Negro Poets and Their Poems

James Weldon Johnson entitled a section of his book Jingles and Croons. Among these pieces, so disparagingly designated, are to be found some of the best dialect writing in the whole range of Negro literature. Every quality of excellence is there. The one piece I give is perhaps not above the average of a score in his book:

MY LADY’S LIPS AM LIKE DE HONEY

(Negro Love Song)

Numerous other writers would furnish quite as good specimens of dialectical verse as those given. This medium of artistic expression is not being neglected, it is only made secondary and, as it were, incidental. By perhaps half of the poets it is not used. With a few, and they of no little talent, it is the main medium. Among this few, Carmichael has been named; S. Jonathan Clark, of Dublin, Mississippi, and Theodore Henry Shackelford, of Jamaica Plains, New York, are others.

Shackelford, with little schooling, displays a versatility of talent. His own pen has illustrated with interesting realistic sketches his book entitled My Country and Other Poems, and for some of his lyrics he has written music. A large proportion of his pieces are in dialect, much in the spirit of Dunbar. His best productions in standard English are ballads. He tells a tale in verse with Wordsworthian simplicity and feeling. Mr. Clark is a school principal, with the education that implies. He has not yet published a book.

CHAPTER VII

THE POETRY OF PROTEST

As elsewhere intimated there is being produced in America a literature of which America, as the term is commonly understood, is not aware. It is a literature of protest—protest sometimes pathetic and prayerful, sometimes vehement and bitter. It comes from Negro writers, in prose and verse, in the various forms of fiction, drama, essay, editorial, and lyric. It is only with the lyric form that we are here concerned. Of that we shall make a special presentation, in this chapter.

An artistic and restrained expression of the protest against irrational color prejudice, in the plaintive, pathetic key, is found in the following free-verse poem by Winston Allen:

THE BLACK VIOLINIST

Sometimes the protest runs in a lighter vein—as thus, in verses entitled:

OLD JIM CROW

But the Negro is seldom humorous these days on the subject of racial discriminations. Occasionally, in dialect verse, he still makes merry with the foibles or over-accentuated traits of certain types of the Negro. In general, however, the Negro verse-smith goes to his work with a grim aspect. He is there to smite. Sometimes the anvil clangs, more mightily than musically. But there is precedent.

A stanza each from two poems somewhat intense will serve to show the character of much verse in Negro newspapers. The first is from verses entitled “Sympathy,” by Tilford Jones:

The second is the last stanza of a poem entitled Shall Race Hatred Prevail? by Adeline Carter Watson.

The following two poems have a world of pathos for every reflecting person, in the unanswered question of each. The first is by Mrs. Georgia Douglas Johnson:

TO MY SON

The second is by Will Sexton:

TO MY LOST CHILD

In much of this utterance of protest, this arraignment of the white man’s civilization that rebukes God, there may be more passion than poesy. But out of such passion, as it were a rumbling of thunder, the lightning will one day leap. A poet born and reared in South Carolina, Joshua Henry Jones, Jr., appeals from man’s inhumanities to God’s prevailing power in passionate stanzas of which this is the first, the rest being like:

This or a similar lynching provoked the following lines from another, Walter Everette Hawkins, in a poem entitled A Festival in Christendom. After relating that the white people of a certain community were on their way to church on the Sabbath day, the poem continues:

Few are the poets quoted or mentioned in this volume who have not contributed to this literature of protest. James Weldon Johnson, whose predominant motive is artistic creation, affords more than one poem in which the note of protest is sounded in pathos. Pathos is indeed the characteristic note of the great body of Negro verse. Aided by the two preceding extracts to an understanding of Johnson’s point of view, the reader will appreciate the following poem, remarkable for that restraint which adds to the potency of art:

THE BLACK MAMMY

There died in Fort McHenry hospital, February, 2, 1921, a soldier-poet of the Negro race, who had been called “the poet laureate of the New Negro,” his name Lucian B. Watkins. He deserved the title, whatever may be the exact definition of “the New Negro.” For in his lyrics, of many forms, racial consciousness reached a degree of intensity to which only a disciplined sense of art set a limit.—He was born in a cabin at Chesterfield, Virginia, struggled in the usual way for the rudiments of book-knowledge, became a teacher, then a soldier. His health was wrecked in the World War. He died before his powers were matured.—Short and simple are the annals of the poet. Before one of his intenser race poems I shall give his last lyric cry, uttered but a few days before his lingering death:

