The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
THE AFRO-MODERNIST EPIC

AND LITERARY HISTORY
TOLSON, HUGHES, BARAKA
Kathy Lou Schultz

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The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History
Tolson, Hughes, Baraka
Kathy Lou Schultz
The Afro-Modernist Epic and
Literary History
Tolson, Hughes, Baraka
Kathy Lou Schultz

THE AFRO-MODERNIST EPIC AND LITERARY HISTORY
Copyright © Kathy Lou Schultz, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978 1 349 34180 1
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First published in 2013 by
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For Jackson
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface xiii
Chapter 1 Modern, Modernist, Afro-Modernist: Melvin B.

Tolson in the 1930s and 1940s 1
Chapter 2 A Poem for the Futurafrique: Tolson’s Libretto for
the Republic of Liberia 37
Chapter 3 “In the Modern Vein”: Tolson’s Harlem Gallery 65
Chapter 4 Bound By Law—Langston Hughes in/and the 1950s 91
Chapter 5 Toward An Afro-Modernist Future: Langston’s
Hughes’s ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ 119
Chapter 6 Amiri Baraka’s Wise Why’s Y’s: Lineages of
the Afro-Modernist Epic 151
Notes 189
Works Cited 201
Index 213
Acknowledgments
We are all, as moderns, travelers through

uncertain seas, struggling to maintain our families
and ourselves, searching for a pathway home.
—Robert G. O’Meally
Romare Bearden Exhibition Prospectus:
A Black Odyssey
M
any strong emotions accompany the completion of a first mono-
graph. When I finished the manuscript that became this book,
I felt a profound sense of gratitude, specifically, gratitude for my
education. I was born in a rural health clinic in the southern, central region of
South Dakota and was a first-generation college student. Thus, I both highly
prize and fiercely fought for my education. It is in the spirit of this grati-
tude, therefore, that I name some of the outstanding scholars, writers, poets,
and teachers with whom I have studied: feminist scholars Leslie Calman,
Ethel Klein, Nancy K. Miller, and the late Carolyn Heilbrun at Columbia
University; Sandra Zagarell, Gloria Watkins (bell hooks), Leonard Podis,
and Mary Childers at Oberlin College; Robert Glück and Myung Mi Kim
at San Francisco State University; and Bob Perelman, Charles Bernstein,
Herman Beavers, Susan Stewart, Nancy Bentley, Emily Steiner, Max
Cavitch, Margreta DeGrazia, Joan (Colin) Dayan, and Michael Awkward at
the University of Pennsylvania. I also wish to acknowledge members of my
Penn cohort, including Cyrus Mulready and Dahlia Porter, for their friend-
ship and intellectual energy.
Before I had even applied to Penn, Bob Perelman, upon learning my
areas of scholarly interest, enthusiastically told me during a phone conver-
sation that I had to read Melvin Tolson. This was probably in 1999, the
year that the University Press of Virginia first released “Harlem Gallery” and
x ● Acknowledgments
Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson. (Bob indicates in a conference paper he

delivered at the University of Maine, Orono on “Poetry in the Sixties,” that
Lorenzo Thomas introduced him to Tolson “some time in the 80s.”) I have
been a student of Tolson’s work ever since, and Bob has been an extraordi-
nary teacher, mentor, and friend. Other scholars who have generously sup-
ported me and my work include Jeremy Braddock, Stephen Cope, Brent
Hayes Edwards, William J. Harris, Damien Keane, Ben Lee, Aldon Lynn
Nielsen, Guthrie Ramsey, and the late Lorenzo Thomas, whose own work
on Tolson inspires me.
I also wish to thank Faculty director Al Filreis and the wonderful com-
munity at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, includ-
ing past and present staff Kerry Sherin, Tom Devaney, Jennifer Snead, and
Jessica Lowenthal. While at Penn, I cofounded the Poetry Reading Group
and had stimulating discussions with many amazing people who formed
this group over the years, including Jessica Lowenthal, Randall Couch, Jane
Malcolm, Julia Bloch, Bernie Rhie, and Matt Hart. Penn was a terrific place
for me to reenter academia after nine years of living in San Francisco and
participating in the San Francisco Writing Community. In fact, the many
talented writers I met in the Bay Area taught me as much as the professors in
my doctoral program, and I am grateful for both types of education.
I also must express my sincere gratitude to, and admiration of, editor
of the Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Series Rachel Blau
DuPlessis for her belief in my project. Her writing as both a poet and a
scholar is of the highest quality, and I strive always to emulate the stan-
dards that her work embodies. Thank you also goes to Palgrave Macmillan
editor Brigitte Shull and her editorial assistants Maia Woolner and Joanna
Roberts. I greatly appreciate their efforts on my book and on this series, sup-
porting the important work of poetry scholarship.
In addition, I wish to acknowledge the College of Arts and Science at the
University of Memphis for a Professional Development Award (PDA) for
the academic year 2010–2011, without which this book would have been
impossible to complete. Thank you to Eric Carl Link, English department
chairman, for his support of this PDA. Thank you also to the numerous
University of Memphis undergraduate and graduate students who have
embraced me and my work. Research for this book was also supported by a
faculty research grant from the College of Arts and Science at the University
of Memphis in 2008, which enabled me to conduct critical research in the
Melvin Tolson Archive at the Library of Congress. Thank you to the librar-
ians and staff at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, the
Poetry Archives at the University of Buffalo, the Schomburg Collection
of the New York Public Library, and Van Pelt Library at the University
Acknowledgments ● xi
of Pennsylvania for professional assistance and good cheer. Thank you to

Archivist Susan G. Hamson of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at
Columbia University for providing access to the Amiri Baraka Papers while
they were in the process of being cataloged.
Thank you also to the permissions departments at the University of
Missouri Press, University of Virginia Press, Contemporary Literature
(University of Wisconsin Press), the Journal of Modern Literature (Indiana
University Press), Third World Press, Random House, and Harold Ober
Associates (for the Langston Hughes Estate). Craig Tenney at Harold Ober
Associates was particularly helpful.
In addition, Susan Weber, Mary Gorman, Kelly Rayne, and Carina
Nyberg Washington all helped me to deal with extraordinary circumstances
after my move to Memphis, as did longtime friends Kellie Knox and Robin
Tremblay-McGaw. Each of these women is an accomplished professional and
mother, and I would not have made it through these past few years without
their friendship and support. My sister, Lucy Schultz, and my mother, Jeanne
Schultz, have also stepped up to help me during critical times (in addition
to being an outstanding aunt and grandmother to my son). My mom and
dad, Lewis Schultz (1929–2003), are the hardest working people I know. The
lessons of their tenacity have enabled my successes. And, finally, thanks to
Brian Slaughter and Jackson Slaughter for time enough, hugs enough, coffee
enough to see me through this project. I learn from both of you every day.
Kathy Lou Schultz
July 30, 2012
Memphis, TN
Credits
Baraka, Amiri. Wise Why’s Y’s: The Griot’s Song (Djeli Ya). Pp. 3, 5, 6 7, 8, 9,
10, 11, 13,18, 43, 44, 67, 75, 76, 120. © 1995 by Amiri Baraka. Reprinted
by permission of Third World Press, Inc., Chicago, Illinois.
Hughes, Langston. “Prelude to Our Age,” “Consider Me,” “Same in Blues,”
“Dream Boogie,” “Neon Signs,” “Tell Me,” “Deferred,” “ Harlem (2),” “Jam
Session,” “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria” from THE COLLECTED
POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES by Langston Hughes, edited by
Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994
by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a
division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside
of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to
Random House, Inc. for permission.
xii ● Acknowledgments
Schultz, Kathy Lou. Portions of chapters 2 and 4 appeared in a different

version in “To Save and Destroy: Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and
Theories of the Archive.” Originally published in Contemporary Literature
Vol. 52 No. 1 (Spring 2011): 108–45. © 2011 by the Board of Regents of the
University of Wisconsin System. Reproduced courtesy of the University of
Wisconsin Press.
Schultz, Kathy Lou. Portions of chapter 6 appeared in a previous version
in “Amiri Baraka’s Wise Why’s Wise: Lineages of the Afro-Modernist Epic.”
Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 35 No. 3 (Spring 2012): 25–50. Reprinted
courtesy of the editors.
Tolson, Melvin B. A Gallery of Harlem Portraits. Edited by Robert M.
Farnsworth. Pp. 3, 5. © 1979 by the Curators of the University of Missouri.
Reprinted by permission of the University of Missouri Press.
Tolson, Melvin B. Harlem Gallery and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson. Edited
by Raymond Nelson. Pp. 135, 209, 227–230, 232–234, 236, 239–240, 243,
254–255, 264, 307–308, 312–313, 315, 335–338. © 1999 by the Rector
and Visitors of the University of Virginia. Reprinted by permission of the
University of Virginia Press.
Preface
R
arely mentioned in the same context, Melvin B. Tolson and Langston
Hughes were in fact contemporaries. Tolson, born in Moberly,
Missouri, lived from 1898 to 1966. Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri,
lived from 1902 to 1967. Tolson and Hughes both received bachelor’s
degrees from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania (Tolson in 1923; Hughes
in 1929), a historically black university founded for men of African descent,
and attended Columbia University in New York, with Tolson receiving
an M.A. in 1940. Yet Tolson’s career challenges our theories of periodiza-
tion, supposedly falling in between movements, considered too late for the
Harlem Renaissance and too early for Black Arts, while Hughes is practi-
cally synonymous with the Harlem Renaissance. Although Tolson is still
often unrecognized, Amiri Baraka, the third writer in this study, is thought
to be recognized through a profusion of labels, but these tend to obscure his
actual writing practice. Born Everett LeRoy Jones in Newark, New Jersey in
1934, Baraka attended Rutgers and Howard Universities and served in the
Air Force from 1954 to 1957, an experience he calls the “Error Farce” in The
Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1984). These three writers are
usually associated with very different historical and aesthetic schools of writ-
ing; however, all of them contributed to what I am newly presenting in this
volume as an Afro-Modernist poetic practice. I bring them together here to
exemplify a lineage of twentieth-century Afro-Modernist epics.1
To understand Afro-Modernism, as theorized here, we must look back to
proto-modernist Paul Laurence Dunbar’s attempts to synthesize modern black
identity. Dunbar’s body of work is literally split, between “high” and “low,”
“majors” and “minors,” “standard” and “vernacular.” Later twentieth-century
poets inherit Dunbar’s binaries, but through the invention of formal meth-
ods and the inclusion of more diverse content and language registers, begin
to combine and unoppose those oppositions. Afro-Modernism continues
xiv ● Preface
throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first with so-called
innovative2 or formally experimental poetry. These last descriptive terms are
undertheorized and tend to create dichotomies of judgment: (“experimental
compared to what?”3). However, if we begin to understand how the project
of modernist poetry develops into the later twentieth century, a continuing
lineage is clearly seen.
Critics as diverse as Amiri Baraka and Marjorie Perloff observe that
when dealing specifically with poetry, the project of modernism extends
throughout the twentieth century.4 Baraka notes in an observation on
the “New American Poetry” in 1963 that “the concerns that made the
poetry seem so new were merely that the writers who were identified with
this recent poetic renaissance were continuing the tradition of twentieth-
centur y modernism that had been initiated in the early part of this cen-
tury” (x). Continuing, in his introduction to the anthology of prose works
The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America that he edited,
Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) notes: “William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound,
The Imagists, and the French symbolist poets were restored to importance
as beginners of a still vital tradition of Western poetry. It was an attempt
to restore American poetry to the mainstream of modern poetry after it
had been cut off from that tradition by the Anglo-Eliotic domination of
the academies” (x–xi). Extending the chronology of modernisms further,
Perloff describes a “21st century modernism.” She notes that “as we move
into the twenty-first century, the modern/postmodern divide has emerged
as more apparent than real” (164) and finally concludes that our contem-
porary moment “may well be the moment when the lessons of early mod-
ernism are finally being learned” (200).
Perloff’s work on Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, and
Steve McCaffery—what she calls “‘Modernism’ at the Millennium” dem-
onstrates continuity between early twentieth-century modernists and early
twenty-first-century writers often labeled “innovative” or “experimental.”
These later terms suggest a certain kind of poetic practice to those who
use them, but do not offer the historical and aesthetic grounding that, say,
“Millennial Modernist” might. In beginning to use the term Afro-Modernist
to describe Tolson and Hughes’s work from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as,
for example, Baraka’s or Harryette Mullen’s from 1990s, I am suggesting a
similar historical continuity as proposed in Perloff’s project, one that begins
with what I term mid-century Afro-Modernism. Both Tolson and Hughes
publish their first Afro-Modernist epics in the 1950s.
This mid-century period, from the end of World War II through the
1950s, is also significant within the larger transnational and transcultural
frame of the African diaspora. Tolson and Hughes’s mid-century works are
Preface ● xv
influenced by these global contexts, historically, politically, and artistically.

