Up-surging, symphonic roar.
’Tis ill of all clashings; it seeks release
From fetters of greed and gore.
The winds of the battlefields echo the sigh
Of heroes slumbering deep,
Who gave all they had and now dreamlessly lie
Where the bayonets sent them to sleep.
Peace on the hillside, and peace on the moor.
For fingers to bind up the wound,
Slashed deep by the ruthless, harsh hand of might,
When Justice is crushed to the ground.
’Tis ill of the fevers of fear of the strong—
Of jealousies—prejudice—pride.
“Is there no ideal that’s proof against wrong?”
Man asks of the man at his side.
White heart—Red—Yellow—and Black.
Each face turns to Bethlehem’s bright star above,
Though wolves of self howl at each back.
The whole earth is lifting its voice in a prayer
That nations may learn to endure,
Without killing and maiming, but doing what’s fair
With a soul that is noble and pure.
Love that will banish all hatred and wrong.
East—West—and North—and South.
Stirring, deep-yearning, breast-heaving call for God
A-tremble behind each mouth.
The heart’s ill of torments that rend men’s souls.
Skyward lift all faiths and hopes;
Across all the oceans the evidence rolls,
Refreshing all life’s arid slopes.
God calls us, world-brothers. Hark ye! and know.
From Poems of the Four Seas I will take a piece that gives the Negro background for the yearning expressed in the foregoing poem:
BROTHERS
With hard hemp rope and iron bands.
They scourge his back in ghoulish glee;
And bleed his flesh;—men, mark ye—free.
They still his groans with fiendish shout,
Where flesh streams red they ply the knout.
Thus sons of men feed lust to kill
And yet, oh God! they’re brothers still.
While Justice weeps in deepest shame.
E’en Death in pity bows its head,
Yet ’midst these men no prayer is said.
They gather up charred flesh and bone—
Mementos—boasting brave deed done.
They sip of gore their souls to fill;
Drink deep of blood their hands did spill.
Who prate of God and yet have none;
Think of themselves as wholly good,
Blaspheme the name of brotherhood;
Who hearken not as brothers cry
For brother’s chance to live and die.
To keep a demon’s murder tryst
They’d rend the sepulcher of Christ.
VIII. Walter Everette Hawkins
CREDO
I break the limbs of idols
And smash the traditions of men.
I believe in war and destruction—
Not in the killing of men,
But the killing of creed and custom.
I accept nothing without questioning.
It is my inherent right and duty
To ask the reason why.
To accept without a reason
Is to debase one’s humanity
And destroy the fundamental process
In the ascertainment of Truth.
To me Liberty is priestly and kingly;
Freedom is my Bride,
Liberty my Angel of Light,
Justice my God.
All creeds of church and social orders,
All conventionalities of society and system
Which cross the path of the light of Freedom
Or obstruct the reign of Right.
This is a faithful self-characterization—such a man in reality is Walter Everette Hawkins. A fearless and independent and challenging spirit. He is the rare kind of man that must put everything to the severe test of absolute principles. He hates shams, hypocrisies, compromises, chicaneries, injustices. His poems are the bold and faithful expressions of his personality. Free he has ever been, free he will be ever, striking right out for freedom and truth. Such a personality is refreshing to meet, whether you encounter it in the flesh or in a book.
Born about thirty-five years ago, on a little farm in North Carolina, the thirteenth child of ex-slave parents, young Hawkins, one may imagine, was not opulent in this world’s goods. Nor were his opportunities such as are usually considered thrilling. A few terms of miserable schooling in the village of Warrenton, the fragments of a few more terms in a school maintained by the African Methodist Church, then—“the University of Hard Knocks.” In the two first-named schools the independent-spirited lad seems not to have gotten along well with his teachers, hence a few dismissals. Always too prone to ask troublesome, challenging questions, too prone to doubts and reflections, he was thought incorrigible. In his “University” he chose his own masters—the great free spirits of the ages—and at the feet of these he was teachable, even while the knocks were hardest.
A lover of wild nature and able to commune with nature’s spirit, deeply fond also of communing with the world’s master minds in books, Mr. Hawkins is by necessity—while his spirit soars—the slave of routine toil, being, until recently, a mail clerk in the post office of the City of Washington. “My only recreation,” he writes me, “is in stealing away to be with the masters, the intellectual dynamos, of the world, who converse with me without wincing and deliver me the key to life’s riddle.”