The following sonnet, entitled “The New Negro,” will serve to represent much of Watkins’s verse:

The protest not infrequently takes the form of entreaty and appeal, sometimes the form of an invocation of divine wrath upon the doers of evil. The following poem from Watkins, unique and effective in form and biblical phrasing, is the kind of appeal that will not out of the mind:

A MESSAGE TO THE MODERN PHARAOHS

Mr. Hawkins, whom I have quoted, entitled his book Chords and Discords. What did he mean by “discords”? Perhaps a disparagement of his muse’s efforts at music. Perhaps, and rather, something in the content, for the contrasts are sharp, the tones are piercing. These “discords” abound in contemporary Negro verse. Between the octave and the sestet of the following sonnet, by Mrs. Carrie W. Clifford, the discord is of the kind that stabs you:

AN EASTER MESSAGE

The Negro’s deep resentment of his wrongs has found its most artistic expression in the verse of a poet who came to us from Jamaica—Mr. Claude McKay. In another chapter I have given the reader an opportunity to judge of his merits. He will be represented here by a sonnet, written, I believe, shortly after the race-riot in the national capital, July, 1919. It has been widely reprinted in the Negro newspapers.

IF WE MUST DIE

Race consciousness has recently attained an extraordinary pitch in the Negro, and there seems to be no prospect of any abatement. The verse-smiths one and all have borne witness to a feeling of great intensity on all subjects pertaining to their race—the discriminations and injustices practised against it, the limitations that would be imposed upon it, the contumelies that would offend it. Ardent appeals are therefore made to race pride and ardent exhortations to race unity. The ancient rôle of the poet whereby he is identified with the prophet is being resumed by the enkindled souls of black men. With their natural gift for music and eloquence, with their increasing culture, with their building up of a poetic tradition now in process, with this intensification of race consciousness, almost anything may be expected of the Negro in another generation.

CHAPTER VIII

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

Altogether admirable is the disposition of Negro verse-writers to eulogize the notable personages of their race, the men and women who have blazed the trail of advance. The mention of Attucks, Black Sampson, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and others like these, all practically unknown to white readers, is frequent, and reverential odes and sonnets to Douglass, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Washington, Dunbar, are many and enthusiastic. Here as elsewhere, however, I refrain from giving mere titles and from comments on productions merely cited. The reader will find such poems as I allude to in every poet’s volume. I refer to this body of eulogistic verse only to suggest to the reader who takes up the writings of the American Negroes that he will learn that they have a heritage of heroic traditions from which poetry springs in every race.

Instead of giving here such specimens of poetic eulogy as I have alluded to, however, I shall give a few poems of a more general significance, poems of appeal or tribute to the entire black race or poems of affectionate tribute to individuals. A free-verse poem entitled “The Negro,” by Mr. Langston Hughes, on page 200, may be recalled. Here is a sonnet with the same title, by Mr. McKay, which appeared in The People’s Pilot, published in Richmond, Va.:

THE NEGRO

From another Virginia magazine, also now defunct, The Praiseworthy Muse, of Norfolk, I take the following poem, signed by John J. Fenner, Jr.:

RISE! YOUNG NEGRO—RISE!

In spirit and in form both these productions seem to be quite noteworthy. The first has in it something darkly and terribly ominous, while the second has all the fervor of religion in its youth. The class of poems to follow will afford a contrast. They will bear witness to that pride of race, perhaps, which we of the white race have commended to the colored people:

DAYBREAK

THE NEGRO WOMAN

THE NEGRO CHILD

THE MOTHER

The foregoing poems are generic in character, the following, specific. And yet there is much in these also that is typical and universal:

TO A NEGRO MOTHER

TO MY GRANDMOTHER

EBON MAID AND GIRL OF MINE