The second is by Will Sexton:
TO MY LOST CHILD
It is well, child of my heart, the rosebush drops its petals on your grave.
It is well, child of my heart, the sparrow sings to you when Aurora has rouged the sky.
In your trundle bed deep in the bosom of the earth you can dream pleasanter dreams than I.
You have never felt the sting of living in a white man’s civilization and beneath a white man’s laws.
You have never been forced to dance to the music of hate played by an idle orchestra.
You have never toiled long hours and bowed and scraped for the chance to breathe.
In your dreams you wonder in the Heaven beyond the skies with the God civilization rebukes.
Tell me, little child, are you not happy in that realm no white man can enter?
In much of this utterance of protest, this arraignment of the white man’s civilization that rebukes God, there may be more passion than poesy. But out of such passion, as it were a rumbling of thunder, the lightning will one day leap. A poet born and reared in South Carolina, Joshua Henry Jones, Jr., appeals from man’s inhumanities to God’s prevailing power in passionate stanzas of which this is the first, the rest being like:
They’ve lynched a man in Dixie.
O God, behold the crime.
And midst the mad mob’s howling
How sweet the church bells chime!
They’ve lynched a man in Dixie.
You say this cannot be?
See where his lead-torn body
Mute hangs from yonder tree.
This or a similar lynching provoked the following lines from another, Walter Everette Hawkins, in a poem entitled A Festival in Christendom. After relating that the white people of a certain community were on their way to church on the Sabbath day, the poem continues:
And so this Christian mob did turn
From prayer to rob, to lynch and burn.
A victim helplessly he fell
To tortures truly kin to hell;
They bound him fast and strung him high,
They cut him down lest he should die
Before their energy was spent
In torturing to their heart’s content.
They tore his flesh and broke his bones,
And laughed in triumph at his groans;
They chopped his fingers, clipped his ears
And passed them round as souvenirs.
They bored hot irons in his side
And reveled in their zeal and pride;
They cut his quivering flesh away
And danced and sang as Christians may;
Then from his side they tore his heart
And watched its quivering fibres dart.
And then upon his mangled frame
They piled the wood, the oil and flame.
Lest there be left one of his creed,
One to perpetuate his breed;
Lest there be one to bear his name
Or build the stock from which he came,
They dragged his bride up to the pyre
And plunged her headlong in the fire,
Full-freighted with an unborn child,
Hot embers on her form they piled.
And they raised a Sabbath song,
The echo sounded wild and strong,
A benediction to the skies
That crowned the human sacrifice.
Few are the poets quoted or mentioned in this volume who have not contributed to this literature of protest. James Weldon Johnson, whose predominant motive is artistic creation, affords more than one poem in which the note of protest is sounded in pathos. Pathos is indeed the characteristic note of the great body of Negro verse. Aided by the two preceding extracts to an understanding of Johnson’s point of view, the reader will appreciate the following poem, remarkable for that restraint which adds to the potency of art:
THE BLACK MAMMY
O whitened head entwined with turban gay,
O kind black face, O crude, but tender hand,
O foster-mother in whose arms there lay
The race whose sons are masters of the land!
It was thine arms that sheltered in their fold,
It was thine eyes that followed through the length
Of infant days these sons. In times of old
It was thy breast that nourished them to strength.
So often hast thou to thy bosom pressed
The golden head, the face and brow of snow;
So often has it ’gainst thy broad, dark breast
Lain, set off like a quickened cameo.
Thou simple soul, as cuddling down that babe
With thy sweet croon, so plaintive and so wild,
Came ne’er the thought to thee, swift like a stab,
That it some day might crush thine own black child?