Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis Considers His Place in History
Mostly I hear him daddy Jeff before
I see him he talks to himself real loud when
He walks I hear him mostly anywhere
In the house even when I’m in the yard and
Momma Varina says a gentleman
Announces his presence with his demeanor
I don’t know what that means I think it means
She wants him just to hush sometimes I seen her
Crying and slap him once and the next day
The Yankees marched on Petersburg and that
Was yesterday today he pulls me a-
side and he says he don’t know where they’ll take me
It scared me good but he just floats off talking
Just like a ghost just like I ain’t his ghost
Jefferson Davis the Adoptive Father of the Mulatto Jim Limber Dreams of an Unknowing Love
She is a slim young Negress but I know
she is my Varina she is a girl
I saw only once a few weeks ago
in town on an errand with her master
whom she resembled and his wife who did
not look at her but commanded the air
immediately before her own face
and the Negress three steps behind obeyed
she was nobody she is Varina
I recognize her as she was and is
two women in a single body I
stand hidden in a shadow in the dream
watching but I stood in the sun when I
saw her but things are not as they were and
I stand hidden in a shadow and as
she passes three steps behind her master
who had passed half a step behind his wife
I reach for her and in the way of dreams
touching her who was the moment before
a stranger I know her and have known her
from the moment of her birth and in the
way of dreams also she is new to me
as the moon is she is both known and strange
I pull her into the darkness that hides
me from her master and his wife and hid
me from her before and there I desire
her as a white man desires a Negress
as two women in a single body
I draw her close to me and as I reach
for her face her master’s wife calls her name
Varina she calls where are you and she
calls with my Varina’s voice she calls her
name and mixes it with mine Jefferson
where are you I have fallen asleep in
my study my Varina calls for me
as the moon calls for the light of the sun
from across an unknowable blackness
Shane McCrae is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at Oberlin College, and a faculty member at Spalding University's low-residency MFA in Writing Program. His most recent books are In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017) and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), and his poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Pinwheel, DREGINALD, and elsewhere. He has received a Whiting Writer's Award, a fellowship from the NEA, and a Pushcart Prize.