VIII
The value of Russell's work depends not so much upon the poetic quality of it as upon the faithfulness and the skill with which he has portrayed the negro. Within this narrow field he has had no superior. Harris has summed it up thus:
The most wonderful thing about the dialect poetry of Irwin Russell is his accurate conception of the negro character. The dialect is not always the best—it is often carelessly written—but the negro is there, the old-fashioned, unadulterated negro, who is still dear to the Southern heart. There is no straining after effect—indeed the poems produce their result by indirection; but I do not know where could be found to-day a happier or a more perfect representation of negro character.[132]
Russell is less romantic in his picture of the negro than are Page and Harris. Once in a while he throws the mellow light over the old days, as in "Mahsr John," where he represents the freed slave dwelling in imagination upon the glories that he has once known, but he holds the strain not long:
I only has to shet my eyes, an' den it seems to me
I sees him right afore me now, jes' like he use' to be,
A-settin' on de gal'ry, lookin' awful big an' wise,
Wid little niggers fannin' him to keep away de flies.
He alluz wore de berry bes' ob planters' linen suits,
An' kep' a nigger busy jes' a-blackin' ob his boots;
De buckles on his galluses wuz made of solid gol',
An' diamon's!—dey wuz in his shut as thick as it would hol'.
Page would have stopped after the old negro had ended his glorification of the old days, but Russell hastens to bring the picture to present-day conditions:
Well, times is changed. De war it come an' sot de niggers free,
An' now ol' Mahsr John ain't hardly wuf as much as me;
He had to pay his debts, an' so his lan' is mos'ly gone—
An' I declar' I's sorry fur my pore ol' Mahsr John.
It was essentially the later negro, the negro of the poet's own day, that is represented in the poems. He has become a farmer for himself now and tries sly tricks when he takes his cotton to market. Detected, he is voluble in his explanations:
Rocks in dat ar cotton! How de debbil kin dat be?
I packed dat bale mys'f—hol' on a minute, le'—me—see—
My stars! I mus' be crazy! Mahsr Johnny, dis is fine!
I's gone an' hauled my brudder's cotton in, stead ob mine!
He sends his boy to work as waiter on the river boats and as he is departing overwhelms him with advice:
Dem niggers what runs on de ribber is mos'ly a mighty sharp set;
Dey'd fin' out some way fur to beat you, ef you bet 'em de water wuz wet;
You's got to watch out for dem fellers; dey'd cheat off de horns ob a cow.
I knows 'em; I follered de ribber 'fore ebber I follered a plow.
He is inordinately fond of preaching, as witness "Half-way Doin's" and "A Sermon for the Sisters." He delights to interpret the Scriptures, and his exegesis is often full of local color:
"Dar's gwine to be a' oberflow," said Noah, lookin' solemn—
Fur Noah tuk the Herald, an' he read de ribber column—
An' so he sot his hands to wuk a-cl'arin' timber-patches,
An' 'lowed he's gwine to build a boat to beat the steamah Natchez.
All the characteristics of the negro are touched upon with the certainty of perfect knowledge: his superstitions, his ignorance of the world, his awe of legal terms, his humor, his simple trust in his religion, his childlike attitude toward nature, his habit of addressing sententious language to his beasts of burden as if they understood all he said, his conceit, and his firm belief in immortality.
Russell was one of the pioneers of the new era which had as its most marked characteristic the use of American themes and backgrounds and absolute truth to American life. No section of the social era was too lowly or unknown for him to take as material for his art. He could even plan to write a negro novel with all of its characters negroes and write the first chapters. Little, however, that he planned ever came to completion. The thin volume of poems published after his death was but a fragment of what he might have written under happier conditions. As it is, he must, like Lanier, be treated as one of those brief excited lives that are found ever at the opening of new romantic eras—Novalis, Chatterton, Burns, Keats—poets who left behind only fragments of what might have been, but who influenced enormously the writers that were to be.