White man owe me ’leven, and pay me seven,
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done
And ef I hadn’t tuck that, I wouldn’t got none.
Do you catch the echoes of Communism here? If you do, you are suffering from an auditory illusion; for that irreverent ditty was written long before Communism was conceived of, long before Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital. If there’s any Communism in that verse, it is of a divine origin.
A Negro woman exults consciously and publicly in the disorganization of life which America forces her to live:
My floor is dirty and my house ain’t never clean
My floor is dirty and my house ain’t never clean
Ain’t got no husband but I got a dozen married men…
Still another woman’s knowledge of the sexual prowess of all the men living in her neighborhood reveals a compulsive promiscuity which she unshamedly and lyrically advertises:
There’s nineteen men livin’ in mah neighborhood
Nineteen men livin’ in mah neighborhood
Eighteen of them are fools, an’ de other ain’ no dog-gone good
Well, what do you want? What can you expect from men and women who have been driven out of life?
But there are times when these torrid moods of meanness are lifted by gifted writers to the level of social and political direction, as in the bitter, fighting lyrics of Warren Cuney, who sums up what Jim Crowism in wartime means to Negroes:
Well, airplanes flying across the land and the sea
Everybody’s flying but a Negro like me
Uncle Sam says your place is on the ground
When I fly my airplanes I want no Negroes around
The same thing for the navy when ships go to sea
All they got is a mess-boy’s job for me…
But what was happening, so to speak, upstairs, when the Negro migrants were venting their spleen against the world? If you remember, we left the Negro middle-class writers standing before the Chinese Wall of America, narcissistically preoccupied with their feelings, saying, “If you prick me, I bleed; if you put fire to me, I burn; I am like you who exclude me….” Perhaps the most graphic and lyrical of these men was W. E. B. DuBois; indeed, one might say that it was with him that the Negro complaint reached almost religious heights of expression. DuBois prays to God in public:
Listen to us, Thy children: our faces dark with doubt are made a mockery in Thy sanctuary. With uplifted hands we front Thy heaven, O God, crying; We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!
And then, vehemently, in Old Testament style:
Doth not this justice of hell stink in Thy nostrils, O God? How long shall the mounting flood of innocent blood roar in Thine ears and pound in our hearts for vengeance? Pile the pale frenzy of blood-crazed brutes who do such deeds high on Thine altar, Jehovah, and burn it in hell forever and forever.
Forgive us, good Lord! we know not what we say!
Moods such as these have suffused the many books of DuBois, and where the mood is absent per se, we find it projected in terms of history, fiction, verse. Here we see the outright curse of the Negro migrant lifted to a hymn of bitterness; here we see the long, drawn-out moan of the blues turned into a phrase of lament; here we see the brutal cynicism of illiterate Negroes converted into irony; here we watch the jerky lines of The Dirty Dozens transmute themselves into the surging rhythms of free verse; here indeed we see Pushkin and Dumas turned into raging, livid demons! Poor Phyllis Wheatley would have burned to a cinder if such searing emotions had ever entered her frail body.
Following DuBois, James Weldon Johnson lifted his voice; listen to Johnson, as conservative a Negro as ever lived in America; but his eyes were riveted upon this:
Quick! Chain him to that oak! It will resist
The fire much longer than this slender pine.
Now bring the fuel! Pile it ’round him! Wait!
Pile not so fast or high, or we shall lose
The agony and terror in his face.
And now the torch! Good fuel that! the flames
Already leap head-high. Ha! hear that shriek!
And there’s another! wilder than the first.
Fetch water! Water! Pour a little on
The fire, lest it should burn too fast. Hold so!
Now let it slowly blaze again. See there!
He squirms! He groans! His eyes bulge wildly out,
Searching around in vain appeal for help!
Was it otherwise with other writers? No. You’ve seen the images of horror that a conservative like James Weldon Johnson evoked. Yet, I, coming from an entirely different social stratum, wove the same vision of horror into another pattern in a poem called “Between the World and Me”:
And one morning while in the woods I suddenly stumbled upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms.
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me…
There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly upon a cushion of gray ashes.
There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt finger accusingly at the sky.
There were torn tree limbs, tiny veins of burnt leaves, and a scorched coil of greasy hemp;
A vacant shoe, an empty tie, a ripped shirt, a lonely hat, and a pair of trousers stiff with black blood.
