The Deserted Cabin

Here is an example of a volume of poetry published in 1915, just before the New Negro Renaissance grew into a full-fledged movement. The Deserted Cabin, And Other Poems was printed in Atlanta, Georgia by a major publisher named Arther Bunyan Caldwell. It’s interesting to see what styles of black poetry are deemed acceptable by mainstream whites. You can tell that the author, Sterling M. Means, makes a point not to alienate his white audience despite touching on loaded issues like the Civil War, slavery, and economic struggles in the New South.

The introduction is non-stop gushing for the “days of yore,” a nostalgic and probably inaccurate portrait of Antebellum plantation culture. Sterling Means defines the Master-Slave relationship around the concept of loyalty, citing the example of slaves who safeguarded the women and children on plantations while the white fathers and sons left to fight for the Confederacy. Here’s a bit of it:

We stayed at home and worked the farm

Your maid and wife we did not harm

We cared for them and wept for you

And to our trust were ever true

The longing for the Antebellum years seems absurd at first, but when you consider the abysmal economic situation in Georgia at the start of the century, as the South aggressively sought to industrialize while always staying two steps behind their Northern counterparts, it’s easy to see how someone could long for another time, ANY other time. The boll weevil and other factors made agriculture in general and cotton harvests in particular some of the worst ever recorded in the region.

Rather than attack Southern whites for slavery, Means focuses on how the Civil War destroyed the systems of trade and sustenance in the South, as the region became a colony for victorious Northern businessmen. Raw materials and workers were pumped out of the South while little came back in return. Means is critical of slavery, but he identifies with a South still reeling and trying to find its footing after defeat in 1865.

The one poem which was also published in the white city paper Rome Herald-Tribune is entitled Ode to the Statue of the Women of the Confederacy. You can imagine why this poem by a black poet would be seen as palatable to white audiences - It does not condone the cause of the Confederacy, but it sympathizes with those who suffered:

When the shades of want and carnage

Swung her sable curtains low,

And the music heard in Dixie,

Was the mournful bugle’s blow.

It was then the Southern mother

Smothered back the welling sigh,

And upon her country’s altar.

Gave son and husband both to die.

Means goes on to make a direct call for women’s suffrage. Moving from the Civil War to World War I (remember, this book was published in 1915), Means argues that women’s votes would lesson the national tendency and lust for war:

If the law would give them votes,

They would soon disband the armies;

…

Never would devoted mothers

Train their sons for savage war.

Unlike many brash New Negro works from the 1920s, which labeled the South as merely a stain and a hell to be avoided at all cost, Means describes the painful experience of returning home to one’s plantation to find abandoned, rotting cabins and no traces of your ancestors, the feeling of uprootedness. Millions of black lived in the South – until the 20^th century the great majority of the black population lived in the Southern states. While atrocities were common and food was scarce, it was a home that was hard to cut ties with.

In the poem Ise Gwine Back to Yazoo County, he describes “de panic”- a time when people are starving, he is foreclosing on his home and all his possessions are being taken by creditors. Although he knows the plantations are abandoned, he decides to travel back to his Antebellum home in Mississippi. Migration was not always a one-way street going North:

House-rent man wuz hyeah yistidday,

An fu’n’ture agent, too;

But I tol’ ‘em boaf perlitely,

Dar wuz nuffin’ hyeah ter do;

Ef dey wanted any money,

Take de house an’ f’n’ture ‘long;

Fur de times is mighty squally,

White folks’ bizness done gone wrong.

…

Ise gwine back ter Yazoo Country;

It is whur de times iz fair;

Dar is whur mah muddeer’s buried,

An’ her spirit slumbers dar.

Sense Ise been in Jeff’son County,

I has strayed erway f’um God;

I done lef’ mah mudder’s trainin’,

Now Ise passin’ ‘neaf de rod.

The publisher, A.B. Caldwell, played a prominent role in race relations in Atlanta. In 1917 he began publication of his biographical series History of the American Negro and His Institutions. The books told the accomplishments of hundreds of black leaders, each bio accompanied by a dignified photo. They continue to serve as vital tools for patching together family histories. New volumes were published for different states and regions in the South. In 1922, Caldwell published an autobiography of the black president of the West Virginia Industrial School, Theological Seminary and College, Jared Maurice Arter, entitled Echoes From a Pioneer Life. The Virginia Theological Seminary was a very important institution in its day, and was the cornerstone of a vibrant black community in Lynchburg, Va.