Significantly, from the detritus of World War II, anticolonial revolutions—
and anticolonial literature—flowered. Thus, Robin D. G. Kelley points out
that Malcolm X once described this extraordinary time, “this long decade
from the end of the Second World War to the late 1950s, as a ‘tidal wave
of color’.” In defining the Afro-Modernism practice of Tolson and Hughes,
I place their work within the social, political, and artistic contexts of both
African American and African diasporic cultural production: the literary
and political works of Africans throughout the continent actively influenced
African Americans during this time and vice versa.
The point that must be understood, the critical leap, is how it is possible
to label work from the late 1940s to the 1960s as modernist, for such a label
is certainly out of sync with most timeframes of literary criticism. The criti-
cal intervention I am suggesting is that what Hughes is doing in Montage of
a Dream Deferred (1951) and later, and what Tolson presents in Libretto for
the Republic of Liberia (1953) and Harlem Gallery Book I: The Curator (1965)
is Afro-Modernist. I am not, then, using “modernist” as a floating, ahistori-
cal category. Rather, in defining Afro-Modernism more specifically, I am
locating these long poems in the context of the mid-century as a response
to the historical and social context of that time. To further comprehend
Tolson and Hughes’s artistic responses to the conditions of modernity at
mid-century, I turn to the work of jazz scholars Guthrie Ramsey and Ingrid
Monson.
In Race Music: Black Cultures from Be-Bop to Hip Hop (2003), Ramsey
argues that in the 1940s, African American music became “a site for
expressing some of the paradoxes, contradictions, tensions, and, of course
the joys of African American life in those years. The musical expressions
that circulated these social energies articulated what I am calling here Afro-
modernism, a concept whose genesis belongs to the previous decades but
which ripened in the 1940s” (97). Ramsey explains that mostly he uses the
term Afro-modernism broadly to describe African Americans’ responses to
modernity, one of these responses being what he calls “the North-South
cultural dialogue” (97). Ramsey argues that Afro-modernism asks: “What
was modernity to African Americans at the historical moment under con-
sideration? How were their attitudes about it worked out artistically and
critically?” (97).
As an example, Ramsey cites Dizzy Gillespie’s composition “A Night
in Tunisia,” the formal qualities of which Gillespie saw “as representing
artistic innovation in modern jazz and as a way to situate himself and his
artistic contributions in history and in the African Diaspora” (97–98).
According to Ramsey, “The repetitive ostinato bass pattern that begins the
xvi ● Preface
composition linked [Gillespie’s] sonic experiment to an African past, to his

South Carolinian not-so-distant past, and to an Afro-Cuban future for jazz
music” (98). Gillespie thus places his own artistic response to the conditions
of modernity within the larger, transnational and transcultural, history of
the African diaspora just as Tolson and Hughes were doing in their poetry of
the same time period. Though it is not standard for literary scholars to date
modernist emergence as late as the 1940s and 1950s, Ramsey’s description of
Gillespie’s radical synthesis of multidiasporic influences (past, present, and
future) comes closest to my own theory of Afro-Modernist method, as will
be seen in the work of Tolson, as well as that of Hughes and Baraka.
In her writing on jazz aesthetics of the 1950s, Monson explains that
“individual jazz musicians drew from one or more aesthetic perspectives and
often combined them in novel ways to produce an alternative aesthetics of
modernism at once more populist than its European art music counterpart,
yet committed to articulating its elite position relative to the more com-
mercial genres of R&B and rock and roll” (71). In my argument concerning
the diasporic, transnational consciousness present in Afro-Modernist poetry
I am making a similar claim concerning the ways in which this poetry com-
bines multiple aesthetic perspectives to create a new aesthetic category that I
term Afro-Modernist, which is also at once both populist and modernist.
One of the primary contexts here, a great influence on both Hughes and
Baraka, is be-bop. Monson concurs with Amiri Baraka’s argument in Blues
People (1963) that African American be-bop represented a victory over mass-
marketed white swing music. Yet, Monson develops the argument further
in her theorization of a specifically African American modernist aesthetic:
“The ultimate victory of hard bop styles in defining the aesthetic center
in this canonic period of jazz,” Monson suggests, “represents a blacken-
ing of modernist aesthetics, which would ultimately serve as the standard
against which any player of jazz would be evaluated.” In Freedom Sounds:
Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (2007) Monson calls this aesthetic
“Afro-modernism.” She cites John Coltrane as a musician displaying this
aesthetic, showing how what she calls his “deeply personal musical synthe-
sis” “simultaneously embraced his cultural identity as an African American
and refused to be contained by it” (302). She continues: “For this is one of
the deepest lessons of Afro-modernism—that it is possible both to be hon-
est about one’s origins and to cultivate the knowledge and expressive means
to become something more than the sum of one’s social categories” (302).
For the authors that I present in this volume this means that one should
consider all of the poets’ lineages as artistic influences, for example, showing
the importance of both Carl Sandburg and be-bop to Hughes, or William
Carlos Williams and Hughes to Baraka.
Preface ● xvii
The fact that Afro-Modernism extends throughout the twentieth cen-

tury and into the present moment is evident in the work of Baraka, as well
as in other contemporary African American poets such as Will Alexander
whose writing extends the work of Surrealism and Mullen who employs a
Steinian method in Trimmings (1991). Mullen’s conscious manipulation of
dialect from different eras is as much a riff on Gertrude Stein as it a response
to Paul Laurence Dunbar. For example, Mullen’s Trimmings riffs on the
“Objects” section or chapter from Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914). One can
also hear Stein-like repetition in Mullen’s other works:
womanish girl meets mannish boy

whose best buddy’s a doggish puppy
he dictate so dicty, she sedate so seditty
the girl get biggity when the boy go uppity.” (Muse 63)
Mullen’s work contains African American speech markers on a verbal play-

ing field that does indeed allow for play. For example, Mullen creates an
idiolectical word (“biggity”) that rhymes both in sound and meaning with
the word “seditty,” an African American vernacular term used to describe
someone who is snobbish or pretentious. It is also sometimes used as a term
for the black bourgeois.
The combination of formal experimentation with African American
vernacular forms such as the blues and jazz, written from a diasporic con-
sciousness that critiques American racial constructs, begins to describe a
recognizable poetics of Afro-Modernism. I am not suggesting a litmus test
of Afro-Modernism that repeats earlier tests of black “authenticity” but am
instead suggesting a commonality among what I name Afro-Modernist epics,
a lineage suggested in statements from Baraka as well. Thus what I am call-
ing Afro-Modernist poetry is not simply “late” modernism, nor would I call
it Second Wave Modernism. It is, rather, first wave Afro -Modernist. That
Tolson, Hughes, and Baraka embody this modernist aesthetic within the
epic form is particularly interesting. Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological
investigations led her to conclude in “Characteristics of Negro Expression”
(1934) that in the African American context, “originality” is defined as “the
modification of ideas” (1046). Thus, as I will show, these poets modify the
epic, transforming it for an African American purpose, as Coltrane modi-
fied the sounds of the saxophone, and hip-hop pioneers modified the use of
a turntable.
Tolson and Baraka in particular are responding to early twentieth-century
modernist revisions of the epic, as well as to Classical sources. Hughes, on
the other hand, is more indebted to visual and jazz aesthetics: the montage
xviii ● Preface
and the jam session. Jazz influences are also central to Baraka’s work in Wise
Why’s Y’s: The Griot’s Song (Djeli Ya) (1995). Yet, all of these poets came to
employ the Afro-Modernist epic at a time when they needed a long form to
contain large portions of diasporic history, as each reenvisions his own story
of the African diaspora. In doing so, they revise elements of the Classical
epic to create collective stories of people of African descent and form a new
representation of diasporic identity.
In chapter 1, I provide a reading, and literary history of, Tolson’s early works
of the 1930s and 1940s, which illustrate that his Afro-Modernist epics from
the 1950s and 1960s are neither anomalous nor sudden. In chapter 2, I ana-
lyze his little-read Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) and in chapter 3
I review his meditation on race and the modern artist: Harlem Gallery, Book
I: The Curator (1965). In chapter 4, I read works by Langston Hughes from
the 1950s, showing precedents to his longer epics, including the important
“Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History Poem” (1951). I analyze Hughes’s
late masterwork ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ in chapter 5,
including an overview of the book’s material features and its precedents from
Hughes’s poems of the 1930s. I conclude with an extended analysis of Amiri
Baraka’s Afro-Modernist epic, Wise Why’s Y’s: The Griot’s Song (Djeli Ya), in
chapter 6 showing its various lineages from the Classical epic, early twen-
tieth-century modernist long poems, and the griots of West Africa. Baraka
uses both Tolson’s Libretto and Hughes’s ASK YOUR MAMA as models,
showing a continuity unrecognized in previous scholarship.
CHAPTER 1
Modern, Modernist, Afro-Modernist:

Melvin B. Tolson in the
1930s and 1940s
Afro-Modernist Chronologies
Critical reengagement with Melvin B. Tolson’s writing from the 1930s
and 1940s makes clear that his later Afro-Modernist epics, Libretto for the
Republic of Liberia (1953) and Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator (1965), are
not merely anomalies out of sync with the developments of modernism, nor
even distanced from African American schools of writing. Rather, Tolson’s
engagement with the contemporary poetic practices of his time results in a
traceable trajectory from modern free verse, influenced by Edgar Lee Masters
and Carl Sandburg; to experimental modernist practice in the 1940s, draw-
ing from T. S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s methods; and finally to the develop-
ment of Afro-Modernist innovation in Libretto and Harlem Gallery, as he
realizes his own vision for the Afro-Modernist epic. As he becomes more
fluent in his own particular modernist practice, Tolson’s task of decolonizing
what Aldon Nielsen describes as “the colonized master text of modernism,”
(244) results in a “rearticulation of modernism [that] led him eventually to
assert African progenitors in the realm of technique” (247). Tolson’s Afro-
Modernism is marked by a diasporic worldview in which multiple lineages,
including those from Africa, Europe, and Asia, are incorporated into his
work.1 This diasporic imagination, which is inherently transnational, is pres-
ent in the Afro-Modernist epics of Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka as
well. Each of these poets turned to the epic form to include large swaths of
diasporic history in their retellings of African American genealogies.
2 ● The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History
Tolson was prolific in several genres. His first completed poetry collec-
tion is A Gallery of Harlem Portraits. While he wrote these poems during
the 1930s and 1940s, the book was not published until 1979—well after
Tolson’s death. These poems are virtually unknown today. In addition to
A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, Tolson’s early works include his master’s the-
sis The Harlem Group of Negro Writers (filed 1940, published 2001); his
newspaper column “Caviar and Cabbage” that ran in the African American
newspaper The Washington Tribune from October 8, 1937, to June 24, 1944;
and a poetry collection, Rendezvous with America, published in 1944. His
later works are the book-length Afro-Modernist epics mentioned above:
Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) and Harlem Gallery: Book I, The
Curator (1965). To reconsider Tolson’s affiliations and chronologies, and
thus to better comprehend his Afro-Modernist texts from the 1950s and
1960s, it is helpful to understand the trajectory preceding his important
long poems. Therefore, this chapter focuses on Tolson’s thesis, The Harlem
Group of Negro Writers, and his first two poetry collections: A Gallery of
Harlem Portraits and Rendezvous with America.
Examination of Tolson’s early work provides a new lens for understand-
ing and placing Tolson in literary chronologies. In A Gallery of Harlem
Portraits, Tolson utilizes a modern free verse line. In the 1940s, however, in
Rendezvous with America, Tolson moves toward modernist method. Clearly
his work from the 1940s serves as a bridge to his later Afro-Modernist epics,
as I will illustrate. Although this early work is deserving of close attention,
the foundational stages of Tolson’s development as a poet have been obscured
for several reasons, including Tolson’s publishing history; periods of schol-
arly disinterest, neglect, even outright hostility toward Tolson’s work; and
little recent attention to Tolson’s work prior to the 1950s.
Ironically, when Michael Bérubé published his major work on Tolson,
Marginal Forces / Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the
Canon (1992), Portraits was the only collection of Tolson’s still in print. Yet,
in staging the reemergence of Tolson into modern literary criticism, Bérubé’s
work focuses on unpacking the complexities of Tolson’s last work Harlem
Gallery —the full title of which is Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator2 —
and its relationship to modernist studies. Nielsen’s essay from the same year
accomplishes a similar task for Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia.
Bérubé, whose book mentions Portraits almost exclusively in footnotes,
seems, in part, to have drawn his assessment of that earlier work from Tolson
himself who claims at one point to have stashed the manuscript of A Gallery
of Harlem Portraits in a trunk for 20 years.3 Bérubé also asserts that Tolson
“brackets off” Portraits as “premodernist” in his representation of it in later
works (109). In addition, Raymond Nelson’s important edited volume that
Modern, Modernist, Afro-Modernist ● 3
helped to create a new generation of Tolson readers, “Harlem Gallery” and

Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson (1999), contains, as Nelson explains, only
“the three books [Tolson] published in his lifetime” and does not make men-
tion of Portraits at all (xxvii).
The obscurity of this work has been compounded by critical contro-
versies about Tolson that have erupted from time to time, creating notice-
able moments of neglect. In brief, one of the most important controversies
that informed the development of (or perhaps more accurately, the lack
of development of) Tolson scholarship, which other scholars have docu-
mented, emerged from the prefaces Allen Tate and Karl Shapiro wrote
for Libretto for the Republic of Liberia and Harlem Gallery, respectively.
Briefly, Tate’s preface to the Libretto for the Republic of Liberia states that
Tolson “assimilated completely the full poetic language of his time, and by
implication, the language of the Anglo-American tradition” while Shapiro
countered with the assertion in the introduction to Harlem Gallery Book I:
The Curator that “Tolson writes and thinks in Negro” (13). Shapiro also
famously declared that Tolson had “outpounded Pound,” exacerbating the
argument that Tolson was doing nothing more than copying white mod-
ernists. Nielsen writes: “Just as it has proved nearly impossible to speak
of Tolson’s late books without speaking of their prefaces, few have found
it possible to speak of the development of Tolson’s style without express-
ing suspicion, sometimes severe, about its origins and its racial politics
(242).” 4 Moreover, the assessments of Tolson resulting from these argu-
ments led some scholars to dismiss him completely, leaving the early work
untouched.
Furthermore, Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s now classic account, Modernism
and the Harlem Renaissance (1987), written in response to earlier critical
assessments of the Harlem Renaissance’s “failure,” explicitly rejects any con-
nection between the Harlem Renaissance and Anglo-American or European
modernism. Significantly, Baker’s book opens with an account of an argu-
ment with a “brilliant young black man” who was “adamant in his claim
that only Melvin Tolson among the vast panoply of Afro-American writers
had become a successfully ‘modern’ writer” (xiii). Baker goes on to assert
that the man’s assessment of Tolson’s success was based on the fact that
“only Tolson, in his view, sounded like Eliot, or Joyce, or Pound, or . . .”
(xiii). Baker uses his own assessment of Tolson’s likeness to “Eliot, or Joyce,
or Pound, or . . .” as evidence of Tolson’s failure, of his misguided attempts
to copy white modernists. Though Baker’s move to list white modernists
as if they are interchangeable is of course polemical, he falls into the same
mode as the critics he calls to task for employing a unitary definition of
modernism that excludes African American writers. In excluding Tolson,
he reinforces a “whites only” modernism: Tolson, as a black man, can only

