The Speaker

The unnamed speaker in the majority of the poems throughout the collection shares many biographical details with the author of the book. Much like Trethewey, the speaker is a biracial child born in Mississippi to a white father and a black mother. As a child, she is forced to deal with her status as biracial in a setting notorious for its bigotry and highly volatile racial politics. She is subjected to racism in many different forms, which causes her to feel a sense of displacement and otherness in her own native state.

Other life events that deeply impact the speaker are the divorce of her birth parents, and her mother’s death at a relatively young age. Both of these experiences further contribute to the speaker’s sense of displacement in addition to her biraciality. As she explores the memories of her own history, as well as...