Page 57 - WTP VOl. VIII #6
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A Curiosity
—after Mandingo (1975)
I share a Cure for Rheumatism, a disease that ticks in our bones, with my mother; it’s a more benign treatment than what appears in a plantation porn scene on the veranda of the Big House in which
a charlatan places an enslaved toddler as footstool
for a master suffering from “the rheumatiz.”
His yellowing toes curl on the boy’s distended belly
as the “doctor” diagnoses. Why not try sarsaparilla,
prickly ash, cherry bark, bittersweet, and wintergreen boiled each to a gallon with a quart of rum, three times daily?
Sherrard is the Sally Mead Hands-Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wiscon- sin-Madison, and the author of Grimoire (2020) and Vixen (2017), poetry collections from Autumn House Press, and Mistress, Reclining, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press (2010). Her books also include Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in
the Harlem Renaissance (2007), and Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color (2011). She is the editor of A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. Her work has been published in journals including The Rumpus, Plume, The New York Times Magazine, Verse Daily, The Journal, Terrain.org, Blackbird, Water~Stone Review, and Prairie Schooner.
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