Cherry Tree: “Monticello Peaches” by Sandra Beasley

Monticello Peaches

Jefferson planted over a thousand trees
in the South Orchard—eighteen varieties of apple,
six apricot, four nectarine,
and thirty-eight types of peach.
Lemon Cling. Heath Cling. Indian Blood Cling.
Vaga Loggia. Breast of Venus,
which Jefferson accounted for as the “teat peach”—
interlopers mistaken as indigenous.
Each cleft globe was a luxury,
yet so abundant they were sliced, chipped,
boiled, brandied, fried, sun-dried,
and extras fed to the hogs.

My first wish is that the labourers
may be well treated,
the Master wrote.
He created a system for tipping.
Once, James Hemings was whipped
three times over before the sun had set
behind Brown’s Mountain.

When Jefferson traveled to Paris
in 1784, he took Sally and her brother—
James, who learned the language,
who trained at pasta and pastry,
paid four dollars per month to serve
as chef de cuisine to the Minister to France.
James, who had to be coaxed to leave
a country where, in 1789,
slavery had been abolished.

 I hereby do promise & declare
until he shall have taught such person
as I shall place under him for that purpose
to be a good cook, this previous condition
being performed,
he shall thereupon be made free . . .
“For that purpose”: their brother, Robert.

In 1796, James was freed.
In 1801, James killed himself.
In 1802, Robert debuted macaroni pie
on the menu for Jefferson’s state dinner.
In 1824, a recipe layering pasta, cheese, and butter
appears in The Virginia Housewife: Or, Methodical Cook,
alongside Mrs. Mary Randolph’s marmalade
that specifies a pound of West Indies sugar
to two pounds of peaches—“yellow ones
make the prettiest”—and a hard chop
until flesh gives away to transparent pulp,
chilled to a jelly.

If one was accused of stealing or eating
beyond one’s share
the grill was secured
over the mouth.
This was considered the kind muzzle.
The unkind one settled an iron bit
over the tongue.

The groundskeepers knew we’d come
with our wreath to lay at Jefferson’s grave,
walking Monticello’s grass at misted dawn,
half-drunk and laughing.
We came every year.
There are two types of peaches:
one to which the stone clings,
shredding to wet threads,
and another allowed to lift clean.

“Freestone,” they call those peaches—
that most popular variety, the White Lady.

•••

One great benefit to living in a college community is the academic lectures and programs available to non-students. Online readings by guest authors at the Washington College’s Starr Center and Rose O’Neill Literary House have been especially welcomed during the crushing isolation and shutdowns of this past year.

A recent online reading by writers appearing in Washington College’s issue #7 of Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal @ Washington College inspired the Spy to offer a partnership with the publication and its Editor in Chief James Hall.

Thankfully, the editors were enthusiastic about the project, so here we present our first of a biweekly Cherry Tree offering.

Cherry Tree debuted in 2015 under the creative hands of former Literary House Director Jehanne Dubrow and Assistant Lindsay Lusby and continues its mission under the editorships of James Hall and Roy Kesey to showcase national and international literary arts by emerging and established writers. Poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction are featured in each issue.

The name Cherry Tree was chosen as a sly invitation to ponder “the apocryphal story of George Washington’s ax, and (to) encourage writers to craft new and inventive ways to critique, to re-imagine, and to chop away at literary traditions…and to endeavor to serve as both a site of coalescence and protest and a vibrant archive of human thought and feeling.”

There’s also a thematic section in Cherry Tree—“Literary Shade”—introduced in 2016 to “respond to and challenge oppressive social structures.” It’s both an invitation and permission to pierce the obscuring noise of politics, cultural myths and media and speak personal truth to power

It’s here that we find poet Sandra Beasley “throwing shade” at Thomas Jefferson’s fondness for the peaches in his prodigious Monticello gardens. For the poet, peaches and the naming of them become a mantra recited in the shadows of cruelty and human bondage.

Here is Sandra Beasley’s poem “Monticello Peaches” from her new book of poetry Made to Explode, praised by poet Ada Limon as “a rare and vibrant exploration of whiteness and complicity when it comes to America’s history and traditions.” Made to Explode is published by W.W. Norton and Company and may be found at your local bookstore or online at Amazon.

Sandra Beasley is the author of Made to Explode; Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize; and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir. She also edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Washington, DC.

Cherry Tree appears under the imprint of the Literary House Press, the publishing arm of the Rose O’Neill Literary House, a cultural center with an almost 50-year-history of promoting the arts. Washington College undergraduates participate in all facets of the production of this print journal, though professional writers serve as genre editors and fill most senior reader positions. Although the journal is still growing, Cherry Tree has already received national recognition. Poems from three of its six issues have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry (2016, 2017, and 2020). Poems have been reprinted on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and have appeared in the Orison Anthology. Prose has been listed as “notable” in Best American Essays and appeared in Best Microfictions (2020).

This video is approximately five minutes long.