I, Too
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamedI, too, am America.
-Langston Hughes ( 1902-1967)
The Harlem Renaissance
I
n the early 1920s, African American artists, writers,
musicians, and performers were part of a great cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.
The huge migration to the north after World War I
brought African Americans of all ages and walks
of life to the thriving New York City neighborhood called Harlem. Doctors, singers, students,
musicians, shopkeepers, painters, and writers
congregated, forming a vibrant mecca of cultural
affirmation and inspiration.
As Langston Hughes wrote, "It was the period when
the Negro was in vogue." Marcus Garvey's "Back to
Africa" movement was in full swing. The blues were vibrantly alive; jazz was just beginning. An all-black show,
Shuffle Along, opened on Broadway with the performers Josephine Baker and Florence Mills, music composed by Eubie Blake, and lyrics by Noble Sissie. And
mainstream America was developing a new respect for
African art and culture, thanks in part to its reflection
in the work of the modernist artists Pablo Picasso and
Georges Braque.
Against this backdrop, Harlem Renaissance artists insisted that the African American be accepted as "a collaborator and participant in American civilization," in the
words of the educator and critic Alain Locke. Writers
such as Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston (page 750)
wrote about the African American experience. Artists
such as Aaron Douglas and William H. Johnson painted it.
The photographer James Van Der Zee recorded it with his
camera. The trumpeter Louis Armstrong and the pianist
Fletcher Henderson set it to music, and vocalists Bessie
Smith and Ma Rainey sang it.
Harlem newspapers and journals, such as Crisis and
Opportunity, published the work of both new and established African American writers. To promote and
support intellectually gifted young people, the journals
sponsored literary contests that encouraged creative
writing and rewarded it with cash prizes and social introductions to the top writers of the time.
In autobiographies, poetry, short stories, novels,
and folklore , African American writers afBessie Smith.
firmed the role of black talent in American
Brown Brothers.
culture and focused on different aspects of
black life in Harlem, the South, Europe, the
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The Migration of the Negro, Panel No. I ( 1940-1941) by Jacob Lawrence.
Tempera on masonite ( 12" x 18 ").
Caribbean, and even Russia. They addressed issues of race, class, religion, and gender. Some writers focused entirely on black characters,
while others addressed relationships among people of different races.
Some writers attacked racism; others addressed issues within black communities. A by-product of African American writing was the affirmation
that black dialects were as legitimate as standard English.
Unfortunately, by the early 1930s, the Great Depression had depleted
many of the funds that had provided fmancial support to
individual African American writers, institutions,
and publications. Nevertheless, Harlem and
African American culture were forever
changed. The foundation was laid for
Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin,
Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker,
Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou,
Terry McMillan, Rita Dove,
and thousands of other
African American writers,
painters, composers, and
singers to make their feelings and experiences
part of American artistic
expression: "1, too, sing
America."
Louis Armstrong.
Brown Brothers.
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James Weldon Johnson (c. 1925) by Winold Reiss.
Pastel on artist board (30 lf16" x 21 9/16").
ten years. In 1931, he was appointed professor
of creative literature at Fisk University. Seven
years later, he died in an automobile accident.
Although some of Johnson's early poems are
in dialect, he soon abandoned that style for
standard English, which he felt was capable of
greater variety and power. His principal theme
was black pride, which he celebrated in such
poems as "Fifty Years," written on the fiftieth
anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation,
and "0 Black and Unknown Bards," a tribute to
the anonymous authors of African American
spirituals. With his brother, the composer John
Rosamond Johnson, he wrote a number of very
successful light operas and songs for Tin Pan
Alley, and the brothers collaborated in editing
two collections of spirituals.
Johnson was an important leader of the first
phase of the Harlem Renaissance. His anthology,
The Book of American Negro Poetry ( 1922), was one
of the significant early collections of poems by
African Americans. In addition to poetry, Johnson
wrote fiction (most notably The Autobiography of
an Ex-Colored Man, published in 1912), nonfiction
studies of black life, and an autobiography, Along
This Way (1933).
James Weldon Johnson
(1871-1938)
ames Weldon Johnson-poet, teacher, and
lawyer-was born in Jacksonville, Florida.
Educated at Atlanta University in Georgia and
Columbia University in New York City, he
was the first African American to be admitted
to the Florida bar after Reconstruction.
Throughout his career, Johnson was an energetic exponent of civil rights, and in his writing
he constantly sought recognition for the contributions that African Americans had made to
American culture.
After serving as U.S. consul in Venezuela and
then in Nicaragua ( 1907-1913), Johnson
worked as field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) for four years and then served as the
association's general secretary for the following
J
It was Johnson's extensive research for one
collection, The Book of American Negro Spirituals
( 1925), that inspired his poem "Go Down,
Death." Describing this experience, he said:
"The research which I did in collecting the spirituals and gathering the data for my introductory
essay had an effect on me similar to what I received from hearing the Negro evangelist
preach .... I was in touch with the deepest revelation of the Negro's soul that has yet been
made, and I felt myself attuned to it. I made an
outline of the second poem that I wrote of this
series. It was to be a 'funeral sermon: I decided
to call it 'Go Down, Death:
"On Thanksgiving Day, 1926, I was at home.
After breakfast I went to my desk and began
work in earnest on the poem. As I worked, my
own spirit rose till it reached a degree almost of
ecstasy. The poem shaped itself easily and before the hour for dinner I had written it as it
stands published."
go.hrw.com
736
THE MODERNS
LEO 11-15
Before You Read
Go DOWN, DEATH
Make the Connection
Death at the Doorstep
Every religion has its own view of
what happens when we die, and
countless storytellers, philosophers, and writers have added
their views to the sum of our understanding of the great mystery
we call death. Is death a source
of pain and sorrow, or is it a
comfort-perhaps even a joyous
affirmation of life?
Reading Skills
and Strategies
Go Down, Death
A Funeral Sermon
James Weldon Johnson
Weep not, weep not,
She is not dead;
She's resting in the bosom of Jesus.
Heart-broken husband-weep no more;
5 Grief-stricken son- weep no more;
Left-lonesome daughter-weep no more;
She's only just gone home.
~~
W:w,
Tracking Your Responses
This poem is one of seven "sermons" written by Johnson in the
style of the old-time African
American preachers. He collected the sermons in a book
called God's Trombones-the
trombone being "of just the tone
and timbre to represent the oldtime Negro preacher's voice."
Johnson tells us that the person reading "Go Down, Death"
would intone, moan, plead, blare,
crash, and thunder. As you read,
jot down the words, lines, or
stanzas that have the strongest
emotional effect on you.
Elements of Literature
Personification
Personification is a figure of
speech in which an animal, object, or abstract concept is portrayed with human qualities. In
this poem, Johnson invites readers to see and understand Death
as a character rather than as an
abstract concept.
10
15
20
Day before yesterday morning,
God was looking down from his great, high heaven,
Looking down on all his children,
And his eye fell on Sister Caroline,
Tossing on her bed of pain.
And God's big heart was touched with pity,
With the everlasting pity.
And God sat back on his throne,
And he commanded that tall, bright angel standing at his right
hand:
Call me Death!
And that tall, bright angel cried in a voice
That broke like a clap of thunder:
Call Death! -Call Death!
And the echo sounded down the streets of heaven
Till it reached away back to that shadowy place,
Where Death waits with his pale, white horses. o
And Death heard the summons,
And he leaped on his fastest horse,
Pale as a sheet in the moonlight.
Up the golden street Death galloped,
And the hoofs of his horse struck frre from the gold,
But they didn't make no sound.
30 Up Death rode to the Great White Throne,
And waited for God's command.
25
And God said: Go down, Death, go down,
Go down to Savannah, Georgia,
Down in Yamacraw,
23. Death waits ... horses: allusion to Revelation 6:8,
"And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that
sat on him was Death."
jAMES WELDON jOHNSON
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And fmd Sister Caroline.
She's borne the burden and heat of the day,
She's labored long in my vineyard,
And she's tiredShe's weary40 Go down, Death, and bring her to me.