And upon the trampled grass were buttons, dead matches, butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a drained gin-flask, and a whore’s lipstick;
Scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the lingering smell of gasoline.
And through the morning air the sun poured yellow surprise into the eye sockets of a stony skull…
And while I stood there my mind was frozen with a cold pity for the life that was gone.
The ground gripped my feet and my heart was circled with icy walls of fear—
The sun died in the sky; a night wind muttered in the grass and fumbled with leaves in the trees; the woods poured forth the hungry yelping of hounds; the darkness screamed with thirsty voices; and the witnesses rose and lived:
The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves into my bones.
The gray ashes formed flesh firm and black, entering into my flesh.
The gin-flask passed from mouth to mouth; cigars and cigarettes glowed, the whore smeared the lipstick red upon her lips.
And a thousand faces swirled around me, clamoring that my life be burned…
And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth into my throat till I swallowed my own blood.
My voice was drowned in the roar of their voices, and my black wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as they bound me to the sapling.
And my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from me in patches,
And the down and the quills of the white feathers sank into my raw flesh, and I moaned in my agony.
Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a baptism of gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs.
Panting, begging, I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot sides of death.
Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in yellow surprise at the sun…
Did ever in history a race of men have for so long a time the same horror before their eyes? I know that for short periods horrors like this have come to men, but they ended at last; I know that in war horror fills the minds of all, but even wars pass. The horrors that confront Negroes stay in peace and war, in winter and summer, night and day.
Futility now enters the heart of the urban Negro; from the teeming city of Chicago Fenton Johnson comes with testimony:
I am tired of work; I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilization.
Let us take a rest, M’Lissy Jane.
I will go down to the Last Chance Saloon, drink a gallon or two of gin, shoot a game or two of dice and sleep the rest of the night
on one of Mike’s barrels…
Then again racial bitterness enters:
Throw the children into the river; civilization has given us too many. It is better to die than grow up and find out that you are colored.
Pluck the stars out of the heavens. The stars mark our destiny. The stars marked my destiny.
I am tired of civilization.
And then Claude McKay reaches a white-hot pitch of passion with:
Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.
The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
A chafing savage, down the decent street;
A passion rends my vitals as I pass
Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.
Oh, I must search for wisdom every hour,
Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw,
And find in it the superhuman power
To hold me to the letter of your law!
Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate
Against the potent poison of your hate!
Remember that white faces were hovering in the minds of black men when they wrote those lines; this is their judgment upon you and your world. Are we not a long, long way from the innocence of Phyllis Wheatley? To say that Claude McKay is a rebel is to understate it; his rebellion is a way of life.
Even when Negro poets become sensually lyrical now, they cannot escape the horrible vision of their life in America, as we can see in these lines of Jean Toomer:
O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums,
Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air,
Passing, before they strip the old tree bare
One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes
An everlasting song, a singing tree,
Caroling softly souls of slavery
What they were, and what they are to me,
Caroling softly souls of slavery.
Even at the apex of lyrical utterance, color and race form the core of meaning for Countee Cullen, as in “Heritage”:
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
The conflict between the human needs of the Negro and what is demanded of him by white America reaches a point that all but overwhelms the poet:
All day long and all night through,
One thing only must I do:
Quench my pride, and cool my blood,
Lest I perish in the flood….
No less than a black clergyman, James D. Corrothers, likens the plight of the Negro to that of Christ:
To be a Negro in a day like this
Demands forgiveness. Bruised with blow on blow,
Betrayed, like Him whose woe-dimmed eyes gave bliss
Still must one succor those who brought one low,
To be a Negro in a day like this.
George Leonard Allen again stresses the Biblical theme in an attempt to awaken compassion by reminding America that she acts like Pilate toward her darker brother:
Lord, ’twas not I that slew my guiltless brother
Without a cause, save that his skin was black!
Not my fierce hate, but that of many another
Stole what man’s puny strength cannot give back!
In a bitter, masochistic mood of self-laceration a black poet, Frank Home, tries to see his people and himself through white American eyes:
Little Black Boy
Chased down the street—
“Nigger, nigger, never die
Black face and shiny eye,
Nigger…nigger…nigger.”
A mood of poignant nostalgia makes Arna Bontemps evoke:
The golden days are gone. Why do we wait
So long upon the marble steps, blood
Falling from our open wounds? and why
Do our black faces search the sky?
