As the articulate voices of an oppressed minority, one would naturally expect the work of Negro poets to reflect a strongly emphasized social consciousness. That is the case, if gauged by their preoccupation with the theme of race. But whereas the race consciousness factor has been strong for obvious reasons, more generalized social-mindedness has been relatively weak in Negro poetry, and until recently the form of it which we know today as class-consciousness has been conspicuously absent.
Before broaching an interpretation, let us look at the facts. Negro expression from the days of Phyllis Wheatley was pivoted on a painfully negative and melodramatic sense of race. Self-pity and its corrective of rhetorical bombast were the ground notes of the Negro’s poetry for several generations. The gradual conversion of race consciousness from a negative sense of social wrong and injustice to a positive note of race loyalty and pride in racial tradition came as a difficult and rather belated development of spiritual maturity. This and its group analogue—a positively toned morale of group solidarity—was the outstanding feature of Negro development of the post–World War period. I would not recant my 1925 estimate of this, either as a symptom of cultural maturity or as a sign of a significant development in the Negro folk consciousness. However, I would not confuse this upsurging of race consciousness with a parallel maturing of social consciousness, such as seems recently to be taking place. I do think, however, that the Negro could only be spurred on to the development of social consciousness in his creative expression through the previous intensification and change of tone of his racial consciousness.
But for a long while it was quite possible for the Negro poet and writer to be a rebel and protestant in terms of the race situation and a conforming conventionalist in his general social thinking. Just as it was earlier possible for many Negroes to be anti-slavery but Tory, rather than Whig in their general politics. The average Negro writer has thus been characteristically conservative and conformist on general social, political and economic issues, something of a traditionalist with regard to art, style and philosophy, with a little salient of racial radicalism jutting out in front—the spear-point of his position. Many forces account for this, chief among them the tendency the world over for the elite of any oppressed minority to aspire to the conventionally established values and court their protection and prestige. In this the Negro has been no exception, but on that very score is not entitled to exceptional blame or ridicule.
There is an additional important factor in accounting for the lack of social radicalism in the Negro’s artistic expression. This comes from the dilemma of racialism in the form in which it presents itself to the American Negro. Let me state it, with grateful acknowledgments, in the words of Rebecca Barton’s admirable but little known study, “Race Consciousness and the American Negro.”
“The Negroes have no distinctive language to help foster their uniqueness. Their religion is the same fundamentally as that of the white group. There is no complete geographical isolation or centralization in one part of the country. On leaving their particular community they find themselves in a white world which suggests that the only claim they have for being a distinctive group is their color, and that this is nothing to arouse pride. Their manners, habits and customs are typically American, and they cannot escape from a certain economic and cultural dependence on the white people. They have not as much inner content to nurture their separate group life in America as national groups composed of immigrants from the Old World. Too great insistence upon withdrawing into their race would be an unhealthy escape, and would damage the chances of group efficiency by a balanced adjustment to the larger environment. … On the other hand, race values are too important not to preserve, and if the Negroes tried to identify themselves completely with white America, they feel that there would be a cultural loss. The skepticism as to any uniqueness of race temperament which has biological roots may be justified, but there is plenty in the distinctive social experience of the group to account for it and to give it tangible substance. The solution becomes one of being both a Negro and an American. It is the belief of many that this middle course can be taken, that the Negro can still be his individual self and yet cooperate in American life. If the building up of some group tradition is encouraged only as long as it is harmonious with fuller participation in national culture, then it can be a center from which creative activity can radiate. From this point of view, ‘the racialism of the Negro is no limitation or reservation with respect to American life; it is only a constructive effort to build the obstructions in the stream of his progress into an efficient dam of social energy and power.’”
It is this flaming dilemma that has narrowed and monopolized the social vision of the Negro artist. Race has been an obsession with him, and has both helped and hampered his spiritual progress. However, it is absurd to expect him to ignore it and cast it aside. Any larger social vision must be generated from within the Negro’s race consciousness, like the adding of another dimension to this necessary plane of his experience. The deepening social consciousness of Negro poets actually follows this expected course, from its earliest beginning even to the present.