A true expression of himself I said Mr. Hawkins’s poems are. In no degree are they fictions. As a companion to Credo, quoted to introduce him, I will give the last poem in his book, which will again set him before us as he is:
HERO OF THE ROAD
Let me seek no victor’s wreath,
Let my sword unstained in battle
Still lie rusting in its sheath;
Let my garments be unsullied,
Let no man’s blood to me cling;
Life is love and earth is heaven,
If I may but soar and sing.
For the whining craven class of men Mr. Hawkins has little respect:
When the world is all song,
Or dares to sit mute
When the world is all wrong;
Who barters his freedom
Vile honors to win,
Deserves but to die
With the vilest of men.
Upon the times in which we live his judgment is severe. His condemnation, however, bears witness to that earnestness of soul and that idealism of spirit which will not let the world repose in its wickedness. From a list of several poems attesting this I select the following as perhaps the most complete in form:
THE DEATH OF JUSTICE
These the fell years which the prophets have dreamed;
Visions they saw in those full days of old,
The fathers have sinned and the children blasphemed.
Hurt is the world, and its heart is unhealed,
Wrong sways the sceptre and Justice must yield.
Justice must bow before Moloch and Baal;
Blasphemous prayers for the triumph of crimes,
High sounds the cry of the children who wail.
Hurt is the world, and its heart is unhealed,
Wrong sways the sceptre and Justice must yield.
They count not Justice in reckoning things;
Whom their lips worship their hearts crucify,
This the oblation the votary brings.
Hurt is the world, and its heart is unhealed,
Wrong sways the sceptre and Justice must yield.
Seeking revenge with the dagger and sword;
This is the pride which the Pharisees boast,
Man damns his brother in the name of his Lord.
Hurt is the world, and its heart is unhealed,
Wrong sways the sceptre and Justice must yield.
Vainglorious monarchs and proud princes fall;
Until the death of Time revokes his laws,
His awful mandate shall reign over all.
Hurt is the world, and its heart is unhealed,
Wrong sways the sceptre and Justice must yield.
A number of Mr. Hawkins’s productions reveal possibilities of beauty and effectiveness, which he had not the patience or the skill to realize. One imagines that he has never been able to bring his spirit to a submissive study of the minutiæ of metrical composition. A poet in esse—or in posse—is all that nature ever makes. And even the most free spirit must know well the traditions. Whether this iconoclast knows the Cavalier traditions of English poetry may be left to conjecture, but the following piece, illustrating Mr. Hawkins’s faults and virtues as a singer, will prove his kinship to the poetic tribe of which Lovelace and Suckling were conspicuous members:
ASK ME WHY I LOVE YOU
And I will ask the rose
Why it loves the dews of Spring
At the Winter’s close;
Why the blossoms’ nectared sweets
Loved by questing bee,—
I will gladly answer you,
If they answer me.
I will ask the flower
Why it loves the Summer sun,
Or the Summer shower;
I will ask the lover’s heart
Why it loves the moon,
Or the star-besprinkled skies
In a night in June.
I will ask the vine
Why its tendrils trustingly
Round the oak entwine;
Why you love the mignonette
Better than the rue,—
If you will but answer me,
I will answer you.
Let the lark reply,
Why his heart is full of song
When the twilight’s nigh;
Why the lover heaves a sigh
When her heart is true;
If you will but answer me,
I will answer you.
IX. Claude McKay
An English subject, being born and growing to manhood in Jamaica, Claude McKay, a pure blood Negro, was first discovered as a poet by English critics. In Jamaica, as early as 1911, when he was but twenty-two years of age, his Constab Ballads, in Negro dialect, was published. Even in so broken a tongue this book revealed a poet—on the constabulary force of Jamaica. In 1920 his first book of poems in literary English, Spring in New Hamp-Shire, came out in England, with a Preface by Mr. I. A. Richards, of Cambridge, England. Meanwhile, shortly after the publication of his first book, he had come to the United States.
Here he has worked at various occupations, has taken courses in Agriculture and English in the Kansas State College, and has thus become acquainted with life in the States. He is now on the editorial staff of the Liberator, New York. There has been no poet of his race who has more poignantly felt and more artistically expressed the life of the American Negro. His poetry is a most noteworthy contribution to literature. From Spring in New Hampshire I am privileged to take a number of poems which will follow without comment:
SPRING IN NEW HAMPSHIRE
Too blue the silver-speckled sky,
For me to linger here, alas,
While happy winds go laughing by,
Wasting the golden hours indoors,
Washing windows and scrubbing floors.