ever be derivative in this definition, a failed modernist, because a black man
cannot and should not sound like “Eliot, or Joyce, or Pound, or . . .”
Because Tolson does not fit neatly into the way scholars have schematized
twentieth-century African American writing, he is sometimes referred to
as a “post-Renaissance” poet, as critics seek to position him in relation to
existing signposts. Tolson lived far from major urban centers and admit-
tedly arrived on the scene, both poetically and geographically, somewhat
late for the Harlem Renaissance. He spent most of his career teaching at
historically black colleges Wiley College in Texas and Langston College in
Oklahoma. An important influence on his writing occurred in 1931–1932
when he enrolled in Columbia University’s master’s degree program in
comparative literature on a Rockefeller Fellowship, during which time he
immersed himself in the artistic life of Harlem. Tolson’s year in New York
had a long-lasting effect on his career as a poet. He visited the city many
times, with Harlem assuming mythic proportions both in his life and in his
imagination.
Therefore, although Tolson was not a part of the Renaissance, he was
highly aware of the writers associated with this movement as his M.A. thesis,
The Harlem Group of Negro Writers, demonstrates. His study, which includes
individual chapters on Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay,
W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson, amongst others, also draws
from Alain Locke’s positions on the New Negro. Tolson states that his goals
for the thesis are threefold:
First, to give the social background of the Harlem Renaissance and the
various forces that scholars say operated in the black metropolis to bring
about the artistic and literary development of “The New Negro”; second,
to emphasize the lives and works of the leading contemporary Negro
essayists, short story writers, novelists, and poets in the light of modern
criticism; and third, to interpret the attitude and stylistic methods dis-
covered in the Harlem Renaissance. (35)
Although he was one of the first African Americans to conduct a study of

the Harlem Renaissance, mention of Tolson’s critical work is absent from
subsequent major studies because his M.A. thesis went unpublished for
more than 60 years.5
Although some periodizations of twentieth-century American literature
still consider African American literature as a separate category distinct from
other aesthetic and historical configurations, in the conclusion to his thesis,
Tolson provides an alternative analysis:
The literature that came out of the Harlem Renaissance, which has been
the focal point of this thesis, affected and was affected by the larger cul-
ture of the new literature that began with the publication of the first issue
of Poetry by Harriet Monroe in 1912. Many thought that the Harlem
Renaissance was just a fad. In this they were mistaken. It has been fol-
lowed by a proletarian literature of Negro life, wider in scope, deeper in
significance, and better in stylistic methods. (135)
Long before contemporary literary critics began to reconsider modern-

ist chronologies, Tolson’s theory, which positions the Harlem Renaissance
between modernist and proletariat affiliations, recognized that Harlem
Renaissance writers are central to the development of American modern-
ism, while also pointing out the presence of cross-racial affiliations among
American modernists.
Displaying a specific understanding of the place of the Harlem Renaissance
within the broader context of modernist literature, Tolson asserts that this
group is an active component of “the larger culture of the new literature”
represented by one of the seminal modernist little magazines, Poetry, edited
by Harriet Monroe. Tolson’s understanding of the contours of modernism is
prescient on a number of levels, including his awareness of the importance
of Monroe’s journal. John Timberman Newcomb writes:
The magnitude of Poetry ’s importance to modernism has never been

fully appreciated. More than any literary endeavor of its times, Monroe’s
magazine challenged the prevailing notion that poetry had no business in
urban-industrial modernity, and theorized the continued value of verse at
a time when to many, the genre seemed about to end its days as a refuge
for spineless dilettantes. (7)
Poetry magazine was an especially important touchstone for Tolson with

its “uninhibited inclination for conflict with self-appointed defenders of
tradition” (Newcomb 11). Furthermore, Tolson notes that as precursors to
proletarian literature, Harlem Renaissance writers laid the groundwork for
a literature of Negro life “better in stylistic methods” and “wider in scope,”
reflecting his appreciation of the formal and thematic possibilities opened
up by modernist method. Tolson’s analysis remains a highly unusual view of
American literary history. More often, modernism, the Harlem Renaissance,
and proletarian writing are understood as three separate strands, rather than
part of the same thread.
Tolson’s thesis exposes some still-present pitfalls of the received literary
history of African American poetry, which contribute to particular poems
and poets being excluded from (or included in) the canon. A common narra-
tive highlights the so-called Harlem Renaissance (variously dated as begin-
ning around 1917 and extending to early 1930s, although mostly associated
with the 1920s), a somewhat vague “Middle Generation,” and the Black Arts
Movement (mostly associated with the 1960s, though again, dates vary).
An obvious problem with this simple periodization is that whole decades of
poetry go unaccounted for. The emphasis on literary study of the Harlem
Renaissance also tends to leave readers with the impression that with the
coming of the Great Depression, black poets fell silent.6 Moreover, the 1930s
may be a particularly difficult era for some critics, if not for the radical
politics of some of the poets, then for the aesthetics that such a politics
sometimes produced.
Langston Hughes, the most canonical of black poets, is a good example
here. Critics’ emphasis on his early Harlem Renaissance works overshad-
ows his writings from the 1930s and after. Walter B. Kalaidjian argues:
“Academia’s sanitized reception of Hughes as the idealized ‘poet laureate’
of black folk culture was buttressed by the poet’s own forced disavowal of
his depression era allegiances when he was threatened with blacklisting by
Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Committee on Government Operations” (103).
Thus the frequently anthologized “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921)
is the iconic Hughes poem, as opposed to, for example, “Good Morning,
Revolution” (1932), though Hughes maintains a transnational, diasporic
point of view throughout his career. Looking toward the reception of
Hughes’s late works, it is also clear that readers maintain a taste for the
singular lyric poem, while the highly allusive epic, which Hughes turns to
as a mature writer, remains mostly illegible. Reading Hughes’s later long
poems also reveals that he did not disavow his radical political views from
the 1930s after all.
Of course, if particular poems and poets are not written into literary his-
tory, they are therefore not canonized. Uncanonized works have the tendency
to be forgotten by critics and students and to go out of print. Cary Nelson’s
Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural
Memory 1910–1945 (1989) remains particularly helpful in understanding
these phenomena. Nelson writes: “Working together, canon formation and
literary history reaffirm that the dominant culture is the best that has been
thought and said, sanctioning the silencing of minority voices and interests
not only in the classroom but in the society at large” (40). Tolson’s work,
like that of other African American poets of the same time period, emerges
in the no poet’s land of the 1930s and 1940s, an era for which literary his-
torical accounts of African American poetry are still emerging. The poems
that Tolson began writing in the 1930s were never published in book form
in his lifetime, and the poems in his first published book, Rendezvous With
America, do not fall into any widely recognized canonical category.
A distinctive alternative to accepted periodizations is proposed by critic
James Smethurst in The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African
American Poetry, 1930–1946 (1999) in which he argues for consideration
of the 1930s and 1940s as a distinct period in African American poetry. In
an account that could be read as an extension of Tolson’s thesis, Smethurst
creates a framework in which the fallacy of seeing “the disjunction between
modernism and ‘proletarian’ (and Popular Front) literature” (5) is exposed.
Smethurst documents the participation of black poets in the writing of the
Left in the 1930s, and the development of particular African American
modernisms (what he calls “‘popular’ neomodernism” and “‘high’ neomod-
ernism”) in the 1940s (12). His analysis points out the ways in which African
American poetry must be read as a unique genre, predicated by its par-
ticular social relations that emerge from a context informed by American
racism. While keeping this in mind, however, we must also have a view
toward understanding African American poetry’s relationship to—and par-
ticipation in—larger historical and literary movements, including American
and international modernism. Discussion of this more nuanced, complex
literary placement has been lacking. Smethurst also points out that existing
accounts of African American poetry of the 1930s and 1940s come from
intellectual histories that contribute to a “larger discourse that poses ‘mod-
ernism’ (read ‘serious’ or ‘universal’ literature) against ‘proletarian’ or ‘social
realist’ (read ‘hack’ or ‘provincial’) writing, to which only a deluded, naive,
or dishonest artist could subscribe” (6).
Moreover, in my reading, the tendency historically to read African
American poetry from a primarily sociological, rather than literary, perspec-
tive accounts for some of the belatedness of critical recognition of what I
call Afro-Modernism, a lineage in which I place Tolson, Hughes, and Amiri
Baraka. Michael North notes that “the most significant literary criticism of
the Harlem Renaissance . . . has to do not with individual works but with the
movement as a whole, not with matters of literary form and execution but
rather with the role of literary art in the larger political and social world”
(“Harlem” 167). One of the gains made in the new modernist studies has
thus been reevaluation of the Harlem, or New Negro, Renaissance within
a literary framework that highlights the importance of formal choices.
Maintaining that by the mid-twentieth century “the New Critics had
installed in the academy the brand of modernism that must have looked
quite strange, even alien to the New Negro Renaissance artists,” Mark A.
Sanders explains: “It wasn’t simply that the New Critics’ version of modern-
ism excluded New Negroes entirely . . . More to the point, what would come
to be known as ‘high modernism’ robbed the era of the animating ideas and
agendas that largely defined New Negro participation” (129). Sanders dates
the New Negro Renaissance to the “teens, twenties, and thirties,” describ-
ing the American modernism to which New Negroes contributed as “mul-
tivalent, often discursive . . . capable of expressing unbridled optimism and
chronic despair in the same breath” (129). This “ heterodox modernism in
which New Negroes participated fully,” includes for Sanders most notably
Sterling Brown, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston.
The date that Tolson filed his master’s thesis on Harlem writers—
1940—is important because it shows Tolson’s awareness of modernist liter-
ary practice well before his often-cited public pronouncement concerning
the importance of Eliot for black writers. In the address given at Kentucky
State College in 1948, Tolson proclaims:
Now the time has come for a New Negro Poetry for the New Negro . . . The
standard of poetry has changed completely. Negroes must become aware
of this. This is the age of T. S. Eliot who has just won the Nobel Prize
in Literature. If you know Shakespeare from A to Z, it does not mean
you can read one line of T. S. Eliot! But Negro poets and professors must
master T. S. Eliot! (Cited in Bérubé 63–64)
Tolson was developing these ideas at least as early as the 1930s, as he com-
pleted his master’s degree studies in 1931. In addition to his critical work,
Tolson’s awareness of, and conversion to, modernism in the 1930s and 1940s
is further evidenced by the great stylistic change that occurs in his poetry
between the collections A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, written mostly in
the 1930s, and Rendezvous with America, published in 1944. While Bérubé
writes that “Tolson’s conversion to high modernism remains largely his own
doing, and there are no extant public documents of the moment of that con-
version,” (170) the thesis and Rendezvous both serve to document Tolson’s
adaptation of modernist method. Thus Tolson’s “conversion” occurs earlier
than Tolson scholarship would suggest,7 further documentation for which is
contained in the still-neglected early poems.8
A Gallery of Harlem Portraits

It is evident in the thesis, as well as the poems from the late 1930s and 1940s,
that Tolson is linking the concepts of modernism and modernity in the
figure of New Negro. Showing the ongoing importance of the “portrait” in
the foreword to The New Negro anthology (1925), Locke writes of turning to
“the elements of truest social portraiture” in order to “discover in the artistic
self-expression of the Negro to-day a new figure on the national canvas”

(xxxv). Locke emphasizes the importance of blacks representing themselves,
creating a “self-portrait,” rather than allowing others to offer inaccurate
representations: “Whoever wishes to see the Negro in his essential traits,
in the full perspective of his achievement and possibilities, must seek the
enlightenment of that self-portraiture which the present developments of
Negro culture are offering” (xxxv). This emphasis on portraiture is reflected
in Tolson’s work of the 1930s; during his stay in New York, he began com-
posing his Portraits, encouraged by a fellow student at Columbia to write a
“Negro epic.”
During this early stage, we see Tolson working through his initial intro-
duction to modern poetry, a process in which he is more an emulator than
innovator. The result is his first depictions of “Negro” life in Portraits. A
typically hyperbolic Tolson asserts:
At the end of four years and 20,000 miles of traveling and the wasting
of 5,000 sheets of paper, I had finished the epic A Gallery of Harlem
Portraits. A hundred different times in a hundred strange places, from
Tony the Greek’s in Harlem to the Casino in Tiajuana, I had thought
of the death-bed scene of my mother as I looked at the word-pictures
of Black Zuleika, Tiger Strickland, Juarez Mary, Gold Tooth Loony,
Napoleon Hannibal Speare, and many others who inhabit the dark cos-
mos of Harlem. Professors, bums, preachers, magdalens, and babbits had
read parts of the Gallery. It had visited cosy [sic] parlors in Duluth and
cabins in the Yazoo Bottoms, jim-crow colleges in Florida and Roosevelt
Roosts in Illinois. (“Odyssey” 9)
This collection of poems was modeled after The Spoon River Anthology of
Edgar Lee Masters, who in turn had used J. W. Mackail’s Select Epigrams
from the Greek Anthology as a model. Masters’s populism appealed to Tolson.
As critics have noted of Spoon River : “Here for the first time in America was
the whole of a society which people recognized—not only that part of it
reflected in writers of the genteel tradition” (Earnest 63). Masters’s poetic
work, his emphasis on representing the unrepresented, reflects his profes-
sional aims as a lawyer with the law firm of Clarence Darrow where he
worked from 1903 to 1911 (likewise) representing the poor. Ernest Earnest
writes: “Spoon River is a community, a microcosm, not a collection of indi-
viduals” (63). Tolson sought to do the same for the community of Harlem.
Masters, however, could be considered reactionary in some of his views
on poetic form. In “The Genesis of Spoon River,” Masters remarks, “I had
had too much study in verse, too much practice too, to be interested in
such worthless experiments as polyphonic prose, an innovation as absurd

as Dadaism or Cubism or Futurism or Unanimism, all grotesqueries of the
hour, and all worthless, since they were without thought, sincerity, sub-
stance” (48). For Masters, certain modernist moments—in this quote he
addresses the work of Amy Lowell, as well as the international avant-garde—
are reduced to a “worthless experiment” and their poetic innovations are sim-
ply absurd. However, for Tolson at this time, Masters’s free verse innovations
in Spoon River were important because free verse provided a proximity to
living speech that the closed forms Tolson was using when he arrived in New
York could not.
Though the concept of portraiture becomes increasingly contested in
Tolson’s writing—in the title of the later work, Harlem Gallery (1965), the
term “portraits” is dropped—Tolson first sought in the 1930s to accomplish
the task of bringing Harlem’s people to life on the page. This series of poetic
character sketches written to represent the rich variety of life in Harlem is
begun by a poem entitled “Harlem,” probably written after the portraits and
intended to anchor the collection.
Dusky Bards,
Heirs of eons of Comedy and Tragedy,
Pass along the streets and alleys of Harlem
Singing ballads of the Dark World. (3)
This poem invites readers onto the streets of Harlem, while placing the
poem within the context of classical literature (“Heirs of eons of Comedy
and Tragedy”). This latter gesture reveals Tolson’s ongoing stake in placing
and preserving his work within the context of canonical literature, a place he
thought would be assured by his later modernist poems as well.
An important feature of Tolson’s poetics emerges as the turn to free verse
ignites his exuberance concerning vernacular forms. In A Gallery of Harlem
Portraits, the black vernacular form that is most evident is that of the blues.
In the poem “Harlem” that opens the book, half of the 16 stanzas are blues
lyrics, such as:
When a man has lost his taste fer you,

