The most gifted, vivid, and popular black poet to pay tribute to this contradiction was Paul Laurence Dunbar. During his tragically brief career (1872–1906), no sweeter verse than his was written in America:
Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes,
Which all the day with ceaseless care have sought
The magic gold which from the seeker flies;
Ere dreams put on the gown and cap of thought,
And make the waking world of lies—
Of lies most palpable, uncouth, forlorn,
That say life’s full of aches and tears and sighs,—
Oh, how with more than dreams the soul is torn,
Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes.
Dunbar was the first Negro singer to be really helped by whites; he was fostered by William Dean Howells and his verse was published in the leading periodicals of his time. He labored hard to fill the many commissions that poured in upon him; but through his lyrical songs now and again there broke a sense of the paradox that was his life, as in the following poem:
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!
Then there were times when he spoke out what was in his heart:
We smile, but, Oh great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask.
Dunbar wrote many novels and poems which had wide sales. But there was a fatal conflict in him; he drank heavily to drown it, to resolve it, and failed. He tells us but little of what he really felt, but we know that he tried to turn his eyes as much as possible from that vision of horror that had claimed the exclusive attention of so many Negro writers, tried to communicate with his country as a man. Perhaps no other Negro writer ever demanded more of himself than Dunbar did, and that he achieved so much, that he did manage to wring a little unity out of the blatant contradiction that was his life, is truly remarkable.
The black singers who followed Dunbar, however, cared less about what their white friends thought and more about what they felt, and they resumed the tradition, sensing that the greatest and deepest meaning of their lives lay in it, that all that was truly human in them had to be wrung from its dark and painful depths.
But let us catch up with ourselves. Expression springs out of an environment, and events modify what is written by molding consciousness. From 1761 to 1900, roughly speaking, a kind of unity knit Negro expression together. But, starting with emancipation, many kinds of stratification took place in Negro life; Negroes became separated from Negroes, the rich from the poor, the ignorant from the educated, the city Negro from the country Negro, and so on.
While this stratification was taking place among Negroes, white attitudes gradually hardened and a still further atomization of Negro life took place, creating personality types far below even those that existed in slavery. Around the turn of the century, two tendencies became evident in Negro expression. I’ll call the first tendency: The Narcissistic Level, and the second tendency I’ll call: The Forms of Things Unknown, which consists of folk utterances, spirituals, blues, work songs, and folklore.
These two main streams of Negro expression—The Narcissistic Level and The Forms of Things Unknown—remained almost distinctly apart until the depression struck our country in 1929, when once again there surged up a tendency toward unity in Negro thought and feeling, though the traditional sense of distance still prevailed. This division in Negro life can be described in psychological as well as in class terms. It can be said there were Negroes who naively accepted what their lives were, lived more or less unthinkingly in their environment, mean as they found it, and sought escape either in religion, migration, alcohol, or in what I’ve called a sensualization of their sufferings in the form of jazz and blues and folk and work songs.
Then there were those who hoped and felt that they would ultimately be accepted in their native land as free men, and they put forth their claims in a language that their nation had given them. These latter were more or less always middle class in their ideology. But it was among the migratory Negro workers that one found, rejected and ignorant though they were, strangely positive manifestations of expression, original contributions in terms of form and content.
Middle-class Negroes borrowed the forms of the culture which they strove to make their own, but the migratory Negro worker improvised his cultural forms and filled those forms with a content wrung from a bleak and barren environment, an environment that stung, crushed, all but killed him.
But, before I tell of these migratory voices, let me explain what I mean by the Narcissistic Level of expression that prevailed among middle-class Negro writers, say, from 1900 to 1925.
Remember Phyllis Wheatley and how she was at one with her country? After her time that oneness was no longer possible with Negroes; race hate and Jim Crowism would not let them feel it.
