MULATTA AT MANSFIELD MANOR
Inspired by the 1778 painting, Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Elizabeth Murray by David Martin
Dido like the queen of Carthage
As Belle as Helen of Troy,
Who could hide a beauty so coy
When guests dined at Mansfield Manor?
Whenever you romped through your estate
A Greek chorus of powdered wigs
From worlds old and new frothed
At the contradiction of your existence
You belong to a lineage of lettered half-slaves
From Grandpa of Three Musketeers to Black Mozart
Your propertied fathers ferried you all from Antilles
To metropolis as if it were your North Star
In this reversed Middle Passage, you laughed
With your cousin as playmate— not handmaid
And wielded rights denied to your African mother
Yet little of the acceptance given to her naval captor
You were poised to grow up an alien on land you
Could only half-claim, child of an unholy union
Never mind your mother named Maria
Whose death marooned you in Britannia
Did you find yourself among the servants?
Did you ever mistake the nanny for an auntie?
Drop the feathered turban and bowl of exotics
Lest you become an odalisque's domestic
Waters which swept you to the mainland
Drowned truths from your native land
And carried rumors of your upbringing
To men who would face their undoing
If the peculiar trade were ever abolished
To them, you governed your great uncle
At the age of ten and freed chattel reared
With a whisper in his judging ear
Your face launched not a thousand civil suits
Yet your grace was an affront to the white race
Gilded dress and pearled neck emboldened
Your dotted dimple and chocolate smize
As misbegotten as you were
Heralds of empire could not deny
English elegance in your learned mind
Despite whatever laws left you bind
From inheriting your mother’s blight
To acquiring your sires’ wealth
Your transformation from slave to heiress
Is, among rags-to-riches stories, the fairest
Had you stayed in the Caribbean plots
And lived amongst Maria’s lot
Could you imagine, as you laid dying,
Liberty in a Black nation rising?

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