Jaqueline Woodson, Natasha Tretheway, & remembering Civil War heroes

We started Good Trouble For Kids as a collaborative arts initiative to get diverse books into the hands of families and educators. We had an initial fundraiser to donate books, and then expanded into a book subscription service, and are now putting a greater focus on distributing our write-ups. It is our hope that you will see children’s books — like Jacqueline Woodson’s The Day You Begin — as a jumping off point to learn and explore more about the racial and social diversity of experiences in America, especially as they are projected through literature and art.

Jaqueline Woodson is a prolific author — and not just for children. (Her newest adult novel, Red at the Bone, is discussed in this interview in The Guardian). She has written more than thirty books, with her first being published in 1990. Her verse memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, (beautifully reviewed in the New York Times by Veronica Chambers, another prominent Black children’s author), won the Coretta Scott King Book Award, the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, and a Newberry Honor Award. It is hard to conceive of a children’s library (or any library, for that matter) being absent of books by Woodson! Good Trouble For Kids very deliberately chose to feature her modern take on Romeo & Juliet, If You Come Softly, early on in this project.

Woodson’s picture book, The Day You Begin, was actually inspired by a poem from Brown Girl Dreaming, as Woodson elaborates on her website. In that poem, “it’ll be scary sometimes,” Woodson writes about her paternal great, great, grandfather, whose name is inscribed on a Civil War Memorial. This relative of hers becomes a model for not being afraid.

it’ll be scary sometimes

My great-great-grandfather on my father’s side
was born free in Ohio,

1832.

Built his home and farmed his land,
then dug for coal when the farming
wasn’t enough. Fought hard
in the war. His name in stone now
on the Civil War Memorial:

William J. Woodson
United Stated Colored Troops,
Union, Company B 5th Regt.

A long time dead but living still
among the other soldiers
on that monument in Washington, D.C.

His son was sent to Nelsonville
lived with an aunt

William Woodson
the only brown boy in an all-white school.

You’ll face this in your life someday,
my mother will tell us
over and over again.
A moment when you walk into a room and

no one there is like you.

It’ll be scary sometimes. But think of William Woodson
and you’ll be all right.

There is a history lesson — and a story — that Woodson is sharing with us, and it is one that I never learned about in my American history classes. It is the story of the all-Black regiments that fought for the Union army in the Civil War (predecessors to the “Buffalo soldiers” who fought primarily in the Western frontier after the war). I probably first heard of them after seeing Denzel Washington in Glory, way back in 1989, but read about them again recently in Native Guard, Natasha Tretheway’s collection of poetry about a regiment of Black troops in New Orleans. (I wrote a review of her 2020 memoir, Memorial Drive). There is a website worth exploring about the Union’s United Stated Colored Troops, Company B 5th Regt., designed by someone tracing the life story of one his ancestors who fought in the Civil War. Many of those troops were massacred by the Confederates in 1864. From what I can glean off an Ancestry site, I believe Woodson’s relative was in the infantry, and that he enlisted in 1864 when he was 22 years old. This is definitely “going down the rabbit hole” territory, but it sparked my curiosity.

For those of you interested in exploring family histories (and legacies) in more detail, historian Henry Louis Gates’ program on PBS, Finding Your Roots, may be of interest. You may also be interested in reading a letter here by Samuel Cabble, an escaped slave who became a private in the Union Army. A letter from a member of Louisiana’s Native Guard can be found here, and this article, from a few years back, describes the unexpected discovery of a well-preserved letter by another Black Civil War soldier.

Like Jacqueline Woodson, Natasha Tretheway also explores her own history in poetry and memoir. Her “Elegy for the Native Guards” begs us to remember the legacy of those who have too often been forgotten.

Elegy for the Native Guards 
                      Now that the salt of their blood 
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea . . . 
           -Allen Tate 
We leave Gulfport at noon; gulls overhead 
trailing the boat-streamers, noisy fanfare- 
all the way to Ship Island. What we see 
first is the fort, its roof of grass, a lee- 
half reminder of the men who served there- 
a weathered monument to some of the dead. 
Inside we follow the ranger, hurried 
though we are to get to the beach. He tells 
of graves lost in the Gulf, the island split 
in half when Hurricane Camille hit, 
shows us casemates, cannons, the store that sells 
souvenirs, tokens of history long buried. 
The Daughters of the Confederacy 
has placed a plaque here, at the fort's entrance- 
each Confederate soldier's name raised hard 
in bronze; no names carved for the Native Guards- 
2nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx. 
What is monument to their legacy? 
All the grave markers, all the crude headstones- 
water-lost. Now fish dart among their bones, 
and we listen for what the waves intone. 
Only the fort remains, near forty feet high, 
round, unfinished, half open to the sky, 
the elements-wind, rain-God's deliberate eye.

Originally published at https://goodtroubleforkids.substack.com.