2. The Seculars
But other songs the Negro has which are more noteworthy from the point of view of art than the Spirituals: songs that are richer in artistic effects, more elaborate in form, more varied and copious in expression. These are the Negro’s secular songs and rhymes, his dance, play, and love-making songs, his gnomic and nursery rhymes.[1] It is not exaggeration to say that in rhythmic and melodic effects they surpass any other body of folk-verse whatsoever. In wit, wisdom, and quaint turns of humor no other folk-rhymes equal them. Prolific, too, in such productions the race seems to have been, since so many at this late day were to be found.
It comes not within the scope of this anthology to include any of these folk-rhymes of the elder day, but a few specimens seem necessary to indicate to the young Negro who would be a poet his rich heritage of song and to the white reader what essentially poetic traits the Negro has by nature. It was “black and unknown bards,” slaves, too, who sang or said these rhymes:
Oh laugh an’ sing an’ don’t git tired.
We’s all gwine home, some Mond’y,
To de honey pond an’ fritter trees;
An’ ev’ry day’ll be Sund’y.
Pride, too, and a sense of values had the Negro, bond or free:
My name’s Ran, I wuks in de san’;
But I’d druther be a Nigger dan a po’ white man.
Gwinter hitch my oxes side by side,
An’ take my gal fer a big fine ride.
After a description of anticipated pleasures and a comic interlude in dialogue, the ballad from which these two couplets are taken concludes with that varied repetition of the first stanza which we find so effective in the poems of art:
I’d druther be a Nigger, an’ plow ole Beck,
Dan a white Hill Billy wid his long red neck.
Song or rhyme was, as ever, heart’s ease to the Negro in every trouble. Here are two rhymes that “pack up” and put away two common troubles: