Louisa County Patrol Claims, 1770–1863
I pry open the files, still packed
with liquor & strange brine.
Midnight seeps from the cracks
slow pulp of arithmetic. Four or five
or six at a time, the white men draw
along the Gordonsville Road, on foot
or on horseback, clustered close—
each man counting up his hours, the knife
of each man’s tongue at the hinge
of his own mouth. For ninety-three years
& every time I slip away to read
those white men line the roadway
secreting themselves in the night air
feeding & breathing in their private
column. Why belly up to their pay stubs
scraping my teeth on the chipped flat
of each page? This dim drink only blights me
but I do it.
Copyright © 2020 by Kiki Petrosino. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 4, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
“I composed this piece after studying the so-called ‘Free Negro and Slave Records’ of the rural county where some of my African-American ancestors lived. Within this eclectic archive of handwritten documents was an entire folder marked ‘Patrol Claims.’ The folder contained no stories or statements, only receipts naming the white men who had patrolled the county roads, the number of hours they worked, and the money they were to be paid for their time. I realized that these seemingly dry, impersonal records were actually at the heart of slavery's horror: the constant surveillance, by white men, of all people of color within a locality. My poem uses oysters as a conceit to capture this feeling of dreadful discovery; how it feels to pry open a dark hinge of the past.”
—Kiki Petrosino
Kiki Petrosino
Kiki Petrosino is the author of White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia (Sarabande, 2020) and Witch Wife (Sarabande Books, 2017). She is the recipient of a 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and is a professor of poetry at the University of Virginia.