35
And Death didn't say a word,
But he loosed the reins on his pale, white horse,
And he clamped the spurs to his bloodless sides,
And out and down he rode,
45 Through heaven's pearly gates,
Past suns and moons and stars;
On Death rode,
And the foam from his horse was like a comet in the sky;
On Death rode,
50 Leaving the lightning's flash behind;
Straight on down he came.
While we were watching round her bed,
She turned her eyes and looked away,
She saw what we couldn't see;
55 She saw Old Death. She saw Old Death
Coming like a falling star.
But Death didn't frighten Sister Caroline;
He looked to her like a welcome friend.
And she whispered to us: I'm going home,
60 And she smiled and closed her eyes.
And Death took her up like a baby,
And she lay in his icy arms,
But she didn't feel no chill.
And Death began to ride again65 Up beyond the evening star,
Out beyond the morning star, a
Into the glittering light of glory,
On to the Great White Throne.
And there he laid Sister Caroline
70 On the loving breast of Jesus.
And Jesus took his own hand and wiped away her tears,
And he smoothed the furrows from her face,
And the angels sang a little song,
And Jesus rocked her in his arms,
75 And kept a-saying: Take your rest,
Take your rest, take your rest.
'
66. evening star ... morning
star: the planet Venus, which is traditionally referred to as both the morning star and the evening star. Its
orbital path makes it visible for no
more than about three hours after
sunset and three hours before
sunrise.
Weep not-weep not,
She is not dead;
She's resting in the bosom of Jesus.
jAMES WELDON jOHNSON
739
God's Trombones
~
In his preface to God's Trombones, from which "Go Down, Death" is taken,
: Johnson describes the origin of his idea for his collection of poems.
I
The old-time preacher was generally a man far
above the average in intelligence; he was, not
infrequently, a man of positive genius. The earliest of these preachers must have virtually
committed many parts of the Bible to memory
through hearing the scriptures read or
preached from in the white churches which
the slaves attended. They were the flrst of the
slaves to learn to read, and their reading was
confmed to the Bible, and specillcally to the
more dramatic passages of the Old Testament.
A text served mainly as a starting point and
often had no relation to the development of the
sermon. Nor would the old-time preacher balk
at any text within the lids of the Bible. There is
the story of one who after reading a rather
cryptic passage took off his spectacles, closed
the Bible with a bang and by way of preface
said, "Brothers and sisters, this morning-! intend to explain the unexplainable-fmd out
the undefmable-ponder over the imponderable-and unscrew the inscrutable."
The old-time Negro preacher of parts was
above all an orator, and in good measure an
actor. He knew the secret of oratory, that at
bottom it is a progression of rhythmic words
more than it is anything else. Indeed, I have
witnessed congregations moved to ecstasy by
the rhythmic intoning of sheer incoherencies.
He was a master of all the modes of eloquence.
He often possessed a voice that was a marvelous instrument, a voice he could modulate
from a sepulchral whisper to a crashing thunder clap. His discourse was generally kept at a
high pitch of fervency, but occasionally he
dropped into colloquialisms and, less often,
740
THE MODERNS
into humor. He preached a personal and anthropomorphic God, a sure-enough heaven
and a red-hot hell. His imagination was bold
and unfettered. He had the power to sweep his
hearers before him; and so himself was often
swept away. At such times his language was
not prose but poetry. It was from memories of
such preachers there grew the idea of this
book of poems.
-James Weldon Johnson
Prayer Meeting ( 1951) by Samella Sanders Lewis.
Watercolor (I r
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14%").
Hampton University Museum, Hampton, Virginia.
Connections
A
POEM
: Borrowing from the spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," the African Ameri) creates a poem that also has the
: can poet Gwendolyn Brooks ( 1917i rhythm of a song. (For more on spirituals, see page 432.) Lincoln Cemetery is
: in Chicago.
of De Witt Williams on his
way to Lincoln Cemetery
Gwendolyn Brooks
He was born in Alabama.
He was bred in Illinois.
He was nothing but a
Plain black boy.
5 Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot.
Nothing but a plain black boy.
Drive him past the Pool Hall.
Drive him past the Show.
Blind within his casket,
10 But maybe he will know.
Down through Forty-seventh Street:
Underneath the L,
And-Northwest Corner, Prairie,
That he loved so well.
Haitian Funeral Procession (c. 1950s) by Ellis Wilson.
Oil on canvas (30 W' x 29 1f4").
Aaron Douglas Collection, Amistad Research Center,
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.
15 Don't forget the Dance Halls-
Warwick and Savoy,
Where he picked his women, where
He drank his liquid joy.
20
Born in Alabama.
Bred in Illinois.
He was nothing but a
Plain black boy.
Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot.
Nothing but a plain black boy.
jAMES WELDON jOHNSON
741
-
MAKING MEANINGS
justified, but I was taken aback. I got out my
copy of Leaves of Grass and read him some of
the things I admired most. There was, at
least, some personal consolation in the fact
that his verdict was the same on Whitman
himself.
First Thoughts
I. Review the notes you made as you read ~
"Go Down, Death:' Which words, lines,
'--' ,
or stanzas had the strongest effect on you? Why?
- James Weldon Johnson
Shaping Interpretations
l
2. Identify where God is in stanza 2, and where
Death is in stanza 3. According to stanza 5,
where is Sister Caroline? How does Sister Caroline respond to Death's arrival in stanza 7?
3. Find three similes that help to suggest the magnificence of the workings of heaven.
4. Does the speaker portray God and Jesus as distant, forbidding figures, or as familiar, gentle
ones? Point out at least four details that support your interpretation.
5. Why do you think Death rides a "pale, white
horse"? Where else have you seen the color
white used in a similar symbolic way?
I
Examine "Go Down, Death;' and see if you can
identify the influence of Whitman (page 348). Look
for these elements of Whitman's style: (I) repetition and parallel structure to create rhythm;
(2) the simple language of everyday conversation, including slang; (3) variation of line length, from very
long to very short, to create a rolling cadence;
(4) other sound effects.
CHOICES:
Building Your Portfolio
Extending the Text
Writer's Notebook
6. While many of the traditional representations of
death are fearful, the one in this poem is not.
Discuss the ways Johnson personifies death in
this poem. Then compare Johnson's image with
images you have encountered in literature (see
especially Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not
stop for Death" on page 391) or on film.
1. Collecting Ideas for an
ELEMENTS OF
LITERATURE
Free Verse and the Orator's Style
I sho~ed Paul the things I had done under the
sudden influence of Whitman. He read them
through and, looking at me with a queer
smile, said, "I don't like them, and I don't see
what you are driving at." He may have been
-THE MODERNS
Explore the similarities and
differences in the attitudes toward death in
Johnson's "Go Down, Death" and Gwendolyn
Brooks's "of De Witt Williams on his way
to Lincoln Cemetery" (see Connections on
page 741 ). Take notes in a double-column
comparison-contrast chart. Save your notes
for possible use in the Writer's Workshop
on page 804.
Comparing Sermons
When Johnson was working on the poems that
would eventually become God's Trombones, he talked
with the African American poet Paul Laurence
Dunbar ( 1872-1906).
742
Interpretive Essay
2. Sermons Side by Side
Extracts from another famous sermon in
American literature are on page 79-Jonathan
Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God." In a brief essay, compare and contrast
Johnson's sermon with Edwards's. Consider
these elements of each sermon: (a) imagery,
(b) figures of speech, (c) message, (d) tone,
(e) audience, and (f) purpose.
~
1
Claude McKay ( 1941) by Carl Van Vechten.
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New
Haven, Connecticut. Estate of Carl Van Vechten, Joseph Solomon,
Executor.
Claude McKay
(1890-1948)
C
laude McKay was born and raised on the
Caribbean island of Jamaica, the eighth
child of farmers. When he was nine, he went to
live with his eldest brother, who was a schoolmaster, and his early education came chiefly
from his brother's classroom and library. McKay
apprenticed as a wheelwright and cabinetmaker,
then worked as a constable. All the while, he
was writing poems in a Jamaican dialect of
English. In 1912, with the help of an English
friend, he published his first two collections of
verse, Songs ofjamaica and Constab Ballads, then
traveled to the United States to study agriculture. After briefly enrolling at Tuskegee Institute
in Alabama, McKay transferred to Kansas State
College, where he studied for two years.
