The Great Palaces of Versailles

By Rita Dove b. 1952 Rita Dove

Nothing nastier than a white person!

She mutters as she irons alterations

in the backroom of Charlotte’s Dress Shoppe.

The steam rising from a cranberry wool

comes alive with perspiration

and stale Evening of Paris.

Swamp she born from, swamp

she swallow, swamp she got to sink again.

The iron shoves gently

into a gusset, waits until

the puckers bloom away. Beyond

the curtain, the white girls are all

wearing shoulder pads to make their faces

delicate. That laugh would be Autumn,

tossing her hair in imitation of Bacall.

Beulah had read in the library

how French ladies at court would tuck

their fans in a sleeve

and walk in the gardens for air. Swaying

among lilies, lifting shy layers of silk,

they dropped excrement as daintily

as handkerchieves. Against all rules

she had saved the lining from a botched coat

to face last year’s gray skirt. She knows

whenever she lifts a knee

she flashes crimson. That seems legitimate;

but in the book she had read

how the cavaliere amused themselves

wearing powder and perfume and spraying

yellow borders knee-high on the stucco

of the Orangerie.

A hanger clatters

in the front of the shoppe.

Beulah remembers how

even Autumn could lean into a settee

with her ankles crossed, sighing

I need a man who’ll protect me

while smoking her cigarette down to the very end.

Source: Thomas and Beulah (1986)

Biography

Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio in 1952, the daughter of one of the first black chemists in the tire industry. Dove was encouraged to read widely by her parents, and excelled in school. She was named a Presidential Scholar, one of the top one hundred high-school graduates in the country and attended Miami University in Ohio as a National Merit Scholar. After graduating, Dove received a Fulbright to study at the University of . . .

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