I’m not sure if A.B. Caldwell was white or black. I do know that he was the first pastor of the Log Cabin Community Church, a congregation which opened its doors to different denominations and even different races. His wife ran the Ladies' Aide Society. It wasn’t not unusual for a Southern publishing company to be run by a religious man, in this case a Baptist preacher. Christian groups controlled and spearheaded much of the literary publishing in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century in the South.

Mistress and Slave

Here is a stunning poem by an otherwise unknown female poet published in the Christian Recorder in the mid-19th century. The Christian Recorder was the widest circulating black newspaper during the 1800s. It was published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The printing operations were originally established just for producing hymnals and parish handouts, but expanded in the 1860s and 70s. Fighting against slavery and supporting the Union, the paper gained popularity during the Civil War. Until the end of the war, it was banned in the Southern States, but after the North's victory, sales expanded into the new Southern market. In the 1880s and 90s, a Western Christian Recorder was created for the frontier as well as a Southern Reporter for the Black Belt states.

This poem details the creepy narrative of white masters taking advantage of both their slaves and their wives, with women shifting unsteadily between the roles of maidens and mistresses. The speaker is a slave brushing the hair of her young white Lady:

"Mistress and Slave"

Ellen Malvin (12 Dec. 1863)

He wooed her with a lofty grace

And a haughty head unbent;

He touched her with his courtly smile,

And her simple heart outwent;

Ere ever she had learned

What its quicker beating meant,

She mutely dreams with folded hands,

While I, beside her chair,

Before his coming brush and wind

The sunny rings of hair

Slowly she lifts her eyelids

To the mirror, seeing ne'er

How her blue-eyed childish beauty

Pales before my image there.

Dreaming- with her jeweled fingers

Toying in their white unrest,

With the rosebuds that he brought her

Blood-red blossomed on her breast.

To her girlish heart he seemeth

Of all men the noblest, best;

And the world doth give him honor,

Grave men listen when he speaks,

And his tones send rosy pleasure

Flushing to her lily cheeks.

But a troop of dark-browned minions,

Trembling at his bidding wait,

And his shame is on the faces

Of the children at his gate.

But the fear, the shame, the sorrow,

Never haunt the dreamer here,

Dreaming o'er again, the music

Murmured in her maiden ear;

I can say the very words

That he whispered low and clear;

For when he uprose to leave her,

With the last kiss dropt for going,

There I met him face to face.

All his beauty on him glowing,

And my heart stood still within me,

In a sense of dread foreknowing,

For I saw the instant passion

Through his hot blood mounting higher,

Till his burning eyes devoured me

In their fierce exultant fire.

Darkly rose my doom before me,

Slave and victim as the rest;

She, a blossom to be gathered

Just to wither on his breast.

I, a queen to be dethroned

And ground beneath his heel in jest.

I a queen by right of beauty

I a slave by wrong of birth.

Lips and eyes and braided tresses

Valued at their market worth,

For one vile drop within my veins

That links me to the subject race;

To lose my crown of womanhood

For some foul semblance in its place,

Shall I curse her for her glad heart

Throbbing 'neath the snowy lace?

Shall I hate her for the whiteness

Of her cheek, so girlish fair,

For the simple Northern beauty

Falling down her golden hair?

Nay, let her dream on while she may,

For her I have no curse to spare,

Smiling 'mid her flowers and laces,

Petted child, and wife to be,

From this trance of happy worship

She shall bitterest waking see.

Not to us alone the sorrow,

We who suffer, we who toil,

For the serpent's sin so winding

Round their lives his slimy coil.

On our tyrants, our oppressors,

Fall the lightning curses fast,

On a nation old in sinning,

Ere the flush of youth is past,

Who the old world's crime of crimes,

In her first fresh furrow cast.

Not in vain our cries are cleaving

Upward to the throne of God.

Long her sons shall writhe in anguish

Under the avenging rod,

Ere the wo[e]ful sheaves are garnered

And the bloody vintage trod.

-Taken from African American Women's Poetry in the "Christian Recorder", 1855-1865: A Bio-Bibliography with Sample Poems - Eric Gardner

Irony and Brutal Honesty - H.L. Mencken and the Renaissance

Following up on last week’s post on Benjamin Brawley, an intellectual on the fringe of the New Negro movement, I move to another figure who has been cast off in historical analyses of the Harlem Renaissance: H.L. Mencken.

 

Mencken was a white satirist with a bitter, no-holds-barred style who was all the rage in the late 1910s and 1920s. Editor of the popular journal American Mercury, he wrote reviews and essays which defined or rocked the current literary trends. Although certainly not a nurturing personality, his honest criticism and connections to key avenues for publishing made him a hugely important ally for young black writers.