In 1914, McKay moved to Harlem and
opened a restaurant with a friend. When this
venture failed, he supported himself with a variety of jobs, from janitor to butler, while he continued to refine his craft and publish poems in
periodicals. In 1920, his third book, Spring in
New Hampshire, was published. His most important book of poetry, Harlem Shadows, appeared
in 1922.
By this time, McKay was a major figure in the
Harlem Renaissance. He had served as an editor of the radical newspapers the Liberator and
The Masses. Like many writers of the period, he
was drawn to the "noble experiment" of communism. In 1922, he signed on as a stoker for a
merchant ship and toured Russia for a year.
McKay lived abroad, principally in France,
until 1934. During this time he concentrated on
writing fiction and essays rather than poetry,
and he published four novels, including the bestselling Home to Harlem ( 1928). Disillusioned
with communism, in 1942 he converted to
Roman Catholicism. McKay spent the rest of his
life teaching in Catholic schools in Chicago.
Despite the use of Jamaican dialect early in
his career, much of McKay's poetry shows the
influence of the English Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. In subject matter, however, the Romantics and McKay
diverge widely: McKay's sonnets voice his ambivalent and often defiant feelings about African
American life in the United States.
go.hrw.com
LEOJJ-15
CLAUDE McKAY
743
Before
You Read
AMERICA
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By expressing defiance as well as
love, McKay reveals the complexity of the African American experience in the United States-an
experience that requires a large
measure of strength and courage.
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adjectives that you feel describe the heart of today's American society. Then, in two or
three sentences, tell how you
see yourself in relation to that
society.
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Lower East Side from Scenes of New York (Mural study, Madison
Square Postal Station, New York City) by Kindred Mcleary.
Tempera on fiberboard (233/4" x 20").
America
Claude McKay
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, o
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
5 Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts o a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
10 Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
1. bread of bitterness: allusion to Psalm 80:5, "Thou
feedest them with the bread of tears; and givest them
tears to drink in great measure."
8. fronts: confronts.
744
THE MODERNS
~
MAKING MEANINGS
CHOICES:
Building Your Portfolio
First Thoughts
I. Review your Quickwrite. Then, compare •
your views of America, and your place in
it, with McKay's.
Writer's Notebook
1. Collecting Ideas for
an Interpretive Essay
Shaping Interpretations
2. In lines 1-3, what treatment does the poem's
speaker say he receives from America? What
qualities of America cause the speaker to love
the country anyway?
3. America is personified in this poem as an entity
both cruel and powerful. What images suggest
America's cruelty and injustice? What images
convey its power?
4. A rebel with "not a shred I Of terror, malice, not
a word of jeer" might seem to be a rebel who
does not really rebel. How does the poem resolve this paradox, or apparent contradiction?
Using a chart like the one
below, compare McKay's "America" to
Robinson jeffers's "Shine, Perishing Republic"
(page 581 ). Consider the form, subject,
point of view, and tone of each poem. List
similarities in the overlapping space. Use the
remaining spaces to list the differences. Save
your notes for possible use with the Writer's
Workshop on page 804.
Extending the Text
5. What does this speaker see happening to America as he gazes into "the days ahead"? What messages about America's future do you hear today
in various sources-films, TV shows, news programs, magazines, and other media?
Street vendors in Harlem in the
1920s.
UPI/Bettmann.
Creative Writing I Art
2. Get the Message
Design a poster or write a bumper sticker
that the speaker in "America" might display.
Try to capture in a phrase or two the main
idea expressed in the poem.
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(1903-1946)
ountee Cullen grew up in New York City
as the adopted son of Rev. and Mrs. Frederick Cullen. He was a brilliant student, and
during high school he was already writing accomplished poems in traditional forms. He
graduated Phi Beta Kappa from New York University in 1925. While in college, Cullen won
the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize; that same year,
Color, his first volume of poetry, was published.
This collection won a gold medal from the Harmon Foundation and established the young
poet's reputation.
After earning his master's degree from Harvard in 1926, Cullen worked as an assistant
editor of the important African American magazine Opportunity. His poems were published in
such influential periodicals as Harper's, Poetry,
and Crisis. In 1927, he published Copper Sun, a
collection of poems, and Caroling Dusk, an anthology of poetry by African Americans. Caroling Dusk was a significant contribution to the
Harlem Renaissance, but the introduction
Cullen wrote for the book was controversial.
He called for black poets to write traditional
verse and to avoid the restrictions of solely
racial themes.
At the peak of his career, Cullen married the
daughter of the famous black writer W.E.B.
Du Bois and published a third collection of
poems, The Ballad ofthe Brown Girl. In 1929, he
published a fourth volume, The Black Christ.
Although he continued to write prose until
the end of his life, this was his last collection of
poetry. During the Great Depression of the
1930s, unable to make a living solely from writing, he began teaching in Harlem public schools,
a job that he held until his early death.
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Countee Porter Cullen (c. 1925) by Winold Reiss.
Pastel on artist board (30 111{ x 211ft).
Cullen's verse was heavily influenced by the
poetry of the English Romantics, especially John
Keats. He thought of himself primarily as a lyric
poet in the Romantic tradition, not as a black
poet writing about social and racial themes. Nevertheless, Cullen found himself repeatedly drawn
to such themes: "Somehow or other I find my
poetry of itself treating of the Negro, of his joys
and his sorrows-mostly of the latter-and of
the heights and depths of emotion which I feel as
a Negro:•
go.hrw.com
746
THE MODERNS
!:!.
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LEO 11 -15
I
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Before You Read
TABLEAU
Make the Connection
Still Life
Usually, tableau means a scene or
an action stopped cold, like a still
picture in a reel of film. Here we
have a tableau vivant; that is, a little scene in which figures silently
pose, a significant moment
caught and preserved. This preserved moment is a disarmingly
simple glimpse of a friendship-a
friendship that speaks silently but
forcefully of a much larger issue.
Quickwrite
~
If you were sure you
: ;: : ; \
were behaving correctly,
how would you deal with critics
of your actions? Write down
your thoughts in a few sentences.
Tableau
(For Donald Duff)
Countee Cullen
Locked arm in arm they cross the way,
The black boy and the white,
The golden splendor of the day,
The sable pride of night.
5 From lowered blinds the dark folk stare,
And here the fair folk talk,
Indignant that these two should dare
In unison to walk.
10
Oblivious to look and word
They pass, and see no wonder
That lightning brilliant as a sword
Should blaze the path of thunder.
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COUNTEE CULLEN
747
Before
You Read
INCIDENT
Make the Connection
A Word Remembered
The power of a word to taunt,
to criticize, to dehumanize can't
be underestimated. You might be
shaken by the offensive word in
this poem-imagine how it
would affect a child.
Quickwrite
•
Before you read "lnci~'
dent," quickwrite your
response to the poem's title.
Does it suggest something serious, or something relatively
minor? How would you react if
the title were "Catastrophe"?
Passengers ( 1953) by Raphael Soyer. Oil on canvas.
© Estate of Raphael Soyer, Forum Gallery, New York.
Incident
Countee Cullen
Once, riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-ftlled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
s Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me "Nigger."
10
748
THE MODERNS
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.
j
MAKING MEANINGS
CHOICES:
Building Your Portfolio
Tableau
First Thoughts
I. Review your Quickwrite. Do the boys in ~
"Tableau" act toward their critics as you ~
would act toward yours?
Shaping Interpretations
2. What metaphors describe the two boys in the
first stanza?
3. In the third stanza, who or what is "lightning
brilliant as a sword"? Who or what is the "path
of thunder"?
4. Why should such a commonplace thing as the
friendship between two boys evoke such a dramatic response? What larger topic do you think
the poem is really about?
Incident
First Thoughts
I. Look at your Quickwrite notes. Does the
poem describe a mere incident or something much larger? Explain.
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Shaping Interpretations
2. What might lead a child to insult an eight-yearold boy in the way described here? In what ways
is a child's prejudice even more disturbing than
an adult's?