Jest leave dat man alone.
Says I . . . a dawg won’t eat a bone
If he don’t want de bone. (3)
In his thesis, Tolson also emphasizes the importance of the blues, praising
Hughes’s use of the blues as a poetic form.
If an example of the original Blues-ballad is placed in juxtaposition with

a Blues poem by the poet of Lenox Avenue,9 two things will be observed:
the mastery of the racial form by Hughes and the accumulating repeti-
tion . . . There is little doubt that this concentrated repetition reaches its
highest degree of intensity in the Blues form but it may be observed in
other types of versification. (64)
Tolson maintains his interest in “concentrated repetition” as a device for

modulating the pace and tension in his works. As someone interested in
oratory—debate coach, director and playwright, and student of the sermon—
Tolson appreciated the ways in which the performative aspect of the blues
creates what he calls “identification of feeling” (Harlem Group 65). Robert
M. Farnsworth argues: “The blues root Tolson’s poetry in the experience of
black America, and they provide a literary means of expressing some of his
most deeply felt social contradictions” (266). Tolson could not find a pub-
lisher for A Gallery of Harlem Portraits; the University of Missouri Press, with
Farnsworth as editor, published it in 1979—13 years after Tolson died.
Some critics believe that Portraits was probably completed in 1935,
but Tolson continued to revise and submit these poems for publication
long after this date. “The Negro Scholar” appeared in Midwest Journal in
1948, and “African China”—based on two earlier poems from the Portraits
collection—was published in the “Negro Poets Issue” of Voices edited by
Langston Hughes and appearing in winter 1950. In addition, in an appli-
cation for a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation, likely submitted
in 1948, Tolson states: “During the tenure of the fellowship I intend to
finish All Aboard and the epic A Gallery of Harlem Portraits” (E. Mullen
“Introduction” 13). Though Tolson continued to develop writing projects
in a variety of genres, including the novel All Aboard mentioned above,
Portraits was obviously of continuing interest to him.
Despite the fact that Tolson describes A Gallery of Harlem Portraits as the
“first draft” of Harlem Gallery, the two texts are vastly dissimilar in both form
and style. However, we do see in the first text the seed of important concepts
that Tolson develops in his later works. In Portraits Tolson first conceives the
art gallery as a venue in which to stage debates about high and low culture,
audience, and the consumer market, all of which center around the African
American artist. In addition, in Portraits, Tolson’s strategies for conceiving
book-length works begin to take shape. The apparatus that Tolson employs
to transform Portraits from individual poems to a book-length manuscript is
four section headings. These provide a mechanism for grouping the poems:
“Chiaroscuro,” “Silhouettes,” “Etchings,” and “Pastels.” Within these head-
ings, there is potential for the highly effective punning that Tolson uses in
later works to comment upon constructions of race. For example, one can
imagine a later Tolson playing off of possible racial implications of one of
the definitions of chiaroscuro, such as: “The style of pictorial art in which
only the light and shade, and not the various colours, are represented; black-
and-white, or dark brown and white.”10 Yet there is little to suggest that the
poems in “Chiaroscuro” are any different from the poems in the other sec-
tions, except for the fact that they appear at the beginning of the book. As
Keith D. Leonard writes, “the character sketches and gestures of aesthetic
structure are parts that do not add up completely to the larger epic whole
that Tolson wishes to achieve” (209). The entire aesthetic apparatus ulti-
mately does little to advance the meaning of the text.
These poems as a whole suffer from the same pitfalls of other early free
verse works, such as those by Sandburg and Masters of the Chicago School.
It is often unclear what makes these texts poetry, and not just prose with
somewhat arbitrary line breaks. If we compare some poems by Hughes of
this period, who was also influenced by the Chicago Renaissance style, with
those of Tolson, it becomes evident that Hughes’s more concise images and
careful line breaks are effective poetic techniques. Hughes’s poem “Young
Prostitute” was first published in Crisis in August 1923:
Her dark brown face

Is like a withered flower
On a broken stem.
Those kind come cheap in Harlem
So they say. (33)
The resemblance to Ezra Pound’s imagistic gesture from “In a Station of

the Metro” (1913) is unmistakable, though Hughes’s social commentary is
perhaps more incisive. Hughes’s vivid visual image (direct treatment of the
thing) is poignantly contrasted to the gossip about the unnamed woman.
The seemingly simple last line achieves a kind of withering effect on the
reader: lost between the brokenness of the young woman and the nameless
“they” who decide her worth. Thus, “Young Prostitute” can be read as exem-
plarily imagistic. As I show in chapter 4, however, much of Hughes’s early
work relies on phrasally based enjambment, a marker of free verse in the
lineage of Whitman with which Chicago School writers, such as Sandburg,
can be associated. Hughes’s techniques are thus quite diverse.
Tolson’s Portraits, in contrast, rely almost entirely on narrative tech-
niques, lacking the crisp images, pared down lines, and attention to individ-
ual sounds that we see in some of Hughes’s early poems. Tolson’s narratives
about violence and tragic deaths such as “Diamond Canady,” which appears
in the Chiaroscuro section, instead mirror those of Spoon River Anthology in

content and form.
And free-loving women from Nome to Harlem

Swore over their cocktails
That his ways of making love
Surpassed his card tricks.
When Diamond Canady swaggered into a dive,
The sharps became novices
In the presence of a master.
When Diamond Canady favored a woman,
She felt like a commoner honored by a king.
“Love ‘em and leave ‘em.”
Said Diamond Canady . . .
But when he got ready to cast Little Eva Winn aside
She left him in bed one morning
With a thin knife sticking in his heart. (7)
What distinguishes Tolson’s modern free verse from that of Masters, how-
ever, is his inclusion of black vernacular and blues lyrics. For example, the
first stanza of “Diamond Canady,” the poem quoted from above, includes a
familiar African American boast:
I plays any game

Dat you kin name
For any amount
Dat you kin count. (7)
Tolson was conscious of using his poems as written repositories for such
oral forms as the boast and spoken African proverbs; his later works utilize
vernacular forms as a compositional structure, displaying entire scenes fol-
lowing the protocol of the dozens.
According to Tolson, he discovered Masters along with Sandburg,
Robert Frost, and Edward Arlington Robinson in 1932. Tolson writes that
his “German American friend” who encouraged him to begin the collection
that became Portraits told him: “You’re like the professors. You think the
only good poet is a dead one. Why don’t you read Sandburg, Masters, Frost,
Robinson?” (“Odyssey” 8). These writers were not part of his academic
training at Lincoln University and Tolson frequently recounted his disap-
pointment that “his English professor at Lincoln reacted with discouraging
disdain when [he] excitedly discovered Sandburg’s ‘Chicago’” (Farnsworth

24). As Newcomb points out, Sandburg was one of Monroe’s “important
early discoveries” (15). She “sought the maximum avant-garde impact by
leading off [an] issue [of Poetry] with ‘Chicago Poems,’ placing Sandburg’s
rough-edged, soon-to-be-famous portrait of the city, ‘Chicago,’ on the first
page, where it became a self-defining editorial statement for this proudly
Chicagoan magazine” (15).
According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago:
the term “Chicago Renaissance,” as it is usually used, applies more

precisely to the second wave of Chicago writing. It describes a gather-
ing of writers, a flowering of institutions that supported and guided
them . . . between about 1910 and the mid-1920s. Major figures include
novelists [Theodore] Dreiser (whose career extended well into this
period), Sherwood Anderson, and Floyd Dell; poets Carl Sandburg,
Harriet Monroe, Edgar Lee Masters, and Vachel Lindsay; reporters Ben
Hecht and Ring Lardner; and editors and critics Monroe, Dell, Margaret
Anderson, and Henry Justin Smith. (Rotella)
Other sources such as the Encyclopedia of the Chicago Literary Renaissance

date the movement more broadly: from 1900–1930 (Pinkerton).
In addition, a Chicago Renaissance occurred among African American
writers and artists, which a Chicago Public Library project dates from 1932
to 1950.
In 1979, Chicago Renaissance artist Eldzier Cortor recalled that among

those whose “burgeoning talents shaped a kind of Thirties/Forties
Renaissance in Chicago were the dancers Katherine Dunham and Talley
Beatty; writers Richard Wright and Frank Yerby, Margaret Walker,
Willard Motley and John H. Johnson (now publisher of Ebony); sociolo-
gist writers St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton (who later co-authored
Black Metropolis); entertainers Nat King Cole, Ray Nance and Oscar
Brown, Jr.; photographer Gordon Parks; poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and
the artists Elizabeth Catlett and Hughie Lee Smith.” (Flug)
Tolson’s chosen poetic affiliations throughout his career have been a puzzle
to some critics; however, his interest in Masters, Sandburg, and Monroe of
the Chicago Renaissance in his early career as a poet is not unusual among
African American writers. Moreover, recognition of the Chicago writ-
ers illustrates the need to understand the “New Negro Renaissance” more
broadly—instead of relying only on Harlem-centric accounts.
Notably, among the many influences on Harlem Renaissance writers

George Hutchinson lists in The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White is
the “Chicago Renaissance authors’ experiments in vernacular poetry and
regionalist fiction” (30). In fact, for Midwesterners Hughes and Tolson, the
Chicago Renaissance was of special interest.11 More specifically, “accord-
ing to [Langston] Hughes’s biographer, Faith Berry, Hughes’s high school
English teacher (at Central High in Cleveland), ‘introduced her class to the
Chicago school of poets: Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and—the poet
Hughes admired most, and eventually his greatest influence in the matter of
form—Carl Sandburg.’” (Komunyakaa 1143).
Tolson’s early writing shares formal traits, along with their pitfalls, with
Sandburg’s Marxist-influenced The People, Yes (1936). Of the 107 parts of
The People, Yes, Brian M. Reed writes: “There is little or no rhyme, meter,
or other organized patterning of sound. The poetry depends instead on syn-
tactical parallelism—especially in the form of lists, catalogs, and repeated
phrases—to give his verse coherence and force” (191). Tolson’s method is
similar to Sandburg’s in several respects. For example, Reed describes rather
arbitrarily lineated prose quotations throughout Sandburg’s work and
“patches of the book that consist of nothing but reams of what Sandburg
calls ‘proverbs’” (195). So, too, does Tolson’s early work display these traits.
Of the effect of these proverbs on the reader, Reed asserts that “the strings
of authorless, decontextualized ‘proverbs’ that keep recurring in The People,
Yes . . . are like blats of lyricism packaged and delivered serially, indifferently,
ad nauseam” (206), an effect that has moved readers away from such poems
of this period.
Concluding that “Sandburg’s text simply does not display the polish, com-
plexity, variable tone, and layered ironies that typify most anthologized verse
from the twentieth century,” (194) Reed nonetheless argues for a nuanced
understanding of the poem’s political work and context. Writing that The
People, Yes is not “a gallery of portraits and vignettes” like Sandburg’s ear-
lier work in The Cornhuskers, (note again the similarities to Tolson’s early
poems) Reed argues that “instead, The People, Yes attempts something much
more ambitious: to portray the divided, conflictual totality of American
relations” (198). “This impulse is recognizably Marxist,” Reed writes, “of a
piece with the Popular Front aesthetic promulgated by the Seventh Congress
of the Communist International in 1935” (198). Tolson’s Portraits shares
these same impulses.
Tolson, whose political activities included organizing black and white ten-
ant farmers and sharecroppers with the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union, was
also well aware of developments in proletarian literature. The influence of this
literature on his early poetry is evident in the portrayals of “ordinary” people
(such as those by Masters and Sandburg) and a critique of power relations (both
class-based and race-based). In addition, he is writing within a context—his
stay in New York City in the early 1930s—during which the socialist poems of
Hughes, and Hughes’s interest in the blues, are strong influences. By investi-
gating Tolson’s early work, we can begin to see how the influences of the three
strands of literary history that he describes in his thesis: proletarian literature,
Harlem Renaissance, and modernism begin to converge.
His relation to the “modern” at this early point in his career is, how-
ever, complex. This is a period in which Tolson has yet to extol the genius
of Eliot. He is writing more out of a Chicago Renaissance influence: a
Whitman-inspired, free verse poetics. By Tolson’s later account, however, his
introduction to modern free verse served as a springboard toward his even-
tual discovery of formally experimental modernism. Tolson subsequently
links the emphasis on vernacular, or “common speech,” in free verse to the
Imagists: “The first finished manuscript of the Harlem Gallery [A Gallery
of Harlem Portraits] was written in free verse. That was the fashion intro-
duced by the imagists” (“Interview” 194). Though Tolson’s accounting of
the connections between free verse and imagism is historically inexact, this
quote is particularly interesting in that Tolson seems to be attempting retro-
spectively to mark his first manuscript as exhibiting modernist influences,
which may be an attempt to recoup it for history. (At other points he seem-
ingly disavows the manuscript of A Gallery of Harlem Portraits.) In the later
work Harlem Gallery, which Tolson casts here as a rewriting of the earlier
Portraits, we see Tolson’s move from modern free verse to the aesthetics of
experimental modernism.
In the March 1913 number of Poetry, F. S. Flint’s article “Imagisme” lists
the three “rules” of “Imagisme” as follows:
1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.

