Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850 by Hutchinson George; Young John K

Author:Hutchinson, George; Young, John K.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press

The Negro Poets of the U.S.A.

In the “Negro Poets of the U.S.A.” section, whether a poem qualifies as “poetry of the Negro” is based primarily on the poet's race and country of birth. In this, The Poetry of the Negro seems to replicate contemporaneous anthologies’ basic definition of Negro poetry as poetry written by people who “belonged to the group, which is defined in the United States as Negro” (vii). As might be expected, most of the poems in this section are either first-person-narrated poems written in the voice of a Black speaker commenting on an aspect of Black life or third-person-narrated poems that speak about an aspect of the “experience of the Negro in the Western world.”

George Moses Horton's “On Liberty and Slavery” and James Weldon Johnson's “Fifty Years 1863–1913” exemplify the first-person poems. The speaker in “On Liberty and Slavery” is a slave, likely Horton himself, calling on Heaven and Liberty to free him from “this slavish chain” (line 2) and “to soothe the pain—to quell the grief / and anguish of a slave” (lines 11–12). The voice in “Fifty Years” is one Black man speaking to “brothers” (line 4) “on the Fiftieth Anniversary / of the Signing / of the Emancipation Proclamation” (lines 1–3) reminding them that “this land is ours by right of birth / this land is ours by right of toil / we helped to turn its virgin earth / our sweat is in its fruitful soil” (lines 20–24).

The third-person poems include Frances E. W. Harper's “The Slave Auction” and Frank Horne's “On Seeing Two Brown Boys in a Catholic Church.” The speaker in “The Slave Auction” describes the emotional scene surrounding the auction and sale of children, women, and men into slavery. The story is told in the third person: “The sale began—young girls were there” (line 1). But it is clear that the speaker sympathizes or empathizes with the individuals being sold, their families, and their communities: “And mothers stood with streaming eyes / and saw their dearest children sold / Unheeded rose their bitter cries / While tyrants bartered them for gold” (lines 5–8). The speaker in Horne's poem actually addresses the two brown boys: “it is fitting that you be here / little brown boys / with Christ-like eyes / and curling hair” (lines 1–4).

The “Negro Poets of the U.S.A.” section also includes poems that appear to center on an aspect of the broader human condition without any specific reference to race, including Phillis Wheatley's “On Imagination” and Angelina Weld Grimké's “A Winter Twilight.” Although the collection does not include any poems by Louisiana freemen of color, Hughes and Bontemps include this population in their history of Negro poetry. They are part of the history even though they “had not been taught to link themselves personally with the condition of the slaves, and their poetry scarcely touched racial feeling” (ix). The section undoubtedly illustrates Hughes and Bontemps's statement that “where the author is Negro any theme is considered within” to be part of “the poetry of the Negro” (vii).

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