Thursday, September 21, 2023

BÉLIZAIRE

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.