Chosen

In reimagining her ancestor’s life, Nelson considers Diverne may have regarded her pregnancy not as further evidence of her victimhood, but of her triumph over a system that diminished her humanity. Diverne was shipped to the U.S. from Jamaica in the 1850s and in her teens was sold to a slave owner in Kentucky. While working on The Homeplace, Nelson returned to Hickman, Kentucky, where her maternal family originates, and began to collect stories from the relatives still residing there—including a memoir her great-uncle never published.

Diverne, Nelson learned, was raped by Henry Ashburne Tyler, a Confederate officer and frequent visitor to the plantation house of the family who owned Diverne. Nelson imagines her ancestor embracing her role as mother (maternity was regularly denied to enslaved women and their children were often sold to other plantations). She also considers Diverne may have been prescient enough to understand Pomp’s birth was evidence of either “their share of the future” (Line 13) or a time in which her contribution to history would matter as much as that of Tyler, whose Civil War effort was an attempt to perpetuate Diverne’s bondage. Instead, Pomp grew up to become an alderman and Johnnie—Nelson’s mother—an educator.

The proximity of the “close shack” in which Diverne lived to the “twelve-room house” (Lines 10-11) Tyler frequented underscores the inextricability of Black and White lives in the antebellum South and, ultimately, in the nation’s agglomerated story. This episode in Nelson’s family represents a metonym for America’s broader history.