But there were some few Negroes who, through luck, diligence, and courage, did rise and make the culture of their nation their own even though that nation still rejected them; and, having made the culture of their nation their own, they hurled pleading words against the deaf ears of white America until the very meaning of their lives came to be in telling how and what the rejection which their country leveled against them made them feel. You remember the Greek legend of Narcissus who was condemned by Nemesis to fall in love with his own reflection which he saw in the water of a fountain? Well, the middle-class Negro writers were condemned by America to stand before a Chinese Wall and wail that they were like other men, that they felt as others felt. It is this relatively static stance of emotion that I call The Narcissistic Level. These Negroes were in every respect the equal of whites; they were valid examples of personality types of Western culture; but they lived in a land where even insane white people were counted above them. They were men whom constant rejection had rendered impacted of feeling, choked of emotion. During the first quarter of this century, these men, Trotter, DuBois, Washington, etc., fought as the Negro had never fought before for equal rights, but they fought in vain. It is true that when their voices reached the ears of many philanthropic whites, they did win a few concessions which helped Negro institutions to exist. But the irony in the efforts of these Negroes was that the gains they won fastened ever tighter around their necks the shackles of Jim Crowism. For example, every new hospital, clinic, and school that was built was a Negro hospital, a Negro clinic, a Negro school! So, though Negroes were slowly rising out of their debased physical conditions, the black ghettos were growing ever larger; instead of racial segregation lessening, it grew, deepened, spread. Today, Jim Crow institutions have fastened themselves organically upon the free soil of the nation and the Black Belt is commonplace.
While this was happening in the upper levels of Negro life, a chronic and grinding poverty set in in the lower depths. Semi-literate black men and women drifted from city to city, ever seeking what was not to be found: jobs, homes, love—a chance to live as free men…. Millions swarmed from the plantations to the small towns and cities of the South; and then from the southern towns and cities they flooded the northern industrial centers. Bereft of family life, poverty-stricken, bewildered, they moved restlessly amidst the highest industrial civilization the world has ever known, in it but not of it, unable to respond to the vivid symbols of power of an alien culture that met their eyes at every turn.
Because I feel personally identified with the migrant Negro, his folk songs, his ditties, his wild tales of bad men; and because my own life was forged in the depths in which the
y live, I’ll tell first of the Forms of Things Unknown. Numerically, this formless folk utterance accounts for the great majority of the Negro people in the United States, and it is my conviction that the subject matter of future novels and poems resides in the lives of these nameless millions. There are two pools of this black folk expression: The sacred and the secular. (Let me recall to you quickly that we are now far beyond the world of Phyllis Wheatley; she was an integrated individual, at one with her culture; we are now dealing with people who have lost their individuality, whose reactions are fiercely elemental, whose shattered lives are burdened by impulses they cannot master or control.) It is from the sacred songs of the plantation that we get the pathos of:
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long ways from home…
A long ways from home…
And then there is the nostalgia for another world, an unappeasable longing to escape a painful life:
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home…
And here is a paradoxical note of triumphant defeat:
Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus,
Steal away, steal away home,
I ain’t got long to stay here…
And here is militancy disguised in religious imagery:
Joshua fit the battle of Jericho,
Jericho, Jericho,
Joshua fit the battle of Jericho,
And the walls came tumbling down…
And tender, timid despair:
Oh, they whipped him up the hill, up the hill, up the hill
Oh, they whipped him up the hill, up the hill, up the hill
Oh, they whipped him up the hill, and he never said a mumbling word,
He just hung down his head, and he cried…
Outright rebellion is couched in Biblical symbols; is it not plain that the Negro is a Negro even in his religion, that his consciousness of being a rejected American seeps into his worship, his prayers…?
If I had-a my way,
I’d tear this building down.
Great God, then, if I had-a my way
If I had-a my way, little children,
If I had-a my way,
I’d tear this building down…
These authorless utterances sprang spontaneously from the lips of slaves and they remain the single most significant contribution of folk and religious songs to our national culture. It was through the door of religion that the American Negro first walked into the house of Western culture, and it was through religious symbols that he has given voice to his most poignant yearnings. And yet, instead of his songs being mystical or metaphysical, they are simply and directly wish fulfillments, projections of his longings to escape his chains and blows.
And even when the Negro turns from the sacred to the secular, he seems unable to escape the burdens and consciousness of his racial plight that determines all, making him feel that he is a Negro before he is a man. Recognition of wrong comes even in lilting ditties:
We raise the wheat,
They give us the corn;
We bake the bread,
They give us the crust;
We sift the meal,
They give us the husk;
We peel the meat,
They give us the skin;
And that’s the way
We skin the pot,
They give us the liquor,
And they say that’s good enough for nigger.
We get hints of probable dirty work of slaves against their masters in this humorous ditty which tells of a master who promised freedom to a slave, and it brought about an attempt on the part of the slave to hasten his day of liberation:
Yes, my old master promise me;
But his papers didn’t leave me free.
A dose of poison helped him along.
May the Devil preach his funeral song.