THE LYNCHING
His Father, by the cruelest way of pain,
Had bidden him to his bosom once again;
The awful sin remained still unforgiven:
All night a bright and solitary star
(Perchance the one that ever guided him,
Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim)
Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char.
Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue,
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.
THE HARLEM DANCER
And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players upon a picnic day.
She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,
The light gauze hanging loose about her form;
To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.
Upon her swarthy neck, black, shiny curls
Profusely fell; and, tossing coins in praise,
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,
Devoured her with eager, passionate gaze:
But, looking at her falsely-smiling face,
I knew her self was not in that strange place.
IN BONDAGE
Where man, and bird, and beast live leisurely,
And the old earth is kind and ever yields
Her goodly gifts to all her children free;
Where life is fairer, lighter, less demanding,
And boys and girls have time and space for play
Before they come to years of understanding,—
Somewhere I would be singing, far away;
For life is greater than the thousand wars
Men wage for it in their insatiate lust,
And will remain like the eternal stars
When all that is to-day is ashes and dust:
But I am bound with you in your mean graves,
Oh, black men, simple slaves of ruthless slaves.
Distinction of idea and phrase inheres in these poems. In them the Negro is esthetically conceived, and interpreted with vision. This is art working as it should. Mr. McKay has passion and the control of it to the ends of art. He has the poet’s insight, the poet’s understanding.
Perhaps the most arresting poem in this list, and the one most surely attesting the genius of the writer, is The Harlem Dancer. It is an achievement in portrayal sufficient by itself to establish a poetic reputation. The divination that penetrates to the secret purity of soul, or nobleness of character, through denying appearances—how rare is the faculty, and how necessary! Elsewhere I give a poem from a Negro woman which evinces the same divine gift in the author, exhibited in a poem no less original and no less deeply impressive—Mrs. Spencer’s At the Carnival. Here I will companion The Harlem Dancer with one from Mr. Dandridge, for the comparison will deepen the effect of each:
ZALKA PEETRUZA
(Who Was Christened Lucy Jane)
With swaying arms and flying feet,
’Mid swirling spangles, gauze and lace,
Her all was dancing—save her face.
Companioned hearing deaf to cheers;
A body, marshalled by the will,
Kept dancing while a heart stood still:
Looked over heads to empty air,
As though they sought to find therein
Redemption for a maiden sin.
We found the lost look on her face;
And then, to us, did it occur
That, though we saw—we saw not her.
Returning to Mr. McKay, we may assert that his new volume of verse, Harlem Shadows, confirms and enhances the estimate of him we have expressed.
X. Leslie Pinckney Hill
Bearing the diploma of the Lyric Muse, Mr. Leslie Pinckney Hill, schoolmaster of Cheyney, Pennsylvania, and authentic singer, is one of the newest arrivals on the slopes of Parnassus. A first glance tells that he is an agile climber, sinewy, easy of movement, light of step, with both grace and strength. Every indication in form and motion is for some point far up toward the summit. Youthful he is, ambitious, plainly, and, in spite of a burden, buoyant. “Climber,” I said. I will drop the figure. Poets were never pedestrians. Mr. Hill comes not afoot. If not on the wings of Pegasus, yet on wings he comes—the wings of oppression. Sad wings! yet it must be remarked that it is commonly on such wings that poets of whatever race and time rise. And Mr. Hill’s race knows no other wings. On the wings of oppression the Negro poet and the Negro people are rising toward the summits of Parnassus, Pisgah, and other peaks. This they know, too, and of it they are justly proud.
In his Foreword Mr. Hill thus states the case of his people, and, by implication, of himself: “Nothing in the life of the nation has seemed to me more significant than that dark civilization which the colored man has built up in the midst of a white society organized against it. The Negro has been driven under all the burdens of oppression, both material and spiritual, to the brink of desperation, but he has always been saved by his philosophy of life. He has advanced against all opposition by a certain elevation of his spirit. He has been made strong in tribulation. He has constrained oppression to give him wings.”
The significant thing about these wings, in a critical view, is that they fulfill the proper function of wings—bear aloft and sustain in flight through the azure depths. Mr. Hill’s wings do bear aloft and sustain: if not always, nor even ever, into the very empyrean of poetry yet invariably, seventy times, into the ampler air. Like all his race, he has suffered much; and, like all his race still, he has gathered wisdom from sorrow. As a true poet should have, he has philosophy, also vision and imagination—vision for himself and his people, imagination that sees facts in terms of beauty and presents truths with vital imagery. Add thereto craftsmanship acquired in the best traditions of English poetry and you have Hill the poet.
