Caroling dusk

CAROLING DUSK. Copyright 1927 by Harper & Brothers. Copyright renewed 1955 by Ida M. Cullen. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N. Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto.

ISBN: 0-06-010926-2

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 27-23175

“I was born in Nelson County, Ky., February 2nd, 1861, on a farm owned by my great grandfather, Daniel Stapp, a tanner. In 1829 he bought himself and a part of his master’s farm. Later he bought his daughter, Lucinda, my mother’s mother.

Martha, my mother, was born on a nearby farm owned by her English-Indian father, Fleming Vaughan. Prior to my birth she lived in Bardstown and was a servant at “My Old Kentucky Home.” She took me to Bardstown soon after my birth and brought me to Louisville in my fourth week, and here I have lived ever since.

I attended a private school and could read before my fourth year. Conditions were such that my attendance at school was very irregular. I quit school in my eighth year, having completed the third grade, and did not return until my twenty-second year.

During this time I picked up rags in the streets and worked in tobacco factories and brick-yards. My nineteenth year found me a distiller in one of the largest distilleries in Kentucky. A turn of fortune made me a teamster. I hauled cotton and tobacco and made up my mind to enter the prize ring. Another turn of fortune put me into a Louisville public night school. Here I began in the third grade where I left off in my eighth year.

At the end of two school sessions of five months each I was promoted to the high school. I keep this diploma under lock and key, for it is the only one I have ever received.

The man who turned my attention from prize-fighting to night school and then to school teaching, and who discovered my knack for writing verses, was Dr. W. T. Peyton of Louisville. He was my greatest benefactor.

My talent of whatever kind comes from Martha, my mother. She was poet, story-teller, dramatist and musician. My published works are: A Rhyming, Links of Friendship, Caleb, the Degenerate, a poetic drama, A White Song And A Black One and Negro Tales. My unpublished works are: Life’s Dawn And Dusk, poems, Caesar Driftwood and Other One Act Plays and My Mother And Her Family.”

THE TRAGEDY OF PETE

THE WAY-SIDE WELL

James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Fla. He graduated from Atlanta University with the degree of A. B., and he received the degree of A. M. from the same University in 1904. He spent three years in graduate work at Columbia University in the City of New York. The honorary degree of Litt.D. was conferred upon him by Talladega College, Talladega, Ala., in 1917, and by Howard University in 1923.

For several years Mr. Johnson was principal of the colored high school at Jacksonville. He was admitted to the Florida bar in 1897, and practiced law in Jacksonville, until 1901, when he moved to New York to collaborate with his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, in writing for the light opera stage.

In 1906, he was appointed United States Consul at Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, being transferred as Consul to Corinto, Nicaragua, in 1909. While in Corinto, he looked after the interests of his country during the stormy days of revolution which resulted in the downfall of Zelaya, and through the abortive revolution against Diaz.

His knowledge of Spanish has been put to use in the translation of a number of Spanish plays. He was the translator for the English libretto of Goyescas, the Spanish grand opera produced by the Metropolitan Opera Company in 1915.

Mr. Johnson was for ten years the Contributing Editor of the New York Age. He added to his distinction as a newspaper writer by winning in an editorial contest one of three prizes offered by the Philadelphia Public Ledger in 1916. His poems have appeared in the Century, the Independent, the Crisis and other publications.

In the spring of 1920, Mr. Johnson was sent by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to the black republic of Haiti, where he made an investigation of U. S. misrule. The charges which Mr. Johnson published in The Nation, of New York, upon his return were taken up by Senator Harding, and as a consequence a Naval Board of Inquiry was sent to Haiti and a Congressional Investigation promised. The articles published in The Nation have since been republished in a pamphlet entitled, “Self-Determining Haiti.”

Mr. Johnson is Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a member of the Board of Directors of the American Fund for Public Service (The Garland Fund), and a trustee of Atlanta University.

Mr. Johnson’s works include:

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Fifty Years and Other Poems
English Libretto of “Goyescas”
The Book of American Negro Poetry
The Book of American Negro Spirituals
Second Book of Negro Spirituals
God’s Trombones (Seven Negro Sermons in Verse)

FROM THE GERMAN OF UHLAND

THE GLORY OF THE DAY WAS IN HER FACE

THE CREATION

(A Negro Sermon)

THE WHITE WITCH

MY CITY

I was born in Massachusetts and educated in her schools, at Fisk University, at Harvard and Berlin. My first published writings were news notes in The New York Age. Then I had an article in The Atlantic Monthly, and in 1896 my doctor’s thesis on the slave trade was published as my first book. The Souls of Black Folk appeared in 1903 and one or two other books thereafter. I taught at Wilberforce, Pennsylvania and Atlanta and became editor of The Crisis in 1910.

