All Relative

“My wife went into the pantry for peaches / but came out with a baby,” writes Bob Hicok in the November 2016 Poetry. In this issue, children make surprising appearances—“The first thing I did against my will is see light,” grumbles Stanley Moss in “New Born”—and surprising disappearances, too. Emily Pérez’s phantom infants, for instance, come in the night and are “gone / by morning.”

Shane McCrae’s poem, “Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis Was Another Child First,” braids together these themes of promise and loss: here, too, children come and go. McCrae bases the poem on a curious historical anecdote. In 1864, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy and champion of slavery, took an orphaned black boy into his care. During the year that Jim Limber lived with the Davises, he grew close with their children, one of whom died in a fall:

They put me in a dead boy’s clothes dead Joseph

Except he wasn’t dead at first they put

Me in his clothes dead Joseph’s     after Joseph

Died and I used to call him Joe     they put

Me in   Joe’s clothes at first before he died

Joe wasn’t five yet when I met him      I

Was seven     I was seven when he died

Still but a whole year bigger then but I

Wore his clothes still

The sentences themselves tumble down the page, undifferentiated by punctuation. That’s no coincidence: the boys aren’t entirely differentiated, either. Jim wears Joe’s clothes; their names are similar; and at moments the grammar leaves us uncertain who, exactly, McCrae is referring to. “They put / Me in his clothes dead Joseph’s” could be read not just as a reference to dead Joseph, but also as a reference to dead Jim: “they put / me in his clothes, dead. Joseph’s.” Such moments suggest that the Davis house might somehow prove fatal to Jim, too.

Just as Jim blurs into Joe, so does past blur into present. The poem zigzags through time; first we learn that Joseph is dead, then that he wasn’t always. We hear about his death again, and then learn that when he was alive, Jim used to call him Joe. Like the poem he narrates, Jim moves backward and forward at once: he wears the clothes of a younger child—indeed, a child who is gone—but he is outgrowing them.

Those clothes, the poem’s conclusion indicates, are layered with meaning:

                                     and the whole year I lived with

Momma Varina      and with daddy Jeff

I never lived so good as when I lived with

Them and especially it was daddy Jeff

Who kept me fed and wearing those nice clothes

Until they fit as tight as bandages

The word “bandage” comes painfully close to “bondage.” Even as life with the Davises might, like a bandage, heal Jim—they rescued him from an abusive guardian—the ghost of slavery lurks in the background of their relationship. The verb “kept” raises the same specter; “who kept me fed,” or “who kept me”? Yet Jim won’t be kept, since he is growing, nearly bursting out of the clothes that represent at once kindness and entrapment. He’s not identical to Joe after all: in the first selection, Joe “died,” “died,” “died”; in the second, Jim “lived,” “lived,” “lived.”

In Natalie Shapero’s “An Example,” the dead and the living again meet in the unassuming person of a child. The poem begins:

Where can the dead hope
to stash some part
of themselves, if not in the living?

And so when I had a daughter,
I gave her your name.

The phrasing is significant: it suggests the dead are conscious, harboring hopes, planning to “stash” themselves somewhere temporarily for later retrieval. Yet it is, of course, the living person who stashes the dead—or thinks she does. After she gives her friend’s name to her daughter, her daughter promptly rejects it, and passes it on to

                                     her hideous pill-
eyed toys — to them each, she has given
her given name,

and so it is you

I hear her again and again calling to.

“Given” and “given,” “again and again,” “you” and “to”: these lines themselves constitute a call, an echo of the girl’s. And they suggest the uselessness of her mother’s fantasy. The girl has lent her name to inanimate objects, a reminder that her mother’s friend, no matter what she may prefer to think, is inanimate, too.

Yet the girl keeps calling to her stuffed animals, “again and again”—and so will her mother keep calling to her friend. The daughter calls to her during games, and her mother calls to her in stanzas like these.