2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase,
not in sequence of a metronome. (199)
Lawrence Rainey stresses Pound’s influence on this piece, maintaining that

it was “actually drafted by Pound and merely rewritten by Flint” (184). To
foreground the work of the Imagists, in 1914, Pound published the anthology
Des Imagistes, which contained the work of a wide range of writers (includ-
ing Amy Lowell). The volume, however, met with critical resistance. In the
“Preface” to Some Imagist Poets (1915), the first of three volumes edited by
Amy Lowell in response to Pound, Lowell prescribes six rules, sometimes
referred to as the Imagist “Manifesto.”12 The first tenet Lowell lists is as
follows: “To use the language of common speech, but to employ always
the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word” (vi).
By this time, however, Pound had abandoned the Imagist school, calling it
“flaccid” and placing the blame on Lowell herself for much of the move-
ment’s undoing. “In [Pound’s] 1917 ‘Retrospect’ to the imagist manifesto
(printed in Make It New as a ‘Stray Document’), Pound locates the undoing
of imagism (‘Amygism’) in the widespread disregard for his second imagist
principle prescribing scarcity of words” (Jaffe 130).
Lowell’s list also emphasizes “freedom in the choice of subject” and the
“individuality of a poet” (“Preface” vi–vii), concepts that for Tolson may
have also brought to mind the democratizing influence of the Whitmanian
free verse line. Drawing evidence from the Tolson papers housed at the
Library of Congress, Nielsen shows that, “What Tolson came to attempt
was a decolonizing of American letters, a task which he saw as linking him
to Whitman” (244). “I had deserted the great Romantics and Victorians,”
Tolson states in an interview conducted by M. W. King in 1965, “Walt
Whitman’s exuberance was in the marrow of my bones” (“Interview” 195).
Pound’s view, however, is much less democratic than that of Whitman. In
“A Few Don’ts By An Imagiste,” which followed Flint’s article in the same
issue of Poetry, Pound writes: “To begin with, consider the three rules recorded
by Mr. Flint, not as dogma—never consider anything as dogma—but as the
result of long contemplation, which, even if it is some one else’s contempla-
tion, may be worth consideration” (201). It is difficult to imagine, however,
anything more dogmatic than an article assailing one with “Don’ts.”
Significantly, Chicago was an important ground on which the battle
for the kind of free verse that would reign in American modernism was
fought. The two sides that emerged were Midwesterners in the lineage of
Whitman and the Imagist group made up of writers recognizable now as
members of what used to be called the “high modernist” canon. The battles
took place on the pages of Poetry and The Little Review. As Mark Morrisson
explains: “These two trends in the contents of the Little Review reveal two
competing visions of an American modern poetry canon developing dur-
ing the pre-First World War period. The first was epitomized by Lindsay,
Masters, and to some extent Sandburg, and it represents a continuation of
the Whitman-inspired canon” (21). Both Poetry and the Little Review pub-
lished works from this group. “Yet even as many contributors and readers of
the Little Review sang the praises of Lindsay and Masters and Whitmanian
poetics,” Morrisson describes, “another American poetry quickly rivaled this
aesthetic—Imagism” (22). The Little Review eventually becomes an advo-
cate of Imagism, awarding its 1917 “Vers Libre Prize” to American Imagist
writers H. D. and Maxwell Bodenheim (Morrisson 23). Ultimately, “the free
verse revolution in American poetry had come, in the pages of The Little
Review, to be an Imagist revolution” (23).
Morrisson describes Imagism as “a canonization strategy, designed to
give a coherent focus to the otherwise disparate work of poets ranging from
Pound, H. D., and Aldington to D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce” (22).
Current examination of the modernist canon reveals this strategy to have
been a successful one, and though we know—as Tolson certainly must have
known—that Whitman introduced the American revolution in free verse
in the century before Pound, Tolson’s move late in his life to associate him-
self with Imagism may have been one of his own canonization strategies.
Certainly the two types of free verse discussed here are very formally dissim-
ilar, and the influence of free verse by Illinois poets Sandburg and Masters
is dominant in Tolson’s work from the 1930s, exhibiting phrasally based
enjambment based on prose rhythms as opposed to the sculptural exactness
called for by Imagism.
Rendezvous with America

As we turn to Rendezvous with America (1944), Tolson’s next collection fol-
lowing Portraits chronologically and the first published in his lifetime, we
can discern a change in Tolson’s poetic method. Rendezvous is much more of
a part with Tolson’s work in the 1950s and 1960s, his Libretto and Harlem
Gallery, and in Rendezvous we see Tolson applying the lessons of modern-
ism that he has absorbed. Published by Dodd, Mead, and Co. in New
York, Rendezvous is composed of sections of long poems, and groupings of
shorter poems. The sections appear in the following order: “Rendezvous
with America” (title poem), Woodcuts for Americana, “Dark Symphony,”
A Song for Myself, Sonnets, Of Men and Cities, “The Idols of the Tribe,” and
“Tapestries of Time.”13 Given the book’s importance at the time of its release,
its significance in Tolson’s oeuvre, and the paucity of contemporary academic
criticism on these poems, I offer extended readings of the book’s forms and
themes. From this analysis, the emergence of Tolson’s philosophies of mod-
ern poetry and modern American identity in the 1940s can be traced.
For example, in “The Poet” from the section entitled “Woodcuts for
Americana,” the poet’s work is described as follows:
A freebooter of lands and seas,

He plunders the dialects of the marketplace,
Thieves lexicons of Crown jewel discoveries,
Pillages the symbols and meccas of the race:
Of thefts the poet’s magic leaves no trace. (28–29)14
As the poet transforms into freebooter, thief, and pillager he can embrace
such modernist methods as collage (theft) and multivocal experimentation
(plundering of dialects). The poet as pirate adventurer is unleashed from the
strictures of singular narrative and can embrace multiple registers: “the dia-
lects of the marketplace,” and “lexicons of Crown jewel discoveries,” as well
as “the symbols and meccas of the race.” For Tolson, modernist method, how-
ever, is used in service of his Afro-Modernist ideology. Not merely genteel,
the poet remains “A champion of the People versus Kings—” and “A hater of
the hierarchy of things—” for “Freedom’s need is his necessity” (29). Rather
than fetishizing the “new,” Tolson’s poet “breaks the icons of the Old and
New” (29). “The poet’s lien exempts the Many nor the Few,” showing that
in Tolson’s revised role of the poet, all is fair game (29). Though this stanza
does not enact the poetics that it describes, it illustrates Tolson’s changing
ideology, foreshadowing the populist modernist form that is readily appar-
ent in later works.
Tolson also begins in this collection to conceive his role in history, pre-
paring to endure “the wormwood of anonymous years” (28).
He stands before the bar of pride,

Gives not a tinker’s dam
For those who flatter or deride
His epic or epigram:
The potboy, not the connoisseur, toadies for a dram. (28)
Prescient of the debates that will surround Tolson in years to come, the
poet “Gives not a tinker’s dam” for either flattery or derision. In addition
to “The Poet,” the Woodcuts for Americana section of Rendezvous also con-
tains poems such as “The Mountain Climber” that may seem initially to
carry forward Tolson’s interest in portraiture; however, Tolson’s language
use is now markedly different from that in the poems of the 1930s. “The
Mountain Climber” begins and ends with the same quatrain:
What whim of flesh, what quirk of soul,

What cast of the Rubicon die
Fates him to the peaks that bayonet
The winds and snows of the sky? (15)
Tolson’s range of reference is beginning to widen in this collection. Phrases

such as “Rubicon die” (attributed to Julius Caesar) place the poems in con-
versation with an ever-expanding range of historical events and cultural
allusions. Tolson also begins to re see the grammatical function of individual
words, often employing words commonly used as nouns as verbs.15 Tolson’s

particular use of what Zora Neal Hurston called “verbal nouns” (1043) also
helps to increase the visual sense of the poem, as in this same piece where
“porcupine stones” are said to “beard” a mountain’s face (15).
“A Song for Myself”

Elsewhere in this collection, Tolson experiments with other new formal choices.
In “A Song for Myself,” Tolson riffs on Whitman’s title with Dickinson’s
method. Farnsworth writes: “Although the title echoes Whitman, the dimeter
lines, the compressed syntax, and the dry understatement suggest a greater debt
to Emily Dickinson” (82). Far from the wandering free verse lines of Portraits
(or Whitman’s own expansiveness) “A Song for Myself” is composed of two syl-
lable lines made up of either one or two words, reflecting the sculpted concision
associated with Dickinson. Each stanza is eight lines in length.
I judge
My soul
Eagle
Nor mole:
A man
Is what
He saves
From rot. (45)
The “I” here judges his soul to be neither above nor below that of others. In the
last half of the octave, however, an even more intriguing judgment is advanced:
In contrast to Eliot’s modernism, Tolson offers a more optimistic assessment
of modern life. Indeed, a man’s identity is equated here not with the degrada-
tion of rot or waste, but rather with those things that he can preserve.
“A Song for Myself ” also contains a similar sentiment as “The Poet” con-
cerning the poet’s place in history:
Today
The Few
Yield poets
Their due;
Tomorrow
The Mass
Judgment
Shall pass. (50)
Poets save culture from rot, and sift “The chaff / From wheat / And laugh”
(48) but they also must remain amongst the people and be able to commu-
nicate across “The Gulf / of Man” (51). If the poet separates himself from
the people, all he will create is “a pest”:
Those who
Wall in
Themselves
And grin
Commit
Incest
And spawn
A pest. (48)
Thus the poet is most successful if he continues to draw inspiration from

so-called common people, a dictum drawn from Whitman. Of the American
poets, Whitman explains in his “Preface” (1855), “a bard is to be commen-
surate with the people” and thus able to sing for the nation (7). Published
in Phylon in 1943, the octaves of “Song for Myself” are printed three across
and three down on the first page (351), and three across and four down on
the next (352), in a grid. The effect is a kind of wild simultaneity that under-
mines linear reading; the eye lands at any of several points on the page, mak-
ing any of the stanzas a possible starting point and thus rendering standard
left-to-right reading of English ineffective. The reader has to decide how to
read the stanzas for him or herself, in what order, and therefore determine
what relationship the proverbs have to one another.
Sonnets
Sandwiched between the poems in “A Song for Myself” and a group of mostly
serial poems in “Of Men and Cities” is a collection of 12 Shakespearean son-
nets. Several of the sonnets resemble extended proverbs or fables, often with
an epigrammatic ending.16 In “A Primer for Today,” a biologist, a geologist,
an economist, and a historian debate the concept of progress. In the opening
quatrain, the biologist speaks first.
The great biologist said: “The semen of change

Crawls upward from the simple to the complex,
Through animal and plant, in kingdoms strange,
Whimmed by the drama of milieu and sex.” (59)
The manner in which the poems open with a kind of proposal or point
(“The great biologist said”) followed by counterpoint will become a famil-
iar Tolson strategy. The opening proposals of the poems are increasingly
encoded in word puzzles, often requiring the reader to translate a series of
allusions into a visual picture. Here we see that the biologist believes in a
linear and progressivist model of change that “crawls upward.” The “great
biologist” is also masculinist in philosophy, relying upon the “semen of
change” as the active agent. The geologist counters with an argument that
“Nature disdains / Your gradualism” while the economist points out that
man’s activities complicate the pattern: “The species of Man / Has spells of
calm, too, spasms of devilment.” The historian has the last word and final
couplet: “The great historian said: ‘I want to know / Who knows when
changes are too fast or slow’” (59). In each of these sonnets, Tolson takes full
advantage of the sonnet’s turn, placing emphasis upon the closing couplet
to convey the attitude or message of the poem. Here the historian’s ques-
tion about the nature of change—who knows when it’s too fast or slow—
provides a lens through which to revise the other scholars’ certainty about
the unfolding of history.
Though the meter varies, the sonnets follow the traditional Shakespearian
rhyme scheme: ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG. Most of the end rhymes are
straightforward: “disdains/plains,” “Man/span,” though Tolson also reaches
for the rhyme “Magdalen/guttermen” in “The Traitor to France,” a son-
net that piles on references to illustrate that one who betrays his country
turns it into a decidedly unmasculine “bawling Magdalen, / A taxi-dancer
and a cuckold’s wench,” who seduces “apaches and paillards and gutter-
men / Beyond the gaslights on a byway bench” (64). Critics at the time
differed in their assessments of Tolson’s use of traditional forms. Nathaniel
Tillman writing for Phylon states that Tolson “exhibits excellent technique
in the twelve Shakespearean sonnets which comprise a section of the vol-
ume. Particularly effective are his cryptic final couplets” (391). In contrast,
Arthur Burke, writing for The Crisis states: “The one section which may
disappoint is ‘Sonnets.’ Here Tolson does not achieve sufficient flexibility in
the Shakespearean form to produce a truly lyrical quality” (61).
Though critics were somewhat divided in their judgment of particu-
lar sections of the book, the collection quickly went into its third print-
ing and composer Earl Robinson set Tolson’s award-winning poem “Dark
Symphony” to music (Farnsworth 93). Illustrating Tolson’s continuing rel-
evance amongst African American artists and intellectuals in the decades
following, a 1968 anthology, Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America,
edited by James A. Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross, takes Tolson’s poem as
its title and a quote from the poem as epigraph:
Out of dead-ends of Poverty,

Through wildernesses of Superstition,
Across barricades of Jim Crowism . . .
We advance! (42)
Although Rendezvous is largely forgotten today, the book was widely reviewed
at its release, receiving notice in black newspapers, mainstream newspapers,
and literary journals, with most offering praise. Ramona Lowe, writing for
the Chicago Defender ’s New York bureau in the April 28, 194517 edition,
declares that “with a single volume of poetry, ‘Rendezvous with America,’”
Melvin B. Tolson has “established himself as one of America’s important
contemporary poets” (18).
Reviewers Robert Hilyer and Burke, though critical of some parts of
the collection, offered positive assessments of the book as a whole. Though
Hilyer of the New York Times Book Review rejected Tolson’s attempts in
“A Song for Myself,” he called Rendezvous “an admirable collection” and
Tolson “a good poet, and a good craftsman.” Alternatively, Burke, who
found the sonnet section unappealing, writes in The Crisis that Rendezvous
“carries one back to Cullen’s Color and Hughes’ Fine Clothes to the Jew. No
Negro save Sterling Brown, in his Southern Road, has published in one vol-
ume so much that is remarkable in its freshness, its poetic imagination, and
above all, its reflection of American life as it affects Negroes” (61). We see
in Burke an attempt to write Tolson into an emerging canon of African
American poets—including Cullen, Hughes, and Brown—but the sonnets
do not fit into his expectations for the representation of “Negro life.” For his
part, Hilyer cannot imagine an African American poet in the traditions of
Whitman or Dickinson.
“Rendezvous with America,” Title Poem