A LITANY OF ATLANTA⁠[9]

Done at Atlanta, in the Day of Death, 1906.

O Silent God, Thou whose voice afar in mist and mystery hath left our ears an-hungered in these fearful days—

Hear us, good Lord!

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!

We are not better than our fellows, Lord, we are but weak and human men. When our devils do deviltry, curse Thou the doer and the deed: curse them as we curse them, do to them all and more than ever they have done to innocence and weakness, to womanhood and home.

Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners!

And yet whose is the deeper guilt? Who made these devils? Who nursed them in crime and fed them on injustice? Who ravished and debauched their mothers and their grandmothers? Who bought and sold their crime, and waxed fat and rich on public iniquity?

Thou knowest, good God!

Is this Thy Justice, O Father, that guile be easier than innocence, and the innocent crucified for the guilt of the untouched guilty?

Justice, O Judge of men!

Wherefore do we pray? Is not the God of the fathers dead? Have not seers seen in Heaven’s halls Thine hearsed and lifeless form stark amidst the black and rolling smoke of sin, where all along bow bitter forms of endless dead?

Awake, Thou that sleepest!

Thou art not dead, but flown afar, up hills of endless light, thru blazing corridors of suns, where worlds do swing of good and gentle men, of women strong and free—far from the cozenage, black hypocrisy and chaste prostitution of this shameful speck of dust!

Turn again, O Lord, leave us not to perish in our sin!

A city lay in travail, God our Lord, and from her loins sprang twin Murder and Black Hate. Red was the midnight; clang, crack and cry of death and fury filled the air and trembled underneath the stars when church spires pointed silently to Thee. And all this was to sate the greed of greedy men who hide behind the veil of vengeance!

Bend us Thine ear, O Lord!

In the pale, still morning we looked upon the deed. We stopped our ears and held our leaping hands, but they—did they not wag their heads and leer and cry with bloody jaws: Cease from Crime! The word was mockery, for thus they train a hundred crimes while we do cure one.

Turn again our captivity, O Lord!

Behold this maimed and broken thing; dear God, it was an humble black man who toiled and sweat to save a bit from the pittance paid him. They told him: Work and Rise. He worked. Did this man sin? Nay, but some one told how some one said another did—one whom he had never seen nor known. Yet for that man’s crime this man lieth maimed and murdered, his wife naked to shame, his children, to poverty and evil.

Hear us, O Heavenly Father!

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 Jireh, and burn it in hell forever and forever!

Forgive us, good Lord; we know not what we say!

Bewildered we are, and passion-tost, mad with the madness of a mobbed and mocked and murdered people; straining at the armposts of Thy Throne, we raise our shackled hands and charge Thee, God, by the bones of our stolen fathers, by the tears of our dead mothers, by the very blood of Thy crucified Christ: What meaneth this? Tell us the Plan; give us the Sign!

Keep not Thou silence, O God!

Sit no longer blind, Lord God, deaf to our prayer and dumb to our dumb suffering. Surely, Thou too art not white, O Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless thing?

Ah! Christ of all the Pities!

Forgive the thought! Forgive these wild, blasphemous words. Thou art still the God of our black fathers, and in Thy soul’s soul sit some soft darkenings of the evening, some shadowings of the velvet night.

But whisper—speak—call, great God, for Thy silence is white terror to our hearts! The way, O God, show us the way and point us the path.

Whither? North is greed and South is blood; within, the coward, and without the liar. Whither? To death?

Amen! Welcome dark sleep!

Whither? To life? But not this life, dear God, not this. Let the cup pass from us, tempt us not beyond our strength, for there is that clamoring and clawing within, to whose voice we would not listen, yet shudder lest we must, and it is red, Ah! God! It is a red and awful shape.

Selah!

James Edward McCall was born September 2, 1880 at Montgomery, Ala., and received his early education in the public schools of that city. Graduating from the Alabama State Normal in 1900 he entered Howard University as a medical student the same year, but some months later was forced to abandon his medical career, following an attack of typhoid fever leading to total blindness. Undaunted by this misfortune, he at once set out to develop his literary talent. During this period he read and studied much through the eyes of others, also writing many poems, a number of which were published in Southern dailies, the New York World and other periodicals. The Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser styled him “The Blind Tom of Literature.” One of his poems, “Meditation,” has been compared to Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.”

