March 11

from “Letters from Storyville,” March 1911

It troubles me to think that I am suited
for this work—spectacle and fetish—
a pale odalisque. But then I recall
my earliest training—childhood—how
my mother taught me to curtsy and be still
so that I might please a white man, my father.
For him I learned to shape my gestures,
practiced expressions on my pliant face.

Later, I took arsenic—tablets I swallowed
to keep me fair, bleached white as stone.
Whiter still, I am a reversed silhouette
against the black backdrop where I pose, now,
for the photographs, a man named Bellocq.
He visits often, buys time only to look
through his lens. It seems I can sit for hours,
suffer the distant eye he trains on me,

lose myself in reverie where I think most
of you: how I was a doll in your hands
as you brushed and plaited my hair, marveling
that the comb—your fingers—could slip through
as if sifting fine white flour. I could lose myself
then, too, my face—each gesture—shifting
to mirror yours as when I’d sit before you, scrubbed
and bright with schooling, my eyebrows raised,

punctuating each new thing you taught. There,
at school, I could escape my other life of work:
laundry, flat irons and damp sheets, the bloom
of steam before my face; or picking time,
hunchbacked in the field – a sea of cotton,
white as oblivion – where I would sink
and disappear. Now I face the camera, wait
for the photograph to show me who I am.

I can't believe that I am good at prostituting.  All my training growing up was to make me civilized. It is to fulfill someone else's fetish.  Growing up my mother trained me to please a white man. I am now doing just that. I take arsenic. It kills me, but it keeps me young. I stay beautiful for the man who visits me often. You touch me, and feel me. I feel wanted. I could give myself to you, Is this love? I work all day to be beautiful, for you. The more I try to be beautiful, the less I have to focus on the world. I wait to see if I am more beautiful each day.