The title poem “Rendezvous with America” is both patriotic ode and warn-
ing. In method, the poem employs lists that are at once Whitmanian and
Biblical. Section I contains a list of the men “Who bridged the ocean / With
arches of dreams / And piers of devotion” (3).
Messiahs from the Sodoms and Gomorrahs of the Old World,

Searchers from Cathay and Cipango and El Dorado,
Mystics from Oubangui Chari and Uppsala,
Serfs from Perugia and Tonle Sap,
Jailbirds from Newgate and Danzig,
Patriots from Yokosuka and Straslund,
Scholars from Oxford and Leyden,

Beggars from Bagdad and Montmartre,
Traders from the Tyrrhenian Sea and Mona Passage,
Sailors from the Skagerrak and Bosporus Strait,
Iconoclasts from Buteshire and Zermatt. (3)
Though at times Tolson is basing his word choices at least in part on allitera-
tion: “Beggars from Bagdad,” “Traders from the Tyrrhenian Sea,” “Sailors
from the Skagerrak,” the strikingly wide array of geographical references
illustrates the collision of cultures necessary to make Tolson’s America, a
national identity formed from both the detritus and treasure of diasporas
(3). After this list, Tolson begins the next section by pointing out that “these
were the men of many breeds / Who mixed their blood and sowed their
seeds” highlighting the hybrid nature of these identities (3). Tolson’s some-
times hyperbolic listing, though it may present certain difficulties for the
reader wanting to track down the many allusions, is often more compelling
than the more explanatory lines that follow in Section II with end rhymes
like “breeds” and “seeds.” The quatrains of iambic tetrameter in Section II
do, however, pick up momentum as the section continues in its praise of the
founders of America.
There were the men of iron lips

Who challenged Dawn’s apocalypse,
Who married Earth and Sea and Sky
And died to live and lived to die.
There were the men who dared to be
The sire of things they could not see,
Whose martyred and rejected bones
Became the States’ foundation-stones. (4)
The force of this section is also carried through by the anaphora “These were
the men” at the opening of each stanza.
Illustrating the flexible manner in which Tolson is working with the
serial poem, Section III abandons iambs and quatrains in favor of the listing
technique introduced at the outset.
Into the arteries of the Republic poured

The babels of bloods,
The omegas of peoples,
The moods of continents,
The melting-pots of seas,
The flotsams of isms,

The flavors of tongues,
The yesterdays of martyrs,
The tomorrows of utopias. (4–5)
The “babels” or different languages are encoded in the blood, while conti-
nents possess moods and tongues possess flavors. The life force—language
itself—flows through the arteries of the Republic carrying “a magnificent
cosmorama with myriad patterns and colors” (5). In a mirror of this “cosmo-
politan orchestra with a thousand instruments playing,” Tolson experiments
with different formal possibilities within the same poem through the act of
marrying the epic and the modernist serial into his own Afro-Modernist
creation. Thus, Rendezvous With America is a precedent for Tolson’s Afro-
Modernist epic Libretto, published in 1953.
In each section, Tolson creates a form and sticks with it for the dura-
tion of that section. In Sections IV and V Tolson goes on to praise famous
Americans (both real and mythic), and decry racism by illustrating the
contributions made by various groups. Section IV, which devotes one cou-
plet each to Daniel Boone, Paul Bunyan, Jesse James, John Henry, Casey
Jones, Johnny Appleseed, Joe DiMaggio, Joe Louis, Thomas Paine, and
Abe Lincoln—displaying a masculinist conception of nationhood—is con-
structed of quatrains in which lines one and three are indented, and lines
two and four contain end rhymes. This method interlinks the first and sec-
ond couplet of each quatrain, even though the couplets are about different
men.
I see America in Thomas Paine,

As he pinnacles the freedoms that tyrants ban;
In you Abe Lincoln, tanned by prairie suns,
As he splits his rails and thinks the Rights of Man. (6)
Tolson achieves emphasis throughout the section again utilizing ana-

phora, with the repetition of the phrase “I see America” at the beginning
of each stanza. He also once again employs verbal nouns, giving the reader
the unusual, though highly visual, phrase “he pinnacles the freedoms that
tyrants ban.”
In Section V, Tolson presents and refutes racist stereotypes. For exam-
ple, a stanza that begins “A blind man said, / ‘Look at the kikes’” coun-
ters with a description of the accomplishments of Rosenwald, Michelson,
Brandeis, and Boas. A stanza that begins “A blind man said, / ‘Look at the
dagos’” counters with a description of the accomplishments of La Guardia,
Brumidi, Caruso, and Toscanini. He ends the section with a description

of Black Samson, Marian Anderson, “Fred” Douglass, and Private Brooks.
Each stanza is composed of centered and left-flush sections and this form is
repeated throughout.
A blind man said,

“Look at the niggers.”
And I saw
Black Samson mowing down Hessians with a scythe at Brandywine,
Marian Anderson bewitching continents with the talismans of art,
Fred Douglass hurling from tombstones the philippics of freedom,
Private Brooks dying at the feet of MacArthur in Bataan. (7–8)
This use of the visual space, with the movement of the eye from the center,
back to the left margin, and to the center again in the next stanza, under-
scores the point/counterpoint structure of the section.
After setting up an epic history of America and its people in the first five
sections, Tolson begins to introduce America’s contradictions in Section VI.
America can worship gods of brass

And bow before the strut of Breed and Class;
Then gather to her bosom refugees
Who champion the causes of the Mass. (8)
While America may worship money and whiteness, she also embraces refu-
gees and the causes of the masses. In this section, America’s vices and virtues
appear to be equal. The form of the quatrain, with the first couplet explain-
ing America’s downfalls and the second extolling the country’s virtues, pro-
vides a visually balanced treatment of both good and bad aspects of the
republic. Section VII, however, is much more vociferous.
Sometimes
Uncle Sam
Pillows his head on the Statue of Liberty,
Tranquilizes himself on the soft couch of the Corn Belt,
Leaves his feet in the Golden Gate,
And sinks into the nepenthe of slumber. (9)
Using both the listing technique and a series of “ands” to multiply the accu-
mulation, Tolson goes on to caution against the many evils that occur when
Uncle Sam falls into a forgetful slumber.
And the termites of anti-Semitism busy themselves

And the Klu Klux Klan marches with rope and faggot
And the money-changers plunder the Temple of Democracy
And the copperheads start boring from within
And the robber barons pillage the countryside
And the con men try to jimmy the Constitution
And the men of good will are hounded over the Land
And the people groan in the tribulum of tyranny. (9)
The inevitable outcome is war and economic degradation.
Then
Comes the roar of cannon at Fort Sumter
Or the explosion of Teapot Dome
Or the Wall Street Crash of ’29
Or the thunderclap of bombs at Pearl Harbor! (9)
The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, looms over this
collection published in 1944, as Tolson struggles to apply the lessons of his-
tory to the events of World War II.
In Section VIII, the speaker calls forth the dream of those who landed at
Plymouth Rock: “A government which leaves men free and equal / And yet
knits men together as one man” (10). Though Tolson weaves together the
past with the present in his “rendezvous,” the focus is returned again and
again to events of the present, emphasized by the repetition of the words
“Here, / Now.”
Here,
Now,
At Pearl Harbor, I remember
I have a rendezvous at Plymouth Rock and Valley Forge
This Seventh of December. (11)
Tolson describes the heroism of “Pilgrim Fathers” at Plymouth Rock and

“winter soldiers” at Valley Forge who “keep the faith” (10) to remind the
reader of the heroism and strength of the country, because the rendezvous
with America occurs in the present as the country deals with the wounds of
Pearl Harbor.
I have a rendezvous with America

This Seventh of December.
The maiden freshness of Pearl Harbor’s dawn,

The peace of seas that thieve the breath,
I shall remember. (10–11)
Though Tolson previously listed the social ills of America in Section VI, he
is quick here to reinforce a patriotic stance against “fascist spawn” (11) with
a “masculine allegro” in Section IX.
In order to remedy “The traitor’s ruse / And the traitor’s lie” that led
to “Pearl Harbor’s ruins / Of sea and sky,” Tolson turns to the “common
ground of America” (11). The poet, like Whitman, finds comfort in “the
brows of mountains,” “the breasts of rivers,” “the flanks of prairies,” and
“the wombs of valleys” “In these midnight dawns / Of the Gethsemanes
and the Golgothas of Peoples” (11). Though the land is gendered feminine,
the “Victory March of the Republic” is heard in a masculinized song of the
machines used by America’s workers.
In the masculine allegro of factories

And the blues rhapsody of express trains,
In the bass crescendo of power dams
And the nocturne adagio of river boats,
In the sound and fury of threshing machines
And the clarineting needles of textile mills,
In the fortissimo hammers of shipyards
And the diatonic picks of coal mines,
In the oboe rhythms of cotton gins
And the sharped notes of salmon traps,
In the belting harmonics of lumber camps
And the drumming derricks of oil fields. (11–12)
In this stanza Tolson’s favor for pattern and balance is once again evident.
The last two sections of “Rendezvous” contain portions in which the lines
are centered (a form that is used for the entire of the later Harlem Gallery).
This centering achieves balance between the oscillations that Tolson favors
to make his points. Moreover, the rhythmic toggling between “in” and “and”
at the beginning of the lines echoes the rhythmic sound of the machines
that Tolson hears as powerful music. This modern cacophony of factories,
express trains, power dams, river boats, threshing machines, textile mills,
shipyards, and so on, reveals, like the early editorial discourse of Poetry,
“a forceful engagement with the conditions of urban-industrial modernity”
(Newcomb 12).
The final section of “Rendezvous” points toward the range of allusions

that Tolson will employ in later works.
In these midnight dawns

Of the vulture Philistines of the unquiet skies
And the rattlesnake Attilas of the uptorn seas . . .
In these midnight dawns
Of the Gethsemanes and the Golgothas of Peoples
America stands. (12)
This section is most like the later poem Harlem Gallery in form and lan-
guage use, which further illustrates the development of Tolson’s Afro-
Modernist technique in the 1940s, accompanied by a more acute attention
to musicality and the poetic line. Significantly, Tolson closes this poem with
a metaphor borrowed from W. E. B. Du Bois, which Tolson also uses in the
opening of Harlem Gallery. The final line of “Rendezvous with America”
reads: “Uprearing their heads in the dawns and dusks of ages” that illustrates
the continuing importance of Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn, an Essay toward an
Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940) to Tolson’s thinking about construc-
tions of African American identity.
“Dark Symphony”
“Dark Symphony” extends the “masculine allegro” of “Rendezvous,” but
within a specifically African American context. Section I, “Allegro Moderato,”
is composed of sestets with the rhyme scheme ABCDBC.
Black Crispus Attucks taught

Us how to die
Before white Patrick Henry’s bugle breath
Uttered the vertical
Transmitting cry:
“Yea, give me liberty or give me death.” (37)
Lines two and five are indented to highlight the B/B end rhyme. In addition,
the white space created by moving line two nearly past the right margin,
allows the eye to line up “Black Crispus Attucks” and “Before white Patrick
Henry” in stanza one creating a juxtaposition that Tolson uses to highlight
African American Crispus Attucks’s primary place in Revolutionary War his-
tory, and showing him to be of equal prominence with hero Patrick Henry.
The six sections of “Dark Symphony” are assigned both roman numer-
als and instructions for tempo: Allegro Moderato, Lento Grave, Andante
Sostenuto, Tempo Primo, Larghetto, and Tempo di Marcia. Section II “Lento
Grave ” (slow and stately) recounts what Du Bois calls “sorrow songs” that
blacks sang to endure slavery. Farnsworth remarks on the signifying that
took place in spirituals noting, “these songs carried sustaining messages
that only the slaves understood” (82). Linking the suffering of Africans in
America with that of the ancient Jews, Tolson writes: “Black slaves sang Go
Down Moses / In the canebrakes of the Southern Pharaohs” (38).
While “Rendezvous with America” emphasizes a patriotic attitude toward
America, “Dark Symphony” calls up the injuries done to democracy by the
institution of slavery.
They tell us to forget

Democracy is spurned.
They tell us to forget
The Bill of Rights is burned.
Three hundred years we slaved,
We slave and suffer yet:
Though flesh and bone rebel,
They tell us to forget! (38–39)
This “we” is not conjured in “Rendezvous.” In contrast here, the “us” and “we”
are clearly African Americans who “slave and suffer yet.” Both Farnsworth
and Bérubé18 have commented on the revisions to “Dark Symphony” that
Tolson made between its first publication in Atlantic Monthly in September
1941 and its inclusion in Rendezvous with America in 1944. In stanza 4, line
4, as it appears in the book, his is underlined: “The New Negro Speaks in
his America,” strongly stating African Americans’ ownership of, and unique
relationship to, the nation.
Farnsworth interprets the revisions as revealing that “America is a nation
of the people, not a nation of the Big Boys. It is a nation of a people who
have learned to respect the rights and dignity of other people, not a nation of
exploiters, racists, or demagogues. The latter are the true un-Americans” (81).
Tolson also recenters blackness as part of American identity, showing that
“black people share in the authentic American heritage as richly as do any
other people” (81). However, Tolson clearly delineates an “us” and a “them.”
None in the Land can say

To us black men Today:
You send the tractors on their bloody path,
And create Okies for the Grapes of Wrath.
You breed the slum that breeds a Native Son

To damn the good earth the Pilgrim Fathers won. (40–41)
The “you” addressed in the poem (who are “them” and not “us”) are capi-
talists, racists, and fascists who “bring contempt upon Democracy” (41).
Clearly, African Americans are not the ones responsible for the ills of soci-
ety bred by economic collapse. The final triumphant section, Section VI
“Tempo di Marcia,” is a call to African Americans to march forward with all
oppressed peoples of the world.
Out of abysses of Illiteracy,