Despite his handicap, McCall determined to acquire a college education. Accompanied by his sister, he entered Albion College (Michigan) in 1905, where he was graduated two years later, being the only sightless student in the college. Returning to his natal city, he took up journalistic work, for some years being employed as a special writer for one of the local white dailies, also contributing to other periodicals, and ultimately publishing at Montgomery a successful race weekly—The Emancipator.

This blind writer is ably assisted in his journalistic work by his wife, to whom he was married in 1914. He and his family moved to Detroit in 1920. He is city editor and editorial writer for the Detroit Independent, his editorials in this publication having been widely read and re-published throughout the country during the past two years.

THE NEW NEGRO

Angelina Weld Grimké was born in Boston, Mass., February 27, 1880. She was a student at Carleton Academy, Northfield, Minn., Cushing Academy, Ashburnham, Mass., and Girls’ Latin School, Boston. In 1902 she was graduated from the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. In 1902 she began her career as a teacher in the Armstrong Manual Training School in Washington, D. C.; since 1916 she has taught in the Dunbar High School in the same city. She is the author of a three act play Rachel published in 1920, short stories, and numerous poems.

HUSHED BY THE HANDS OF SLEEP

(To Dr. George F. Grant)

I

II

GREENNESS

THE EYES OF MY REGRET

GRASS FINGERS

SURRENDER

THE WAYS O’ MEN

TENEBRIS

WHEN THE GREEN LIES OVER THE EARTH

A MONA LISA

1.

2.

PARADOX

YOUR HANDS

I WEEP

FOR THE CANDLE LIGHT

DUSK

THE PUPPET PLAYER

A WINTER TWILIGHT

“I came into the world May 7, 1888. No notice was taken of the event save in immediate circles. I presume the world was too busy or preoccupied to note it. It happened in Chicago. I went to school and also college. My scholastic record never attained me any notoriety.

Taught school one year and repented. Having scribbled since the age of nine, had some plays produced on the stage of the old Pekin Theatre, Chicago, at the time I was nineteen. When I was twenty-four my first volume A Little Dreaming was published. Since then Visions of the Dusk (1915) and Songs of the Soil (1916) represent my own collections of my work. Also published a volume of short stories Tales of Darkest America and a group of essays on American politics For the Highest Good. Work in poetry appears in the following anthologies: The New Poetry (Monroe and Henderson), Victory (Braithwaite), Others (Kreymborg), The Chicago Anthology (Blanden), Anthology of Magazine Verse (Braithwaite), Poetry by American Negroes (White and Jackson), Negro Poets and their Poetry (Kerlin), Poets of America (Wood), Book of American Negro Poetry (J. W. Johnson), Today’s Poetry (Crawford and O’Neil) and others.

Edited two or three magazines and published one or two of them myself.

My complete autobiography I promise to the world when I am able to realize that I have done something.”

WHEN I DIE

PUCK GOES TO COURT

THE MARATHON RUNNER

“Philadelphia where I was born and educated was once the dear delight of my heart. But everything in my life has contrived to pull me away from it. First I travelled to Cornell University and came back with a Phi Beta Kappa key and a degree of Bachelor of Arts. That launched me. Since then I’ve seen England, Scotland, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Austria and Algeria. The College de France and the Alliance Francaise have given me some points on the difference between the French of Stratford-atte-Bowe and that of Paris. And there was a pleasant year too at the University of Pennsylvania when I renewed my acquaintance with Philadelphia and earned a Master’s Degree. So much for education. As to occupations I’ve taught Latin and French in the Dunbar High School in Washington, D. C. And served as Literary Editor on the Crisis in New York.

Wonderful days those! Now I’m teaching French again in the City of New York which at present claims my love and allegiance. Like the French I am fond of dancing, and adore cards and the theatre probably because I am a minister’s daughter. All my life I have wanted to write novels and have had one published. But usually, in spite of myself, I have scribbled poetry.... I should like to see the West Indies, South America and Tunis and live a long time on the French Riviera. Aside from this I have few desires. And I find life perpetually enchanting.”

WORDS! WORDS!

TOUCHÉ

NOBLESSE OBLIGE

LA VIE C’EST LA VIE

THE RETURN

RENCONTRE

FRAGMENT

Born Alice Ruth Moore, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Educated in public schools and Straight College in New Orleans. Afterwards studied at University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University and School of Industrial Art. Married to Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1898. Taught school prior to marriage in New Orleans, and Brooklyn. One of the founders of the White Rose Industrial Home in New York, and the Industrial School for Colored Girls in Delaware. At present teaching in Delaware.

