THE RECKONING OF NATASHA TRETHEWEY
NATASHA TRETHEWEY’S HOME IS NOT A bad place to spend quarantine. With its Corinthian columns and neoclassical portico, it looks, on its Evanston corner, like a stately Southern manor — a house perfectly suited to Trethewey, a Southern transplant. The Pulitzer Prize winner and former two-time United States poet laureate is a Chicagoan by way of Atlanta by way of Mississippi.
When I ring the bell in late May, I see a plaque designating the house a historic site; it’s noted for its architect. We sit in her fenced backyard near the raised vegetable gardens, our facemasks set aside once our chairs are 10 feet apart. Listening a week later to the recording I made of our conversation, I'll hear more birdcalls than cars in the background. Add to that the music of Trethewey’s accent; it’s regally Southern, but with tinges of Massachusetts and even her father's native Nova Scotia. When we talk about Tracy K. Smith, she pronounces her fellow poet’s last name with two syllables. The scene is heavenly, and you’d never know how hard Trethewey, 54, has fought to call this place home.
She and her husband, the historian Brett Gadsden, moved to Evanston in May 2017. She was eager to leave Atlanta, where she’d been teaching at Emory University but where she was haunted by reminders of her mother’s murder — the topic of her new book, the memoir . While the couple had many invitations over the years to other universities, they were waiting for a place they actually wanted to live, a place that felt right. When the opportunity came for both of them to teach at Northwestern University (Gadsden’s doctoral alma mater, a place Trethewey had fallen in love with in the early, long-distance years of their marriage), they embraced the move, found their beautiful historic home, and arrived to spend the summer before the school’s fall quarter started. They were here only six
