What do the American Puritans, the Scottish, the French, and the English have in common with black Americans? Famous writers, of course. Both Robert Burns and Paul Lawrence Dunbar are remembered for their use of the folklore and the language of their people. Jonathan Edwards and James Weldon Johnson “rained down hellfire” in their biblical interpretations of literature. Guy de Maupassant and Langston Hughes are masters of the short novel that captured the ambitions and hopes of their races. Charlotte Bronte and Maya Angelou managed to put excitement into otherwise commonplace autobiographies. Each of these writers stands among the giants of his times. Black America, though shackled and oppressed, has risen to the ranks of the great by producing her share of genius among the masterpieces of literature. There are many notable black writers, living and dead.
Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Maya Angelou are black writers who have produced some of the best black writing over the years, ranging from the serious to the light. Their thoughts, emotions, and accomplishments transcend the color line. Their works, like those of other black writers, combine entertainment, historical interest, and literary value. They share a common subject and set of feelings: the black experience. Margaret Butcher says in an article from
The Negro in American Culture
that every Negro writer has “something to say.” He cannot escape having important things to say. His mere body, for that matter, is eloquence. His quiet walk down the street is a speech to the people.
Dunbar, Johnson, Hughes, and Angelou represent the varieties of the black experience. Through their magical words and musical phrases, it is easy to comprehend their roots, joys, sorrows, dreams, and anger. The mention of their names can bring instant excitement. Two of these major writers, James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, come out of the Harlem Renaissance. Paul Lawrence Dunbar dates back before the Renaissance period, and Maya Angelou is considered a remarkable contemporary writer of the present. The ties that bind these artists are not only color but also tradition, form, and language.
Dunbar, Johnson, Hughes, and Angelou use the spoken language of black people, often dialect or something close to it. Frequently, Paul Lawrence Dunbar captured the language of his people in a colorful and exaggerated way. He loved to write about the lives of average blacks during the post-Civil War period. Dunbar wrote about people involved in the simple pursuits of life, showing them as they sang, conversed, hunted, fished, or napped by the fireplace. He wrote most freely when he used dialect. He described and evaluated pretty girls, handsome young men, and selfish old men. What young woman wouldn’t want to be praised like the songbird in Dunbar’s poem “When Malindy Sings”?
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G’way an’ quit dat noise, Miss Lucy—
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Put dat music book away;
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What’s de use to keep on trying?
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Ef you practise twell you’re grey,
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You cain’t sta’t no notes a-flyin’
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Lak de ones dat rants and rings
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F’om de kitchen to de big woods
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When Malindy sings.
In 1895, W. D. Howells, for want of a closer phrase, suggested that such pieces be called “dialect pieces,” but they are really not dialect so much as delightful ways of glorifying the spoken language.
Whatever the consensus may be, the language of the common black man, whether past or present, is unique and interesting in itself. Often dialect was looked upon as a weakness in black speech, but today it is considered chic. “Right On, Bro!” Whites imitate blacks in picking up and popularizing the latest in “street language.” Each of the four writers shows skill in using colorful, vivid black language. Sometimes James Weldon Johnson hesitated to use dialect in his compositions because he felt that dialect had its place in fun and jest, and used it in the poem “Sence You Went Away.”
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Seems lak to me de stars don’ shine so
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bright,
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Seems lak to me de sun done loss his
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light,
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Seems lak to me der’s nothing goin’
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right,
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Sence you went away.
The language of that verse is uniquely black, as is the language of the following epitaph taken from Dunbar’s “A Death Song”:
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Lay me down beneaf de willers in de grass,
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Where de Branch’ll go a-singin’ as it pass,
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An’ w’en I’s a-layin’ low
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I kin heah it as I go,
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Sayin’, sleep, Ma Honey, tek yo’ res’
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at las’.
In his poem “Po Boy Blues” Langston Hughes shows his skill at a language very close to dialect:
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I was a good boy
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Never done no wrong
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Yes, I was a good boy
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Never done no wrong,
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But this world is weary,
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An’ de road is hard an’ long.
Maya Angelou steps outside of poetry to prose in her autobiography
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
as she describes a conversation with her mother that took place in Stamps, Arkansas:.
