Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove

First published: 1986

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Rita Dove’s third collection of poems, Thomas and Beulah, presents a fictionalized version of the author’s maternal grandparents’ lives in Akron, Ohio. Dove explains that she likes to show many sides of an event or experience. Accordingly, the book is divided into two almost-equal sections. The first section, “Mandolin,” contains twenty-three poems from Grandfather Thomas’s point of view, and the second section, “Canary in Bloom,” contains twenty-one poems telling the story according to Grandmother Beulah.

The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1987, explores the changing lives of a middle-class African American family set against the background of American history in the first half of the twentieth century. Dove includes a chronology at the end of the book that starts in 1900 with Thomas’s birth in Wartrace, Tennessee, and ends in 1969 with Beulah’s death. Events listed in the chronology include both personal events, such as the couple’s wedding in December, 1924, and birth of their first child, Rose, in 1926, and public events, such as the building of the Goodyear Zeppelin Airdock in 1929 and the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights. The events of history and the cultural changes remain in the background. Dove wished to convey the meaning of her grandparents’ lives rather than be strictly factual.

In both Tennessee and Ohio, the couple faces discrimination in various forms. For example, in “Nothing Down,” Thomas remembers having to hide from rampaging white men. In “Roast Possum,” Thomas tells his grandchildren stories, but omits the passage from an encyclopedia that claims that “Negro” children become lazy at puberty. After Thomas’s death (“Wingfoot Lake”), Beulah attends a company picnic on Independence Day, 1964, in which the families of whites and the families of African Americans sit on opposite sides at the picnic, yet unpacking similar food items.

Musical imagery, as the section titles indicate, is a structural link among the poems, starting with the mandolin that Thomas’s friend Lem plays and echoing through the sequence as Thomas joins a gospel chorus and Beulah gets a pet canary and a musical jewelry box. Poem titles include “Jiving,” “Refrain,” and “Lightnin’ Blues.” Both the rhythms of many of the poems and the book’s themes of love and loss suggest blues songs.

A chain of images revolves around the colors yellow and blue. Thomas gives Beulah a yellow scarf when they are courting. In “Dusting,” Beulah remembers having a goldfish, and she later gets a pet canary. Thomas gets a blue car (which gets repossessed during the Depression) and shows Beulah her first swimming pool when she is thirty-six years old.

Another recurring image is that of river and water. The book grew from a story that Dove learned about her grandfather after his death. In “The Event,” Thomas and his friend Lem, a musical duo, are traveling on a riverboat. One night, Thomas dares Lem to swim, but he drowns, leaving Thomas to grieve the rest of his life. In fact, Lem appears in several poems by name or by reference as a kind of guide for Thomas (“Variation on Pain,” “The Charm,” “The Stroke,” and “Thomas at the Wheel”). As Thomas dies in his car in the parking lot of a pharmacy, where he had driven for his medication, he thinks about how he, too, must now swim the river, as did Lem years ago.

Thomas starts out as a young dandy but becomes a family man. He is disappointed that he fathers only daughters and is happy when he gains a son-in-law. The Depression finds him struggling to support his family. He would like to join the U.S. Army during World War II (“Aircraft”), but is deemed too frail to serve. Instead, he gets a job as a riveter at Goodyear Aircraft.

In a 2005 interview in the journal Callaloo, Dove explains that she had written the poem “Dusting” for inclusion in an earlier book, Museum, published in 1983. She began working on a series of poems after this, about her grandfather, and realized that “Dusting” represented her grandmother speaking to her: “Wake up Girl! I’m here too! I wanna talk!” Beulah wanted to be part of the evolving book, along with her husband—and so the Beulah sequence derived from this start. For the book, Dove changed her grandmother’s name from Georgianna to Beulah because she wanted the biblical allusions and because it was more effective rhythmically to use a shorter name in the poems. The name Beulah is derived from the Hebrew word that means “married,” and it refers to the land of Israel in the book of Isaiah. Dove asserts that Beulah also means “desert in peace.”

In Thomas and Beulah, the mother of the young Beulah wishes to protect her from her father: In “Taking in Wash,” her mother warns her husband not to “touch that child.” The poem “Promises,” about the wedding of Thomas and Beulah, deals as much with Beulah’s father as it does with her new husband. After her marriage to Thomas, Beulah’s life revolves around her family and housekeeping. As the mother of four daughters, she still finds space to indulge her private fantasies (“Daystar”) and has dreams of Paris and travel, which she never fulfills. Poems such as “Taking in Wash,” “Dusting,” “A Hill of Beans,” and “Sunday Greens” refer to the women’s work of housekeeping and cooking. When she is forty-two years old, Beulah gets a part-time job pressing clothes and making alterations in a dress shop.

The marriage is a comfortable one, although Dove treats the couple realistically rather than romantically. In “Company,” as Thomas is suffering his last illness, Beulah reminds him of the following: “listen: we were good,/ though we never believed it.” In an interview, the poet said that she had wished to honor her grandmother as a curious and imaginative person, “a very strong woman, who still has no way of showing how strong she could be.”

Dove’s intent in writing the book was to combine the“grandness” and “sweep of time” that narrative poems achieve with the immediacy of lyric poetry. In another interview, Dove said she wanted the book to embody the best features of both lyric and narrative, “to string moments as beads on a necklace.” In writing the book, she said, she believed she was returning to her family background and honoring her grandparents.

Bibliography

Dove, Rita. “Rita Dove.” Interview by Camille Dungy. Callaloo 28, no. 4 (2005): 1027-1040. This discussion ranges over several books and examines Dove’s participation in an African American poetic tradition. Dove sees this tradition as moving in many directions and encompassing a variety of forms, both formal and loose.

Ingersoll, Earl G., ed. Conversations with Rita Dove. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. A collection of interviews with Dove, in which she discusses Thomas and Beulah and describes the origin of the poems, her background research, and her techniques and themes. Includes an index that points to specific poems.

Pereira, Malin. Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. This book explores Dove as part of an African American poetic tradition. Chapter 5 discusses Thomas and Beulah in terms of blues music. The appendix contains an interview between Pereira and Dove.

Righelato, Pat. Understanding Rita Dove. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. Chapter 4 discusses Thomas and Beulah in terms of “the changing landscape of the American Dream highlighted in the personal moment.” Part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series.

Schneider, Steven, “Writing for Those Moments of Discovery.” In Conversations with Rita Dove, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. This informative interview is chiefly focused on Thomas and Beulah and on Dove’s reactions to winning the Pulitzer Prize.

Shoptaw, John, “Segregated Lives: Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. Shoptaw focuses on the disjunction among the lives of the protagonists and on this disjunction as a stylistic device in the poems.

Steffen, Therese. Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Chapter 3 focuses on Thomas and Beulah. Explains that the book counteracts negative stereotypes of African American families. Places the book in the context of African American history and also discusses Dove’s artistry.

Vendler, Helen. “Rita Dove: Identity Markers.” In The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Vendler terms the poems brief “snapshots” and small “vignettes.” She explicates the poem “Aircraft” in terms of theme, language, and poetic structure.