The Book of American Negro Poetry by Edited by James Weldon Johnson
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Edited by James Weldon Johnson >> The Book of American Negro Poetry
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9 THE BOOK OF AMERICAN NEGRO POETRY
Chosen and Edited
With An Essay On The Negro's Creative Genius
by
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
Author of "Fifty Years and Other Poems"
1922
Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., New York
Printed in the U.S.A. by the Quinn & Boden Company, Rahway, N.J.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
A Negro Love Song
Little Brown Baby
Ships That Pass in the Night
Lover's Lane
The Debt
The Haunted Oak
When de Co'n Pone's Hot
A Death Song
JAMES EDWIN CAMPBELL
Negro Serenade
De Cunjah Man
Uncle Eph's Banjo Song
Ol' Doc' Hyar
When Ol' Sis' Judy Pray
Compensation
JAMES D. CORROTHERS
At the Closed Gate of Justice
Paul Laurence Dunbar
The Negro Singer
The Road to the Bow
In the Matter of Two Men
An Indignation Dinner
Dream and the Song
DANIEL WEBSTER DAVIS
'Weh Down Souf
Hog Meat
WILLIAM H. A. MOORE
Dusk Song
It Was Not Fate
W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS
A Litany of Atlanta
GEORGE MARION McCLELLAN
Dogwood Blossoms
A Butterfly in Church
The Hills of Sewanee
The Feet of Judas
WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
Sandy Star and Willie Gee
I. Sculptured Worship
II. Laughing It Out
III. The Exit
IV. The Way
V. Onus Probandi
Del Cascar
Turn Me to My Yellow Leaves
Ironic: LL.D
Scintilla
Sic Vita
Rhapsody
GEORGE REGINALD MARGETSON
Stanzas from The Fledgling Bard and the Poetry Society
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
O Black and Unknown Bards
Sence You Went Away
The Creation
The White Witch
Mother Night
O Southland
Brothers
Fifty Years
JOHN WESLEY HOLLOWAY
Miss Melerlee
Calling the Doctor
The Corn Song
Black Mammies
LESLIE PINCKNEY HILL
Tuskegee
Christmas at Melrose
Summer Magic
The Teacher
EDWARD SMYTH JONES
A Song of Thanks
RAY G. DANDRIDGE
Time to Die
'Ittle Touzle Head
Zalka Peetruza
Sprin' Fevah
De Drum Majah
FENTON JOHNSON
Children of the Sun
The New Day
Tired
The Banjo Player
The Scarlet Woman
R. NATHANIEL DETT
The Rubinstein Staccato Etude
GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON
The Heart of a Woman
Youth
Lost Illusions
I Want to Die While You Love Me
Welt
My Little Dreams
CLAUDE McKAY
The Lynching
If We Must Die
To the White Fiends
The Harlem Dancer
Harlem Shadows
After the Winter
Spring in New Hampshire
The Tired Worker
The Barrier
To O. E. A
Flame-Heart
Two-an'-Six
JOSEPH S. COTTER, JR.
A Prayer
And What Shall You Say
Is It Because I Am Black?
The Band of Gideon
Rain Music
Supplication
ROSCOE C. JAMISON
The Negro Soldiers
JESSIE FAUSET
La Vie C'est la Vie
Christmas Eve in France
Dead Fires
Oriflamme
Oblivion
ANNE SPENCER
Before the Feast of Shushan
At the Carnival
The Wife-Woman
Translation
Dunbar
ALEX ROGERS
Why Adam Sinned
The Rain Song
WAVERLEY TURNER CARMICHAEL
Keep Me, Jesus, Keep Me
Winter Is Coming
ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON
Sonnet
CHARLES BERTRAM JOHNSON
A Little Cabin
Negro Poets
OTTO LEYLAND BOHANAN
The Dawn's Awake!
The Washer-Woman
THEODORE HENRY SHACKLEFORD
The Big Bell in Zion
LUCIAN B. WATKINS
Star of Ethiopia
Two Points of View
To Our Friends
BENJAMIN BRAWLEY
My Hero
Chaucer
JOSHUA HENRY JONES, JR.
To a Skull
PREFACE
There is, perhaps, a better excuse for giving an Anthology of American
Negro Poetry to the public than can be offered for many of the anthologies
that have recently been issued. The public, generally speaking, does not
know that there are American Negro poets--to supply this lack of
information is, alone, a work worthy of somebody's effort.