3. Review your response to First Thoughts. What
ironic overtones does the title have?
4. The speaker never directly states his emotional
response to the experience. How does the last
stanza indirectly make clear the impact the event
had on him?
Extending the Text
1. Collecting Ideas for an
Interpretive Essay
Compare and contrast the
diction and sentence structure in "Tableau" and "Incident."
~
Take notes that show how Cullen uses language to create two different effects in poems
that are about very similar subjects. Save your
notes for possible use in the Writer's Workshop on page 804.
Creative Writing
2. Kindred Spirits
Write a conversation in which the two boys
who appear in "Tableau" discuss what happens in "Incident" with the eight-year-old boy
who was the victim of the incident.
Creative Writing I Music
3. AFilm Version
Suppose you were going to make a short film
based on the poem "Incident." To convince a
producer that you have a good idea, write a
list of planned camera shots, in the
order in which they would appear on screen. Then
write a treatment, or
summary, of your vision
of the film. If you wish,
find or compose music
that you would use as an
appropriate soundtrack
for your film, and include
a recording of that music
with your film treatment.
5. Do you think that the content and message of
"Tableau" and "Incident" are outdated, or are
the scenes described in these poems still occurring today? Explain.
COUNTEE CULLEN
749
Zora Neale Hurston
a scholar's eye to evaluate oral tales, many of
which were familiar to her from earliest childhood. Eventually, she gathered enough folklore
(c. 1903-1960)
to fill two groundbreaking collections, Mules
and Men ( 1935) and Tell My Horse ( 1938). Alice
ora Neale Hurston was born in the all-black
Walker (page I I 0 I) says that the stories in
town of Eatonville, Florida. Her father was a
Mules and Men gave back to her own relatives in
preacher, and her mother, a schoolteacher, urged
the South all the stories they'd forgotten or
her talented daughter to "jump at the sun:'
grown ashamed of.
In her autobiography, Hurston recalls that as
a young girl, "I used to climb to the top of one
Hurston also wrote musical revues portraying black folk-culture, and these brought her iniof the huge chinaberry trees which guarded our
front gate and look out over
tial success. But it was Story
the world. The most interestmagazine's publication of her
ing thing that I saw was the
short story "The Gilded Six
horizon .... It grew upon me
Bits" that launched her literary
that I ought to walk out to the
career. When the Philadelphia
horizon and see what the end
publisher J. B. Lippincott asked
of the world was like."
if she had a novel, Hurston
When Hurston was about
promptly sat down and wrote
nine, her mother died, and
Jonah's Gourd Vine, published in
Zora was passed among rela1934. Three years later,
tives and family friends, supHurston published her best
porting herself from her early
novel, Their Eyes Were Watching
teens on. Eventually, she enGod, the story of a young
rolled at Howard University in
African American woman who
Washington, D.C., where she
strikes out for a life beyond a
published her first story in 1921.
conventional marriage, much as
Four years later, she set out
Hurston herself had done.
Zora Neale Hurston ( 1935) by Carl
for New York City to attend
Throughout the last twenty
Barnard College, arriving with Van Yechten.
years of her life, Hurston continued to produce fiction and nonfiction, includa dollar and a half in her pocket. Hurston was
soon in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance,
ing her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road.
But she began to have difficulty finding a market
writing stories and plays that celebrated her
African American heritage. She wore big hats
for her work, some of which was criticized in
and turbans, danced, gave parties, and somethe African American community for celebrattimes shocked other African American artists,
ing the life of black people in the United States
rather than confronting the white community
especially male writers like James
for its discrimination.
Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes.
In the late 1940s, Hurston left New York and
Enrolling at prestigious Barnard College,
returned to Florida. In 1960, she died, broke, in
Hurston met the famous anthropologist Franz
a Florida welfare home. A collection had to be
Boas. Boas believed that Hurston's interest was
taken up to pay for her funeral. Ironically, in the
really in his field, the study of human social and
years since her death, much of her work has
cultural behavior. Indeed, Hurston, who became
been brought back into print, and Hurston is
his protege, did eventually make her reputation
now recognized as the forerunner of such celenot just as a fiction writer, but also as a folklorist. She traveled through Alabama, Florida,
brated contemporary writers as Toni Morrison
and Alice Walker.
and Louisiana to gather folklore material, using
Z
go.hrw.com
750
THE MODERNS
LEOll-15
Before You Read
FROM
DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD
Make the Connection
Looking for the Threads
It's no surprise that the autobiographies of writers often include lovingly detailed memories
of childhood interests and discoveries that paved the way for
the adult writer. In her autobiography, One Writer's
Beginnings, Eudora Welty (page
633) notes, "Writing fiction has
developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a
human lifetime and a sense of
where to look for the threads,
how to follow, how to connect,
find in the thick of the tangle
what clear line persists. The
strands are all there: To the
memory nothing is ever really
lost." Here, Zora Neale Hurston
connects some of her own
threads by recounting what is
surely every writer's first experience of falling in love: the passion
for hearing and reading stories.
Reading Skills
and Strategies
well as personal insight and data.
Woven through these recollections of Hurston's childhood are
her impressions of racial segregation, economic conditions, education, social customs, and family,
as well as general attitudes of
Southerners around 1900.
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Analyzing an Autobiography
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As you read, write down what
you learn about Hurston's character from her thoughts and
actions, as well as any details that
suggest Hurston's early interest
in people, her fascination with
storytelling, and her later devotion to anthropology and folklore
research.
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Background
Zora Neale Hurston's Dust
Tracks on a Road is rich with cultural and historical meaning, as
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Her World ( 1948) by Philip Evergood. Oil on canvas (48" x 35%'}
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
75 I
I
used to take a seat on top of the gatepost and
watch the world go by. One way to Orlando
ran past my house, so the carriages and cars
would pass before me. The movement made
me glad to see it. Often the white travelers
would hail me, but more often I hailed them,
and asked, "Don't you want me to go a piece of
the way with you?"
They always did. I
know now that I must
s~hadklwum
have caused a great
deal of amusement
among them, but my
must
self-assurance
have carried the point,
br~rWM
for I was always invited
to come along. I'd ride
~~.
up the road for perhaps
a half-mile, then walk
back. I did not do this with the permission of
my parents, nor with their foreknowledge.
When they found out about it later, I usually
got a whipping. My grandmother worried
about my forward ways a great deal. She had
known slavery and to her my brazenness was
unthinkable.
"Git down offa dat gatepost! You li'l sow,
you! Git down! Setting up dere looking dem
1
white folks right in de face! They's gowine to
lynch you, yet. And don't stand in dat doorway
gazing out at 'em neither. Youse too brazen to
live long."
;!Avery aJtd to
Ito my
1. gowine: dialect for "going."
WORDS TO OWN
hail (hal) v.: greet.
brazenness (bra'zan · nis) n.: boldness.
Nevertheless, I kept right on gazing at them,
and "going a piece of the way" whenever I could
make it. The village seemed dull to me most of the
time. If the village was singing a chorus, I must
have missed the tune.
2
Perhaps a year before the old man died, I came
to know two other white people for myself. They
were women.
It came about this way. The whites who came
down from the North were often brought by their
friends to visit the village school. A Negro school
was something strange to them, and while they
were always sympathetic and kind, curiosity must
have been present, also. They came and went,
came and went. Always, the room was hurriedly
put in order, and we were threatened with a
prompt and bloody death if we cut one caper
while the visitors were present. We always sang a
spiritual, led by Mr. Calhoun himself. Mrs. Calhoun always stood in the back, with a palmetto
switch 3 in her hand as a squelcher. We were all little angels for the duration, because we'd better
4
be. She would cut her eyes and give us a glare
that meant trouble, then turn her face toward the
visitors and beam as much as to say it was a great
privilege and pleasure to teach lovely children like
us. They couldn't see that palmetto hickory in her
hand behind all those benches, but we knew
where our angelic behavior was coming from.
Usually, the visitors gave warning a day ahead
and we would be cautioned to put on shoes,
comb our heads, and see to ears and fmgernails.