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He said, “Annie, I done tole you,
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I ain’t gonna mess around in no
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niggah’s mouth.” I said, “Some-
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body’s got to do it then.” And he
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said, “Take her to Texarkana to
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the colored dentist.”
Langston Hughes once said, “The passing of dialect as a medium for Negro poetry will be an actual loss for in it many beautiful things can be done, and done best.” If W.D. Howells had lived during Hughes’ time, he would have agreed. Howells had written, “There is a precious difference of temperament between the races which would be a great pity to ever lose. This is best preserved and most charmingly suggested by Mr. Dunbar in those pieces of his where he studies the moods and traits of his race in its own accent.”
Margaret Larkin in
Opportunity
pointed out that Robert Burns had caught the dialect, speech cadences, and character of the Scottish people in his poems, and that Langston Hughes had done for the Negro race what Burns did for the Scotch—squeezed out the beauty and rich warmth of a noble people into enduring poetry.
Dunbar, Johnson, Hughes, and Angelou also reflect in their works a respect for the power of the folk preacher in providing an imaginative view of the world and coherence to his community. Dunbar did not advocate organized religion and dogma, but he believed in the Christian faith. At the end of
The Uncalled
, Fred says to Eliphalet: “I can do all the good I can, Uncle Liph, but I shall do it in the name of poor humanity until I come nearer to Him.” When Eliphalet suggests that he has lost his religion, Fred replied, “Lost it all? I’ve just come to know what religion is. It’s to be bigger and broader and kinder, so that people around you will be happy.”
Biblical references are found in the works of all four of the writers selected here. Vivid pictures of the Shepherd and his sheep abound. From the printed page, the roar of the black preacher delivering a rousing sermon peals. From the tradition of slavery emerged the strong respect for the Church that blacks have treasured. The ability of writers to capture the sense of deliverance from the trials and tribulations of everyday life is indeed a talent. The spirituals, an extradinary rich example of black folk art, have taken a significant place in black folklore.
Dunbar joyfully put words to rhyme as he told of the Christmas story in his poem “Christmas Carol.”
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Ring out, ye bells!
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All Nature swells
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With gladness of the wondrous story.
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The world was lorn,
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But Christ is born
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To change our sadness into glory.
Many religious messages come from sermons or sermonettes in black literature or from well-known Biblical allusions, such as this verse from “The Prodigal Son” by Johnson.
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Oh-O-oh, sinner,
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When you’re mingling with the crowd in
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Babylon-
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Drinking the wine of Babylon-
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Running with the women of Babylon-
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You forget about God, and you laugh
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at Death . . .
Johnson said in reference to the poems in
God’s Trombones
that the power of the old-time preacher was still a vital force; in fact, it was still the greatest influence among the colored people of the United States. Not only did Johnson write sermons, he told his readers how he wanted them read. “This intoning is always a matter of crescendo and diminuendo in the intensity—arising and falling between plain speaking and chanting . . . A startling effect is gained by breaking off suddenly at the highest point of intensity and dropping into the monotone of ordinary speech.” Langston Hughes allows the high-spirited Laura to preach her first sermon in the novel
Tambourines to Glory
in just this way. She stands on a street corner in Harlem:
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“I were drowning once, friends, but
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now I’m saved. I were down there in
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sin’s gutter lower than a snake’s belly—
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now look at me. Look at me up here on
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the curbstone of life reaching out with
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my voice to you to come and be saved, too.
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Our Church is this corner, our roof is
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God’s sky, and there’s no doors, no place
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in our church that is not open to you
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because there are no doors. So come in
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and be one with us, one with God, and
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be Saved.”
Laura drew in enough sympathizers from that one sermon to collect money to feed Essie and herself for a whole week.
Angelou, too, has pictured the mighty preacher at the altar giving out the “do’s” and the “don’ts” to the congregation in
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.
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First Corinthians tells me, “Even if I have the tongue of men and of angels and have not charity, I am as nothing. Even if I give all my clothes to the poor and have not charity, I am as nothing . . . Wooooo, Charity . . . it don’t want nothing for itself. I’m talking about Charity. Oh Lord . . . help me tonight. Charity is poor. Charity is simple.