The merit of his book cannot be shown by lines and stanzas. As ever with true art, the merit lies in the whole effect of complete poems. Still, we may here first detach from this and that poem a stanza or two, despite the wrong to art. The first and fourth stanzas of the title-poem will indicate Mr. Hill’s technique and philosophy:
In honor of all suffering,
A song to which my heart can bring
The homage of believing—
A song the heavy-laden hears
Above the clamor of his fears,
While still he walks with blinding tears,
And drains the cup of grieving.
******
So long as life is steeped in wrong,
And nations cry: “How long, how long!”
I look not to the wise and strong
For peace and self-possession;
But right will rise, and mercy shine,
And justice lift her conquering sign
Where lowly people starve and pine
Beneath a world oppression.
The character and temper of the Negro in those gentler aspects which make such an appeal to the heart are revealed in the following sonnet:
MATER DOLOROSA
God’s presence to the full. The city street
May wrap me in the tumult and the heat
Of futile striving; bitter winds may blow
With winter-wilting freeze of hail and snow,
And all my hopes lie shattered in defeat;
But in my heart the springtime blossoms sweet,
And heaven seems very near the way I go.
Which thou hast breathed for many a troubled year
With bended knee and swarthy-streaming face—
“Uphold him, Father, with a double care:
He is but mortal, yet his days must bear
The world cross, and the burden of his race.”
If these poems, taken collectively, do not declare “what is on the Negro’s mind” they yet truly reveal, to the reflecting person, what has sunk deep into his heart. They are therefore a message to America, a protest, an appeal, and a warning. They will penetrate, I predict, through breast-armor of aes triplex into the hearts of those whom sermons and editorials fail to touch in the springs of action. Such is the virtue of music wed to persuasive words. In strong lines of soaring blank verse, in which Mr. Hill is particularly capable, he makes a direct appeal to America in behalf of his people, in a poem entitled Armageddon:
And gave to them your God, and poured your blood
Into their veins to make them what they are,
They shall not fail you in the hour of need.
They own in them enough of you to feel
All that has made you masters in your time—
Dear art and riches, unremitting toil,
Proud types of beauty, an unbounded will
To triumph, wondrous science and old law—
These have they learned to covet and to share.
To hot abhorrence and unmeasured dread
Of your undaunted sins against the light—
Red sins of lust, of envy and of hate,
Of guilty gain extorted from the weak,
Of brotherhood traduced, and God denied.
All this have they beheld without revolt,
And borne the brunt in agonizing prayer.
Older than Egypt, whence the dark man gave
The rudiments of learning to all lands,
Have been a strong constraint. And they have dreamed
Of a peculiar mission under heaven,
And felt the force of unexampled gifts
That make for them a rare inheritance—
The gift of cheerful confidence in man,
The gift of calm endurance, solacing
An infinite capacity for pain,
The gift of an unfeigned humility,
Blinding the eyes of strident arrogance
And bigot pride to that philosophy
And that far-glancing wisdom which it veils,
Of joy in beauty, hardihood in toil,
Of hope in tribulation, and of wide
Adaptive power without a parallel
In chronicles of men.
A sonnet entitled To a Caged Canary in a Negro Restaurant will present the poet’s people with the persuasiveness of pathos as the foregoing poem with the persuasiveness of reason:
A cage cannot restrain the rapturous joy
Which thou dost shed abroad. Thou dost employ
Thy bondage for high uses. Grievous wrong
Is thine; yet in thy heart glows full and strong
The tropic sun, though far beyond thy flight,
And though thou flutterest there by day and night
Above the clamor of a dusky throng.
So let my will, albeit hedged about
By creed and caste, feed on the light within;
So let my song sing through the bars of doubt
With light and healing where despair has been;
So let my people bide their time and place,
A hindered but a sunny-hearted race.
It would be an injustice to this poet did I convey the idea that his seventy-odd poems are exclusively occupied with race wrongs and oppression. Not a few of them bear no stamp of an oppressed or afflicted spirit, though of sorrow they may have been nurtured.
A lyric of pure loveliness is the following, entitled
TO A NOBLY-GIFTED SINGER
Telleth of an inward grace;
In her dark eyes I have seen
Sorrows of the Nazarene;
In the proud and perfect mould
Of her body I behold,
Rounded in a single view,
The good, the beautiful, the true;
And when her spirit goes up-winging
On sweet airs of artless singing,
Surely the heavenly spheres rejoice
In union with a kindred voice.
