NVN Thursday: BÉLIZAIRE
by Suzanne Morris
after “Bélizaire and the Frey Children” attributed to French portraitist Jacques Amans, 1837, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2023
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He stands tall, one shoulder resting against a wide-girthed tree on the pleasant green expanse of a Louisiana plantation. His arms are folded contemplatively across the front of his tailored coat. His face is solemn, cheeks highly colored, gaze fixed on some point in the distance as if he’s assessing his place above the three young, open-faced siblings in dainty frocks standing below: What might have led to an enslaved youngster’s appearance in a portrait of his owner’s fair children? And if this be vouchsafed by sweet Heaven’s intent, then might these privileged youths who boast to him of their McGuffey Readers and are well-versed in Bible stories one day take up their writing pens and set down the truth of his people’s history? Some sixty years hence, the yoke of American slavery broken, Bélizaire’s noble figure will be cunningly painted over leaving his ghost to hover between the artist’s vision and the sunny sky, added later, to obscure him. The antebellum portrait of three comely white children will be forgotten in the dark reaches of attic and basement until the dawn of the 21st century, when Bélizaire’s figure is finally restored and the work receives due veneration the full franchise of his people bought with calloused feet and heroes’ blood. Yet now, less than two decades passed, Bélizaire looks down contemplatively from high up on a museum wall as a generation come lately forswearing the truth painstakingly written again takes up the brush to paint over him.
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Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works. Her poems have appeared inThe New Verse News and The Texas Poetry Assignment, as well as other online poetry journals, and anthologies. A native of Houston, she now makes her home in Cherokee County, Texas.