Embedded Files
Learning about Lettuce
by Luke P.
We started our journey
with a little bit of help from our friend Dennis Culliton.
He gave us many links to analyze.
We then sacrificed our English and history periods
To form Humanities,
And from there we started to piece together her story
We struggled
because of the way her name was spelled differently in some documents,
And because of the fact we got a lot of information from her enslaver’s will,
And because we didn’t know what was right.
But we struggled mostly
because there were holes in her story,
Holes that we just couldn’t fill,
Like a bullet wound that couldn’t be patched.
So we just put together what we could
And in the end
We learned a lot about Lettuce Bailey,
Daughter of Tamar,
Mother of five,
Weaver in the almshouse,
Died at the age of 55 on December 4, 1820.
While we can never tell the full story of Lettuce,
She will still be recognized as a human being,
Something she never was while she was alive.
The Life of Lettuce
Lettuce was freed twice
But never lived a free life
She knew how to weave
Or that’s what we believe
She was a mother of five
One died while she was still alive
She rented out her kids
But not with bids
They weren't owned
Just loaned
She was a servant maid
But barely got paid.
Luke's artwork depicts the style of ships that carried enslaved Africans to the United States.
Author’s Statement
My intention with these poems is to make people feel like they want to go deeper into this story and to show what we had to do to find this information. I think I achieved it because of the emotion and information that I put into these works of art. I hope people read this poem and remember about the hardships that Lettuce had to go through during her lifetime. I tied in my historical knowledge in my poems by talking about things we have learned about Lettuce. The most challenging part of this was the holes that were in the story because it made it harder to write a historically accurate poem.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse