Chapter II: The Present Renaissance of the Negro (2)

Born at Callao, Missouri, October 5, 1880, of a Kentucky mother and a Virginia father, Charles Bertram Johnson attended a one-room school “across the railroad track,” where--who can explain this?--he was “Introduced to Bacon, Shakespeare, and the art of rhyming.” It reads like an old story. Some freak of a schoolmaster whose head is filled with “useless” lore--poetry, tales, and “such stuff”--nurturing a child of genius into song. But it was Johnson’s mother who was the great influence in his life. She was an “adept at rhyming” and “she initiated me into the world of color and melody”--so writes our poet. It is always the mother. Then, by chance--but how marvelously chance comes to the aid of the predestined!--by chance, he learns of Dunbar and his poetry. The ambition to be a poet of his people like Dunbar possesses him. He knows the path to that goal is education. He therefore makes his way to a little college at Macon, Missouri, from which, after five years, he is graduated--without having received any help in the art of poetry, however. Two terms at a summer school and special instruction by correspondence seem to have aided him here, or to have induced the belief that he had been aided. For twenty-odd years he followed the profession of teaching. For ten years of that period he also preached. The ministry now claims his entire energies, and the muse knocks less and less frequently at his door.

Yet he still sings. In a recent number of _The Crisis_ I find a poem of his that in suggesting a life of toil growing to a peaceful close is filled with soothing melody:

OLD FRIENDS

Sit here before my grate,
Until it’s ashen gray,
Or till the night grows late,
And talk the time away.

I cannot think to sleep,
And miss your golden speech,
My bed of dreams will keep--
You here within my reach.

I have so much to say,
The time is short at best,
A bit of toil and play,
And after that comes rest.

But you and I know now
The wisdom of the soul,
The years that seamed the brow
Have made our visions whole.

Sit here before my grate
Until the ash is cold;
The things you say of late
Are fine as shriven gold.

Even though one be born to sing, if circumstances have made him a preacher he may be expected to moralize his song. Whether we shall be reconciled to this will depend on the art with which it is done. If the moral idea be a sweet human one, and if the verse still be melifluous, we will submit, and our delight will be twofold--ethical and esthetical. We will put our preacher-poet of Missouri to the test:

SO MUCH

So much of love I need,
And tender passioned care,
Of human fault and greed
To make me unaware:

So much of love I owe,
That, ere my life be done,
How shall I keep His will
To owe not any one?

Truth is, Mr. Johnson is not given to preaching in verse any more than other poets. His sole aim is beauty. He assures me it is truth. Instead of admitting disagreement I only assert that, being a poet, he must find all truth beautiful. It is only for relative thinking we need the three terms, truth, goodness, and beauty.

I will conclude this presentation of the Missouri singer with a lyrical sermonette:

A RAIN SONG

Chill the rain falls, chill!
Dull gray the world; the vale
Rain-swept; wind-swept the hill;
“But gloom and doubt prevail,”
My heart breaks forth to say.

Ere thus its sorrow-note,
“Cheer up! Cheer up, to-day!
To-morrow is to be!”
Babbled from a joyous throat,
A robin’s in a mist-gray tree.

Then off to keep a tryst--
He preened his drabbled cloak--
Doughty little optimist!--
As if in answer, broke
The sunlight through that oak.

_3. Fenton Johnson_

Dreams and visions--such are the treasures of suffering loyal hearts: dreams, visions, and song. Happy even in their sorrows the people to whom God has given poets to be their spokesmen to the world. Else their hearts should stifle with woe. As the prophet was of old so in these times the poet. As a prophet speaks Fenton Johnson, his heart yearning toward the black folk of our land:

THESE ARE MY PEOPLE

These are my people, I have built for them
A castle in the cloister of my heart;
And I shall fight that they may dwell therein.
The God that gave Sojourner tongue of fire
Has made with me a righteous covenant
That these, my brothers of the dusk, shall rise
To Sinai and thence in purple walk
A newer Canaan, vineyards of the West.
The rods that chasten us shall break as straw
And fire consume the godless in the South;
The hand that struck the helpless of my race
Shall wither as a leaf in drear November,
And liberty, the nectar God has blest,
Shall flow as free as wine in Babylon.
O God of Covenants, forget us not!

Fenton Johnson seems to be more deeply rooted in the song-traditions of his people than are most of his fellow-poets. To him the classic Spirituals afford inspiration and pattern. Whoever is familiar with those “canticles of love and woe” will recognize their influence throughout Mr. Johnson’s three volumes of song. I shall make no attempt here to illustrate this truth but shall rather select a piece or two that will represent the poet’s general qualities. Other poems more typical of him as a melodist could be found but these have special traits that commend them for this place.

THE PLAINT OF THE FACTORY CHILD

Mother, must I work all day?
All the day? Ay, all the day?
Must my little hands be torn?
And my heart bleed, all forlorn?
I am but a child of five,
And the street is all alive
With the tops and balls and toys,--
Pretty tops and balls and toys.

Day in, day out, I toil--toil!
And all that I know is toil;
Never laugh as others do,
Never cry as others do,
Never see the stars at night,
Nor the golden glow of sunlight,--
And all for but a silver coin,--
Just a worthless silver coin.

Would that death might come to me!
That blessed death might come to me,
And lead me to waters cool,
Lying in a tranquil pool,
Up there where the angels sing,
And the ivy tendrils cling
To the land of play and song,--
Fairy land of play and song.

THE MULATTO’S SONG

Die, you vain but sweet desires!
Die, you living, burning fires!
I am like a Prince of France,--
Like a prince whose noble sires
Have been robbed of heritage;
I am phantom derelict,
Drifting on a flaming sea.

Everywhere I go, I strive,
Vainly strive for greater things;
Daisies die, and stars are cold,
And canary never sings;
Where I go they mock my name,
Never grant me liberty,
Chance to breathe and chance to do.

_The Vision of Lazarus_, contained in _A Little Dreaming_, is a blank-verse poem of about three-hundred lines, original, well-sustained, imaginative, and deeply impressive.

In one of the newer methods of verse, and yet with a splendid suggestion of the old Spirituals, I will take from a recent magazine a poem by Mr. Johnson that will show how the vision of his people is turned toward the future, from the welter of struggling forces in the World War:

THE NEW DAY

From a vision red with war I awoke and saw the Prince
of Peace hovering over No Man’s Land.
Loud the whistles blew and thunder of cannon was drowned
by the happy shouting of the people.
From the Sinai that faces Armageddon I heard this chant
from the throats of white-robed angels:

Blow your trumpets, little children!
From the East and from the West,
From the cities in the valley,
From God’s dwelling on the mountain,
Blow your blast that Peace might know
She is Queen of God’s great army.
With the crying blood of millions
We have written deep her name
In the Book of all the Ages;
With the lilies in the valley,
With the roses by the Mersey,
With the golden flower of Jersey,
We have crowned her smooth young temples.
Where her footsteps cease to falter
Golden grain will greet the morning,
Where her chariot descends
Shall be broken down the altar
Of the gods of dark disturbance.
Nevermore shall men know suffering,
Nevermore shall women wailing
Shake to grief the God of Heaven.
From the East and from the West,
From the cities in the valley,
From God’s dwelling on the mountain,
Little children, blow your trumpets!

From Ethiopia, groaning ’neath her heavy burdens I
heard the music of the old slave songs.
I heard the wail of warriors, dusk brown, who grimly
fought the fight of others in the trenches of Mars.
I heard the plea of blood-stained men of dusk and
the crimson in my veins leapt furiously:

Forget not, O my brothers, how we fought
In No Man’s Land that peace might come again!
Forget not, O my brothers, how we gave
Red blood to save the freedom of the world!
We were not free, our tawny hands were tied;
But Belgium’s plight and Serbia’s woes we shared
Each rise of sun or setting of the moon.
So when the bugle blast had called us forth
We went not like the surly brute of yore,
But, as the Spartan, proud to give the world
The freedom that we never knew nor shared.
These chains, O brothers mine, have weighed us down
As Samson in the temple of the gods;
Unloosen them and let us breathe the air
That makes the goldenrod the flower of Christ;
For we have been with thee in No Man’s Land,
Through lake of fire and down to Hell itself;
And now we ask of thee our liberty,
Our freedom in the land of Stars and Stripes.

I am glad that the Prince of Peace is hovering over No Man’s Land.

4. _Adolphus Johnson_

From the _Preface_ of Adolphus Johnson’s _The Silver Chord_ I will take a paragraph that is more poetic and perfect in expression than any stanza in his book. Poetry, I think, is in him, but when he wrote these rhymes he was not yet sufficiently disciplined in expression. But this is how he can say a thing in prose:

“As the Goddess of Music takes down her lute, touches its silver chords, and sets the summer melodies of nature to words, so an inspiration comes to me in my profoundest slumbers and gently awakens my highest faculties to the finest thought and serenest contemplation herein expressed. Always remember that a book is your best friend when it compels you to think, disenthralls your reason, enkindles your hopes, vivifies your imagination, and makes easier all the burdens of your daily life.”

_IV. William Stanley Braithwaite_

The critical and the creative faculties rarely dwell together in harmony. One or the other finally predominates. In the case of Mr. Braithwaite it seems to be the critical faculty. He has preferred, it seems, to be America’s chief anthologist, encouraging others up rugged Parnassus, rather than himself to stand on the heights of song. Since 1913 he has edited a series of annual anthologies of American magazine verse, which he has provided with critical reviews of the verse output of the respective year. Of several anthologies of English verse also he is the editor. Three books of original verse stand to his credit: _Lyrics of Life and Love_ (1904), _The House of Falling Leaves_ (1908), and _Sandy Star and Willie Gee_ (1922). These dates seem to prove that the creative impulse has waned.

Verse artistry, in simple forms, reaches a degree of excellence in Mr. Braithwaite’s lyrics that has rarely been surpassed in our times. Graceful and esthetically satisfying expression is given to elusive or mystical and rare fancies. I will give one of his brief lyrics as an example of the qualities to which I allude:

SANDY STAR

No more from out the sunset,
No more across the foam,
No more across the windy hills
Will Sandy Star come home.

He went away to search it,
With a curse upon his tongue,
And in his hands the staff of life
Made music as it swung.

I wonder if he found it,
And knows the mystery now:
Our Sandy Star who went away
With the secret on his brow.

In a number of Mr. Braithwaite’s lyrics, as in this one, there is an atmosphere of mystery that, with the charming simplicity of manner, strongly suggests Blake. There is a strangeness in all beauty, it has been said. There is commonly something of Faëryland in the finest lyric poetry. Another lyric illustrating this quality in Mr. Braithwaite is the following:

IT’S A LONG WAY

It’s a long way the sea-winds blow
Over the sea-plains blue,--
But longer far has my heart to go
Before its dreams come true.

It’s work we must, and love we must,
And do the best we may,
And take the hope of dreams in trust
To keep us day by day.

It’s a long way the sea-winds blow--
But somewhere lies a shore--
Thus down the tide of Time shall flow
My dreams forevermore.

Mr. Braithwaite’s art rises above race. He seems not to be race-conscious in his writing, whether prose or verse. Yet no man can say but that race has given his poetry the distinctive quality I have indicated. In this connection a most interesting poem is his “A New England Spinster.” The detachment is perfect, the analysis is done in the spirit of absolute art. I will quote but two of its dozen or so stanzas:

She dwells alone, and never heeds
How strange may sound her own footfall,
And yet is prompt to others’ needs,
Or ready at a neighbor’s call.

But still her world is one apart,
Serene above desire and change;
There are no hills beyond her heart,
Beyond her gate, no winds that range.

Here is the true artist’s imagination that penetrates to the secrets of life. No poet’s lyrics, with their deceptive simplicity, better reward study for a full appreciation of their idea. So much of suggestion to the reader of the poems which follow:

FOSCATI

Blest be Foscati! You’ve heard tell
How--spirit and flesh of him--blown to flame,
Leaped the stars for heaven, dropped back to hell,
And felt no shame.

I here indite this record of his journey:
The splendor of his epical will to perform
Life’s best, with the lance of Truth at Tourney--
Till caught in the storm.

Of a woman’s face and hair like scented clover,
Te Deums, Lauds, and Magnificat, he
Praised with tongue of saint, heart of lover--
Missed all, but found Foscati!

AUTUMN SADNESS

The warm October rain fell upon his dream,
When once again the autumn sadness stirred,
And murmured through his blood, like a hidden stream
In a forest, unheard.

The drowsy rain battered against his delight
Of the half forgotten poignancies,
That settle in the dusk of an autumn night
On a world one hears and sees.

One was, he thought, an echo merely,
A glow enshadowed of truths untraced;
But the autumn sadness, brought him yearly,
Was a joy embraced.

THANKING GOD

The way folks had of thanking God
He found annoying, till he thought
Of flame and coolness in the sod--
Of balms and blessings that they wrought.

And so the habit grew, and then--
Of when and how he did not care--
He found his God as other men
The mystic verb in a grammar of prayer.

He never knelt, nor uttered words--
His laughter felt no chastening rod;
“My being,” he said, “is a choir of birds,
And all my senses are thanking God.”

Mr. Braithwaite is thoroughly conversant, as these selections indicate, with the subtleties and finest effects of the art poetic, and his impulses to write spring from the deepest human speculations, the purest motives of art. Hence in his work he takes his place among the few.

_V. George Reginald Margetson_

Under tropical suns, amid the tropical luxuriance of nature, developed the many-hued imagination of the subject of this sketch. His nature is tropical, for Mr. Margetson is a prolific bard: _Songs of Life_, _The Fledgling Bard and the Poetry Society_, _Ethiopia’s Flight_, _England in the West Indies_--four published books, and more yet unpublished--are proof. No excerpts can fully reveal the distinctive quality of Mr. Margetson’s poetry--its sonorous and ever-varying flow, like a mountain stream, its descriptive richness in which it resembles his native islands. For he was born in the British West Indies, and there lived the first twenty years of his life. Coming to America in 1897, his home has been in Boston or its environment since that time. Educated in the Moravian School at St. Kitts, he has lived with and in the English poets from Spenser to Byron--Byron seems to have been his favorite--and so has cultivated his native talent. I can give here but one brief lyric from his pen.

THE LIGHT OF VICTORY

In the East a star is rising,
Breaking through the clouds of war,
With a light old arts revising
Shattering steel and iron bar.
Freedom’s heirs with banners blazing,
Emblems of Democracy,
At the magic light are gazing
Battling with Autocracy.

Through the night brave souls are marching
With the armies of the Free;
Where the Stars and Stripes o’er-arching
Form a sheltering canopy.
Allies! hold a front united!
Shaping well our destiny;
Let each brutal wrong be righted
In the drive for Liberty!

_VI. William Moore_

The productions I have seen in the Negro magazines and newspapers from William Moore’s pen give me the idea of a poet distinctly original and distinctly endowed with imagination. If there appears some obscurity in his poems let it not be too hastily set down against him as a fault. Some ideas are intrinsically obscure. The expression of them that should be lucid would be false, inadequate. Some poets there needs must be who, escaping from the inevitable, the commonplace, will transport us out into infinity to confront the eternal mysteries. Mr. Moore does this in two sonnets which I will give to represent his poetic work:

EXPECTANCY

I do not care for sleep, I’ll wait awhile
For Love to come out of the darkness, wait
For laughter, gifted with the frequent fate
Of dusk-lit hope, to touch me with the smile
Of moon and star and joy of that last mile
Before I reach the sea. The ships are late
And mayhap laden with the precious freight
Dawn brings from Life’s eternal summer isle.

And should I find the sweeter fruits of dream--
The oranges of love and mating song--
I’ll laugh so true the morn will gayly seem
Endless and ships full laden with a throng
Of beauty, dreams and loves will come to me
Out of the surge of yonder silver sea.

AS THE OLD YEAR PASSED

I stood with dear friend Death awhile last night,
Out where the stars shone with a lustre true
In sacred dreams and all the old and new
Of love and life winged in a silver flight
Off to the sea of peace that waits where white,
Pale silences melt in the tranquil blue
Of skies so tender beauty doth imbue
The time with holiness and singing light.

My heart is Life, my soul, O Death, is thine!
Is thine to kiss with yearning life again,
Is thine to strengthen and to sweet incline
To peace and mellowed dream of joy’s refrain.
I’ll stand with Death again to-night, I think,
Out where the stars reveal life’s deeper brink.

_VII. Joshua Henry Jones, Jr._

Poets are born and nurtured in all conditions of life: Joseph Cotter the elder was a slave-woman’s child; Dunbar wrote his first book between the runs of the elevator he tended; Leon R. Harris was left in infancy to the dreary shelter of an orphanage, then indentured to a brutal farmer; Carmichael came from the cabin of an unlettered farmer in the Black Belt of Alabama; of a dozen others the story is similar. Born in poverty, up through adversities they struggled, with little human help save perhaps from the croons and caresses of a singing mother, and a few terms at a wretched school, they toiled into the kingdom of knowledge and entered the world of poetry. Some, however, have had the advantages afforded by parents of culture and of means. Among these is the subject of this sketch, the son of Bishop J. H. Jones, of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He has had the best educational opportunity offered by American colleges. He is a graduate of Brown University. Writing has been his employment since graduation, and he has been on the staffs of several New England papers. His first book of poems, entitled _The Heart of the World_ (1919), now in the second edition, reveals at once a student of poetry and an independent artist in verse. His second book, _Poems of the Four Seas_ (1921), shows that his vein is still rich in ore.

In Chapter VIII I give his “Goodbye, Old Year.” Another poem of similar technique takes for its title the last words of Colonel Roosevelt: “Turn out the light, please.” The reader cannot but note the sense of proper effect exhibited in the short sentences, the very manner of a dying man. But more than this will be perceived in this poem. It will seem to have sprung out of the world-weary soul of the young poet himself. Struggle, grief, weariness in the strife, have been his also. Hence:

TURN OUT THE LIGHT

Turn out the light. Now would I slumber,
I’m weary with the toil of day.
Let me forget my pains to number.
Turn out the light. Dreams come to play.

Turn out the light. The hours were dreary.
Clouds of despair long hid the sun.
I’ve battled hard and now I’m weary.
Turn out the light. My day is done.

I’ve done life’s best gloom’s ways to brighten--
I’ve scattered cheer from heart to heart,
And where I could I’ve sought to righten
The wrongs of men ere day depart.

This morn ’twas bright with hope--and cheery.
This noon gave courage--made me brave.
But as the sun sank I grew weary
Till now my soul for rest doth crave.

Turn out the light. I’ve done my duty
To friend and enemy as well.
I go to sleep where things of beauty
In glitt’ring chambers ever dwell.

Turn out the light. Now would I slumber.
To rest--to dream--soon go we all.
Let’s hope we wake soul free of cumber.
Turn out the light. Dream comrades call.

The next piece I select from Mr. Jones’s first book will represent his talent in another sphere. I suggest that comparison might be made between this song in literary English and Mr. Johnson’s Negro love song in dialect, page 226.

A SOUTHERN LOVE SONG

Dogwoods all a-bloom
Perfume earth’s big room,
White full moon is gliding o’er the sky serene.
Quiet reigns about,
In the house and out;
Hoot owl in the hollow mopes with solemn mien.
Birds have gone to rest
In each tree-top nest;
Cotton fields a-shimmer flash forth silver-green.

O’er the wild cane brake,
Whip-poor-wills awake,
And they speak in tender voicings, Heart, of You.
Answering my call,
Through the leafy hall,
Telling how I’m waiting for your tripping, Sue.
All the world is glad,
Just because I’m mad.
Sense-bereft am I through my great love for you.

