Benjamin Harrison Maintains He Is More Heartbroken by the Death of His Wife Than by Losing the 1892 Presidential Election
Sasha Debevec-McKenney
Life does not always go the way we want life to go for instance after
a string of good luck (a trip to Milwaukee where my hotel was across the street from a plaque citing the invention of the typewriter (1868),
a successful Tinder date where we held our laughter together as a woman scraped her kayak through the half-frozen lake, a Sunday afternoon walk where I stopped at a gas station and got the last ice cream sandwich), my car broke down on the way to Indianapolis.
I should have known driving to Indianapolis to learn about a First Lady was a bad idea, but I ignored the signs. I failed the Budget Rental soft credit check. I convinced myself my car would make it. I put on a podcast about Benjamin Harrison and set my Google Maps to Benjamin Harrison Grave. On the podcast they said, Caroline Harrison, née Scott, died with a week left in her term. I really should have known then because I’ve always had especially bad luck with Scotts.
My therapist wants me to consider the possibility that I’m highly sensitive and obsessively observational because past lives are real and this time the spirit within me needed to look at the world even closer. Maybe the spirit within me missed something last time. But if that’s true, and I were a spirit on my umpteenth time on Earth, would I spend it broken down outside Loves Park, Illinois, on my way to President Harrison’s grave?
In Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents, Margaret Kimberley writes: “Like other Republican presidents at the end of the nineteenth century, Harrison wanted to get white southern votes, and that meant that black people and their political needs had to be ignored.”
I told the tow truck driver I was on my way to President Harrison’s grave, to write a poem, well, actually, the poem was specifically commissioned to be about the First Lady, but if you put Caroline Harrison Grave into Google Maps it will say NO RESULTS. HAVE YOU SEARCHED FOR HER USING HER HUSBAND’S NAME INSTEAD?. The tow truck driver said, “well now you can spend the day with me, towing cars!” It was the highest up I had ever sat—the tow truck passenger seat—we were taller even than the minivans.
Billions of people lived and died before credit scores were ever invented. I wanted to plead my case: “I’m good for it, I swear.” But what was I good for?
I was writing a poem about a white woman who lived at the end of the nineteenth century while the trial for the murder of George Floyd played on my TV in the background. I only got paid 50 bucks for this poem and the bill for my car and emergency hotel combined was around $700. And what do I know now about Caroline Harrison that I didn’t know before?
The Harrisons had two pet raccoons: Mr. Reciprocity and Mr. Protection. This is the kind of fact you learn about the presidents as a child, before you learn better.
Caroline Harrison died of tuberculosis. There was a tuberculosis scare in my elementary school, so we have that in common. They turned our combination gymnasium/auditorium into a testing site and the nurse asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” before stabbing my forearm.
After Caroline died, the President married her niece, which made me want to write this as a persona poem from her point of view, back from the dead after having learned what he did, but when I tried to write a poem as a white woman the spirit within me shuddered.
There were like ten other dudes on Tinder who wanted my attention and my nude photos but I was ignoring them to write a poem about a white woman who lived at the end of the nineteenth century, and with every sentence I wrote I was participating in uplifting the white supremacist version of history in which white women didn’t know any better. The men could wait—
I mean I guess that’s what you get for marrying the President? You get tuberculosis and you die. You hold the President’s hand and the evil spreads to you. Which means yes. The First Lady is an imperialist. The First Lady is a criminal. Sorry if you thought this was going to be sympathetic. Would she have felt sympathy for me?
There’s just too much spirit in me not to ask: Is making art in the
name of the wife of a President as bad as making art in the name of
a President? And don’t you know what Presidents have done?
To people like me?
About the Artist
Sasha Debevec-McKenney is the 2020-2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She received her MFA from New York University, where she was the 2018 Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Yale Review, Nashville Review, Peach Mag, Underblong, TriQuarterly, Granta, Poem-A-Day, and elsewhere. She minored in American Studies at Beloit College and was born in Hartford, Connecticut.