Published Violets and Other Tales, The Goodness of St. Rocque, Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence, The Dunbar Speaker, and The Negro in Louisiana. Contributor to magazines and newspapers, as short story writer and columnist.

Married to Robert John Nelson, 1916.

SNOW IN OCTOBER

SONNET

I SIT AND SEW

“I was born in a very little village high up in the hills of the parish of Clarendon in the island of Jamaica. The village was so small it hadn’t a name like the larger surrounding villages. But our place was called Sunny Ville. I was the youngest of eleven.

My father was a peasant proprietor who owned his land and cultivated large tracts of coffee, cocoa, bananas and sugar-cane. When I was of school age I was sent to my brother who was a schoolmaster in a small town in the North-Western part of the island. He educated me. He was a free-thinker and I became one, too, so soon as I could think about life and religion. I was never a child of any church. My brother had a nice library with books of all sorts and I read such free-thought writers as Haeckel, Huxley, Matthew Arnold, side by side with Shakespeare and the great English novelists and poets (excepting Browning) before I was fourteen. At that time Shakespeare to me was only a wonderful story-teller. When I was seventeen I won a Jamaica Government Trade Scholarship and was apprenticed to a cabinet-maker and wheelwright. I hated trade and quit. When I was nineteen I joined the Jamaica Constabulary and left it after ten months. An English gentleman who was collecting Jamaica folklore became interested in my dialect verses and helped me to publish my first book: Songs of Jamaica, in 1911. I was twenty years old then. The next year I went to the United States. First to an educational institution for Negroes in the South. I did not like it, and left there after three months for a college in a Western state. There I stayed two years. Came to New York. Abandoned all thought of returning to the West Indies. Lost a few thousand dollars (a legacy) in high living and bad business. Went to work at various jobs, porter, houseman, longshoreman, bar-man, railroad club and hotel waiter. Kept on writing. The Seven Arts Magazine took two of my poems in 1917. In 1918 Frank Harris published some poems in Pearson’s. In 1919 The Liberator published some things. The same year I went to Holland, Belgium and England. Lived in London over a year. Published Spring in New Hampshire. Returned to America in 1921. Got a job with Max Eastman on the Liberator. Kept it till Max Eastman left for Europe. Went to Russia in 1922. Harlem Shadows published 1922 by Harcourt, Brace & Co. Stayed six months in Moscow and Petrograd. Berlin in 1923. Paris at the end of 1923, where I was very ill for months. Been in France ever since trying to exist and write.”

AMERICA⁠[11]

Claude McKay

EXHORTATION: SUMMER, 1919⁠[12]

FLAME-HEART⁠[13]

THE WILD GOAT⁠[14]

RUSSIAN CATHEDRAL

DESOLATE

ABSENCE⁠[15]

MY HOUSE

Jean Toomer was born in Washington, D. C., in 1894. He has since lived there and in New York, receiving his education mainly in these cities. Having traveled over a good part of America, experiencing varied aspects of its life and studying the elements of contemporary problems, in 1918 in the midst of a general interest in art, he gradually centered on that of literature. There followed a four year period devoted entirely to writing, the results of which were first given printed form by The Double Dealer of New Orleans. And soon thereafter, sketches, poems, short stories, and critical reviews began appearing in Broom, The Crisis, The Dial, The Liberator, The Little Review, Opportunity, etc. These brought him in contact with a literary and artistic group in New York composed of such men as Waldo Frank, Alfred Steiglitz, Paul Rosenfeld, Gorham B. Munson, and others. With these he has been associated in the effort to articulate the diverse significances of America. In 1923 his first book, Cane, was published by Boni and Liveright, New York.

REAPERS

EVENING SONG

GEORGIA DUSK

SONG OF THE SON

COTTON SONG

FACE

NOVEMBER COTTON FLOWER

“At Thanksgiving time 1894 Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Negro poet, was a guest in my house in Louisville, Ky. Here for the first time in the South he read the Negro dialect poems that afterwards made him famous.

September 2nd, 1895, my son, the late Joseph S. Cotter, Jr., was born in the room in which these poems were read. He learned to read and write from his sister, Florence Olivia, who was two years older. Before he entered school at the age of six years he had read about thirty books—these included all the readers in the elementary schools—1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8th grades and parts of the Bible.

Mrs. Maria F. Cotter, my wife, and I held both children back. We refused to allow them to be promoted in several instances. Both were graduated from the Louisville Central High School under 16; Florence Olivia won first honor of her class and Joseph the second. He was graduated June 1911. After a year and a half at Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn., Florence Olivia wrote us that Joseph had tuberculosis and must leave school. He returned home and was put under a doctor. The 16th of the following December, Florence Olivia returned from Fisk with tuberculosis, and one year from that day she died. It was grieving over his sister’s death that discovered to Joseph his poetic talent. He died February 3rd, 1919, leaving his published poems,—The Band of Gideon and two other unpublished works—one of poems and one of one-act plays.”

