19 pages • 38 minutes read
Ross GayA Small Needful Fact
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Elegy
While “A Small Needful Fact” is not a traditional elegy, it borrows and reinvents significant tropes from the English elegiac tradition. An elegy is a poem of mourning written on the occasion of a death. “A Small Needful Fact” expresses sorrow over the death of Eric Garner, who sowed plants into the soil, “making it easier / for us to breathe” (Lines 14-15). The poem only focuses on one “small” fact about Garner’s life, but the implication is that there are many other positive ways—both small and large—Garner contributed to society, thus his loss is tragic.
Most early elegies written in English name their subject somewhere in the poem (for example, in the title, the inscription, or the lines of the poem itself), and “A Small Needful Fact” names Garner on the first line: “Is that Eric Garner worked” (Line 1).
Also, traditional English elegies take place in a pastoral setting. While Garner lived and died in New York City, the poem’s focus on Garner’s work—planting for the Parks Department—creates an imagined pastoral setting.
Spring is an important time in a traditional elegy because the springtime renewal of flora suggests continuance after death. Elegy scholar Peter Sacks writes, there is “immortality suggested by nature’s self-regenerative power” (Sack, Peter. The English Elegy. John Hopkins University Press, 1985, p. 27). As many traditional elegies do, “A Small Needful Fact” ends with the springtime renewal of vegetation. The plants Garner sowed into the soil
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to the touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe (Lines 9-15).
The goal of a traditional elegy is to offer consolation, often achieved by an image of the deceased living on in heaven, as a star in the sky, or as a part of nature. While the final lines of “A Small Needful Fact” offer no image of Garner himself living on, they offer an image of the work of Garner’s hands: the vegetation Garner planted “with his very large hands” (Line 4) continues to blossom long after Garner’s death. While this image does not remove the tragedy of Garner’s death, it is consolatory because it shows that Garner’s positive contributions to society continue. Traditional English elegies tend to end on a comforting, consolatory note, and that is where “A Small Needful Fact” ends, too.
Social Context: #BLACKLIVESMATTER
Weeks after Garner was choked to death by a member of the NYPD, John Crawford was shot and killed by a police officer inside a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio. Crawford was examining a BB gun that was for sale in the store. Officers claimed he was pointing the gun at people, but security footage revealed this was false (Iqbal, Mawa. “Community Remembers John Crawford III Seven Years After Death.” WYSO, 6 August 2021). Days after this murder, Michael Brown was also shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. All three victims were Black and murdered by a white police officer. Unlike Garner and Crawford, however, Brown was only a teenager. The murders of Garner, Crawford, and Brown were protested by a then relatively new movement that used Twitter to empower supporters, mobilize protestors, and garner national attention: #BlackLivesMatter.
These deaths were also mourned in poems. “A Small Needful Fact” mourns the death of Eric Garner. “Testimony (for Michael Brown, 1996-2014)” by Hafizah Geter, “not an elegy for Mike Brown” by Danez Smith, and “Nightstick [a Mural for Michael Brown]” by Kevin Young all mourn the death of Brown. “The Tradition” by Jericho Brown mourns all three deaths, it’s final line expressing devastation: “Where the world ends, everything cut down” (Brown, Jericho. “The Tradition.” Poets.org, 7 August 2015.)
The abject fact is that police officers have continued to kill unarmed Black people in the United States; and these deaths have continued to be protested by #BlackLivesMatter and mourned in poems. In July 2015, a state trooper pulled over Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman who was about to start a new job at her alma mater. The trooper stopped her for failing to use a turn signal, and, in a short video Bland captured on her cell phone, the trooper threatens to shoot her with a stun gun. Bland was imprisoned, and, a few days later, she was found hanging in her jail cell. Local authorities ruled her death a suicide, but her friends and family dispute this assessment. Her family brought and won a $1.9 million wrongful-death settlement against the jail where Bland was held and the Texas Department of Public Safety (Montgomery, Brian. “Sandra Bland, It Turns Out, Filmed Traffic Stop Confrontation Herself.” New York Times, 7 May 2019). Patricia Smith wrote about Bland’s death, as well as other deaths of Black people at the hands of the police, in Incendiary Art. Jericho Brown also wrote about Bland and others in his poem “Bullet Points.”
On March 13, 2020, Louisville police officers barged into the home of Breonna Taylor and shot her several times. The murder sparked a new wave of #BlackLivesMatter protests, and poet W. J. Lofton created a visual poem for Taylor titled, “Would You Kill God Too?”
Then on May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Concerned and outraged bystanders recorded Floyd’s murder on their cell phones; following his death, video and still images of the event circulated on social media and on news sites. The murder and footage intensified #BlackLivesMatter protests in the summer of 2020. Poems were also written in response to this killing, including “Why I don’t write about George Floyd” by Toi Derricotte. Additionally, Patricia Smith’s “Salutations in Search Of” mourns Floyd’s, Taylor’s, and Garner’s death, along with many others.
“A Small Needful Fact” is in conversation with these and many other poems written for unarmed Black people killed by white police officers. Instead of focusing on the circumstances of Garner’s death, “A Small Needful Fact” focuses on a single fact about his life: He worked for the Parks Department. One of the feats of the poem is how much poetic impact Gay achieves with this one “small” fact.
Authorial Context: “A Small Needful Fact” and Gay’s Other Work
As one might expect from an author of a poetry collection titled Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and an essay collection titled The Book of Delights, Gay’s work often explores joy. The bio on Gay’s website begins:
Ross Gay is interested in joy.
Ross Gay wants to understand joy.
Ross Gay is curious about joy.
Ross Gay studies joy.
Something like that (“About Ross.” Rossgay.net).
Gay’s 2020 work Be Holding is about a sport that brings him joy: basketball. It’s a book-length poem that is also a single-sentence poem. The resulting tone is playful, joyful, revelatory.
In The Book of Delights, Gay finds joy in his garden, and in “A Small Needful Fact,” there is joy in the image of Garner’s plants thriving and supporting other lifeforms.
“A Small Needful Fact” is thus one of many works in which Gay explores joy—but the poem also explores grief and racism, in keeping with Gay’s other work that engages painful subjects yet manages to still find joy. This is a counterintuitive combination, but one that characterizes the poet’s work.
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