James Weldon Johnson would have been pleased by the depth of that sermon and by sisters and brothers of the church giving out loud Amens.
Dunbar, Johnson, Hughes, and Angelou also shared the belief that beauty can be extracted from the ability of blacks to transcend bondage and oppression, that the black experience could be transformed into a literary equivalent of music. Arna Bontemps has said, “Negro experience in America has found a vastly satisfying medium of expression in music. If occasionally this has been felt as a mood of the times, in the broad sense, perhaps that is true. The lyrics . . . are certainly as valid as the music.” Just as Louis Armstrong composed beautiful notes on the horn and intimately touched the black ear, some black writers have touched the black mind. James Weldon Johnson paid tribute to the unknown composers of the spirituals in his poem “0 Black and Unknown Bards”:
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O black and unknown bards of long ago,
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How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
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How, in your darkness, did you come to know
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The power and beauty of the minstrel’s lyre?
The title of Maya Angelou’s
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
is a sort of parody of Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poem, “Sympathy”:
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I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
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When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,
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When he beats his bars and would be free;
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It is not a carol of joy or glee,
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But a prayer that he sends from his
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heart’s deep core,
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But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings-
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I know why the caged bird sings.
Human bondage becomes melodious in Dunbar’s poems, loudly enough to impress Maya Angelou when she wrote a novel about bondage—bondage of the mind which is the hardest to escape.
Through the isolation and depression of being black rose part of the essence of the black experience—soul. Although soul is not the whole black experience, it is the most romanticized. In the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Langston Hughes used the word “soul” in the refrain, and was perhaps one of the first to give it the same meaning it would come to have fifty years later for all young blacks. (His reference probably goes back to
The Souls of Black Folk
by Du Bois.)
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I’ve known rivers:
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I’ve known rivers ancient as the world
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and older than the flow of human blood
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in human veins.
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My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Hughes talked about another type of soul in
The Best of Simple
, one with which many Black Americans can identify:
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“I have been laid off, fired and not
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rehired, jim crowed, segregated, insulted, eliminated, locked in, locked
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out, locked up, left holding the bag,
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and denied relief. I have been caught
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in the rain, caught in jails, caught
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short with my rent, and caught with the
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wrong woman, but I am still here.”
Only those that have lived what Simple lived can appreciated what he was saying. Curly, who is Rita’s lover in
Gather Together in My Name
by Angelou, brings soul closer to home:
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He drove his 1941 Pontiac without seeming
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to think about it. I sat in the corner
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pushed against the door trying desperately
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not to watch him.
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“Where’s the baby’s Daddy?”
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“I don’t know.”
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“He wouldn’t marry you, huh?” His voice
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hardened in the question.
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“I didn’t want to marry him.” Partly
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true.
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“Well, he’s a low-down bastard in my
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book and needs his ass kicked.” I began to
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love him at that moment.
Dunbar makes readers feel that “something extra” that the colored band emits as it struts proudly in “The Colored Band”:
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You kin hyeah a fine perfo’mance w’en de
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white ban’s serenade,
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An’ dey play dey high-toned music mighty sweet,
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But hit’s Sousa played in ragtime, an’
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hit’a Rastus on Parade,
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W’en de colo’ed ban’ comes ma’chin’ down de street.
No one has yet rivaled James Weldon Johnson’s soulful version of the “Creation”:
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And there the great God Almighty
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Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
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Who flung the stars to the most far corner
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of the night,
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Who rounded the earth in the middle of
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His hand;
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This Great God,
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Like a mammy bending over her baby,
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Kneeled down in the dust
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Toiling over a lump of clay
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Till He shaped it in His own image;
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Then into it He blew the breath of life,
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And man became a living soul.
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Amen. Amen.
Dunbar, Johnson, Hughes, and Angelou present the phenomenon of the black folk-preacher. Collectively, they describe a belief in beauty that transcends bondage. Frequently they use a language that retains certain qualities of dialect. And they enrich the immense volume of black literature with their labors. These same qualities appear and will continue to reappear in new forms in the black writing of today and tomorrow.
