Katelin's Poem

Did She?

by Katelin H.

Did she know how to read?

Tamar.

Did she know how to look at a book?

Could she speak English?

Was she taught to read?

Could she sit and enjoy a book,

could she understand the flow of the story

or process the words written across the page?

Jonathan Todd, her captor,

he thought about it.

At least he said he did, but

we are fed so many lies,

eagerly searching for answers

to the questions that may not have answers.

We hold onto the lies hoping that they are true,

that the world isn’t as messed up as it seems,

It is though. It truly is.

But did she,

know how to read?

But could she,

speak English?

Could she?

Was the promise kept,

or lost in a jumble throughout the years?

Or maybe it never was.

Maybe it was just an idea,

a thought that rolled through his head like a tumbleweed.

Did he ever even think about it,

teaching her the basic fundamentals that we take for granted

Every day?

Another unsolved question.

Another question to keep us up late at night.

Another question that drives the curious in us mad.

We don’t know.

There are so many things we are unaware of.

Did she know how to read?

Tamar.

Statement

I wrote this poem because I thought it was so interesting and awful how slaves got punished for knowing how to read. It made me wonder if Tamar knew how to read. There is so much that we don't know about her. We have to look to legal documents to learn about a human being. Nowhere in those documents does it say anything about who she was and how she felt. We know so little about her and many others. We are taught to read when we are little and we use that skill every day. Even one of the simplest things to us could have been huge to her. There are so many unanswered questions that we don't know how to answer. In a book written about John Todd we learn about how Johnathan Todd claimed he was thinking about teaching the people he enslaved to read, and I wondered if he ever came to do it. It just all made me think, did she know how to read?