His disregard for political correctness, his use of racial slurs (for all races), and his refusal to tackle even the most serious issue without a heavy touch of irony and ridicule makes his work unappetizing for today’s critics. In the book The Sage in Harlem, Charles Scruggs investigates Mencken’s role in the Harlem Renaissance in an effort to reshape his legacy. This is one of those non-fiction books that reads like a great novel – the author is personally invested in the subject and is unafraid of putting personal opinions and flourishes into the text. I recommend it.

Mencken is distinctive because he approached blacks on equal footing – he judged their work as he would a white writer. If it was crap, he told the author so; if it had merit, he published it. While some white publishers were beginning to buy into the “primitivism/exoticism” of black literature, or publishing black works out of charity, Mencken did not degrade black authors in this way. He published Countee Cullen, George Schuyler, James Weldon Johnson and others. He stressed realism and spat on Puritanism, holding up accuracy and honesty as ideals rather than moralistic concerns. He criticized black writers for being too sentimental – basically for crying too much – and called on them to create great works that were a little rough around the edges.

In a book review, Mencken outlined his challenge for black writers:

“The thing we need is a realistic picture of this inner life of the negro by one who sees the race from within – a self-portrait as vivid and accurate as Dostoyevsky’s portrait of the Russian or Thackeray’s of the Englishman. The action should be kept within the normal range of negro experience… The negro author who makes such a book will dignify American literature and accomplish more for his race than a thousand propagandists and theorists. He will force the understanding that now seems hopeless. He will blow up nine-tenths of the current poppycock.”

Realism, detail, brutal honesty – Mencken stressed it again and again. He looked to the examples of the Russians and the realism of types like Emile Zola when crafting a critical ideal. This approach influenced Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, everyone. I imagine Mencken and Benjamin Brawley would have utterly despised each other. Dirty realism and polished Victorianism don’t mix.

.Mencken attracted the most notoriety in his career for his brutal condemnation of white Southern culture in the essay “The Sahara of the Bozart” from his book Prejudices. Here are a few bits from it which demonstrate just how harsh and snarky he could really be:

“Virginia is the best of the south to-day, and Georgia is perhaps the worst. The one is simply senile; the other is crass, gross, vulgar and obnoxious. Between lies a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity, lethargy, almost of dead silence.”

“I published a short discourse on lynching, arguing that the sport was popular in the south  because the backward culture of the region denied the populace more seemly recreations… brass bands, symphony orchestras, etc”

“The southerner, at his worst, is never quite the surly cad that the Yankee is. His sensitiveness may betray him into occasional bad manners, but in the main he is a pleasant fellow - hospitable, polite, good-humored, even jovial. . . . But a bit absurd. ... A bit pathetic.”

Its important to remember this tone when thinking of Mencken’s role in aiding the budding generation of black writers – he wasn’t patting them on the back by any means, but was treating them as writers rather than charity cases or brutish animals.

Did blacks write satires like The Sahara of the Bozart ? Charles Scruggs argues that they did, but that we must expand our definition of satire to see them as such. Satire usually resides in the realm of fiction. Blacks were not writing picaresque novels or farces, they were describing daily struggles – and yet the racism they had to deal with was so absurd that irony was the most apt register for discussion. Can you sustain a serious essay arguing simply “Lynching is wrong?” Does it help if you tack on a mountain of facts to prove your irrefutable original point? No. Better to laugh and expose the desperation and hypocrisy of the Klu Klux Klan than act as if they have any legitimacy in the first place.

It would be interesting to look further into black satire during the period. I doubt I could find much in poetry – satire seems to need a longer format to develop its conceit whereas poems have to be heartfelt and concise. George Schuyler wrote satire in his “Shafts and Darts” column in The Messenger. He also published an absurd novel called Black No More in which a scientist invents a way to turn dark skin pigment white. After everyone changes themselves white, you can still tell the black people apart because the treatment makes them more white even than white people. In result, the whites discriminate against them, and the new fad among whites becomes getting a super dark skin tan to separate themselves from the chemically changed blacks. Absurd. Aaaaabsurd.

Schuyler explained his motives:

“What I have tried to do in this novel is to laugh the color question out of school by showing up its ridiculousness and absurdity.”

There are other black figures – E. Franklin Frazier, Theophilus Lewis, Wallace Thurman – who tried their hands at satire also. All of them were at the periphery of the New Negro movement but are worth a closer look. My teacher, Professor McDowell, specializes in 18^th century satire but I’m sure she would also have insights about this side of the Harlem Renaissance. It would be worth asking her and hope that she pushes me in an interesting direction.