Moreover, the matter of Negro poets and the production of literature by
the colored people in this country involves more than supplying
information that is lacking. It is a matter which has a direct bearing on
the most vital of American problems.
A people may become great through many means, but there is only one
measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final
measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the
literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a
people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No
people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked
upon by the world as distinctly inferior.
The status of the Negro in the United States' is more a question of
national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And
nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status
than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the
production of literature and art.
Is there likelihood that the American Negro will be able to do this? There
is, for the good reason that he possesses the innate powers. He has the
emotional endowment, the originality and artistic conception, and, what is
more important, the power of creating that which has universal appeal and
influence.
I make here what may appear to be a more startling statement by saying
that the Negro has already proved the possession of these powers by being
the creator of the only things artistic that have yet sprung from American
soil and been universally acknowledged as distinctive American products.
These creations by the American Negro may be summed up under four heads.
The first two are the Uncle Remus stories, which were collected by Joel
Chandler Harris, and the "spirituals" or slave songs, to which the Fisk
Jubilee Singers made the public and the musicians of both the United
States and Europe listen. The Uncle Remus stories constitute the greatest
body of folklore that America has produced, and the "spirituals" the
greatest body of folk-song. I shall speak of the "spirituals" later
because they are more than folk-songs, for in them the Negro sounded the
depths, if he did not scale the heights, of music.
The other two creations are the Cakewalk and ragtime. We do not need to go
very far back to remember when cakewalking was the rage in the United
States, Europe and South America. Society in this country and royalty
abroad spent time in practicing the intricate steps. Paris pronounced it
the "poetry of motion." The popularity of the cakewalk passed away but its
influence remained. The influence can be seen to-day on any American stage
where there is dancing.
The influence which the Negro has exercised on the art of dancing in this
country has been almost absolute. For generations the "buck and wing" and
the "stop-time" dances, which are strictly Negro, have been familiar to
American theatre audiences. A few years ago the public discovered the
"turkey trot," the "eagle rock," "ballin' the jack," and several other
varieties that started the modern dance craze. These dances were quickly
followed by the "tango," a dance originated by the Negroes of Cuba and
later transplanted to South America. (This fact is attested by no less
authority than Vincente Blasco Ibanez in his "Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse.") Half the floor space in the country was then turned over to
dancing, and highly paid exponents sprang up everywhere. The most noted,
Mr. Vernon Castle, and, by the way, an Englishman, never danced except to
the music of a colored band, and he never failed to state to his audiences
that most of his dances had long been done by "your colored people," as he
put it.
Any one who witnesses a musical production in which there is dancing
cannot fail to notice the Negro stamp on all the movements; a stamp which
even the great vogue of Russian dances that swept the country about the
time of the popular dance craze could not affect. That peculiar swaying of
the shoulders which you see done everywhere by the blond girls of the
chorus is nothing more than a movement from the Negro dance referred to
above, the "eagle rock." Occasionally the movement takes on a suggestion
of the, now outlawed, "shimmy."
As for Ragtime, I go straight to the statement that it is the one
artistic production by which America is known the world over. It has been
all-conquering. Everywhere it is hailed as "American music."
For a dozen years or so there has been a steady tendency to divorce
Ragtime from the Negro; in fact, to take from him the credit of having
originated it. Probably the younger people of the present generation do
not know that Ragtime is of Negro origin. The change wrought in Ragtime
and the way in which it is accepted by the country have been brought about
chiefly through the change which has gradually been made in the words and
stories accompanying the music. Once the text of all Ragtime songs was
written in Negro dialect, and was about Negroes in the cabin or in the
cotton field or on the levee or at a jubilee or on Sixth Avenue or at a
ball, and about their love affairs. To-day, only a small proportion of
Ragtime songs relate at all to the Negro. The truth is, Ragtime is now
national rather than racial. But that does not abolish in any way the
claim of the American Negro as its originator.
Ragtime music was originated by colored piano players in the questionable
resorts of St. Louis, Memphis, and other Mississippi River towns. These
men did not know any more about the theory of music than they did about
the theory of the universe. They were guided by their natural musical
instinct and talent, but above all by the Negro's extraordinary sense of
rhythm. Any one who is familiar with Ragtime may note that its chief charm
is not in melody, but in rhythms. These players often improvised crude
and, at times, vulgar words to fit the music. This was the beginning of
the Ragtime song.
Ragtime music got its first popular hearing at Chicago during the world's
fair in that city. From Chicago it made its way to New York, and then
started on its universal triumph.
The earliest Ragtime songs, like Topsy, "jes' grew." Some of these
earliest songs were taken down by white men, the words slightly altered or
changed, and published under the names of the arrangers. They sprang into
immediate popularity and earned small fortunes. The first to become widely
known was "The Bully," a levee song which had been long used by
roustabouts along the Mississippi. It was introduced in New York by Miss
May Irwin, and gained instant popularity. Another one of these "jes' grew"
songs was one which for a while disputed for place with Yankee Doodle;
perhaps, disputes it even to-day. That song was "A Hot Time in the Old
Town To-night"; introduced and made popular by the colored regimental
bands during the Spanish-American War.
Later there came along a number of colored men who were able to transcribe
the old songs and write original ones. I was, about that time, writing
words to music for the music show stage in New York. I was collaborating
with my brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and the late Bob Cole. I remember
that we appropriated about the last one of the old "jes' grew" songs. It
was a song which had been sung for years all through the South. The words
were unprintable, but the tune was irresistible, and belonged to nobody.
We took it, re-wrote the verses, telling an entirely different story from
the original, left the chorus as it was, and published the song, at first
under the name of "Will Handy." It became very popular with college boys,
especially at football games, and perhaps still is. The song was, "Oh,
Didn't He Ramble!"
In the beginning, and for quite a while, almost all of the Ragtime songs
that were deliberately composed were the work of colored writers. Now, the
colored composers, even in this particular field, are greatly outnumbered
by the white.
The reader might be curious to know if the "jes' grew" songs have ceased
to grow. No, they have not; they are growing all the time. The country has
lately been flooded with several varieties of "The Blues." These "Blues,"
too, had their origin in Memphis, and the towns along the Mississippi.
They are a sort of lament of a lover who is feeling "blue" over the loss
of his sweetheart. The "Blues" of Memphis have been adulterated so much on
Broadway that they have lost their pristine hue. But whenever you hear a
piece of music which has a strain like this in it:
[Illustration: Music]
you will know you are listening to something which belonged originally to
Beale Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee. The original "Memphis Blues," so far as
it can be credited to a composer, must be credited to Mr. W. C. Handy, a
colored musician of Memphis.
As illustrations of the genuine Ragtime song in the making, I quote the
words of two that were popular with the Southern colored soldiers in
France. Here is the first:
"Mah mammy's lyin' in her grave,
Mah daddy done run away,
Mah sister's married a gamblin' man,
An' I've done gone astray.
Yes, I've done gone astray, po' boy,
An' I've done gone astray,
Mah sister's married a gamblin' man,
An' I've done gone astray, po' boy."
These lines are crude, but they contain something of real poetry, of that
elusive thing which nobody can define and that you can only tell that it
is there when you feel it. You cannot read these lines without becoming
reflective and feeling sorry for "Po' Boy."
Now, take in this word picture of utter dejection:
"I'm jes' as misabul as I can be,
I'm unhappy even if I am free,
I'm feelin' down, I'm feelin' blue;
I wander 'round, don't know what to do.
I'm go'n lay mah haid on de railroad line,
Let de B. & O. come and pacify mah min'."
These lines are, no doubt, one of the many versions of the famous "Blues."
They are also crude, but they go straight to the mark. The last two lines
move with the swiftness of all great tragedy.
In spite of the bans which musicians and music teachers have placed on it,
the people still demand and enjoy Ragtime. In fact, there is not a corner
of the civilized world in which it is not known and liked. And this proves
its originality, for if it were an imitation, the people of Europe, at
least, would not have found it a novelty. And it is proof of a more
important thing, it is proof that Ragtime possesses the vital spark, the
power to appeal universally, without which any artistic production, no
matter how approved its form may be, is dead.
Of course, there are those who will deny that Ragtime is an artistic
production. American musicians, especially, instead of investigating
Ragtime, dismiss it with a contemptuous word. But this has been the course
of scholasticism in every branch of art. Whatever new thing the people
like is pooh-poohed; whatever is popular is regarded as not worth while.
The fact is, nothing great or enduring in music has ever sprung
full-fledged from the brain of any master; the best he gives the world he
gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of
his genius.
Ragtime deserves serious attention. There is a lot of colorless and
vicious imitation, but there is enough that is genuine. In one composition
alone, "The Memphis Blues," the musician will find not only great melodic
beauty, but a polyphonic structure that is amazing.
