Enumeration | Katharine Jager
~ Texas Southern University, Special Collections:
The Heartmann Collection
Texas Slavery Documents, 1818-1886
These notarized letters are written
in oak gall ink, itself a burnished brown
eating the paper, they bear wax sigils,
but sometimes the notary has no stamp,
relies on a squiggle labeled “my seal.”
Mr. Amis of Lowndes County brought
his hundreds from Mississippi, he died,
his lawyers split them into sale for Fort
Bend, Brazoria, Galveston, the maw
of sugar and money and grief. “Ada
Abt 18 mos,” “Hetty, F, pregnant,
20,” a receipt that runs for pages
and tawny pages. In the slave schedules
my children would be “C” for “copper,” and
would go anon. Here’s a crowd of people
who are not people even though they’re named.
about the author:
Katharine Jager is a poet and medieval scholar. She is Professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, and has published poems in such venues as The Gettysburg Review, Friends Journal, Commonweal, GoodFoot, The Red River Review and the Yale Anthology: Before the Door of God, among other places.
“The good life” means time, for me. Time enough to make poems, time enough to be in my garden, abundant time to be with my children and spouse.
Accompanying artwork by Sholanke Boluwatife Emmanuel