Night is all a-smile,
Happy all the while.
That is why my heart so filled with song o’erflows.
I have tarried long,
Lilting here my song.
And I’ll ever waiting be till life’s step slows.
Come to me, my girl,
Precious more than pearl,
I’ll be waiting for you where the grapevine grows.

How my heart doth yearn,
And with anguish burn,
Hungry for sweet pains awaked with your embrace.
Starward goes my cry.
Echo hears my sigh.
Heaven itself its pity at my plight shows trace.
Parson waits to wed.
Soon the nuptials said.
I’ve a rose-clad cottage reared for you to grace.

The title-piece of Mr. Jones’s first volume reveals his mastery of effective form and his command of the language of passionate appeal. The World War, in which the Negroes of the country gave liberally and heroically, both of blood and treasure, for democracy, quickened failing hopes in them and kindled anew their aspirations. In this poem the writer speaks for his entire race:

THE HEART OF THE WORLD

In the heart of the world is the call for peace--
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 for the wealthy; peace for the poor;
Peace on the hillside, and peace on the moor._

In the heart of the world is the call for right:
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.

_Right for the lowly; right for the great;
Right all to pilot to happiness’ gate._

In the heart of the world is the call for love:
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 in weak peoples; love in the strong;
Love that will banish all hatred and wrong._

In the heart of the world is the call of God;
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 in the highborn; God in the low;
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

They bind his feet; they thong his hands
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.

They build a pyre of torch and flame
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.

Go tell the world what men have done
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 am an Iconoclast.
I break the limbs of idols
And smash the traditions of men.

I am an Anarchist.
I believe in war and destruction--
Not in the killing of men,
But the killing of creed and custom.

I am an Agnostic.
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.

I believe in Justice and Freedom.
To me Liberty is priestly and kingly;
Freedom is my Bride,
Liberty my Angel of Light,
Justice my God.

I oppose all laws of state or country,
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 statesman’s mantle,
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.

This then is my sternest struggle,
Ease the load and sing my song,
Lift the lame and cheer the cheerless
As they plod the road along;
And we see ourselves transfigured
In a new and bigger plan;
Man transformed, his own Messiah,
God embodied into man.

For the whining craven class of men Mr. Hawkins has little respect:

The man who complains
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 dread days which the seers have foretold,
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.

We have come to the travail of troublous times,
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.

In the brute strength of the sword men rely,
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.

Locked in death-struggle humanity’s host,
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.

Time dims the glare of the pomp and applause,
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

Ask me why I love you, dear,
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.

Ask me why I love you, dear,
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.

Ask me why I love you, dear,
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.

Ask me why I love you, dear,
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 green the springing April grass,
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.

Too wonderful the April night,
Too faintly sweet the first May flowers,
The stars too gloriously bright,
For me to spend the evening hours,
When fields are fresh and streams are leaping,
Wearied, exhausted, dully sleeping.

THE LYNCHING

His spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven.
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

Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes
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

I would be wandering in distant fields
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_)

She danced, near nude, to tom-tom beat,
With swaying arms and flying feet,
’Mid swirling spangles, gauze and lace,
Her all was dancing--save her face.

A conscience, dumb to brooding fears,
Companioned hearing deaf to cheers;
A body, marshalled by the will,
Kept dancing while a heart stood still:

And eyes obsessed with vacant stare
Looked over heads to empty air,
As though they sought to find therein
Redemption for a maiden sin.

’Twas thus, amid force-driven grace,
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:

I have a song that few will sing
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

O mother, there are moments when I know
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.

These moments are the angels of that prayer
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:

Because ye schooled them in the arts of life,
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.

But deeper in them still is something steeled
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.

For other strains of blood that flow from times
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:

Thou little golden bird of happy song!
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

All the pleasance of her face
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_

Four things we will not do, in spite of all
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.

_We will not hate._ Law, custom, creed and caste,
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 will not cease to laugh and multiply._
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.

_We will not use the ancient carnal tools._
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.

_We will not waver in our loyalty._
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.

And if we hold to this, we dream some day
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.