As early as 1914, Fenton Johnson flared out with a mood of emotional revolt and social indictment that was half a generation ahead of its time. Johnson went much further than the usual rhetorical protest against social injustice; he flung down a cynical challenge and a note of complete disillusionment with contemporary civilization. His contemporaries were too startled to catch the full significance of “Tired” and “The Scarlet Woman.”
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.
You will let the old shanty go to rot, the white people’s clothes turn to dust, and the Calvary Baptist Church sink to the bottomless pit.
You will spend your days forgetting you married me and your nights hunting the warm gin Mike serves the ladies in the rear of the Last Chance Saloon.
Throw the children into the river; civilization has given us too many. It is better to die than it is to 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.
Once I was good like the Virgin Mary and the Minister’s wife.
My father worked for Mr. Pullman and white people’s tips; but he died two days after his insurance expired.
I had nothing, so I had to go to work.
All the stock I had was a white girl’s education and a face that enchanted the men of both races.
Starvation danced with me.
So when Big Lizzie, who kept a house for white men, came to me with tales of fortune that I could reap for the sale of my virtue I bowed my head to Vice.
Now I can drink more gin than any man for miles around.
Gin is better than all the water in Lethe.
Claude McKay’s vibrant protests of a few years later deserve mention, although in social philosophy they are no more radical because the indignation is fired by personal anger and the threat of moral retribution. McKay was a rebel, but an individualistic one. And so, for the most part was Langston Hughes, except in his later phase of deliberate proletarian protest. In his earlier poetry, Hughes has a double strain of social protest; the first, based on a curious preoccupation (almost an obsession) with the dilemma of the mulatto, and the other, a passionate description of the suppressed worker. But in both, Hughes’ reaction is that of an ironic question mark or the mocking challenge of a folk laughter and joy which cannot be silenced or suppressed. “Loudmouthed laughers in the hands of Fate:” Hughes throws his emotional defiance into the teeth of oppression. He rarely extends this mood to systematic social criticism or protest, often suggests, instead of a revolutionary solution, emotional defiance and escape—as in
My old man’s a white old man
And my old mother’s black.
If ever I cursed my white old man
I take my curses back.
If ever I cursed my black old mother
And wished she were in hell,
I’m sorry for that evil wish
And now I wish her well.
My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I’m gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?
and
A bright bowl of brass is beautiful to the Lord.
Bright polished brass like the cymbals
Of King David’s dancers,
Like the wine cups of Solomon.
Hey, boy!
A clean spittoon on the altar of the Lord….
At least I can offer that.
This is hardly more socialistic than Countee Cullen’s well-turned epigram
She even thinks that up in Heaven,
Her class lies late and snores,
While poor black Cherubs rise at seven
To do celestial chores.
or Waring Cuney’s
Men never know
What they are doing.
They always make a muddle
Of their affairs,
They always tie their affairs
Into a knot
They cannot untie.
Then I come in
Uninvited.
They do not ask me in;
I am the radical,
The bomb thrower,
I untie the knot
That they have made,
And they never thank me.
These were the moods of 1927–31; and though they are not Marxian or doctrinal, their emotional logic is significantly radical. They have one great advantage over later more doctrinal versification—they do have poetic force and artistry.