There was a close inspection of every one of us
before we marched in that morning. Knotty
heads, dirty ears, and fmgernails got hauled out of
line, strapped, and sent home to lick the calf 5
over again.
This particular afternoon, the two young ladies
just popped in. Mr. Calhoun was flustered, but he
put on the best show he could. He dismissed the
class that he was teaching up at the front of the
room, then called the flfth grade in reading. That
was my class.
2. old man: a white farmer who knew Hurston's
family, took her fishing, and gave her advice.
3. palmetto switch: whip made from the stem of a large,
fanlike leaf of a kind of palm tree. Teachers sometimes
used these switches to discipline students.
4. cut her eyes: slang for "look scornfully."
5. lick the calf: slang for "wash up."
754
THE MODERNS
So we took our readers and went up front. We
stood up in the usual line, and opened to the lesson. It was the story of Pluto and Persephone. 6 It
was new and hard to the class in general, and Mr.
Calhoun was very uncomfortable as the readers
stumbled along, spelling out words with their
lips, and in mumbling undertones before they exposed them experimentally to the teacher's ears.
Then it came to me. I was ftfth or sixth down
the line. The story was not new to me, because I
had read my reader through from lid to lid, the
frrst week that Papa had bought it for me.
That is how it was that my eyes were not in the
book, working out the paragraph which I knew
would be mine by counting the children ahead of
me. I was observing our visitors, who held a book
between them, following the lesson. They had
shiny hair, mostly brownish. One had a looping
gold chain around her neck. The other one was
dressed all over in black and white with a pretty
fmger ring on her left hand. But the thing that
held my eyes were their fmgers. They were long
and thin, and very white, except up near the tips.
There they were baby pink. I had never seen such
hands. It was a fascinating discovery for me. I
wondered how they felt. I would have given those
hands more attention, but the child before me
was almost through. My turn next, so I got on my
mark, bringing my eyes back to the book and
made sure of my place. Some of the stories I had
reread several times, and this Greco-Roman myth
was one of my favorites. I was exalted by it, and
that is the way I read my paragraph.
"Yes, Jupiter7 had seen her (Persephone). He
had seen the maiden picking flowers in the fleld.
He had seen the chariot of the dark monarch
pause by the maiden's side. He had seen him
when he seized Persephone. He had seen the
6. Pluto and Persephone (p;)r · sef';) · ne): In classical
mythology, Pluto, or Hades, is the god who rules the underworld; Persephone, also known as Proserpina, is his
wife, queen of the underworld. In this version of the origin of the seasons, Hurston uses the names of Roman and
Greek gods interchangeably.
7. Jupiter: in Roman mythology, king of the gods.
WORDS TO OWN
caper (ka'par) n.: foolish prank.
exalted (eg · zolt'id) v.: lifted up.
black horses leap down Mount Aetna's8 fiery
held out those flower-looking fmgers toward me.
throat. Persephone was now in Pluto's dark realm
I seized the opportunity for a good look.
and he had made her his wife."
"Shake hands with the ladies, Zora Neale," Mr.
The two women looked at each other and then
Calhoun prompted and they took my hand one
back to me. Mr. Calhoun broke out with a proud
after the other and smiled. They asked me if I
smile beneath his bristly moustache, and instead
loved school, and I lied that I did. There was some
of the next child taking up where I had ended, he
truth in it, because I liked geography and reading,
nodded to me to go on. So I read the story to the
and I liked to play at recess time. Whoever it was
end, where flying Mercury, the messenger of the
invented writing and arithmetic got no thanks
Gods, brought Persephone
from me. Neither did I like
back to the sunlit earth and
the arrangement where
restored her to the arms of
the teacher could sit up
Dame Ceres, her mother,
there with a palmetto
that the world might have
stem and lick me whenspringtime and summer
ever he saw fit. I hated
flowers, autumn and harthings I couldn't do anything about. But I knew
vest. But because she had
bitten the pomegranate
better than to bring that
while in Pluto's kingdom,
up right there, so I said
she must return to him for
yes, I loved school.
three months of each year,
"I can tell you do,"
Brown Taffeta gleamed.
and be his queen. Then the
She patted my head, and
world had winter, until she
~ laAi,u
returned to earth.
was lucky enough not to
The class was dismissed and the
get sandspurs in her hand. Chilou& thor~
visitors smiled us away and went
dren who roll and tumble in the
into a low-voiced conversation with
grass in Florida are apt to get
Mr. Calhoun for a few minutes.
sandspurs in their hair. They
shook hands with me again and
They glanced my way once or twice
~err toward flU,.
I went back to my seat.
and I began to worry. Not only was I
When school let out at three
barefooted, but my feet and legs
o'clock, Mr. Calhoun told me to wait. When
were dusty. My hair was more uncombed than
everybody had gone, he told me I was to go to the
usual, and my nails were not shiny clean. Oh, I'm
Park House, that was the hotel in Maitland, the
going to catch it now. Those ladies saw me, too.
next
afternoon to call upon Mrs. Johnstone and
Mr. Calhoun is promising to 'tend to me. So I
Miss Hurd. I must tell Mama to see that I was clean
thought.
and brushed from head to feet, and I must wear
Then Mr. Calhoun called me. I went up thinkshoes and stockings. The ladies liked me, he said,
ing how awful it was to get a whipping before
and I must be on my best behavior.
company. Furthermore, I heard a snicker run over
The next day I was let out of school an hour
the room. Hermie Clark and Stell Brazzle did it out
early, and went home to be stood up in a tub of
loud, so I would be sure to hear them. The smart
suds and be scrubbed and have my ears dug into.
aleck was going to get it. I slipped one hand beMy sandy hair sported a red ribbon to match
hind me and switched my dress tail at them, indimy red and white checked gingham dress,
cating scorn.
starched until it could stand alone. Mama saw to it
"Come here, Zora Neale," Mr. Calhoun cooed as
that my shoes were on the right feet, since I was
I reached the desk. He put his hand on my shoulder and gave me little pats. The ladies smiled and
rHfi.Lut
4ltli held
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WORDS TO OWN
8. Mount Aetna's: Mount Aetna (also spelled Etna) is a
volcanic mountain in eastern Sicily.
realm (relm) n.: kingdom.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
755
careless about left and right. Last thing, I was
given a handkerchief to carry, warned again
about my behavior, and sent off, with my big
brother John to go as far as the hotel gate with me.
First thing, the ladies gave me strange things,
like stuffed dates and preserved ginger, and encouraged me to eat all that I wanted. Then they
showed me their Japanese dolls and just talked. I
was then handed a copy of Scribner's Magazine,
and asked to read a place that was pointed out to
me. After a paragraph or two, I was told with
smiles, that that would do.
I was led out on the grounds and they took my
picture under a palm tree. They handed me what
was to me then a heavy cylinder done up in
fancy paper, tied with a ribbon, and they told me
goodbye, asking me not to open it until I got
home.
My brother was waiting for me down by the
lake, and we hurried home, eager to see what
was in the thing. It was too heavy to be candy or
anything like that. John insisted on toting it for
me.
My mother made John give it back to me and
let me open it. Perhaps, I shall never experience
such joy again. The nearest thing to that moment
was the telegram accepting my frrst book. One
hundred goldy-new pennies rolled out of the
cylinder. Their gleam lit up the world. It was not
avarice that moved me. It was the beauty of the
thing. I stood on the mountain. Mama let me play
with my pennies for a while, then put them away
for me to keep.
That was only the beginning. The next day I
received an Episcopal hymnbook bound in white
leather with a golden cross stamped into the
front cover, a copy of The Swiss Family Robinson, and a book of fairy tales.
I set about to commit the song words to memory. There was no music written there, just the
words. But there was to my consciousness music
in between them just the same. "When I survey
the Wondrous Cross" seemed the most beautiful
to me, so I committed that to memory first of all.
Some of them seemed dull and without life, and I
pretended they were-not there. If white people
liked trashy singing like that, there must be
something funny about them that I had not noticed before. I stuck to the pretty ones where the
words marched to a throb I could feel.