Joseph S. Cotter, Sr.

RAIN MUSIC

SUPPLICATION

AN APRIL DAY

THE DESERTER

AND WHAT SHALL YOU SAY?

THE BAND OF GIDEON

I was born on a farm near Franklin, Kentucky, April 15, 1896, and received my education variously ... public schools, Bowling Green Academy, Simmon’s University and Summer schools.

No degree. Taught for several years in my native state. I am a lover of music and divide my time between the typewriter and piano. First published in Franklin Favorite, later, Louisville Leader, Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Crisis, Opportunity and Wayfarer. My favorite poets are Countee Cullen, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Edna St. Vincent Millay; my favorite past-time, walking along a crowded street. I have a hunch that I shall become a short story writer and my favorite exertion is trying to perfect my “technique.”

At present I am living in Sewickley, Penna.

THE WALLS OF JERICHO

POEM

REVELATION

1

2

THAT HILL

TO AN ICICLE

FOUR WALLS

“Born in New York City, August 18, 1899, I have lived all but about six years in Brooklyn. I studied at the College of the City of New York, and was guilty there of my first sonnet; but am ever so much more proud of my varsity letters won on the track—once ran a “10 flat” hundred and a 51 sec. quarter. Went to the Northern Illinois College of Ophthalmology—took degree “Doctor of Optometry.” Have practiced in Chicago and New York. At present writing, am doing some teaching and publicity work at the Fort Valley High and Industrial School, Georgia, while recovering from a mean illness. Have had a hankering to write as long as I can remember, but Charles Johnson, Editor of Opportunity and a certain Gwendolyn Bennett are responsible for my trying it openly. My “published works” are limited to the indulgence of Opportunity, The Crisis, and Braithwaite’s Anthology. It is the perversity of my nature to crave the ability to write good prose, and yet my attempts at poetry are the only things to which any notice is given.”

ON SEEING TWO BROWN BOYS IN A CATHOLIC CHURCH

TO A PERSISTENT PHANTOM

LETTERS FOUND NEAR A SUICIDE

To all of you

To Lewellyn

To Mother

To B——

To Jean

To Catalina

To Mariette

To ——

To Telie

To “Chick”

To Wanda

NIGGER

A Chant for Children

Lewis Alexander was born July 4, 1900, at Washington, D. C. He was educated in the public schools of Washington and at Howard University where he was a member of the Howard Players. He has also studied at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a member of the Ethiopian Art Theatre for the season 1922-1923 playing in Salome and The Comedy of Errors on Broadway. As the result of a recent tour of North and South Carolina he edited in May 1927 the Negro Number of the Carolina Magazine. He has been writing poetry since 1917, specializing in Japanese forms. Two Little Theatre groups in Washington, The Ira Aldridge Players of the Grover Cleveland School and the Randall Community Center Players have been under his direction.

NEGRO WOMAN

AFRICA

TRANSFORMATION

THE DARK BROTHER

TANKA I-VIII

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

JAPANESE HOKKU

DAY AND NIGHT

I was born in Washington, D. C., the first of May, 1901. I received primary and secondary education in the Public Schools of that city, and on a farm near Laurel, Md.; entered Williams College in 1918, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1921, graduated in 1922; and received my Master of Arts Degree at Harvard in 1923. Since that time I have been seeking a more liberal education teaching school. I have been inflicted on unsuspecting, helpless students; teaching diverse things at Manassas Summer School in Virginia, Rhetoric and Literature at Virginia Seminary and College, Lynchburg, Va., and Literature at Lincoln University, Jefferson City, Mo.

From early years I have lisped in numbers but the numbers seem improper fractions. I have always been interested in people, particularly and generally, and in books. The list runs from Homer to Housman.

Except for an essay on Roland Hayes submitted to an Opportunity contest, and occasional poems and reviews, I have published nothing of the voluminous works cluttering my desk.

ODYSSEY OF BIG BOY

MAUMEE RUTH

LONG GONE

TO A CERTAIN LADY, IN HER GARDEN

(A. S.)

