Summary
"A Small Needful Fact" honors the life of Eric Garner, an African American man killed by police. The poem's title continues into the body of the poem as Gay states that Garner worked for some time for the New York City Parks and Recreation Horticultural Department. Gay proceeds to speculate as to what this means.
Gay imagines that Garner, with his very large hands, in all likelihood gently placed plants into the earth. This most likely means that some of them continue to grow and do what plants do: house and feed small and necessary creatures, be pleasant to touch and smell, convert sunlight into food, and make it easier for us to breathe.
Analysis
"A Small Needful Fact" draws an organic line between past and present, life and death, as the poet honors the life of a man without attempting to sanctify him. Eric Garner was a forty-three-year-old African American man who was killed on a Staten Island sidewalk in 2014 when a police officer placed him in a chokehold. Garner's final words, "I can't breathe," became a rallying cry for a national movement and protests concerning police brutality and racial inequality. While knowing the context of Garner's death is important in the reading of this poem, "A Small Needful Fact" does not directly mention the death. Rather, the poem retrieves Garner's memory and presents its implications for American society in the present day.
Titles help unlock a poem's meaning. Here, the title "A Small Needful Fact" also serves as the first line. This continuation from the title into the body of the poem does not contain a pause for breath, which contributes to the ethos of hedging humility that the speaker takes on. There is no pause given for emphasis in the statement of this small needful fact, which is that Eric Garner worked for some time for the New York City Parks and Recreation Horticultural Department. This is the foundation upon which the poem builds its poetic speculation.
Horticulture is the art or practice of garden cultivation and management. Sonically, the word is not pleasing in a poetic way. Gay does not replace "the Parks and Rec. Horticultural Department" with a beautiful metonym; he merely states the fact that Garner worked there. This, along with the use of hedging phrases ("perhaps," "in all likelihood," and "most likely"), creates a flatness and an important distance. There is no dramatic flare or emphasis in these lines; the fact of where Garner worked is communicated in a "small" way. Ultimately this contributes to the poem's impact.
The meaning that the poet makes from the fact of where Garner worked is that "with [Garner's] very large hands, / perhaps, in all likelihood, / he put gently into the earth / some plants" (Lines 4-7). The line about Garner's hands makes sense considering he was over six feet tall; there is no poetic or imaginative handling of this description of his having "very large hands." The significance of the description comes from the contrast between the largeness of Garner's hands and the gentle nature of his actions. Stereotypes about Black men and violence in the United States are ingrained in the larger cultural framework that led to Garner's death. But according to the Stanford Libraries Exhibition "Say Their Names—No More Names," Garner "was known as a peacemaker in his community" (Smith 2020).
The word "earth" is used to describe the specific places where Garner planted. Though "earth" is a synonym for "dirt" or "ground," here this word choice contributes to the sense of collectivism that Gay creates in the poem because it evokes a larger scale than just the plot of dirt in which Garner planted. By gently placing some plants into the earth, Gay seems to be saying, Garner continues to impact us all.
Gay continues to contemplate what the fact of Garner's past work means in the present: "some plants which, most likely, / some of them, in all likelihood, / continue to grow, continue / to do what such plants do" (Lines 7-10). The poet's conjectures are stated with hedging phrases. The word hedge is from Old English hecg—originally any fence, living or artificial. The tone that this creates is simultaneously one of uncertainty, slight discomfort, and hope. As the poem ultimately implicates everyone (including the poet himself) in the landscape of life and death, these lines about Garner's plants continuing to grow imply a question about what we as a collective nation must do as we "continue" on (Line 9).
The list of what such plants do is given through the anaphora of the word "like:" "like house / and feed small and necessary creatures, / like being pleasant to touch and smell, / like converting sunlight / into food, like making it easier / for us to breathe" (Lines 10-15). As author and poetry editor Daisy Fried has pointed out, this gives the illusion of reading simile (which allows for what she calls "the grace and escape of metaphor"). But no transformative comparison follows. The word "like" comes from the Old English word gelic, which meant “with the body,” as in “with the body of,” which was a way of saying “similar to” (McWhorter). Here, the body of the text remains crafted only from flat, banal language.
This flatness, which contrasts with much of Gay's other poetry, is an important aspect of "A Small Needful Fact." Elevated language or a transformative metaphor would not have had the same effect as the last lines of this poem: "like making it easier / for us to breathe" (Lines 14-15). The irony is that Garner, a man who died after being placed in a chokehold, once worked a position that, to this day, likely contributes to helping us breathe. The "us" here implicates everyone (including the poet) in considering what happened to Garner. According to a New York Times report, at least seventy people in the last decade have died in police custody after saying the words "I can't breathe" (Baker et al., 2020). Though Gay does not explicitly state this, the poem implies that our actions can have far-reaching impacts, and asks how we as a collective can do better.