Schoolmaster I said Mr. Hill was. To represent his didactic quality, not his purer lyrical note, nor yet his narrative beauty, I choose the following piece:
SELF-DETERMINATION
The Philosophy of the American Negro
That demons plot for our decline and fall;
We bring four benedictions which the meek
Unto the proud are privileged to speak,
Four gifts by which amidst all stern-browed races
We move with kindly hearts and shining faces.
All notwithstanding, here we hold us fast.
Down through the years the mighty ships of state
Have all been broken on the rocks of hate.
We slough off trouble, and refuse to die.
The Indian stood unyielding, stark and grim;
We saw him perish, and we learned of him
To mix a grain of philosophic mirth
With all the crass injustices of earth.
These never won, yet centuries of schools,
Of priests, and all the work of brush and pen
Have not availed to win the wisest men
From futile faith in battleship and shell:
We see them fall, and mark that folly well.
No strange voice reaches us across the sea;
No crime at home shall stir us from this soil.
Ours is the guerdon, ours the blight of toil,
But raised above it by a faith sublime
We choose to suffer here and bide our time.
Our countrymen will follow in our way.
But though teacher Leslie Pinckney Hill is singer too. And though he has a message for America he also has music. His powers are rich, varied, cultured, and developing. His second book will be better than his excellent first.
CHAPTER III
THE HEART OF NEGRO WOMANHOOD
I. Miss Eva A. Jessye
From newspapers I have clipt several poems by Miss Jessye that exhibit a nature touched to the finer things of the world and of life. She has fancy, and skill in expression. I concluded section I of chapter II with a poem of hers, and I will here give two more. The first, in a lighter vein, betrays the human nature of a school-teacher in the midst of her vexations while she tries to appear above the reach of common desires.
SPRING WITH THE TEACHER
Of swelling bud and fancies free
As western winds, but then, ah me!
May cannot come too soon;
The rover calls in every child,
And sets his pulses running wild!
Joe, learn to study quietly!
Why girl, it surely has me beat
How you forget geography!
Brazil’s in Spain? Here, close that book!
What caused the Civil War, you say?—
Suzanna says somebody took
Her beads; return them right away!
To put that story book away!
I’ll call the roll: Beatrice Moore,
Why were you absent yesterday?
Why yes, I heard that mocking bird.
Lee Arthur, straighten up your face!
Well, surely, class, you never heard
Of adverbs having tense and case!
My, my, ’tis surely not forgot!
If it were fun or devilment
You’d know it all, sir, like as not!
Who put that bent pin in my chair?
No one of course—bent pins can walk!
I’ll tell you though, had I sat there
I’d make these straps and switches talk.
(I wish that I were going, too!)
Oh, no! I couldn’t get away,
I have so many things to do.
Well, there’s the bell! Goodbye, goodbye,
And be good children, don’t forget.”—
Well, thank the Lord they’re gone, but I
Can hear their joyous laughter yet.
Of swelling bud and fancies free
As western winds, but then, ah me!
May cannot come too soon!
Though the moral motive is rarely consistent with the artistic, yet in the next poem of Miss Jessye’s I shall give there is a perfect reconciliation. Original no doubt is the idea of this poem, but Sappho, it seems to me, as one of her fragments bears witness, had meditated upon the very same idea twenty-five centuries ago.
TO A ROSEBUD
A castaway, a dead, a lifeless thing,
A few days since I saw thee, wet with dew,
A bud of promise to thy parent cling,
Now thou art crushed yet lovely as before,
The adverse winds but waft thy fragrance more.
And crush thy petals in the reeking ground:
Perchance some one in pity for thy state
Will pick thee up in reverence profound—
Lo, thou art pure with virtue more intense,
Thy perfume grows from earthly detriments.
A greater beauty springing from the sod,
May sweetness well as incense from the urn,
Which, rising high, enshrouds the throne of God.
Envoy of Hope, this lesson I disclose—
“Be Ever Sweet,” thou humble, fragrant rose!
Miss Jessye, now a teacher of the piano in Muskogee, Oklahoma, was born in Kansas and was graduated from Western University. She has taken prizes in oratory, poetry, and essay-writing. Yet in her early twenties, she has a volume of verse ready for publication.
II. Mrs. J. W. Hammond
Self-taught, and disclaiming knowledge of books, Mrs. Hammond of Omaha, Nebraska, contributes to The Monitor of that city verses of musical cadences and gentle beauty. Her response to the scenes and objects of nature is that of a poetic mind. The spirit of joy sings through her verses. As a representative poem the following may be accepted:
THE OPTIMIST