SALUTAMUS

(O Gentlemen the time of Life is short—Henry IV)

CHALLENGE

RETURN

Gwendolyn B. Bennett was born in Giddings, Texas, on July 8th, 1902. Her father was a lawyer and her mother was a school teacher. She received her elementary training in the Public Schools of Washington, D. C., and Harrisburg, Pa. She was graduated from the Girls’ High School in Brooklyn, New York, during January, 1921. While she was in attendance there she was a member of the Felter Literary Society and the Girls’ High School Dramatic Society, being the first Negro girl to have been elected to either of these societies. In an open contest she was awarded the first prize for a poster bearing the slogan Fresh Air Prevents Tuberculosis.

She matriculated in the Fine Arts Department of Teachers’ College, Columbia University, where she remained for two years. She then entered the Normal Art Course at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. She was the author of her class play each of the two years she was there. In her Junior Year she played the leading part in the play which she had herself written. She was graduated from Pratt Institute June 1924.

She then became a member of the Howard University Faculty in Fine Arts as Instructor in Design, Water-color and Crafts. During the Christmas holidays of the school year 1924-25 Miss Bennett was awarded the Thousand Dollar Foreign Scholarship by the Alpha Sigma Chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority at its Annual Convention held in New York City.

She sailed for Cherbourg, France on June fifteenth, 1925. While in Paris she studied at the Académie Julian, The Académie Coloraossi and the École de Pantheon. Through the influence of Konrad Bercovici she was thrown in contact with the artist, Frans Masereel, one of France’s best known modern painters. M. and Mme. Masereel offered Miss Bennett the hospitality of their home and together with their circle of friends did much to encourage her in her work while in Paris. She returned to America during June 1926.

For the summer of 1926 she was employed at the Opportunity magazine where she acted in the capacity of Assistant to the Editor. September 1926 she returned to Howard University where she resumed her classroom work after a year’s leave of absence.

QUATRAINS

1

2

SECRET

ADVICE

TO A DARK GIRL

YOUR SONGS

FANTASY

LINES WRITTEN AT THE GRAVE OF ALEXANDER DUMAS

HATRED

SONNET

1

SONNET

2

Arna Bontemps explains that he was just tall enough to see above window sills when the first trolley car came down Lee Street in Alexandria, La. His mother, Marie Pembroke, had been born in this same town but his father had come out of Marksville, a smaller town of that state. Though exceedingly young and very frail, Marie Pembroke had taught school until her marriage, while her husband, Paul Bontemps, was a brick mason, the son and grandson of brick masons.

With Arna Bontemps in his third year and a second child, a girl, just past one, the family left the South for San Francisco. However, they stopped in Los Angeles to visit relatives and have never moved further. Here the boy’s mother died some nine years later and here his father is still living. Here also he received his early education in a rather irregular attendance of a number of schools. He went through the schools rapidly enough and in spite of being out several years received a college degree in his twentieth year.

In the year following that he lost his illusions with reference to a musical career and returned to an original intention to eat bread by the sweat of teaching school. It is to be remembered that he went to college first with the purpose of taking a medical course but it took him only a day or two to decide better.

He lives in New York City and is now twenty-four and married.

THE RETURN

I

II

III

IV

A BLACK MAN TALKS OF REAPING

TO A YOUNG GIRL LEAVING THE HILL COUNTRY

NOCTURNE AT BETHESDA

LENGTH OF MOON

LANCELOT

GETHSEMANE

A TREE DESIGN

BLIGHT

THE DAY-BREAKERS

CLOSE YOUR EYES!

GOD GIVE TO MEN

HOMING

GOLGOTHA IS A MOUNTAIN

I am a native of our Capital City, born in the Mauve Decade (1903). My schooling has been in the Washington grammar and high schools. It was while a student at Dunbar High School that I felt a restless urge to write something other than dull formal paragraphs in English. I made several attempts at verse but found them so poor that I hastily put such ideas behind me.

After leaving high school I entered the government service in Washington, but my radical views could not become reconciled to the conservative bourgeoise ideals around me; so I left the government service and journeyed to New York in the winter of 1926. Here I served an apprenticeship in literary vagabondage with the bizarre and eccentric young vagabond poet of High Harlem, Richard Bruce. It was here that I felt inspired to write “The Black Madonna.” I was one evening at vespers down at St. Mary’s the Virgin, and while lost in contemplation before Our Lady, I thought of a Madonna of swart skin, a Madonna of dark mien.

