the National Woman’s Party in token of her Allegiance to Equality for men and women.’; ‘Justice. Miss Florence Hanlin as Justice in the Dance Drama presented at Seneca Falls, on July 20th in connection with the National Woman’s Party’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebration of Equal Rights.’; ‘Miss Beulah Amidon, “The Prettiest Picket.”’ Two of the photographs portray no people at all. The caption attached to the first is studiously noncommittal: ‘Interior dining room D.C. prison.’ The other tells us much about regimes of punishment, both then and now: ‘Negro women prostitutes were brought to this sleeping room and placed in beds alternating with suffrage prisoners, 1917.’ My poem is a double ekphrastic.”
—Linda Gregerson
Linda Gregerson
Linda Gregerson’s book Waterborne won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, and her book The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She currently serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.