But despair is not the entire picture. Each new generation of Negro writers lived in an environment that was almost the same until World War I; but that war provided the first real break in this continuity of hopelessness. Out of the restlessness left in the wake of World War I, Soviet Russia rose and sent out her calls to the oppressed. Until that time the American Negro had to depend upon white Americans for a definition of his problem, of his position, had to accept the friendship of white liberals. For three centuries white America told the Negro that nowhere on earth would he be as highly regarded as in America; and the Negro had to fight and plead within the frame of reference of that charitable advice. But suddenly that spell was broken forever. Alien ideologies gripped men’s minds and the most receptive minds in our land were those of rejected Negroes. Color consciousness lost some of its edge and was replaced in a large measure by class consciousness; with the rise of an integral working-class movement, a new sense of identification came to the American Negro.
Then, for the first time since Phyllis Wheatley, the Negro began to make a wholehearted commitment to a new world; after wandering for three hundred years, he found a new sense of oneness, a new integration; it was possible once more for him to write out of the shared hopes and aspirations of millions of people. Phyllis Wheatley visited the headquarters of George Washington, the father of our republic; Langston Hughes visited the headquarters of Lenin, the father of the Soviet Republic!
In the work of poets like Davis, Tolson, Hughes, Brown, Walker, Brooks, and Bontemps this new vision was reflected. One of the first lyrical-sounding voices of this new period was that of Langston Hughes; here, in plain images, we get, not complaints and pleas, but statements and demands:
Let America be America again,
Let it be the dream it used to be,
Let it be the pioneer in the plain,
Seeking a home where he himself is free….
Out of a mood of bitter, political anger, he says:
Good morning, Revolution,
You’re the very best friend I ever had;
Come on; let’s pal around together…
Poet Robert E. Hayden imagines the dying testimony of Gabriel, an executed slave, in these lyrical but bitter terms:
I see a thousand
Thousand slaves
Rising up
From forgotten graves
And their wounds drip flame
On slavery’s ground,
And their chains shake Dixie
With a thunder sound.
Gabriel, Gabriel
The end is nigh,
What do you wish
Before you die?
That rebellion suckle
The slave-mother’s breast
And black men
Never, never rest
Till slavery’s pillars
Lie splintered in dust
And slavery’s chains
Lie eaten with rust.
Sterling Brown hints at what the Negro would do if the numerical odds were more nearly equal:
They don’t come [at us] by ones
They don’t come by twos
But they come by tens
They got the judges
They got the lawyers
They got the law
They don’t come by ones
They got the sheriffs
They got the deputies
They don’t come by twos
They got the shotguns
They got the rope
We get the justice
In the end
And they come by tens….
Out of the Deep South, out of Texas, Melvin Tolson lifts his voice higher than that of Martin Dies and says:
Out of the dead-ends of poverty,
Through the wilderness of Superstition,
Across the barricades of Jim Crowism…
>
We advance!
With the peoples of the world…
We advance!
Margaret Walker, a Negro girl who started writing at about the age when Phyllis Wheatley began writing, says in images that Phyllis Wheatley could not imagine:
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth, let a people loving freedom come to growth, let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control!
Out of this sense of identification with the workers of other lands, I too wrote:
I am black and I have seen black hands
Raised in fists of revolt, side by side with the white fists of white workers.
And some day—and it is only this which sustains me—
Some day there shall be millions of them,
On some red day in a burst of fists on a new horizon!
Now, I’m not naive. I know that many of you are shaking your heads and wondering what value there is in writing like that; you may feel that we ought to write like Phyllis Wheatley, Alexander Dumas, or Alexander Pushkin. Well, we simply cannot; our world is not their world. We write out of what life gives us in the form of experience. And there is a value in what we Negro writers say. Is it not clear to you that the American Negro is the only group in our nation that consistently and passionately raises the question of freedom? This is a service to America and to the world. More than this: The voice of the American Negro is rapidly becoming the most representative voice of America and of oppressed people anywhere in the world today.
Let me remind you that during the past twenty-five years the great majority of the human race has undergone experiences comparable to those which Negroes in America have undergone for three centuries! These people, Russians, Germans, French, Chinese, Indians, Danes, Spaniards, suddenly heard a voice speaking of their wrongs. From the Argentine, Brazil, Sweden, Norway, England, France, and India have come questions about the American Negro; they want to know how we live; they want our testimony since we live here amidst the greatest pretense of democracy on earth. And we Negroes are answering, straight, honestly.
Black Power Page 69
