'Memorial Drive': A daughter's moving ode to her mother 

We know from the first page of poet Natasha Trethewey's "Memorial Road: A Daughter's Memoir," that her mother is dead. She was snuffed out by a brutal man, a fractured judicial system and a patriarchy as old as Methuselah. It is also an examination of the Old South colliding with the new, a chronicle of one artist's beginnings, and of a changing America.

"Memorial Drive" is metaphorical — memory takes us for a ride — but it is also a road in Atlanta, a major east-west artery that "winds east from downtown ending at Stone Mountain, the nation's largest monument to the Confederacy." Massive statues of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis are displayed here. Near its base, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough was shot to death in the parking lot of her apartment complex. She was 40 years old.

Trethewey excavates her mother's life, transforming her from tragic victim to luminous human being. She is a living, breathing dynamo, coming of age in the Jim Crow South, breaking out of the restrictions imposed on her. Born in 1944, she meets her first husband, Canadian Eric Trethewey, in college. They live with her extended family in North Gulfport, Mississippi. Her parents' interracial marriage is always an issue.

"My parents and I met with a great deal of hostility most places we went," Trethewey recalls. "If I was with my father, I measured the polite responses from white people, the way they addressed him as 'Sir' or 'Mister.' Whereas my mother would be called 'Gal,' never 'Miss' or 'Ma'am,' as I had been taught was proper." Her biracial identity becomes disorienting.

Things change when the family moves to Atlanta, the city that "epitomized the emergence of the New South" with its embrace of the civil rights movement. But Trethewey's parents divorce and her mother meets the brutal Joel Grimmette, or "Big Joe." Their union is a surprise to Trethewey, who, after a summer with her grandmother in Mississippi, returns to find her mother, married, with a new baby.

Trethewey, like her mother, is psychologically abused by Grimmette. Through her childhood diary, a gift from her mother, she finds agency through language, and the will to resist. "I had begun to compose myself," she recalls.

The quagmire of male entitlement and mental illness make up the second half of the book. There are black eyes, bruised kidneys, a sprained arm, a fractured jaw. Divorce follows, along with restraining orders and some relief. For a brief period, her mother has hope for her own future. Joel even is imprisoned for a short time. After his released, a police detail lets down its guard. 

This is a political book. It is the story of a woman cut down in her prime, about a sick man who imposed his control and had his way, about the larger story of power in America. The awful postscript to this story is that Grimmette was released from prison in March of last year, and is now a free man.