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.