Wingfoot Lake

Rita Dove’s “Wingfoot Lake” is one part of Beulah’s larger narrative. That narrative is best understood through engagement with Dove’s collection Thomas and Beulah. Despite Beulah’s name not appearing in “Wingfoot Lake,” she is the assumed subject by the work’s place in the larger collection. Beulah is not the poem’s speaker and is referred to using third-person pronouns, but her thoughts and feelings are often directly communicated by the speaker. The communication of a character’s language and subjectivity is known as free indirect discourse, a technique usually associated with narrative fiction rather than poetry. The narrative qualities of the poems in Dove’s Thomas and Beulah are part of the reason some people refer to the collection as a “verse-novel” (“Rita Dove.” 2016. Poetry Foundation).

The above context is important to understanding the poem’s basic framing, but this analysis will consider “Wingfoot Lake” in relative isolation to demonstrate the work’s poetic nuances. This analysis is interested in how the poem’s narrative progresses through a series of fragmented images and settings. Dove uses these fragmented scenes to create powerful juxtapositions, and many of the poem’s themes and messages exist only in the space between these different fragments.

One of the clearest juxtapositions in “Wingfoot Lake” is between the present and the past. The poem begins on Beulah’s “36th birthday” (Line 1), and it moves from there to the “company picnic” (Line 9) on July 4, 1964, to Beulah’s looking back “ten years ago” (Line 15) to 1954, then to 1944, and finally to “Last August” (Line 19), or August of 1963. Dove’s poem is constantly renegotiating its relationship with time and history, even if that history only exists in Beulah’s fragmented memories. History not only lives on through Beulah, it shapes her. When Beulah’s daughter, Joanna, identifies her as “Afro-American” (Line 25), Beulah’s response is to think that “Where she came from / was the past” (Lines 32-33) rather than from Africa.

From Beulah’s perspective, one’s own personal history is more important than one’s ethnic background. That does not mean, however, that these two aspects of a person can be completely separated. Much of Beulah’s past experience is intimately tied to her status as a person of color. The poem’s first stanza, in fact, relates Beulah’s memory of encountering her “first swimming pool” (Line 2) during a time when such places were racially segregated. The pool’s “white arms” (Line 4) indicate that this pool is for white people only, and the earlier information, that this pool is the “first” that Beulah encounters, suggests that there are no pools for Black people. Likewise, the “white arms” (Line 4) form “chevrons of high society” (Line 5), symbolizing the class and societal gaps between Beulah and the white people allowed to swim in the pool. Beulah’s “roll[ing] up her window” (Line 6) and telling Thomas to “drive on, fast” (Line 7) communicates that Beulah fears the couple’s presence will cause the “white arms” (Line 4) to become violent.

This segregation scene is juxtaposed with the second stanza’s “company picnic” (Line 9). Beulah is hesitant to go to the picnic, likely because of her experience in the previous stanza, and must be “dragg[ed]” (Line 9) there by her four daughters. At the picnic, Beulah sees the racial segregation she grew up with perpetuated: “white families on one side” of the picnic ground and “them / on the other” (Lines 10-11). Though both families work for the same company and eat identical meals of “Heinz, […] waxy beef patties and Salem potato chip[s]” (Lines 12-13), suggesting that they are both of the same socio-economic class, the racial segmentation is still represented. The picnic ground is not legally segregated, but the implied narrative association between it and Beulah’s previous experience presents how such cultural norms persist outside of legislation.

The particular picnic ground is not explicitly mentioned. There are, however, a few indications that it takes place at the titular “Wingfoot Lake.” As further explored in the authorial context section, the poems in Thomas and Beulah tend to be drawn from Dove’s life and the lives of her maternal grandparents. Dove’s father, Ray Dove, worked for Goodyear; at that time, Goodyear was the leading global manufacturer of rubber and tires. Goodyear, as the poem’s last stanza notes, owns Wingfoot Lake. Given the biographical connection between Dove’s maternal grandmother and Beulah, it can be assumed that the poem’s “husbands” (Line 9) includes Dove’s father, and that the picnic takes place at Wingfoot Lake. This lake, as the speaker outlines, rests “under the company symbol, a white foot / sprouting two small wings” (Lines 36-37). There is an implicit connection between the lake and the “swimming pool” of the second line. Both bodies of water are owned by a particular, privileged group, and that ownership is represented, in both cases, by a “white” body part. This connection furthers the idea that there is little difference between the racially segregated past and the somewhat racially integrated present of 1964.

Beulah, shaped by her past experience, might be the only one capable of making these connections. Given the speaker’s free indirect discourse with Beulah’s inner thoughts, it is also possible that Beulah’s past experiences and traumas related to segregation make it difficult for her to see anything else. This is likely what she means when she says, “Where she came from / was the past” (Lines 32-33). Who Beulah is and what she is capable of understanding is a direct result of what she has lived through. Despite the anxiety that made her tell Thomas “to drive on, fast” (Line 7), Beulah longs for the past “where nobody had locked their back door, / and Goodyear hadn’t begun to dream of a park / under the company symbol” (Lines 34-36). The violent threat from the “high society” (Line 5) has given way to the greed and power of corporations, but behind each privileged group are “white arms” (Line 4) and “a white foot” (Line 36). Each form of ownership or claim over a public space, it seems, reveals another white limb at work.