It is obvious that Ragtime has influenced, and in a large measure,
become our popular music; but not many would know that it has influenced
even our religious music. Those who are familiar with gospel hymns can at
once see this influence if they will compare the songs of thirty years
ago, such as "In the Sweet Bye and Bye," "The Ninety and Nine," etc., with
the up-to-date, syncopated tunes that are sung in Sunday Schools,
Christian Endeavor Societies, Y.M.C.A.'s and like gatherings to-day.
Ragtime has not only influenced American music, it has influenced American
life; indeed, it has saturated American life. It has become the popular
medium for our national expression musically. And who can say that it does
not express the blare and jangle and the surge, too, of our national
spirit?
Any one who doubts that there is a peculiar heel-tickling,
smile-provoking, joy-awakening, response-compelling charm in Ragtime needs
only to hear a skilful performer play the genuine article, needs only to
listen to its bizarre harmonies, its audacious resolutions often
consisting of an abrupt jump from one key to another, its intricate
rhythms in which the accents fall in the most unexpected places but in
which the fundamental beat is never lost in order to be convinced. I
believe it has its place as well as the music which draws from us sighs
and tears.
Now, these dances which I have referred to and Ragtime music may be lower
forms of art, but they are evidence of a power that will some day be
applied to the higher forms. And even now we need not stop at the Negro's
accomplishment through these lower forms. In the "spirituals," or slave
songs, the Negro has given America not only its only folksongs, but a mass
of noble music. I never think of this music but that I am struck by the
wonder, the miracle of its production. How did the men who originated
these songs manage to do it? The sentiments are easily accounted for; they
are, for the most part, taken from the Bible. But the melodies, where did
they come from? Some of them so weirdly sweet, and others so wonderfully
strong. Take, for instance, "Go Down, Moses"; I doubt that there is a
stronger theme in the whole musical literature of the world.
[Illustration: Music (Oppressed so hard they could not stand, Let my
people go. Go down, Mo-ses, way down in E-gypt land, Tell ole Pha-raoh,
Let my people go.)]
It is to be noted that whereas the chief characteristic of Ragtime is
rhythm, the chief characteristic of the "spirituals" is melody. The
melodies of "Steal Away to Jesus," "Swing Low Sweet Chariot," "Nobody
Knows de Trouble I See," "I Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray," "Deep River," "O,
Freedom Over Me," and many others of these songs possess a beauty that
is--what shall I say? poignant. In the riotous rhythms of Ragtime the
Negro expressed his irrepressible buoyancy, his keen response to the sheer
joy of living; in the "spirituals" he voiced his sense of beauty and his
deep religious feeling.
Naturally, not as much can be said for the words of these songs as for the
music. Most of the songs are religious. Some of them are songs expressing
faith and endurance and a longing for freedom. In the religious songs, the
sentiments and often the entire lines are taken bodily from the Bible.
However, there is no doubt that some of these religious songs have a
meaning apart from the Biblical text. It is evident that the opening lines
of "Go Down, Moses,"
"Go down, Moses,
'Way down in Egypt land;
Tell old Pharoah,
Let my people go."
have a significance beyond the bondage of Israel in Egypt.
The bulk of the lines to these songs, as is the case in all communal
music, is made up of choral iteration and incremental repetition of the
leader's lines. If the words are read, this constant iteration and
repetition are found to be tiresome; and it must be admitted that the
lines themselves are often very trite. And, yet, there is frequently
revealed a flash of real, primitive poetry. I give the following examples:
"Sometimes I feel like an eagle in de air."
"You may bury me in de East,
You may bury me in de West,
But I'll hear de trumpet sound
In-a dat mornin'."
"I know de moonlight, I know de starlight;
I lay dis body down.
I walk in de moonlight, I walk in de starlight;
I lay dis body down.
I know de graveyard, I know de graveyard,
When I lay dis body down.
I walk in de graveyard, I walk troo de graveyard
To lay dis body down.
I lay in de grave an' stretch out my arms;
I lay dis body down.
I go to de judgment in de evenin' of de day
When I lay dis body down.
An' my soul an' yo' soul will meet in de day
When I lay dis body down."
Regarding the line, "I lay in de grave an' stretch out my arms," Col.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson of Boston, one of the first to give these slave
songs serious study, said: "Never it seems to me, since man first lived
and suffered, was his infinite longing for peace uttered more plaintively
than in that line."