756
THE MODERNS
Of~greek~
~euler HUJv-ed
HUJrt.
WORDS TO OWN
avarice (av' a· ris) n.: greed.
HU!,-
A month or so after the two young ladies returned to Minnesota, they sent me a huge box
packed with clothes and books. The red coat with
a wide circular collar and the red tam pleased me
more than any of the other things. My chums pretended not to like anything that I had, but even
then I knew that they were jealous. Old Smarty
had gotten by them again. The clothes were not
new, but they were very good. I shone like the
morning sun.
But the books gave me more pleasure than the
clothes. I had never been too keen on dressing
up. It called for hard scrubbings with Octagon
soap suds getting in my eyes, and none too gentle
fmgers scrubbing my neck and gouging in my
ears.
In that box were Gulliver's Travels, Grimm's
Fairy Tales, Dick Whittington, Greek and
Roman Myths, and best of all, Norse Tales. Why
did the Norse tales strike so deeply into my soul? I
do not know, but they did. I seemed to remember
seeing Thor swing his mighty short-handled hammer as he sped across the sky in rumbling thunder, lightning flashing from the tread of his steeds
and the wheels of his chariot. The great and good
Odin, who went down to the well of knowledge
to drink, and was told that the price of a drink
from that fountain was an eye. Odin drank deeply,
then plucked out one eye without a murmur and
handed it to the grizzly keeper, and walked away.
That held majesty for me.
Of the Greeks, Hercules moved me most. I followed him eagerly on his tasks. The story of the
choice of Hercules as a boy when he met Pleasure
and Duty, and put his hand in that of Duty and followed her steep way to the blue hills of fame and
glory, which she pointed out at the end, moved
me profoundly. I resolved to be like him. The
tricks and turns of the other gods and goddesses
left me cold. There were other thin books about
this and that sweet and gentle little girl who gave
up her heart to Christ and good works. Almost always they died from it, preaching as they passed. I
was utterly indifferent to their deaths. In the first
place I could not conceive of death, and in the
next place they never had any funerals that
amounted to a hill of beans, so I didn't care how
soon they rolled up their big, soulful, blue eyes
and kicked the bucket. They had no meat on
their bones.
But I also met Hans Andersen9 and Robert
10
Louis Stevenson. They seemed to know what I
wanted to hear and said it in a way that tingled
me. Just a little below these friends was Rudyard
11
Kipling in his Jungle Books. I loved his talking
snakes as much as I did the hero.
I came to start reading the Bible through my
mother. She gave me a licking one afternoon for
repeating something I had overheard a neighbor
telling her. She locked me in her room after the
whipping, and the Bible was the only thing in
there for me to read. I happened to open to the
place where David was doing some mighty smiting, and I got interested. David went here and he
went there, and no matter where he went, he
smote 'em hip and thigh. Then he sung songs to
his harp awhile, and went out and smote some
more. Not one time did David stop and preach
about sins and things. All David wanted to know
from God was who to kill and when. He took care
of the other details himself. Never a quiet moment. I liked him a lot. So I read a great deal more
in the Bible, hunting for some more active people
like David. Except for the beautiful language of
Luke and Paul, the New Testament still plays a
poor second to the Old Testament for me. The
12
Jews had a God who laid about Him when they
needed Him. I could see no use waiting till Judgment Day to see a man who was just crying for a
13
good killing, to be told to go and roast. My idea
was to give him a good killing first, and then if he
got roasted later on, so much the better.
9. Hans Andersen: Hans Christian Andersen (18051875), Danish writer known primarily for his fairy tales.
10. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894): Scottish
writer of adventure stories such as Kidnapped and Treasure Island.
11. Rudyard Kipling ... Books: Kipling (1865-1936)
was an English writer born in India. His jungle Book and
Second jungle Book contain stories of the adventures of
Mowgli, a boy raised by animals in the jungles of India.
12. laid about Him: slang for "struck blows in every
direction."
13. roast: slang for "burn in hell."
WORDS TO OWN
tread (tred) n.: stepping.
profoundly (pro· found'le) adv.: deeply.
resolved (re · zalvd') v.: made a decision; determined.
conceive (kan · sev') v.: think; imagine.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
757
,. . ,
r-rr!'N
In Search of a Story
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In another section of Dust Tracks on a Road,
Zora Neale Hurston tells of her passion, as a
child, for hearing stories from the African
American tradition.
For me, the store porch was the most interesting place that I could think of. I was not allowed to sit around there, naturally. But, I
could and did drag my feet going in and out,
whenever I was sent there for something, to
allow whatever was being said to hang in my
ear. I would hear an occasional scrap of gossip
in what to me was adult double talk, but which
I understood at times ....
But what I really loved to hear was the menfolks holding a "lying" session. That is, straining
against each other in telling folks tales. God,
Devil, Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Sis Cat, Brer Bear,
Lion, Tiger, Buzzard, and all the wood folk
walked and talked like natural men. The wives
of the storytellers might yell from back yards
for them to come and tote some water, or chop
wood for the cookstove and never get a move
out of the men. The usual rejoinder was, "Oh,
she's got enough to go on. No matter how
much wood you chop, a woman will burn it all
up to get a meal. If she got a couple of pieces,
she will make it do. If you chop up a whole
bo:xful, she will burn every stick of it. Pay her
no mind." So the storytelling would go right on.
...
'I This passion for listening to stories from the
' oral tradition led Hurston to collect folklore
as a field researcher. In this section of her autobiography, Hurston tells of studying anthropology at Barnard College in New York City
and of how she went out among African
Americans to gather their folk tales. In her
first attempts as a folklore collector, she did
not succeed. She had to learn the hard way
that a folklorist must use just the right approach with his or her sources.
758 THE MODERNS
Mecklenburg Evening ( 1984) by Romare Bearden.
Collage and watercolor on board.
© Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking
and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that
he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets
of the world and they that dwell therein. . . .
My first six months were disappointing. I
found out later that it was not because I had no
talents for research, but because I did not have
the right approach. The glamour of Barnard
College was still upon me. I dwelt in marble
halls. I knew where the material was all right.
But, I went about asking, in carefully accented
Barnardese, "Pardon me, but do you know any
folk tales or folk songs?" The men and women
who had whole treasuries of material just seeping through their pores looked at me and
shook their heads. No, they had never heard of
anything like that around there. Maybe it was
over in the next county. Why didn't I try over
there? I did, and got the selfsame answer. Oh, I
got a few little items. But compared with what
I did later, not enough to make a flea a waltzing jacket.
-Zora Neale Hurston
MAKING MEANINGS
Building Your Portfolio
First Thoughts
I. Did you identify with
Hurston's love
of books?
What were
your feelings
about books
when you
were younger?
Have your feelings changed?
Reading Check
a. Why is Hurston's
grandmother afraid
of Zora's boldness?
b. Why do white
Northerners visit the
school?
c. What do the two
young ladies send
I
from Minnesota?
'
d. What are the narrator's favorite books?
Shaping
Interpretations
2. Consulting the notes you took while
3.
4.
5.
6.
CHOICES:
~
reading, characterize the narrator. ~
Find examples from the text to support your
view of Hurston.
What qualities does the young Hurston exhibit
when she reads aloud in class?
What does Hurston think about the two women
who visit? How do you know?
Why do you think the visitors invite Hurston to
their hotel?
Why does the young Hurston treasure the
books the ladies from Minnesota send her?
Challenging the Text
7. Hurston was criticized by some of her contemporaries because they felt she did not place
enough emphasis on the racial oppression of
African Americans by the white community.
Using references from this autobiographical excerpt, explain whether you agree or disagree
with this criticism.
Writer's Notebook
1. Collecting Ideas
for an Interpretive Essay
~OHI!tf
~~
~·
The title of an autobiography
can tell you a great deal about how a writer
views his or her life. Write down your reactions to the title Dust Tracks on a Road. Based
on what you learned about Hurston in the biography on page 750 and in this excerpt, why
do you think she chose this title? What does
it reveal about her life experiences? Keep
your notes for possible use in the Writer's
Workshop on page 804.
