Negro Poets and Their Poems. Robert Thomas Kerlin

Negro Poets and Their Poems - Robert Thomas Kerlin


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soul of the African in those centuries when he could only with patience endure and trust in God—and wail these mournfullest of melodies. Some lyrical drama like “Prometheus Bound,” but more touching as being more human; some epic like “Paradise Lost,” but nearer to the common heart of man, and more lyrical; some “Divina Commedia,” that shall be the voice of those silent centuries of slavery, as Dante’s poem was the voice of the long-silent epoch preceding it, or some lyrical “passion play” like that of Oberammergau, is the not improbable achievement of some descendant of the slaves.

      In a poem of tender appeal, James Weldon Johnson has celebrated the “black and unknown bards,” who, without art, and even without letters, produced from their hearts, weighed down with sorrows, the immortal Spirituals:

      O black and unknown bards of long ago,

       How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?

       How, in your darkness, did you come to know

       The power and beauty of the minstrel’s lyre?

       Who first from midst his bonds lifted his eyes?

       Who first from out the still watch, lone and long,

       Feeling the ancient faith of prophets rise

       Within his dark-kept soul, burst into song?

      So begins this noble tribute to the nameless natural poets whose hearts, touched as a harp by the Divine Spirit, gave forth “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “Nobody Knows de Trouble I See,” “Steal Away to Jesus,” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll.”

      Great praise does indeed rightly belong to that black slave-folk who gave to the world this treasure of religious song. To the world, I say, for they belong as truly to the whole world as do the quaint and incomparable animal stories of Uncle Remus. Their appeal is to every human heart, but especially to the heart that has known great sorrow and which looks to God for help.

      It is only of late their meaning has begun to dawn upon us—their tragic, heart-searching meaning. Who in hearing these Spirituals sung to-day by the heirs of their creators can doubt what they meant when they were wailed in the quarters or shouted in wild frenzy in the camp-meetings of the slaves? Even the broken, poverty-stricken English adds infinitely to the pathos:

      I’m walking on borrowed land,

       This world ain’t none of my home.

      We’ll stand the storm, it won’t be long.

      Oh, walk together children,

       Don’t get weary.

      My heavenly home is bright and fair,

       Nor pain nor death can enter there.

      Oh, steal away and pray,

       I’m looking for my Jesus.

      Oh, freedom! oh, freedom! oh, freedom over me!

       An’ before I’d be a slave,

       I’ll be buried in my grave,

       And go home to my Lord an’ be free.

      Not a word here but had two meanings for the slave, a worldly one and a spiritual one, and only one meaning, the spiritual one, for the master—who gladly saw this religious frenzy as an emotional safety-valve.

      In certain aspects these Spirituals suggest the songs of Zion, the Psalms. Trouble is the mother of song, particularly of religious song. In trouble the soul cries out to God—“a very present help in time of trouble.” The Psalms and the Spirituals alike rise de profundis. But in one respect the songs of the African slaves differ from the songs of Israel in captivity: there is no prayer for vengeance in the Spirituals, no vindictive spirit ever even suggested. We can but wonder now at this. For slavery at its best was degrading, cruel, and oppressive. Yet no imprecation, such as mars so many a beautiful Psalm, ever found its way into a plantation Spiritual. A convincing testimony this to that spirit in the African slave which Christ, by precept and example, sought to establish in His disciples. If the Negro in our present day is growing bitter toward the white race, it behooves us to inquire why it is so, in view of his indisputable patience, meekness, and good-nature. We might find in our present régime a more intolerable cruelty than belonged even to slavery, if we investigated honestly. There is certainly a bitter and vindictive tone in much of the Afro-American verse now appearing in the colored press. For both races it augurs ill.

      But I have not yet indicated the precise place of these Spirituals in the world’s treasury of song. They have a close kinship with the Psalms but a yet closer one with the chanted prayers of the primitive Christians, the Christians when they were the outcasts of the Roman Empire when to be a Christian was to be a martyr. In secret places, in catacombs, they sent up their triumphant though sorrowful songs, they chanted their litanies

      “—that came

       Like the volcano’s tongue of flame

       Up from the burning core below—

       The canticles of love and woe.”

      Inspiration

       By Meta Warrick Fuller

      shell and patiently takes the blows that fall. The world knew not then, nor fully knows now—partly because of African buoyancy, pliability, and optimism—what tears they wept. These Spirituals are the golden vials spoken of in Holy Writ, “full of odors, which are the prayers of saints”—an everlasting memorial before the throne of God. Other vials there are, different from these, and they, too, are at God’s right hand.

      A Negro sculptor, Mrs. Meta Warrick Fuller, not knowing of this proverb about the tortoise which has only recently been brought from Africa, but simply interpreting Negro life in America, has embodied the very idea of the African saying in bronze. Under the title “Secret Sorrow” a man is represented as eating his own heart.

      The interpretation in art of the Spirituals, or a poetry of art developed along the lines and in the spirit of those songs, is something we may expect the black singers of no distant day to produce. Already we have many a poem that offers striking reminiscences of them.

      2. The Seculars

      But other songs the Negro has which are more noteworthy from the point of view of art than the Spirituals: songs that are richer in artistic effects, more elaborate in form, more varied and copious in expression. These are the Negro’s secular songs and rhymes, his dance, play, and love-making songs, his gnomic and nursery rhymes.[1] It is not exaggeration to say that in rhythmic and melodic effects they surpass any other body of folk-verse whatsoever. In wit, wisdom, and quaint turns of humor no other folk-rhymes equal them. Prolific, too, in such productions the race seems to have been, since so many at this late day were to be found.

      It comes not within the scope of this anthology to include any of these folk-rhymes of the elder day, but a few specimens seem necessary to indicate to the young Negro who would be a poet his rich heritage of song and to the white reader what essentially poetic traits the Negro has by nature. It was “black and unknown bards,” slaves, too, who sang or said these rhymes:

      Oh laugh an’ sing an’ don’t git tired.

       We’s all gwine home, some Mond’y,

       To de honey pond an’ fritter trees;

       An’ ev’ry day’ll be Sund’y.

      Pride, too, and


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