These Negro folksongs constitute a vast mine of material that has been
neglected almost absolutely. The only white writers who have in recent
years given adequate attention and study to this music, that I know of,
are Mr. H.E. Krehbiel and Mrs. Natalie Curtis Burlin. We have our native
composers denying the worth and importance of this music, and trying to
manufacture grand opera out of so-called Indian themes.
But there is a great hope for the development of this music, and that hope
is the Negro himself. A worthy beginning has already been made by
Burleigh, Cook, Johnson, and Dett. And there will yet come great Negro
composers who will take this music and voice through it not only the soul
of their race, but the soul of America.
And does it not seem odd that this greatest gift of the Negro has been the
most neglected of all he possesses? Money and effort have been expended
upon his development in every direction except this. This gift has been
regarded as a kind of side show, something for occasional exhibition;
wherein it is the touchstone, it is the magic thing, it is that by which
the Negro can bridge all chasms. No persons, however hostile, can listen
to Negroes singing this wonderful music without having their hostility
melted down.
This power of the Negro to suck up the national spirit from the soil and
create something artistic and original, which, at the same time, possesses
the note of universal appeal, is due to a remarkable racial gift of
adaptability; it is more than adaptability, it is a transfusive quality.
And the Negro has exercised this transfusive quality not only here in
America, where the race lives in large numbers, but in European countries,
where the number has been almost infinitesimal.
Is it not curious to know that the greatest poet of Russia is Alexander
Pushkin, a man of African descent; that the greatest romancer of France
is Alexander Dumas, a man of African descent; and that one of the greatest
musicians of England is Coleridge-Taylor, a man of African descent?
The fact is fairly well known that the father of Dumas was a Negro of
the French West Indies, and that the father of Coleridge-Taylor was a
native-born African; but the facts concerning Pushkin's African ancestry
are not so familiar.
When Peter the Great was Czar of Russia, some potentate presented him with
a full-blooded Negro of gigantic size. Peter, the most eccentric ruler of
modern times, dressed this Negro up in soldier clothes, christened him
Hannibal, and made him a special body-guard.
But Hannibal had more than size, he had brain and ability. He not only
looked picturesque and imposing in soldier clothes, he showed that he had
in him the making of a real soldier. Peter recognized this, and eventually
made him a general. He afterwards ennobled him, and Hannibal, later,
married one of the ladies of the Russian court. This same Hannibal was
great-grandfather of Pushkin, the national poet of Russia, the man who
bears the same relation to Russian literature that Shakespeare bears to
English literature.
I know the question naturally arises: If out of the few Negroes who have
lived in France there came a Dumas; and out of the few Negroes who have
lived in England there came a Coleridge-Taylor; and if from the man who
was at the time, probably, the only Negro in Russia there sprang that
country's national poet, why have not the millions of Negroes in the
United States with all the emotional and artistic endowment claimed for
them produced a Dumas, or a Coleridge-Taylor, or a Pushkin?
The question seems difficult, but there is an answer. The Negro in the
United States is consuming all of his intellectual energy in this
gruelling race-struggle. And the same statement may be made in a general
way about the white South. Why does not the white South produce literature
and art? The white South, too, is consuming all of its intellectual energy
in this lamentable conflict. Nearly all of the mental efforts of the white
South run through one narrow channel. The life of every Southern white man
and all of his activities are impassably limited by the ever present Negro
problem. And that is why, as Mr. H. L. Mencken puts it, in all that vast
region, with its thirty or forty million people and its territory as large
as a half a dozen Frances or Germanys, there is not a single poet, not a
serious historian, not a creditable composer, not a critic good or bad,
not a dramatist dead or alive.
But, even so, the American Negro has accomplished something in pure
literature. The list of those who have done so would be surprising both by
its length and the excellence of the achievements. One of the great books
written in this country since the Civil War is the work of a colored man,
"The Souls of Black Folk," by W.E.B. Du Bois.
Such a list begins with Phillis Wheatley. In 1761 a slave ship landed a
cargo of slaves in Boston. Among them was a little girl seven or eight
years of age. She attracted the attention of John Wheatley, a wealthy
gentleman of Boston, who purchased her as a servant for his wife. Mrs.
Wheatley was a benevolent woman. She noticed the girl's quick mind and
determined to give her opportunity for its development. Twelve years later
Phillis published a volume of poems. The book was brought out in London,
where Phillis was for several months an object of great curiosity and
attention.
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