Right here we may profitably take account of an unfortunate insistence of proletarian poetry on being drab, prosy and inartistic, as though the regard for style were a bourgeois taint and an act of social treason. Granted that virtuosity is a symptom of decadence, and preciosity a sign of cultural snobbishness, the radical poet need not disavow artistry, for that is a hallmark of all great folk-art. The simplicity, calm dignity and depth of folk art have yet to be constructively considered by the bulk of the proletarian exponents of our present scene. This decline in poetic force, terseness and simplicity is noticeable in the majority of the overtly radical Negro poetry. In his later poems that more directly espouse the cause of the masses, Langston Hughes, for example, is much less of a poet; he is often merely rhetorical and melodramatic rather than immersed in the mood. “Scottsboro Limited” (1932) marks with him the definite transition from the folk concept to the class concept. But instead of the authentic folk note, the powerful and convincing dialect, the terse moving rhythm of his lyric and his “blues” period, or the barbed and flaming ironies of his earlier social challenge, we have turgid, smouldering rhetoric, rimed propaganda, and the tone of the ranting orator and the strident prosecutor. I have two criticisms in passing, made in the interests of effective expression of the very reactions in question and the radical objectives themselves. The fire of social protest should flame, not smoulder; and any expression on behalf of the Negro masses should exhibit the characteristic Negro folk artistry.
That is why we should scan the horizon for the appearance of a true spokesman for the black masses, an authentic voice of the people. As yet, he seems not at hand. But a succession of younger poets points in his direction. Richard Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, Sterling Brown show a gradually nearer approach to the poetry that can fuse class consciousness with racial protest, and express proletarian sentiment in the genuine Negro folk idiom. And with this we approach a really effective and probably lasting poetry. Even Hughes moves on between 1933 and 1935, from the turgid tractate drawl of his “Letter to the Academy” (1933):
“But please—all you gentlemen with beards who are so wise and old, and who write better than we do and whose souls have triumphed (in spite of hungers and wars and the evils about you) and whose books have soared in calmness and beauty aloof from the struggle to the library shelves and the desks of students and who are now classics—come forward and speak upon The subject of the Revolution.
We want to know what in the hell you’d say?” to the terser, homelier, more effective “Ballad of Roosevelt:”
The pot was empty,
The cupboard was bare.
I said, Papa
What’s the matter here?
“I’m waitin’ on Roosevelt, son,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt,
Waitin’ on Roosevelt, son.”
But when they felt those
Cold winds blow
And didn’t have no
Place to go—
Pa said, “I’m tired
O’ waitin’ on Roosevelt,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt,
Damn tired o’ waitin’ on Roosevelt.”
Similarly, much of Richard Wright’s poetry is mere strophic propaganda, little better for being cast in the broken mold of free verse than if it were spoken in plain pamphlet prose. Of course, this is not always so. “I Have Seen Black Hands,” for all its obvious Whitman derivation, is powerful throughout, and, in several spots, is definitely poetic. The final strophe, lifted out of the descriptive potpourri of the earlier sections by a really surging rhapsodic swell, is convincing and exceeds propagandist dimensions:
“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 will be millions and millions of them,
On some red day in a burst of fists on a new horizon!”
But Wright is capable of the still finer, though entirely non-racial note of
“Everywhere,
On tenemented mountains of hunger,
In ghetto swamps of suffering,
In breadline forest of despair,
In peonized forest of hopelessness
The red moisture of revolt
Is condensing on the cold stones of human need.”
Frank Howard Davis, of Chicago, for all that he boasts of a “perch on Parnassus” and confesses an urge “to take little, pale, wan, penny-apiece words and weave them into gay tapestries for beauty’s sake,” has an etcher’s touch and an acid bite to his vignettes of life that any “proletarian poet” or Marxian critic might well envy and emulate. For he speaks of
Black scars disfigure the ruddy cheeks of new mornings in Dixie
(lynched black men hanging from green trees)
Blind justice kicked, beaten, taken for a ride and left for dead
(have you ever heard of Scottsboro, Alabam?)
Your Constitution gone blah-blah, shattered into a thousand pieces like a broken mirror
Lincoln a hoary myth
(how many black men vote in Georgia?)
Mobs, chaingangs down South
Tuberculosis up North
—so now I am civilized
What do you want, America?….
Kill me if you must, America
All at once or a little each day
It won’t matter….
Yet today is today
Today must be emptied like a bucket before it dries into history
Today is an eagle, lingering a while, ready to fly into eternity,
Today I live
Today I tell of black folk who made America yesterday, who make America now
Today I see America clawing me like a tiger caged with a hare
Today I hear discords and crazy words in the song America sings to black folk
So today I ask—
What do you want, America?