Through labyrinths of Lies,
Across waste lands of Disease . . .
We advance!
Out of dead-ends of Poverty,
Through wildernesses of Superstition,
Across barricades of Jim Crowism . . .
We advance!
With the Peoples of the World . . .
We advance! (41–42)
Tolson envisioned a world in which workers would unite against the oppres-
sions of capitalism. He also saw workers’ voices as the source of poetry. In “The
Shipwright” from the section entitled “Of Men and Cities,” Tolson writes:
We,
The workers of the world strike catholic notes
On woods and irons, wring from brassy throats
Epics of industry. (80)
Here Tolson modernizes the epic into the “epic of industry” to create his
Afro-Modernist vision. The epic is not sung in service of the state, but
instead for the “workers of the world.”
For Tolson, these powerful, masculine figures are the driving forces in
the process of modernization, and are represented by the active and highly
masculine New Negro. For example, Tolson writes of the New Negro and
his “history-moulding ancestors” who modernized cultures when they
Built ships to conquer the seven seas,

Erected the Cotton Empire,
Flung railroads across a hemisphere,

Disemboweled the earth’s iron and coal. (40)
He then praises the intellectual and cultural accomplishments of the New

Negro who “Strides in seven-league boots / Along the Highway of Today /
Toward the Promised Land of Tomorrow!” (40). Active, sometimes violent,
verbs of modernization such as “built,” “erected,” “flung,” and “disembow-
eled,” are repeated throughout the poem. Hands “fling” murals, and voices
“thunder” the message of labor organizing:19
The New Negro:

His giant hands fling murals upon high chambers,
His drama teaches a world to laugh and weep,
His music leads continents captive,
His voice thunders the Brotherhood of Labor,
His science creates seven wonders,
His Republic of Letters challenges the Negro-baiters. (40)
The New Negro is depicted as both modern superhero and model citizen:
“The New Negro, / Hard-muscled, Fascist-hating, Democracy-ensouled”
(40). His art and science lead the way for change worldwide.
It is certain that the work in Rendezvous takes a turn both formally
and thematically away from Tolson’s first completed manuscript, and in
Rendezvous we find the initial evidence of Tolson’s own conception of both
the modern and modernism. His catalogs and use of anaphora (as in the
passage quoted above) also link him to proto-modernist American poet
Whitman, whose influence is evident in the work of Hughes as well.
“The Idols of the Tribe”

Tolson was keenly aware of the terror imposed by the state during the hor-
rors of World War II. He thus takes on Nazism with an ironic and chilling
epigraph to “The Idols of the Tribe” from Mein Kampf: A State which, in
the epoch of race poisoning, dedicates itself to the cherishing of its best racial ele-
ments, must some day be master of the world (97). In Section I of this poem,
the speaker asks:
Who dares to mock,

Who dares to shove
The idols folk
Are schooled to love? (98)
The answer is surely the poet, Tolson, for Section II begins:
The rule-or-ruin class, in idols of the tribe,

Creates narcissine images of itself;
Defends its fetishes from the merest gibe,
Like iron captains of Guelf. (99)
Tolson warns against idols held by any race because “Race biases sow /
Hemlocks to maim and blind” (100). His final warning is for whites who
worship a “Nordic god” in their own image.
The Nordic god

Behold, his blue-gray eyes
Far-famed to conquer with a single prod
A people mazed in a hinterland of whys.
Hairy as the ape, of lip as thin,
With Mongol, one in blood, with African,
He makes a pseudo-science of his skin
And writes his autobiography Superman. (100)
Tolson’s observation that whites share “one blood,” the supposed biological
carrier of race, with both Asians and Africans is especially important given
the Nazi’s preoccupation with proving a biological basis for racial difference,
and therefore for racial superiority. The obsession with racially “pure blood”
was also active during this time in the United States, as Lorenzo Thomas
shows: “The South’s racist stupidity approached genuinely tragic dimen-
sions in 1942 when the Red Cross, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, refused to
accept blood from African American donors” (109).20
“Tapestries of Time”
Yet, when the speaker in the final poem of Rendezvous with America,
“Tapestries of Time,” pauses “to remember / The warp and woof of the
Whole,” the assessment is perhaps surprisingly optimistic (108). In Section II
of “Tapestries of Time,” the speaker explains:
The puny tyrants who bullyrag

The People, as they strut and brag
Till the exodus of breath,
Are scythed like weeds by Prophet Time
And raked by irony sublime
Into the mute democracy of death. (109)
And later, in Section VI of the same poem:
Death I have seen

In beggar’s sackcloth, in priest’s armozeen;
But I, nor Prophet Time, shall ever see
The death of Liberty. (119)
There is faith here that “Prophet Time” will ensure that justice wins out over
“puny tyrants.” The “mute democracy of death” will silence those tyrants,
while liberty lives eternally. The poem closes with a section describing the
power of story and of women (as mothers) to generate and regenerate jus-
tice. Prophet time brings justice cyclically through metaphorical and literal
generations. Though Tolson’s is primarily a masculine universe, in Section
VIII, the speaker calls out to the “mothers of men”: “O Hammers of Justice,
hark to the mothers of men: / Beat into plowshares Tokio, Rome, and Berlin!”
and we learn that “Already legends gear the brave and free / From Dunkirk,
Sevastopol, and the Coral Sea” (121). Although “mothers of women” or
indeed women as women (individual subjects and not mothers) are absent in
the poem, the poem demonstrates that it is through the passing down of oral
stories (legends) and the tending of mothers that justice will be achieved. In
a final note of faith and optimism, the poem closes with a last couplet: “The
Swastika Terror cannot conjure a plan / To stop the calendared March of
Global Man!” (121).
Caviar and Cabbage

Tolson’s newspaper column mirrors some of the optimism and the basic ethos
operating in Rendezvous With America: African Americans are a central part
of the nation, what Farnsworth calls “the strong assertion that Tolson makes
for black Americans being part of the national American identity from its
beginning” (108). The following excerpt is from a column written during
World War II entitled “Who Said: ‘This Is a White Man’s Country’?” The
piece is dated July 31, 1943. Much like Ralph Ellison and Jean Toomer,
Tolson often stressed his “Americaness.”
A Negro who thinks this country—the United States—is not his coun-
try is a damned fool. My native land! Where is it? It is where my mother
gave me birth. My hometown is where I was born. Jesus was a Nazarene,
because He was born in Nazareth. I am just as much an American as
President Roosevelt. And for the same reason. We both were born in the
United States. I love Africa. But Africa isn’t my country. (Caviar 99)
This viewpoint of America is strongly positive, especially given that African

Americans still served in a segregated army during this period, with most
black soldiers restricted to serving with Service and Supply units—pools
of unskilled labor. Stateside, the progress of organizations (such as the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),
the National Urban League, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters)
working on desegregation efforts was painfully incremental. Tolson, how-
ever, pointedly stakes a claim to America: he is as much “American” as the
president himself.
Tolson’s statement about Africa may have made him problematic for some
Black Arts Movement proponents later on, yet, Tolson was no assimilation-
ist. Consider this selection from a column of March 29, 1941: “Physically,
the white man is closer to the ape than the Negro. The ape and the white
man have these things in common: thin lips, straight hair, and hairy bod-
ies. The unpolluted Negro has thick lips, kinky hair, and little hair on his
body. Yet the Negro does his silliest to ape the white man who is the closet
relative of the ape” (Caviar 93). This same language is reflected in “Idols of
the Tribe,” “Hairy as the ape, of lip as thin, / With Mongol, one in blood,
with African” (100). Thus, though Tolson embraces America, he also rejects
white supremacy. He sees African American identity as historically and cul-
turally distinctive, but not marginal or separate from the nation.
The faith in an optimistic unfolding of future history after World War II—
“the calendared March of Global Man”—continues into Tolson’s work in
the 1950s with Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, in which Tolson more
explicitly embraces African roots. Though from our current historical van-
tage we must consider the conflicts inherent in the colonizing and mission-
ary ideologies that led to the founding of Liberia, in Libretto Tolson enacts a
celebration of modern diasporic identity as the emigrants reverse the trajec-
tory through the Middle Passage to return to West Africa. Learning what
Tolson’s early work has to teach opens up new ways for understanding this
poem, as well as Tolson’s final masterwork, Harlem Gallery.
CHAPTER 2
A Poem for the Futurafrique: Tolson’s

Libretto for the Republic of Liberia
Overview
In Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) Melvin B. Tolson writes into
the voids in official histories, highlighting the fact that the construction of
the archive—of memory—must constantly be tended. Writing in the mid-
twentieth century, Tolson seeks to preserve the histories of people of African
descent throughout the diaspora, writing into the void to un-silence black
voices. Tolson’s book-length Libretto is his first major Afro-Modernist epic,
following on his experiments with the serial poem and modernist techniques
in the early 1940s. Tolson’s experimental forms in Libretto produce a fluidity
that allow the poem to flow both backward and forward in historical time,
and in and through a multiplicity of identities.
Written in the late 1940s (approximately 1947–1950), Libretto for the
Republic of Liberia was published in book form in 1953. While Tolson’s Afro-
Modernist epics appear to some readers to be anomalous or “sudden,” in fact,
Tolson was consciously employing modernist techniques by at least 1940,
showing continuity from the forms of his earlier work, to the experimen-
talism evident throughout Libretto. By 1948, Tolson was publicly extolling
the importance of T. S. Eliot for black writers, and Tolson’s self-conscious
immersion in modernism is evident in the highly imbricated allusions
throughout Libretto. Tolson, however, combines modernist formal experi-
mentation with a populist-inflected subject position. Libretto is a song for
the people of Liberia, as well as a celebration of the accomplishments of peo-
ple of African descent around the globe. The flowering of global diasporic
consciousness evident in the poem is informed by an understanding that
the flow and collision of peoples and cultures results in identities that are in
flux, rather than fixed.
Writing on Libretto for the American Quarterly in 1966 (a time when few
critics were actually reading the Libretto) Dan McCall praises what I am
calling Tolson’s populist position, writing that “Tolson restores to the poet
his function of singing to the community” and calling the Libretto “ a kind
of master singing-book for the country [of Liberia], a storehouse of education
for the Futurafrique” (538). McCall, however, finds that Tolson’s conception
of the poet’s role in the community places him outside of modernism:
While the verse seems to be that of Pound in the Cantos or Eliot in The
Waste Land, Tolson does not really belong in the modern American tra-
dition of poetry. His main difference stems, first of all, from his refusal
to accept a primary assumption of those who have shaped the tradition:
poetry is an art of privacy. (538)
However, Tolson’s use of modernist techniques to address a populist audi-

ence—in this case the citizenry of Liberia as well as the United States—is
part of his Afro-Modernist innovation. Moreover, this unique subject posi-
tioning illustrates the connections among African American literature,
modernism, and proletarian literature that he defines in his master’s thesis,
The Harlem Group of Negro Writers. For Tolson, then, the populist modern-
ist is not an oxymoron; rather, it is an extension of the work he had been
doing since the 1930s.
Tolson’s eldest son, Melvin Tolson, Jr., explains Libretto’s singularity
this way: “Though obviously influenced by the modernism of the period,
[Libretto] is unlike the poetry of any of his contemporaries. It has lost
none of its exultant belief in the final triumph of the ‘little people’ and the
achievement of political and socio-economic justice” (398). Tolson, Jr., also
compares his father’s work to that of Amié Césaire: “Like Amié Césaire,
whose Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1947) masterfully utilizes the tech-
niques of surrealism, Tolson remains a poet in blackness” (398). Tolson’s
son makes the same distinction here as that of his father: while Tolson, Sr.,
employed modernist technique, his content is anchored from within African
American culture. The reference to Césaire also roots Tolson within mid-
century Afro-Modernism globally.
Libretto is an eight-section, serial epic structured on the Do-Re-Mi dia-
tonic musical scale. Completing the octave, the poem ascends to a final
futuristic, utopian vision displaying an optimism that distinguishes it
from Hughes’s work of the 1950s.1 Tolson’s vision of Liberia is constructed
through both imaginative flights and extensive research. An article in the
A Poem for the Futurafrique ● 39
Washington, DC, newspaper Evening Star (January 1954) announcing

the upcoming release of Libretto declares: “After five years of work, which
included the reading of 500 books, the poem, an epic, is ready” (Liberian
Laureate). The 16 pages of notes to the poem contain ample evidence of
that research, though no firsthand observations of the country itself. In
fact, Tolson may have never visited the country of Liberia. The writer of
the Evening Star article conjectures: “surely he is the first poet laureate of
a country he has never seen” (“Liberian Laureate”). Tolson’s papers at the
Library of Congress contain invitations to attend events in Liberia January
1–9, 1956, celebrating the inauguration of Liberian president-elect William
V. S. Tubman, but there is no evidence that Tolson actually went (Programme
of Ceremonies).2 This becomes important as we consider the ways in Tolson
constructed “Liberia” out of texts.
Headlines in the magazine Liberia Today from this time, published by
the Liberian Embassy in Washington, DC, and found in Tolson’s archive
at the Library of Congress, tout “Liberian Progress in Agriculture” and
“Democracy At Work.” Following on Liberia’s contributions to the Allies’
effort in World War II, the journal also highlights progress in rubber pro-
duction, including photos from the Firestone plant in Monrovia. The mood
surrounding the 1956 inauguration of President William V. S. Tubman
is likewise celebratory. The January 1956 issue of Liberia Today opens
with a story about “12 Years of Progress” brought by Tubman’s leader-
ship: “The most outstanding feature about Liberia today is the effective-
ness of the Development Program initiated and carried out by the Tubman
Administration” (2). This celebration of Liberia’s potential is reflected in
Tolson’s Libretto through the utopian vision of the final section of the poem,
“Do,” and is represented by a series of futuristic vehicles: “The Futurafrique,
the chef d’oeuvre of Liberian / Motors” (575–576); “The United Nations
Limited,” a train (635); “The Bula Matadi,” an ocean liner “diesel-engined,
four-decked, swan-sleek” that “glides like an ice- / ballet skater out of the
Bight of / Benin” (663–666); and finally an airplane “Le Premier des Noirs,
of Pan-African Airways” (680).3 The Pan-African focus is highlighted as the
poem closes with the voices of the “Parliament of African Peoples.”
The settlers of Liberia, freed slaves who reversed the trajectory through the
Middle Passage from the Americas to return to West Africa, are represented
in Tolson’s Libretto by the glittering modern vehicle: “The Futurafrique,
the chef d’oeuvre of Liberian / Motors [that] slips through the traffic / swirl
of axial Parsifal-Feirefiz” (575–577). The “Futurafrique” speeds through
a traffic swirl in which half-brothers Parsifal and Feirefiz are “axial.” In
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century German Arthurian poem
“Parzival,” Parsifal is Christian; Feirefiz is pagan. Feirefiz’s mother is queen
of an African kingdom; Parsifal’s mother is queen of a European kingdom.