Even at the very bottom of Negro life there existed a knowledge of the dual existence they were forced to live; in this work song, a laborer states the problem:
Me and my captain don’t agree
But he don’t know, ’cause he don’t ask me
He don’t know, he don’t know my mind
When he sees me laughing
Laughing to keep from crying
Got one mind for white folks to see
Another for what I know is me…
The impulses that prodded so many millions of southern Negroes to leave the plantations for the cities of the South, and the dissatisfaction that drove so many other millions from the cities of the South to the industrial centers of the North are summed up in the “Backwater Blues” as sung by Bessie Smith:
Then I went an’ stood up on some high ol’ lonesome hill
I went an’ stood up on some high ol’ lonesome hill
An’ looked down on the house where I used to live
Backwater blues done cause me to pack mah things and go
Backwater blues done cause me to pack mah things and go
Cause mah house fell down an’ I cain’ live there no mo’
Many of them knew that their hope was hopeless, and it was out of this that the blues was born, the apex of sensual despair. A strange and emotional joy is found in contemplating the blackest aspects of life:
I’m going down to the river, set down on the ground
I’m going down to the river, set down on the ground
If the blues overtake me, I’ll jump overboard and drown
And what the psychoanalysts call ambivalence is put forward by illiterate Negroes in terms that would have shocked Dr. Freud:
I’m going to buy me a shotgun long as I am tall
I’m going to buy me a shotgun just as long as I am tall
I’m going to shoot my woman just to see her fall…
In “Dink’s Blues” we hear a death-wish vented against white people:
I wish to God that east-bound train would wreck
I wish to God that east-bound train would wreck
Kill the engineer, break the fireman’s neck…
Lower-class Negroes cannot be accused of possessing repressions or inhibitions! Out of the folk songs of the migrant Negro there has come one form of Negro folklore that makes even Negroes blush a little among themselves when it is mentioned. These songs, sung by more adult Negroes than would willingly admit it, sum up the mood of despairing rebellion. They are called The Dirty Dozens. Their origin is obscure but their intent is plain and unmistakable. They jeer at life; they leer at what is decent, holy, just, wise, straight, right, and uplifting. I think that it is because, from the Negro’s point of view, it is the right, the holy, the just, that crush him in America. I’m sure that we’ve reached that point in our public life where straight, documentary facts can be presented without someone saying that they are in bad taste. I insist upon presenting The Dirty Dozens because they possess a meaning far beyond that of the merely risqué.
But first, picture to yourselves a vast mass of semi-literate people living amidst the most complex, the most highly industrialized, nation on earth, and try to understand these contradictions: The Negro’s shattered families lived amidst the most stable families of the land; his broken speech was uttered in the same neighborhoods where white people spoke flawlessly. The Negro had but to turn his eyes from his unpainted wooden shack and he saw the painted homes of whites. Out of this organic contradiction, the Negro hurled his hardest words against the white world in which he lived. He had no family life; well, why worry about that? Was it not the family life of whites above him that was crushing him? These Negroes seemed to have said to themselves: “Well, if what is happening to me is right, then, dammit, anything is right.”
The Dirty Dozens extol incest, celebrate homosexuality; even God’s ability to create a rational world is naively but scornfully doubted, as in the following ditty:
God made Him an elephant<
br />
And He made him stout
But He wasn’t satisfied
’Til He made him a snout
And He made his snout
Just as long as a rail
But He wasn’t satisfied
’Til He made him a tail
He made his tail
Just to fan the flies
But He wasn’t satisfied
’Til He made him some eyes
He made his eyes
Just to look on the grass
But He wasn’t satisfied
’Til He made his yes yes yes
He made his yes yes yes
But He didn’t get it fixed
But He wasn’t satisfied
’Til He made him six
He made him six, Lord,
And He made them well
So you know by that
That the elephant caught hell…
This is not atheism; this is beyond atheism; these people do not walk and talk with God; they walk and talk about Him. The seduction of virgins is celebrated with amoral delight:
Why your little sister
Why she ask me to kiss her
I told her to wait
’Til she got a little bigger
When she got a little bigger
She said I could kiss her
You know by that, boys,
That I didn’t miss her
Now she’s a dirty mistreat
A robber and a cheat
Slip her in the dozens
Her papa is her cousin
And her mama do the Lordy Lord…
That white men who claimed that they followed the precepts of Christ should have been guilty of so much cruelty forced some nameless black bard to utter:
Our Father, who art in heaven
Black Power Page 68