by Suzanne Morris
after “Bélizaire and the Frey Children” attributed to French portraitist Jacques Amans, 1837, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2023
He stands tall, one shoulder
resting against a wide-girthed tree
on the pleasant green expanse
of a Louisiana plantation.
His arms are folded
contemplatively
across the front of his
tailored coat.
His face is solemn,
cheeks highly colored,
gaze fixed on some
point in the distance
as if he’s assessing
his place above
the three young,
open-faced siblings
in dainty frocks
standing below:
What might have led to an
enslaved youngster’s appearance
in a portrait of his
owner’s fair children?
And if this be vouchsafed by
sweet Heaven’s intent, then
might these
privileged youths
who boast to him of their
McGuffey Readers and are
well-versed in Bible stories
one day take up
their writing pens and
set down the truth of
his people’s history?
Some sixty years hence,
the yoke of American
slavery broken,
Bélizaire’s noble figure
will be cunningly painted over
leaving his ghost to hover
between the artist’s vision
and the sunny sky, added later,
to obscure him.
The antebellum portrait of
three comely white children
will be forgotten
in the dark reaches
of attic and basement
until the dawn of the
21st century, when
Bélizaire’s figure
is finally restored
and the work receives
due veneration
the full franchise of
his people bought with
calloused feet and heroes’ blood.
Yet now, less than
two decades passed,
Bélizaire looks down
contemplatively
from high up on a
museum wall
as a generation
come lately
forswearing the truth
painstakingly written
again takes up the brush to
paint over him.
Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works. Her poems have appeared inThe New Verse News and The Texas Poetry Assignment, as well as other online poetry journals, and anthologies. A native of Houston, she now makes her home in Cherokee County, Texas.