Despite my radicalism I am religious. I admire the socialist form of government, and my favorite poet is Claude McKay. And some day I hope to flee the shores of this exquisite hell. My temperament is Latin. I abhor all things Anglo-Saxon. I’d rather live in the squalor of Mulberry Street, N. Y. (Little Italy) than at Irvington-on-the-Hudson. I love bull fights and dislike baseball games. I like dancing and dislike prayer meetings. I love New York because it is crowded and noisy and an outpost of Europe. Of my home here in Washington I have not much to offer. I like Washington because it has such a large share of Babbitts, both white and black. And I like it because Georgia Douglas Johnson lives there and on Saturday nights has an assembly of likable and civilized people, and because it was from this Saturday night circle that Jean Toomer, Richard Bruce, and Richard Goodwin, the artist, went forth to fame and infamy.

THE BLACK MADONNA

“I was born at Axim on the African Gold Coast in 1904 on the 11th of May to singularly cultured and intellectual parents, my mother being one of the daughters of Judge Smith, the first Judge of the Excomission Court of Sierra Leone, and my father being one of the three pioneer lawyers of the Gold Coast.

I am a Fanti, of the Fanti tribe which spreads from Axim right down the Gold Coast, to Acera, and is subdivided into groups speaking different dialects. It is said that the Acera branch, at one time, wandered away from the main body and eventually arrived also at the sea coast, speaking another tongue, but retaining the same customs.

I spent five years in England, three of which were spent in school. I went to Penrohs College, Colwyn Bay in Wales, and on my return home became a school teacher in The Girls Vocational School, Sierra Leone.

By twenty, I had the firm conviction that I was meant to write for Africa. This was accentuated by the help which our boys and girls need so much and fired by the determination to show those who are prejudiced against colour, that we deny inferiority to them, spiritually, intellectually and morally; and to prove it.

I argued that the first thing to do, was to imbue our own people with the idea of their own beauty, superiority and individuality, with a love and admiration for our own country, which has been systematically suppressed. Consequently I studied the beautiful points of Negro physique, texture of skin, beauty of hair, soft sweetness of eyes, charm of curves, so that none should think it a shame to be black, but rather a glorious adventure.”

NATIVITY

Note: lappah—a straight woven cloth tied round the waist to form a skirt.
Frangepani—An African flower.

RAINY SEASON LOVE SONG

THE SERVING GIRL

BABY COBINA

Lucy Ariel Williams was born in Mobile, Alabama, March 3, 1905. Her parents, Dr. and Mrs. H. Roger Williams surrounded her with the aesthetic and cultural environment usually given the only daughters in professional homes in the South. Miss Williams is well known as a modiste, poet and extremely talented pianist. Her early training was acquired at Emerson Institute, Mobile, Alabama. Later she was graduated from Talladega College and Fisk University, after which she attended Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Oberlin, Ohio. Although a first year student there, she received third year classification, being the first member of her race to be so honored. Her work has appeared in Opportunity and other journals. Her poem “Northboun’” received first prize in the Opportunity contest for 1926.

NORTHBOUN’

I was born in Washington, D. C., on the second of July, 1906, and have never ceased to marvel at the fact. After attending public school with very good marks (I was thrashed if I did not lead my class), I attended Dunbar High School of the same city. When I was thirteen my father died, my greatest impression being the crowded church and the vault. Mother left Washington for New York where my brother and I joined her in a few months. New York was an adventure and still is. A glorious something torn from a novel. Even the first hard winter with mother ill and my feet on the ground was just a part of it. My gathering bits of fur to paste on newspaper to cut out for inner soles for my shoes, the walking to work to save carfare, and getting lunch as best I could, all seemed romantic and highly colored. Weren’t there theatres and lights, Broadway, Fifth Avenue ... and lights? Noise and bustle and high silk hats and flowers in pots in the Bowery. Hobble cars creeping like caterpillars up Broadway. Taxis and people and forty-second street. Traffic towers and tall buildings. Wasn’t this New York? A year later I discovered Harlem. I was at that time an art apprentice at seven fifty a week. But that was too little money. So I became in turn errand boy for ten dollars, bell hop in an all-women’s hotel for eleven fifty-five, eighteen with tips, secretary and confidence man for a modiste for twenty-five, ornamental iron-worker and designer for twenty-eight, and elevator operator for thirty. Then I had the mumps and despite the glamor of New York, I wanted to go, just go somewhere. So I went to Panama working my way. Then New York again and a costume design class. A visit home to D. C. where I met Langston Hughes. Opportunity accepted my first poem. Washington for eleven months then New York again. I arrived penniless and have remained so. Dilatory jobs, trips to New England, Florida, California and Canada, but always New York again. The few drawings and sketches made on these trips were either destroyed, lost, or given away en route. I began to write seriously and to paint just as seriously; I entered contests but never won. I am still penniless and happy and planning to go to Paris and Vienna by hook or crook.

