Thomas and Beulah

Thomas and Beulah is a collection of forty-four connected, narrative poems that tell the semi-fictionalized story of author Rita Dove's maternal grandparents, Thomas and Georgianna (who was renamed Beulah in the book). The book follows seventy years of their private history, living together in Akron, Ohio and raising a family. Separated into two distinct parts, the first in Thomas's voice and the second told from the perspective of Beulah, the book is the story of a black family in the predominantly white Midwest, and the sometimes contradictory experiences and perspectives of men and women within a traditional, American marriage.

The book opens with a section written in the voice of Thomas, Rita Dove's maternal grandfather. Thomas is a handsome man, a sharp dresser with a beautiful tenor voice. An avid mandolin player, he often performed his music, a musical drifter traveling around America until he finally settled in Akron, Ohio, many hundreds of miles from his family in Tennessee. Thomas came to Akron to find a good job, but he also found Beulah, a beautiful young woman whose family had resettled in Ohio after leaving their home state of Georgia. Thomas and Beulah court and marry; much of the book follows their romance and the development of their family, including the birth of four daughters, a grandson, and the rapid changes in social politics around what it means to be African American in the United States.

There are a number of significant moments in the narrative, during which the subject of blackness and its shifting definitions comes up for both Thomas and Beulah. In one poem, the couple is driven off the road by a group of shouting white men, who ridicule and mock them for their skin color. Later, Beulah's daughters talk to her about the new terminology, “Afro-American,” that leaves Beulah wondering what tenuous connections her daughters have to their “African” heritage. She rejects the term, choosing instead to refer to herself and her husband as “Negros,” which is uncomfortable for modern readers used to more politically correct terms. Though Thomas dies in 1963 before the March on Washington, Beulah witnesses the changes that are coming through the Civil Rights Movement for her people, and is both pleased and confused by the shifting social landscape.



Other themes in the collection include ideas of parenting and the realities of married life, which are best conveyed through Beulah's point-of-view. Though Thomas reflects on the experience of having four daughters and is thrilled to have an infant grandson later in his life, Beulah is more specific about her experience with motherhood, particularly around her own freedoms, and ideas of self. She treasures moments in the middle of the day when her girls go down for a nap, and she has quiet moments to herself. Much of her entertainment comes from inside her own head, where she daydreams about a past boyfriend and relives old traumas. Her imagination is so inventive, she realizes, that she would never have thought to dream up the plain story of her own small family, living in a house together for decades, relatively happy and carefree.

The dueling perspectives of Thomas and Beulah build on each other, fleshing out the narrative of a complete life, and seventy years of romance. Thomas dies reassuring Beulah that they lived a good life together, which they never believed, and the sentiment is both sweet and sincere. In some moments, when perspectives contradict, it is easy to see the tensions in the marriage – typical tensions, which more clearly develop each character in turn and give the story nuance. The result is a personal history of a typical family at a pivotal moment in history, too common for any historian of significance to note, but important because it gives an account of the real lives of African American people during the twentieth century.

Rita Dove is a poet and essayist from Akron, Ohio. She has written ten collections of poetry, edited a number of anthologies, and written a collection of short stories, a novel, and a work of non-fiction called Poets in the World. She was the first African American woman to serve as a poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, where she worked from 1993-1995. She also served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia and was the second African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1987, which she won for Thomas and Beulah.