Hello, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast.

I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine.

On today's program, we're discussing our latest interactive multimedia poetry feature on New Yorker.com.

Jim Limber in Heaven is a series of poems that imagine the life and afterlife of a figure who embodies the tensions

and traumas of a historically divided country. Joining me is the author of Jim Limber in Heaven,

Shane McCrae, whose work has received such honors as a Whiting Award and Anisfield-Wolf

Book Award, a Lannin Literary Award, and he was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Shane, welcome.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me.

So these poems are written from the perspective of a character named Jim Limber.

I know that Jim Limber was a real person.

Can you tell us a little bit about him and what drew you to his story?

Yeah, I'll tell you what I know. The historical record is a little scanty.

So one day when she was returning home from town, she had been shopping. Varina Davis, the wife of Jefferson Davis, saw a woman beating a child on the side of the road.

And she ordered her driver to stop and

took the child from the woman and took the child home with her. He was a mixed-race child,

and this was just about a year before the end of the Civil War. And from that point on,

Jim Limber lived with the Davises.

There was no, at the time, sort of legal way for the Davises to adopt Jim Limber.

Scholars are a little divided about what his status was, but for a long time, he was thought of as having been adopted by the Davis family,

and it is understood that he was very close with them.

...