Besides the documentation of historical events through visual art, students will see in studying The Migration Series of Jacob Lawrence an expression of cultural identity. Students will be introduced to paintings by artists whose paintings interpret poetry. Aaron Douglas did this when he illustrated James Weldon Johnson’s book of seven sermons in verse, God’s Trombones, that attempts to capture the folk sermons of the old-time black preacher. Dealing with topics from the creation to judgment day, each poem has been interpreted visually through an illustration by Aaron Douglas, who also illustrated Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in ink and graphite that may be seen at: www.world african net.com/blackhistory/blackhistory6127.html. Not only is this an opportunity for students to become acquainted with Douglas’s illustrations but students will also read Johnson’s poetic sermons, rich in imagery and lyrics. (Students may view illustrations for the following poetic sermons at web sites. An excellent source for these paintings is Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America.)
Inspired by these illustrations, students themselves may be encouraged to interpret and illustrate one of Johnson’s poetic sermons. For example, Johnson’s highly visual poem “The Creation” concludes with an image of God, the powerful force who has just created the universe, kneeling down like a mammy bending over her baby, kneeling down in the dust and toiling over a lump of clay, until he has shaped and blown the breath of life into man. This is one of a wealth of images that students might choose to interpret through the medium of visual art.
Two dissimilar poems that lend themselves to visual interpretation are the very exotic, pulsating “Heritage” by Countee Cullen and the lyrical “Song of Son” by Jean Toomer. The former holds out verdant images of Africa as a possibility for black cultural identity, while the latter holds up the South with its embodiment of slavery as the true homeland that must be embraced for the black person to know his or her real identity. In his poem “Heritage” Cullen creates lush images of Africa as a possible answer to the question he poses several times, “What is Africa to me?” Concerned with the loss of his past, Toomer, makes contact with the soul-songs of slaves, ghosts in the valleys of his homeland, describing “Negro slaves” as “dark purple ripened plums” that have all but disappeared, but for:
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One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes
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An everlasting song, a singing tree,
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Caroling softly souls of slavery,
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What they were, and what they are to me,
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Caroling softly souls of slavery.
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(“Song of Son,” 19-23)
There is a wealth of poems that students might choose to interpret through visual art. Two written by Helene Johnson are “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” and “Poem,” both rich in images celebrating the magnificence of the black race. 5