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.