How different, even in the similarity of theme, is this from James Weldon Johnson’s pale rhetoric of yesterday:
“How would you have us—
As we are,
Our eyes fixed forward on a star?
Or clanking chains about your feet?”
No more apt illustration could be given of the change in the last fifteen years of the tone and gamut of the Negro poet’s social consciousness. But let us follow Frank Davis a step further in his social analysis which is as accurate as his social description is trenchant: from his “Georgia’s Atlanta:”
As omnipresent as air
are the Complexes
reminding white folk of superiority
keeping black folk subdued.
God
it so happens
either sleeps in the barn
or washes dishes for the Complexes.
Black Shirts—B.Y.P.U.’s
Ku Klux Klan—Methodist Conventions
Colleges—chaingangs
Millionaires—Breadlines
and taxes for the poor
(out of every dollar….
take twenty-five cents
to feed the Complexes
who keep white folk, black folk separate).
“Yas suh—Yas suh”
“You niggers ain’t got no business bein’ out past midnight”
“I know it’s so … a white man said it”
“That black gal you got there, boy, is good enough for any white man. Is she youah wife or youah woman? …”
“S’cuse me, Boss”
“You niggers git in th’ back of this streetcah or stand up”
“We’s got seats reserved for you white folks at ouah church Sunday night”
“He’s a good darky”
“I know’d mah whitefolks’d git me outa dis mess from killin’ dat no good nigguh”
“I’ve known one or two of you Nigras who were highly intelligent.”
These, in case you don’t know, are extracts from the official book on race relations as published by the Complexes.
Is it necessary to call attention to the evenhanded, unsparing chastisement meted out to white and black alike? Or to the unanswerable realism? Or to the devastating irony, or the calm courage? For all its sophisticated underpinning, I construe this as more instinctively and idiomatically an expression of Negro social protest than an officially proletarian screed. It comes from the vital heart of the Negro experience and its setting; it smacks neither of Marx, Moscow nor Union Square.
Similarly undoctrinated, and for that reason, in my judgment, more significant and more effective, are Sterling Brown’s recent poems of social analysis and protest. The indictment is the more searching because of its calm poise and the absence of melodramatic sweat and strain. Not all of Mr. Brown’s poems reach this altitude, but the best do. So that where the earlier Negro poetry of protest fumes and perorates, these later ones point, talk and reveal: where the one challenges and threatens, the other enlightens and indicts. Today it is the rise of this quieter, more indigenous radicalism that is significant and promising. Doubly so, because along with a leftist turn of thought goes a real enlargement of native social consciousness and a more authentic folk spokesmanship. Judged by these criteria, I find today’s advance point in the work of Sterling Brown. Without show of boast or fury, it began in the challenge of “Strong Men:”
“Walk togedder, chillen, Dontcha git weary….
They bought off some of your leaders.
You stumbled, as blind men will …
They coaxed you, unwontedly soft-voiced …
You followed a way
Then laughed as usual.
They heard the laugh and wondered;
Uncomfortable;
Unadmitting a deeper terror …
The strong men keep a-comin’ on
Gittin’ stronger….”
Later there was the unconventional appeal of “Strange Legacies” to the folk hero, unconquered in defeat:
“John Henry, with your hammer;
John Henry, with your steel driver’s pride,
You taught us that a man could go down like a man,
Sticking to your hammer till you died. Brother, …
You had what we need now, John Henry.
Help us get it.”
But in yet unpublished poems, the proletarian implications of “Mr. Samuel and Sam” become more explicit as the color line and its plight are definitely linked up with the class issue:
“Listen, John Cracker:
Grits and molasses like grease for belts
Coffee-like chicory and collards like jimson,
And side-meat from the same place on the hog
Are about the same on both sides of the track.
Listen, John, does Joe’s riding ahead in the ‘Jimmy’
Sweeten so much the dull grits of your days?
When you get where you’re going, are you not still
John, the po’ cracker, Joe, the po’ nig?”