SHADOW

CAVALIER

Waring Cuney was born in Washington, D. C., May 6, 1906. He received his education in the public schools of that city and at Howard University. Later he attended Lincoln University, and while there sang in the Glee Club and the quartet. His work with these groups encouraged him to study music and he is now studying voice at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. His first published poem was “No Images” which won first award in the Opportunity contest of 1926. Since then he has continued to write and his poems have appeared in Opportunity, Braithwaite’s Anthology, The Forum, and Palms.

THE DEATH BED

A TRIVIALITY

I THINK I SEE HIM THERE

DUST

NO IMAGES

THE RADICAL

TRUE LOVE

I was born in Florida in the year 1906—moved to Orange, N. J., at an early age—graduated from Orange High School in 1924—am now a Junior at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. Here I am a member of the varsity basket-ball and tennis teams and a member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity.

I get a great deal of pleasure out of observing life and then writing about it just as I see it.

SOUTH STREET

(Philadelphia, Pa.)

JUNGLE TASTE

Helene Johnson was born twenty years ago in Boston, Mass., where she received her early education and attended Boston University for a short time. A year ago she came to New York to attend the Extension Division of Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Opportunity, Vanity Fair and several New York dailies; and has been reprinted in Palms, The Literary Digest, and Braithwaite’s Anthology.

WHAT DO I CARE FOR MORNING

SONNET TO A NEGRO IN HARLEM

SUMMER MATURES

POEM

FULFILLMENT

THE ROAD

BOTTLED

MAGALU

Wesley Curtwright was born in Brunswick, Georgia, on November 30, 1910, but he knows as little about Georgia, perhaps, as about any state in the South. Immediately after his father’s death in 1913, he began a disjointed tour of the land. He has “broken out in spots” of a dozen states both South and North, attending at intervals various schools. He lives in New York at present and has lived there three years. He is attending Harlem Academy, a small private school. He has contributed to Opportunity and The Messenger.

THE CLOSE OF DAY

Lula Lowe Weeden was born in Lynchburg, Va., Feb. 4, 1918. Her mother, Mrs. Lula L. Weeden, herself a poet of ability, writes of this youngest of Negro singers: “She is a very close observer. Each flower in my garden she knows. Sometimes she counts each bloom, lingering over those she likes most.

“Each one of my children is very distinct in her make up. Lula is quiet, sweet and unselfish, a decided contrast to the second. This gives each a chance for moral development while trying to adjust her little mind to the other. A few nights ago, Iola the second child slapped Mary the baby. Lula said to Iola, ‘You are not being a good citizen when you strike back even if Mary did slap you.’ Another time, Iola was saying what her teacher had said about her. Lula remarked, ‘It is not what she says you do, it is what you do do.’ Neither statement meant much to Iola.

“I have always mixed my night time stories with ‘Home spun ones.’ All seem to like them best. I asked Lula since Christmas why she liked my stories. She said because they seemed to be true, and criticized fairy stories.

“I have emphasized racial stories for this reason—I was born on a big farm. There were many employed by my father, also tenants. With these we were not allowed to mingle. On the edge of the farm there was a white school. There was a barrier also. Those little girls with golden locks looked like little angels to me. How I wished to be like them with their shrill voices and laughter. They seemed so happy. I just thought of them as things apart. It took much to get this false conception out of me. They were just God sent. This I have tried not to have my children to fight. Now neither one wishes to be white or dislikes them. To them, they all seem like people.

“Lula does most of her writing at night. It is a privilege to remain a few minutes after the other children to finish something. Some nights she will write several. She mumbles them to herself before she begins to write and then keeps saying the words softly. She will finish this and will draw figures and flowers or people. This she does very well for a child until she says, ‘I am going to write something else.’ Interruptions don’t seem to bother her very much as the little ones are always saying something to make her laugh. I usually attempt to quiet them, but some of her best things are written with many around.

“When she shows them to me, she watches for a favorable expression. I always try to be pleased, but somehow she knows from my face that that was not so good, then remarks, ‘I am going to write something else.’

“The amusing part about it all is that she feels as she has begun to write at a mature age, but consoles herself with this statement, ‘Stevenson did not begin to write until he was fifteen and wrote very skillful things.’

“Lula is just a little girl and is very talkative if anyone appeals to her and will talk with her. You can’t explain anything too minutely for her—whether it is her Sunday school lesson or a star, it matters little.”

ME ALONE

HAVE YOU SEEN IT

ROBIN RED BREAST

THE STREAM

THE LITTLE DANDELION

DANCE