Comparing Autobiographies
2. Real-Life Stories
In a brief essay, compare this passage from
Hurston's autobiography with the selection
from Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (page
86). You might compare (a) the narrators'
actions and motives; (b) the narrators' relationships with other people; (c) the incidents
described and why the narrators might have
chosen to write about them.
Creative Writing I Performance
3. Dust Tracks Onstage
Autobiographies are often successfully
adapted and dramatized for the stage. Working with a group, prepare this excerpt from
Dust Tracks on a Road for performance. You
will have to assign scriptwriters, a director,
actors, costume designers, and set designers.
You might also need a narrator to tell the
parts of the story that are not told directly in
dialogue. Consider using music (such as
orchestral, rock, folk, blues, jazz, or rap) to
emphasize important moments.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
759
Portrait of
Langston
Hughes by
Winold
Reiss.
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National
Portrait Gallery,
Washington,
D.C., U.S.A
Langston Hughes
(1902-1967)
0
ne evening toward the end of 1925, the
poet Vachel Lindsay was eating dinner in
the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C.
The busboy, a twenty-three-year-old African
American, left three poems near Lindsay's plate.
Lindsay was so impressed by the poems that he
presented them in his reading that night, telling
the audience that he had discovered a true
poet-a young black man who was working as a
busboy in the hotel restaurant. Over the next
few days, articles about the "busboy poet" appeared in newspapers up and down the East
Coast.
The busboy, Langston Hughes, was no beginning writer. In fact, when he shyly approached
Lindsay, Hughes's first book of poetry, The Weary
Blues, was about to be published by a prestigious
New York company, and individual poems had
appeared in numerous places. Lindsay warned
the young poet about literary "!ionizers" who
might exploit him for their own purpose: "Hide
and write and study and think. I know what factions do. Beware of them. I know what Iionizers
do. Beware of them:· In response to Lindsay,
Hughes wrote back: "If anything is important, it is
my poetry, not me. I do not want folks to know
me, but if they know and like some of my poems
I am glad. Perhaps the mission of an artist is to
interpret beauty to the people-the beauty
within themselves. That is what I want to do, if I
consciously want to do anything with poetry:•
Before this encounter, Hughes had attended
Columbia University and worked his way to
Africa and back as a crew member on an ocean
freighter. Ambitious and energetic, Hughes had
learned early to rely on himself. He spoke German and Spanish; he had lived in Mexico, France,
and Italy. In the years that followed his "overnight" celebrity, he earned his degree at Lincoln
University, wrote fifteen volumes of poetry, six
novels, three books of short stories, eleven
plays, and a variety of nonfiction works.
Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes spent most
of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, with his
grandmother. When he was thirteen, she died,
and he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, and then to
Cleveland, Ohio, to live with his mother and
stepfather.
Hughes began writing poems in the eighth
grade, and he began publishing his work as a
high school student in his school literary magazine. He read voraciously and greatly admired
the work of Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay,
Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman.
The most important influences on Hughes's
poetry were Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg.
Both poets broke from traditional poetic forms
and used free verse to express the humanity of
all people regardless of their age, gender, race,
and class. Encouraged by the examples of Whitman and Sandburg, Hughes celebrated the experiences of African Americans, often using jazz
rhythms and the repetitive structure of the
blues in his poems. Toward the end of his life,
he wrote poems specifically for jazz accompaniment. He was also responsible for the founding
of several black theater companies, and he
wrote and translated a number of dramatic
works. His work, he said, was an attempt to
"explain and illuminate the Negro condition in
America." It succeeded in doing that with both
vigor and compassion.
go.hrw.com
7 60
THE MODERNS
LEOll-15
Before You Read
THE WEARY BLUES
Make the Connection
Sweet Blues
Among the great contributions
of American culture to the world
is the music produced by African
Americans: orchestral, blues,
ragtime, jazz, rap, and new musical expressions that you can hear
every day.
The kind of music known as
the blues started to attract attention at the turn of the century, eventually becoming widely
popular in the United States and
abroad and making stars out of
such blues singers as Bessie
Smith and Ethel Waters. In this
poem, Hughes tries both toreport the experience of a "sad
raggy tune" and to capture some
of its rhythms in words.
Quickwrite
•
Blues music has influ~'
enced all kinds of popular music, from rock and soul to
country, folk, and jazz. Jot down
any associations you have with
the word blues. What do you already know about blues music? Is
there any blues influence in the
kinds of music you like?
Elements of Literature
Rhythm
Rhythm in poetry is the rise
and fall of the voice, produced by
the alternation of stressed and
unstressed syllables. Langston
Hughes uses several different
kinds of rhythms in "The Weary
Blues." As he says in the first line,
he uses the "syncopated tune" of
a piano. He also uses the rhythm
of everyday speech, the soulful
rhythm of the blues, and even
the formal meter of traditional
poetry. His poems are true
originals.
Background
On a March night in 1922,
Langston Hughes sat in a small
Harlem cabaret and wrote "The
Weary Blues." In this poem,
Hughes incorporated the many
elements of his life-the music of
Southern black speech, the lyrics
of the first blues he ever heard,
and conventional poetic forms he
learned in school. While the
body of the poem took shape
quickly, it took the poet two
years to get the ending right: "I
could not achieve an ending I
liked, although I worked and
worked on it:' When he at last
completed the poem, "The
Weary Blues" marked the beginning of his literary career.
The Weary Blues
Langston Hughes
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,o
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenueo the other night
5 By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway .. .
He did a lazy sway .. .
To the tune o ' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
10 He made that poor piano moan with melody.
0 Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
1. syncopated tune: melody in which accents are placed
on normally unaccented beats.
4. Lenox Avenue: street in Harlem.
lANGSTON HUGHES
761
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15 Coming from a black man's soul.
0 Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
20
Ain't got nobody but rna salf.
I's gwine to quit rna frownin'
And put rna troubles on the shelf."
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more25
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied! ain't happy no mo'
30
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
35 He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
762
THE MODERNS
Birth of the Blues
When asked about the origins of the blues, a veteran New Orleans fiddler once said: "The blues? Ain't no first blues! The blues always been."
The first form of blues, country blues, developed in several parts of the
United States, most notably the Mississippi Delta, around 1900. Country blues tunes were typically sung by men- usually sharecroppers.
The subject was often the relationship between men and women. As
the contemporary blues singer B. B. King once said, the blues is about
a man losing his woman.
From the start, blues music was improvisational- it changed with
every singer and performance. Parts of lyrics were freely borrowed
from other songs or based on folk songs or figures of speech. Lines
might be repeated two or three times, with different accents and
emphases, then answered or completed by a rhyming line:
Black cat on my doorstep, black cat on my window sill. (repeat)
If some black cat don't cross me, some other black cat will.
- Ma Rainey
The blues catch on. The earliest blues singers, among them
Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson,
played at country stores, at Friday- and Saturday-night dances, at
cafes, and at picnics. The first popular blues recordings, made
in the 1920s, featured female singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie
Smith backed by a piano or a jazz band.
When rural Southern African Americans migrated after World
War I to cities like Chicago, New York, Detroit, St. Louis, and
Memphis, the blues sound evolved further. Musicians sang about
their experiences in the city, adding the electric guitar, amplified
harmonica, bass, and drums to blues ensembles. Musicians such as
Sunnyland Slim, T-Bone Walker, and Memphis Minnie pioneered the
urban blues sound in the 1930s and 1940s; the next generat ion included the
blues greats Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and B. B. King. Since then, blues
music has influenced virtually every genre of music, including folk, country
and western, and- most profoundly- rock. Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, the
Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and Bonnie Raitt have all borrowed freely from
the blues tradition. Today, blues music is still being played and created by such
artists as Buddy Guy, Etta James, Otis Rush, Koko Taylor, Keb' Mo', and
Robert Cray. They are carrying on a musical tradition that was invented at a
particular time and place- the American South in the early 1900s- to express the African American experience. The genius of the blues is that it has
honored its origins even as it expresses universal hopes, fears, and sorrows.