And profounder, still, the calm indictment of his “Decatur Street,” entirely within the black Ghetto physically, but underscoring it as but a segment of a common American tragedy:
The picture of content should be complete
I sing the happy pickaninnies
Underneath the Georgia moon….
M’ole man is on de chaingang
Muh mammy’s on relief
Down at the Lincoln Theatre, little Abe is set free again,
Hears music that gets deep-down into his soul:
“Callin’ all cars,—callin’ all cars,” and the prolonged hiss—
“Black Ace, Black Ace!” And his thin voice screams
When the tommy-guns drill and the bodies fall,
“Mow them down, mow them down—gangsters or “G” men
So long as folks get killed, no difference at all,
So long as the rattling gun-fire plays little Abe his song.
And the only pleasure exceeding this
Will come when he gets hold of the pearl-handled gat
Waiting for him, ready, at Moe Epstein’s.
Gonna be the Black Ace hisself before de time ain’t long.
Outside the theatre he stalks his pa’dner,
Creeps up behind him, cocks his thumb,
Rams his forefinger against his side,
“Stick ’em up, damn yuh,” his treble whines.
The squeals and the flight
Are more than he looked for, his laughter peals.
He is just at the bursting point with delight.
Black Ace. “Stick ’em up, feller … I’m the Black Ace.”
Oh to grow up soon to the top of glory, With a glistening furrow on his dark face, Badge of his manhood, pass-key to fame.
“Before de time ain’t long,” he says,
“Lord, before de time ain’t long.”
The young folks roll in the cabins on the floor
And in the narrow unlighted streets
Behind the shrouding vines and lattices
Up the black, foul allies, the unpaved roads
Sallie Lou and Johnnie Mae play the spies.
Ready, giggling, for experiments, for their unformed bodies
To be roughly clasped, for little wild cries,
For words learned of their elders on display.
“Gonna get me a boy-friend,” Sallie Lou says.
“Got me a man already,” brags Johnnie Mae.
This is the schooling ungrudged by the state,
Short in time, as usual, but fashioned to last.
The scholars are apt and never play truant.
The stockade is waiting … and they will not be late.
Before, before the time ain’t very long.
In the stockade: “Little boy, how come you hyeah?”
“Little bitty gal, how old are you?”
“Well, I got hyeah, didn’t I?—Whatchu keer!”
“I’m goin’ on twelve years old.”
Say of them then: “Like Topsy, they just grew.”
It is not enough to think of this as a modern equivalent of “the slave in the dismal rice-swamp” and the Abolitionist moral threat of “Woe be unto ye!” For here it is the question of a social consciousness basic, mature, fitted not to the narrow gauge of the race problem but to the gauge and perspective of our whole contemporary scene. In such a mould poetic and artistic expression can be universal at the same time that it is racial, and racial without being partial and provincial.
A recent writer, of doctrinaire Marxist leanings, insists that as a matter of strict logic the racial note and the class attitude are incongruous. So the proletarian poet should not be a racialist; and the common denominator of the art of our time is to be the “class angle.” I think, in addition to documenting some notable changes in the social consciousness of recent Negro poets, the burden of this evidence is against such a doctrinaire conclusion and in favor of a high compatibility between race-conscious and class-conscious thought. The task of this younger literary generation is not to ignore or eliminate the race problem, but to broaden its social dimensions and deepen its universal human implications. And on the whole, at least so far, the more moving expression seems to have come from the side of the racial approach broadened to universality than from the poetry conceived in doctrinaire Marxist formulae and applied, like a stencil, to the racial problem and situation. The one has the flow and force of reality and the vital tang of life itself; the other, the clank and clatter of propaganda, and for all its seriousness, the hollow echoes of rhetoric. The Negro poet has not so long outgrown the stage of rhetoric; let us hope that the new social philosophy will not stampede our artists into such a relapse. Especially, since the present prospects are that some of the finest and most effective expressions of social protest in contemporary art will come from the younger Negro poet and his colleagues.