When Helene Johnson died in 1995, her obituary, published in The New York Times, mentioned that, despite osteoporosis and spending nearly 60 years out of the literary spotlight, she wrote one poem per day. The poems went unpublished, to be sure, but such commitment to her craft was unsurprising. After all, she had been immersed in the African American literary culture and magazines of the 1920s. With her novelist cousin, Dorothy West, Johnson moved to Harlem at the peak of the New Negro Renaissance, although her roots remained in Boston’s African American middle class. Her poems were released in a variety of venues throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, making Helene Johnson one of the Harlem writers whose appeal crossed cultural boundaries.
Helene was born in Boston to William and Ella (Benson) Johnson. Her father abandoned the family shortly after her birth, and her childhood was largely spent with her maternal grandparents in Brookline, Massachusetts. The elderly Bensons had been born into slavery in South Carolina, but they eventually settled in Boston with their three daughters. From an early age, Helene had an affinity for writing. Her mother encouraged her participation in the Saturday Evening Quill Club; she took classes at Boston University; and she won a short-story contest sponsored by The Boston Chronicle.
Johnson’s work appeared in the two most influential magazines of the New Negro Renaissance: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s The Crisis and the Urban League’s Opportunity. In 1925, she won honorable mention in the first literary contest of Opportunity, which released six of her poems the following year. The awards ceremony first brought Johnson, with Dorothy West, from Boston to New York, where she decided to stay. In 1927, her highly regarded poem “Bottled” appeared in the May edition of Vanity Fair. Johnson and West enrolled at Columbia University, although neither graduated from there. Johnson was also part of the short-lived magazine Fire!!, published by Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Richard Bruce Nugent. After marrying in 1933, Johnson devoted much of her attention to family life, and largely disappeared from the public eye. Her last poems appeared in Challenge: A Literary Quarterly in 1935. Sixty-five years later, in 2000, Helene Johnson’s poems were collected for the first time in This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance.
Leonard, Keith D. “Jazz and African American Literature.” A Companion to African American Literature. Ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 286–301.
Lynes, Katherine R. “‘A real honest-to-cripe jungle’: Contested Authenticities in Helene Johnson’s ‘Bottled’.” Modernism/modernity 14.3 (2007): 517–525.
Lynes, Katherine R. “‘Sprung from American Soil’: The ‘Nature’ of Africa in the Poetry of Helene Johnson.” Isle 16.3 (2009): 525–549.
Mitchell, Verner D., ed. This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.
Mitchell, Verner D. and Cynthia Davis. Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle, A Biography of the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Ch. 5.
Ah my race,
Hungry race,
Throbbing and young –
Ah, my race,
Wonder race,
Sobbing with song –
Ah, my race,
Laughing race,
Careless in mirth –
Ah, my veiled race
Unformed race,
Fumbling in birth.
Ah, little road all whirry in the breeze,
A leaping clay hill lost among the trees,
The bleeding note of rapture steaming thrush
Caught in a drowsy hush
And stretched out in a single singing line of dusky song.
Ah little road, brown as my race is brown,
Your trodden beauty like our trodden pride,
Dust of the dust, they must not bruise you down.
Rise to one brimming golden, spilling cry!
Summer comes.
The ziczac2 hovers
Round the greedy-mouthed crocodile.
A vulture bears away a foolish jackal.
The flamingo is a dash of pink
Against dark green mangroves,
Her slender legs rivalling her slim neck.
The laughing lake gurgles delicious music in its throat
And lulls to sleep the lazy lizard,
A nebulous being on a sun-scorched rock.
In such a place,
In this pulsing, riotous gasp of color,
I met Magula, dark as a tree at night,
Eager-lipped, listening to a man with a white collar
And a small black book with a cross on it.
Oh Magula, come! Take my hand and I’ll read you poetry,
Chromatic words,
Seraphic symphonies,
Fill up your throat with laughter and your heart with song.
Do not let him lure you from your laughing waters,
Lulling lakes, lissom winds.
Would you sell the colors of your sunset and the fragrance
Of your flowers, and the passionate wonder of your forest
or a creed that will not let you dance?
Yolk-colored tongue
parched beneath a burning sky,
A lazy little tune
Hummed up the crest of some
Soft sloping hill.
One streaming line of beauty
Flowing by a forest
Pregnant with tears.
A hidden nest for beauty
Idly flung by God
In one lonely lingering hour
Before the Sabbath.
A blue-fruited black gum,
Like a tall predella,
Bears a dangling figure –
Sacrificial dower to the raff,
Swinging alone,
A solemn, tortured shadow in the air.
Upstairs, on the third floor
Of the 135th Street Library
In Harlem, I saw a little
Bottle of sand, brown sand,
Just like the kids make pies
Out of down at the beach.
But the label said: “This
Sand was taken from the Sahara desert.”
Imagine that! The Sahara desert!
Some bozo’s been all the way to Africa to get some sand.
And yesterday, on Seventh Avenue,
I saw a darky dressed fit to kill
In yellow gloves and swallow-tail coat
And swirling a cane. And everyone
Was laughing at him. Me too,
At first, till I saw his face
When he stopped to hear an
Organ grinder grind out some jazz.
Boy! You should a seen that darky’s face!
It just shone. Gee, he was happy!
And he began to dance. No
Charleston or Black Bottom for him.
No sir. He danced just as dignified
And slow. No, not slow either,
Dignified and proud! You couldn’t
Call it slow, not with all the
Steps he did. You would a died to see him.
The crowd kept yellin’ but he didn’t hear,
Just kept on dancin’ and twirling that cane,
And yellin’ out loud every once in a while.
I know the crowd thought he was coo-coo.
