Chosen

“Chosen” is a narrative poem in the form of a free verse sonnet. The sonnet is in four tercets and ends in a near-rhyme couplet. The poem rhymes only once, in the third tercet (efe) on “name” and “came” (Lines 7 and 9). The past tense verb has a double meaning here referencing both the white man’s act of leaving the house—an emblem of his exceptional status—to enter “her close shack” (Line 11), and his completion of the sex act that resulted in Pomp Atwood and the rest of Diverne’s descendants—including Nelson. Nelson’s choice to offer rhyme only here reinforces the arbitrary link between patrimony and paternity in the antebellum South. Further, it accentuates the incident making possible Nelson’s maternal family.

Though the choice to conceive Pomp was entirely the white man’s, given that this was a setting in which enslaved Black people could not consent to encounters with whites, Nelson undermines the man’s agency by leaving him nameless in the story. It is but Diverne who matters as it is she who loves her son and keeps him alive to beget his own children.