LANGSTON HUGHES
763
Before
You Read
HARLEM
Make the Connection
Feeling Trapped
The Harlem Renaissance writers
created many poems that were
responses to the feeling of oppression that pervaded the lives
of Harlem residents. Hughes
himself wrote several poems
called "Harlem." This poem is set
during the Great Depression,
a time when even a one-cent
increase in the price of bread
could be disastrous, when being
black and poor meant that there
were limited opportunities.
Quickwrite
•
How would it feel to
: ; .: ; '
be the victim of discrimination? List some adjectives describing a victim's emotions.
Elements of literature
Tone
Tone is the attitude a writer
takes toward the subject of a literary work, the characters or
events in it, or the audience that
it is directed to. Some early
African American writers conveyed their real emotions under
masks of carefully shaped observations, images, and thoughts. In
"Harlem," Langston Hughes
manipulates the poem's tone to
both hide and reveal his feelings.
7 64
THE MODERNS
Harlem
Langston Hughes
Here on the edge of hell
Stands HarlemRemembering the old lies,
The old kicks in the back,
5 The old "Be patient"
They told us before.
Sure, we remember.
Now when the man at the corner store
Says sugar's gone up another two cents,
10 And bread one,
And there's a new tax on cigarettesWe remember the job we never had,
Never could get,
And can't have now
15 Because we're colored.
20
So we stand here
On the edge of hell
In Harlem
And look out on the world
And wonder
What we're gonna do
In the face of what
We remember.
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Heyday in Harlem
; Langston Hughes describes the vigor and excitement of Harlem in the 1920s
: and 1930s.
2
White people began to come to Harlem in
droves. For several years they packed the expensive Cotton Club on Lenox Avenue. But I
was never there, because the Cotton Club was
1
a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied
whites. They were not cordial to Negro
patronage, unless you were a celebrity like
Bojangles. So Harlem Negroes did not like the
Cotton Club and never appreciated its Jim
Crow policy in the very heart of their dark
community....
It was a period when, at almost every
Harlem upper-crust dance or party, one would
be introduced to various distinguished white
1. Jim Crow club: segregated nightclub.
2. Bojangles: Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (1879-1949),
star of black musical comedies and vaudeville.
jockey Club ( 1929) by Archibald John Motley, Jr. Oil on canvas.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Art and Artifacts Division. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
7 66
THE MODERNS
celebrities there as guests. It was a period
when almost any Harlem Negro of any social
importance at all would be likely to say casually: "As I was remarking the other day to Heywood-," meaning Heywood Broun. 3 Or: "As I
said to George-," referring to George Gersh4
win. It was a period when local and visiting
royalty were not at all uncommon in Harlem.
And when the parties of A'Lelia Walker, the
Negro heiress, were filled with guests whose
names would turn any Nordic 5 social climber
green with envy. . . . It was a period when
every season there was at least one hit play on
Broadway acted by a Negro cast. And when
books by Negro authors were being published
with much greater frequency and much more
publicity than ever before or since in history. It
was a period when white writers wrote about
Negroes more successfully (commercially
speaking) than Negroes did about themselves.
It was the period (God help us!) when Ethel
6
Barrymore appeared in blackface in Scarlet
Sister Mary! It was the period when the Negro
was in vogue ....
Then it was that house-rent parties began to
flourish-and not always to raise the rent either. But, as often as not, to have a get-together
of one's own, where you could do the blackbottom7 with no stranger behind you trying
to do it, too. Nontheatrical, nonintellectual
Harlem was an unwilling victim of its own
vogue. It didn't like to be stared at by white
folks. But perhaps the downtowners never
knew this-for the cabaret owners, the enter8
tainers, and the speakeasy proprietors treated
them fme-as long as they paid.
3. Heywood Broun (1888-1939): American journalist during the 1920s and 1930s.
4. George Gershwin (1898-1937): great American
composer of both popular and serious music.
5. Nordic: white.
6. Ethel Barrymore (1879-1959): American stage
and movie actress.
7. black-bottom: popular dance of the late 1920s.
8. speakeasy: club where alcoholic drinks were sold
illegally during Prohibition.
The Saturday night rent parties that I attended were often more amusing than any
night club, in small apartments where God
knows who lived-because the guests seldom
did-but where the piano would often be augmented by a guitar, or an odd cornet, or somebody with a pair of drums walking in off the
street. And where awful bootleg whiskey and
good fried fish or steaming chitterling9 were
sold at very low prices. And the dancing and
singing and impromptu entertaining went on
until dawn came in at the windows.
These parties, often termed whise 0 parties
or dances, were usually announced by brightly
colored cards stuck in the grille of apartment
house elevators. Some of the cards were highly
entertaining in themselves:
Some wear pajamas, some wear pants, what does it matter
just so you can dance, at
A Social Whist Party
GJVENny
MR. & MRs. BROWN
AT 258 W. 115TH STREET, APT. 9
SA11JRnAY EVE., SEPT. 14, 1929
The mustc is sweet and everything good to eat!
Almost every Saturday night when I was in
Harlem I went to a house-rent party. I wrote
lots of poems about house-rent parties, and ate
thereat many a fried fish and pig's foot-with
liquid refreshments on the side. I met ladies'
maids and truck drivers, laundry workers and
shoeshine boys, seamstresses and porters. I
can still hear their laughter in my ears, hear the
soft slow music, and feel the floor shaking as
the dancers danced.
-Langston Hughes,
from "When the Negro Was in Vogue,"
from The Big Sea
9. chitterling (chit'lin): food made from small intestines of pigs, deep-fried in hot oil.
10. whist: card game.
LANGSTON HUGHES
76 7
CHOICES:
MAKING MEANINGS
Building Your Portfolio
The Weary Blues
First Thoughts
Writer's Notebook
I. What would you say is the most powerful
image in "The Weary Blues"? Why?
1. Collecting Ideas
for an Interpretive Essay
Shaping Interpretations
2. How does the message of the blues singer's
first verse contrast with that of his second?
3. What are some of the words in the poem that
help to create a slow, weary, melancholy mood?
4. Review your Quickwrite to see how well ~
this poem fits your concept of blues music. ~
Describe how the poem's structure suggests
the rhythms of blues music. Point out examples
of alliteration and onomatopoeia that also
add to the poem's wailing, musical effect.
5. How would you describe the emotional effect of
the image in line 32?
6. What similes in the poem's last line describe
how the singer sleeps? What do you think the
last five words suggest?
First Thoughts
2. Name the specific hardships and injustices that
the people of Harlem remember, according to
the speaker in the poem.
3. In "Harlem," what does the speaker suggest
when he says "Here on the edge of hell I Stands
Harlem-"?
4. What is the effect of the repetition of "remember"?
5. Do you interpret the poem's final stanza as an
expression of powerlessness, or as a threat?
Defend your opinion.
6. How would you read this poem and "The Weary
Blues" aloud to express the tones you hear in
them?
THE MODERNS
2. Echoes of Whitman
In a brief essay, compare and contrast Walt
Whitman's "I celebrate myself, and sing
myself" (page 347) with Hughes's "1, Too"
(page 733).
Creative Writing
3. The Harlem Beat
Describing Blues Music I Research
~
Shaping Interpretations
768
Comparing Poems
Write the opening paragraph for a newspaper article about the Harlem described in
"Harlem." Include a portion of an interview
with an imagined resident of Hughes's Harlem.
Harlem
I. Did any of the adjectives in your Quick- •
write describe the feelings of the speaker
in this poem? If not, what adjective would
best describe the speaker's tone?
Create a chart analyzing the
attitudes of the speakers in "Harlem" and "I,
Too" (page 733). Note the ways the speakers
are similar and the ways they are different.
Save your notes for possible use in the
Writer's Workshop on page 804.
4. Liner Notes
Write brief liner notes (400 to 800 words)
for a recording of classic blues songs. Your
notes should briefly explain what the blues
are and how they developed, as well as tell a
bit about each of the blues artists (your
choice) represented in the anthology.
Music I Performance
5. Blues Riff
Choose any passage in "The Weary Blues,"
and set it to a rhythmic or other musical
accompaniment. Or adapt an existing blues
melody to the poem. When you've brought
music to Hughes's verse, perform your work
for the class.