But say, I was where I could see his face,
And somehow, I could see him dancin’ in a jungle,
A real honest-to-cripe jungle, and he wouldn’t have on them
Trick clothes – those yaller shoes and yaller gloves
And swallow-tail coat. He wouldn’t have on nothing.
And he wouldn’t be carrying no cane.
He’d be carrying a spear with a sharp fine point
Like the bayonets we had “over there”:
And the end of it would be dipped in some kind of
Hoo-doo poison. And he’d be dancin’, black and naked and gleaming.
And he’d have rings in his ears and on his nose,
And bracelets and necklaces of elephants’ teeth.
Gee, I bet he’d be beautiful then, all right.
No one would laugh at him then, I bet.
Say! That boy that took that sand from the Sahara desert
And put it in a little bottle on a shelf in the library;
That’s what they done to this shine, ain’t it? Bottled him.
Those trick shoes, trick coat, trick cane, trick everything; all bottle;
But, inside –
Gee, that poor shine!
Little brown boy,
Slim, dark, big-eyed,
Crooning love songs to your banjo
Down at the Lafayette –
Gee, boy, I love the way you hold your head,
High sort of and a bit to one side,
Like a prince, a jazz prince. And I love
Your eyes flashing, and your hands,
And your patent-leathered feet,
And your shoulders jerking the jig-wa.
And I love your teeth flashing,
And the way your hair shines in the spotlight
Like it was the real stuff.
Gee, brown boy, I loves you all over.
I’m glad I’m a jig. I’m glad I can
Understand your dancin’ and your
Singin’, and feel all the happiness
And joy and don’t-care in you.
Gee, boy, when you sing, I can close my ears
And hear tomtoms just as plain.
Listen to me, will you, what do I know
About tomtoms? But I like the word, sort of,
Don’t you? It belongs to us.
Gee, boy, I love the way you hold your head,
And the way you sing and dance,
And everything,
Say, I think you’re wonderful. You’re
All right with me,
You are.
You are disdainful and magnificent –
Your perfect body and your pompous gait,
Your dark eyes flashing solemnly with hate,
Small wonder that you are incompetent
To imitate those whom you so despise –
Your shoulders towering high above the throng,
Your head thrown back in rich, barbaric song,
Palm trees and mangoes stretched before your eyes.
Let others toil and sweat for labor’s sake
And wring from grasping hands their meed of gold.
Why urge ahead your supercilious feet?
Scorn will efface each footprint that you make.
I love your laughter arrogant and bold.
You are too splendid for this city street!
Summer matures. Brilliant Scorpion
Appears. The pelican’s thick pouch
Hangs heavily with perch and slugs.
The brilliant-bellied newt flashes
Its crimson crest in the white water.
In the lush meadow, by the river,
The yellow-freckled toad laughs
With a toothless gurgle at the white-necked stork
Standing asleep on one red reedy leg.
And here Pan dreams of slim stalks clean for piping,
And of a nightingale gone mad with freedom.
Come. I shall weave a bed of reeds
And willow limbs and pale night flowers.
I shall strip the roses of their petals,
And the white down from the swan’s neck.
Come. Night is here. The air is drunk
With wild grape and sweet clover.
And by the sacred fount of Aganippe
Euterpe sings of love. Ah, the woodland creatures,
The doves in pairs, the wild sow and her shoats,
The stag searching the forest for a mate,
Know more of love than you, my callous Phaon. The young moon is a curved white scimitar
Pierced through the swooning night.
Sweet Phaon. With Sappho sleep like the stars at dawn.
This night was born for love, my Phaon.
Come.
Let me be buried in the rain
In a deep, dripping wood,
Under the warm wet breast of Earth
Where once a gnarled tree stood.
And paint a picture on my tomb
With dirt and a piece of bough
Of a girl and a boy beneath a round, ripe moon
Eating of love with an eager spoon
And vowing an eager vow.
And do not keep my plot mowed smooth
And clean as a spinster’s bed,
But let the weed, the flower, the tree,
Riotous, rampant, wild and free,
Grow high above my head.
Remember not the promises we made
In this same garden many moons ago.
You must forget them. I would have it so.
Old vows are like old flowers as they fade
And vaguely vanish in a feeble death.
There is no reason why your hands should clutch
At pretty yesterdays. There is not much
Of beauty in me now. And though my breath
Is quick, my body sentient, my heart
Attuned to romance as before, you must
Not, through mistaken chivalry, pretend
To love me still. There is no mortal art
Can overcome Time’s deep, corroding rust.
Let Love’s beginning expiate Love’s end.
1925–1929
Helene Johnson, “My Race,” “The Road,” “Magula,” “A Southern Road,” “Bottled,” “Poem,” “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem,” “Summer Matures,” “Invocation,” “Remember Not,” from This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Verner D. Mitchell. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Used by permission of University of Massachusetts Press.
MY RACE
1 First published in Opportunity (July 1925).
THE ROAD
1 First published in The New Negro (1925), edited by Alain Locke.
MAGULA
1 First published in Palms (October 1926).
2 ziczac Euvola ziczac, or zigzag scallop.
A SOUTHERN ROAD
1 First published in Fire!! (November 1926).
BOTTLED
1 First published in Vanity Fair (May 1927).
POEM
1 First published in Caroling Dusk (1927), edited by Countée Cullen.
SONNET TO A NEGRO IN HARLEM
1 First published in Caroling Dusk (1927), edited by Countée Cullen.
SUMMER MATURES
1 First published in Opportunity (July 1927).
INVOCATION
1 First published in The Saturday Evening Quill (April 1929).
REMEMBER NOT
1 First published in The Saturday Evening Quill (April 1929).