Moreover, Feirefiz’s skin is mottled, black-and-white, compared to a mag-
pie, or a parchment with writing on it. Yet such differences, or binaries,
do not oppose one another in Tolson’s metaphor of the axial traffic circle.
Rather, they all connect to a central point, like spokes on a wheel equal, but
interdependent.
Cars for some white modernists represent an American culture out of con-
trol: in Spring and All XVIII (“To Elsie”) (1923) William Carlos Williams
writes: “The pure products of America / go crazy—“ and there is “No one / to
witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car” (Collected 217, 219). In contrast,
Tolson’s pyrotechnic vehicle with an optimistic “accent on youth and speed /
and beauty” “challenges the snow-lily / diadem of the Europa” (581–582,
614–615). Tolson arrives at different conclusions than Williams as to the
uses and effects of modernity’s products, and his interest in the “Negro kins-
men” for whom “America is my mother, / Liberia is my wife, / And Africa
my brother” lies at the heart of his representation of modern black identity
(251–254). This section is composed of a series of long, prose-like lines, the
final portion of which form a visual tower with left flush lines balanced on
top of shorter, centered lines that are both left and right justified, represent-
ing balance. The effect is architectural, a series of modern skyscrapers.
The “Bula Matadi” in Tolson’s poem is a sleek ocean-liner, making it a
somewhat complicated image, but the central detail is that the ship is leaving
the area of West Africa, also known as the Slave Coast, where the European
slave trade was concentrated. At the behest of King Leopold of Belgium,
Henry Morton Stanley began purchasing land in the Congo section of Africa
in the 1870s. “In 1879, with Leopold’s support, Stanley returned to Africa
where he worked to open the lower Congo to commerce by the construction
of roads. He used brutal means that included the widespread use of forced
labour . . . Stanley’s efforts paved the way for the creation of the Congo Free
State, privately owned by Leopold” (“Henry Stanley”).4 Due to his brutality,
Stanley became known as the Bula Matari (or Bula Matadi) to the Africans
in the Congo, a name that translates as “Breaker of Rocks.” Indicating the
gap of understanding, Stanley’s gravestone is inscribed “Henry Morton
Stanley, Bula Matari,” because he believed the name to be a term of endear-
ment (Hochschild). The name may also have been used more generally to
describe the colonial government of the Congo Free State. This section of
the poem thus celebrates sending the colonial Europeans back to Europe.
The celebratory tone begins in “Do,” Section I, which is formed of seven
centered stanzas, each opening with a negation. This section forms a kind of
backward call and response, telling first what Liberia is not, and then what
it is, while disposing of stereotypes applied to Africa, such as the “Dark
Continent,” a “Question Mark,” and a “waste land” (signifying on Eliot).5

The poem opens as follows:
Liberia?
No micro-footnote in a bunioned book
Homed by a pedant
With a gelded look. (1–4)
Right away the reader is confronted with unusual images: “bunioned book,”
“gelded look,” and verbal nouns such as “homed.” In colloquial language, the
gloss of this passage might go something like this: Liberia is not a mere foot-
note to history in an old book obsessed over by a castrated (or barren looking)
teacher overly interested in parading his (or her) academic learning.6 Instead,
we are told of Liberia:
You are
The ladder of survival dawn men saw
In the quicksilver sparrow that slips
The eagle’s claw! (5–8)
Liberia is the “ladder of survival,” a way up for those on the bottom, rep-
resented by a tiny, but clever sparrow that eludes an eagle’s grasp. “Eagle’s
claw” might also represent American imperialism. McCall writes: “Liberia is
a symbol of the slave slipping the claws of the American eagle. In his open-
ing image Tolson defines Liberia in terms of flight; the image continues
throughout the poem” (540).
The second stanza’s negation to the question of “Liberia?” uses more
straightforward language, but, at the same time, perhaps more unusual
images: “No side-show barker’s bio-accident, / No corpse of a soul’s errand /
To the Dark Continent” (10–12). Liberia is not a sideshow to history, nor is it
simply the detritus of European exploration of the “Dark Continent.” Instead
Liberia is a promised land that lights the way for Africa’s future: “The light-
ning rod of Europe, Canaan’s key, / The rope across the abyss, / Mehr licht for
the Africa-To-Be!” (14–16). Tolson draws attention to the intentionality of
Liberia’s founders, for Liberia is “No haply black man’s X / Fixed to a Magna
Charta without a magic-square” (18–19). No black man was forced by cir-
cumstance to sign on to a document that ultimately does not add up. Instead,
Tolson celebrates Liberia among the great civilizations of Africa: “The oasis
of Tahoua, the salt bar of Harra” (23).
Stanza six of “Do” begins: “Liberia? / No Cobra Pirate of the Question
Mark” (41–42) We are then led to a note that tell us: “I now know that
the Question Mark is rough water between Scylla and Charybdis,” a rec-
ognition of the conflicts arising from European colonization of Africa. The
Scylla and Charybdis are a favorite kind of Tolson allusion, representing the
danger of encountering one evil while seeking to avoid its opposite. A literal
dissection of binary oppositions is evident in “Ti” with the image of Siamese
twins Chang and Eng.
O East, O West,
on tenotomy bent,
Chang’s tissue is
Eng’s ligament!
Selah!7 (457–461)
Though the surgeon seeks to dissect the tendons, Siamese twins Chang and
Eng’s tissue and ligaments are part of the same whole, just as East cannot be
separated from West, black cannot be separated from white, and Africa and
America are brought together in African American identity, an experience
constructed from the materials of diaspora and made anew in this poem.
In fact, in the notes to “E. & O. E.”8 (1951), the poem for which Tolson
won the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, he specifically describes African
American identity as a “unity of opposites” (“Harlem Gallery” 147). Tolson
writes in his notes to “E. & O. E.”: “In an attempt to establish his I-ness as
a Negro—a concept in itself a unity of opposites—the man combines the
Cartesian definition with a variant of the Law of Synthetic Identity. This is
the key to his allusions in the poem” (147).
Throughout the poem, Tolson deconstructs and reenvisions such binary
oppositions displaying a break from what Mark A. Sanders calls a “Victorian
epistemology” that is “ill-equipped for the twentieth century,” a hallmark
of which is dichotomous reasoning (130). Sanders asserts that such a break
is the point of departure for what he terms “heterodox modernism,” such
as “native modernism and Afro-modernism” (130). Keith D. Leonard
adds: “Tolson validates his own epic imagination as a component of these
non-binary, Pan-African values of heroism and freedom” (219). Although
Tolson’s work falls historically outside of Sanders’s focus on the New Negro
Renaissance, Tolson’s Afro-Modernism clearly typifies the method that
Sanders describes.
“Re,” Section II, is framed by a series of sayings “The Good Gray Bard
in Timbuktu chanted” (57). Here, Tolson transports Whitman to Africa.
Drawing evidence from the Tolson papers housed at the Library of Congress,
Aldon Nielsen shows that, “What Tolson came to attempt was a decolonizing
of American letters, a task which he saw as linking him to Whitman” (244).
“I had deserted the great Romantics and Victorians,” Tolson states, “Walt
Whitman’s exuberance was in the marrow of my bones” (“Interview” 195).
Tolson’s reenvisioning of Whitman epitomizes his ideology of the African
American poet’s position, one that is formed from all the available materi-
als of the poet’s heritages. Libretto, therefore, is a representation of modern
diasporic identity, as well as an ode to the African nation of Liberia.
Tolson utilizes “Re” to tell of the greatness of African kingdoms, includ-
ing Songai. In addition, this canto highlights successful African educational
systems of the past, such as the University of Sankoré and the “Footloose pro-
fessors,” that is, “the nomadic pedagogues gathered at Timbuktu” (line 81,
note 81). Nielsen points out: “On draft pages of the Libretto [Tolson] notes,
‘Culture of 14th Century Africa equal to Europe’s’ (cont. 9), and in the final
version of the poem he transforms his historical researches into lyric geneal-
ogy” (249). The Good Gray Bard in Timbuktu also warns against the threat
of European aggression: “Europe is an empty python in hiding grass!” (86).
The hungry python is ready to devour regions of Africa and the Caribbean;
it also represents a Europe devoid of the very civilizing influences colonial
powers professed to impart.
“Mi,” one of the shorter sections, tells the story of the founding of
Liberia, “Black Pilgrim Fathers to Cape Mesurado” (116) and the American
Colonization Society in six quatrains. “Fa” celebrates an “interlude of peace ”
(139) from predators including a boa constrictor (“the Bola boa lies / gorged
to the hinges of his jaws”) (126–127), a vulture or “beaked and pouched
assassin” (130) and a “tawny typhoon striped with black / torpors in grasses
tan” (135–136).
Encoding and recording history, Section V, “Sol,” relates the horror of
the Middle Passage and slavery that the emigrants sailing to Liberia leave
behind: “The brig Elizabeth flaunts her stern / At auction blocks with the
eyes of Cain / And down-the-river sjamboks” and tells the story of Liberian
colonist Elijah Johnson who was on board that ship (146–148). “Sol” rises
elegantly into a series of African proverbs formed into tercets such as “ ‘Africa
is a rubber ball; / the harder you dash it to the ground, / the higher it will
rise” (173–175). At times, multiple proverbs are wedded together to sculpt
the tercet form:
“It is the grass that suffers when

two elephants fight. The white man solves
between white sheets his black
“problem. Where would the rich cream be
without skim milk? The eye can cross
the river in a flood. (206–211)
“La,” Section VI, relates the story of “Prophet Jehudi Ashmun” (245),
“A white man spined with dreams” (240) who contributed to the founding
of Liberia and Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. “Ti,” an extended section
employing centered lines, enacts a series of blessings:
O Calendar of the Century,

red-letter the Republic’s birth!
O Hallelujah,
Oh, let no Miserere
venom the spinal cord of Afric earth!
Selah! (255–260)
Endnotes
The 1953 Twyane edition ends with 16 pages of endnotes. The endnotes
function as their own canto, a kind of Section IX that the reader can read
straight through to interesting effect, or choose to flip back and forth
to while reading the poem proper, enlisting the reader in the making of
meaning. There are no indications within the poem as to what lines lead to
endnotes—no endnote numbers are printed in the poem’s text—lessening
the decoding and authorizing function of Tolson’s notes. The reader cannot
presume that he or she will be led to the “correct” answer. Footnotes are at
times assumed to perform the function of providing aid to the reader by list-
ing additional information that will assist in interpreting a text. However,
particularly in the case of Tolson’s modernist endnote, the apparatus may be
working against received notions of clarity and explanation. The apparatus
purposely questions the authority through which approval or sanction is
granted.
In addition, the endnotes enact the poem’s intertextual project, lead-
ing the reader not to explanations, but to other texts—particularly pri-
mary texts—as Jon Woodson has pointed out.9 For example, the endnote
to line 11 “No corpse of a soul’s errand” reads simply “Cf. Raleigh, The
Soul’s Errand.” The endnote to line 15 “The rope across the abyss” states
“V. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra.” The notes do not tell us why these
texts are important or what relationship the texts have to the poem or the
individual lines to which they are linked, but instead, in effect, direct the
reader to the library with the name of an author and a title. Thus Libretto
is a web that reaches out ever fuller and wider if the reader takes on the
challenge of study and investigation that the poem metes out. Libretto leads
readers back to the archive.
Nielsen sees the notes as serving a necessary documentary function.
Tolson was, in the Libretto, memorializing the liberatory impetus of Black

educational institutions. In addition to placing in his poem allusions to
the legendary centers of African learning such as Timbuktoo, which
rival and precede many Anglo-American centers for the dissemination of
White intellectual hegemony, Tolson has created in the Libretto a poem
whose very being is a commemorative to Tolson’s African-American alma
mater [Lincoln University], as well as to African learning and philosophy
generally. (“Deterritorialization” 252)
Nielsen concludes that “the Libretto’s notes were required at least in part
to alert readers to the documentary evidence of this history” (253). Thus,
Tolson fulfills the historical functions of the epic form by documenting a
history of the African diaspora.
According to Melvin Tolson, Jr., his father “was fully aware of the dif-
ficulties this text [the Libretto] presented and supplied pages of notes at the
end of the book. In conversations with me he stated that he knew he was
‘dicing with Fate’ in trying to force entrance into the ‘canon,’ but he was
certain that, like Stendhal, he would be vindicated in time” (398). However,
it is worth noting that Libretto does at turns resist even the most willing
reader, with its paradoxes and epigrams made all the more puzzling at times
by these endnotes to the poem.
Tolson scholars (including myself) motivated in part by a desire to lead
readers back to Tolson, have sometimes engaged in rhetorical maneuver-
ing that will normalize his work, i.e. render him legible. As Tolson’s son
indicates, Tolson, Sr., consciously desired during the 1940s and after that
his work become recognized as part of a modernist canon; however, much
of Tolson’s critical neglect has resulted from the fact that he is still often
unrecognizable, lacking lineage or coterie, a context that will lend a key
for interpretation. While Gertrude Stein’s distinctive word play is labeled
as innovation, and Ezra Pound’s dense allusiveness keeps him under the
avant-garde heading despite his contradictions, Tolson’s unusual forms,
along with a timeline out of sync with many literary histories, have often
rendered him invisible. Unlike those poets who used to be known as the
“high modernists” (Stein and Pound among them), Tolson is rarely taught in
the college classroom, and the number of literary scholars who have actually
read the Libretto remains small. The challenge remains to make a case for
Tolson’s importance while also recognizing his singularity and innovation
(what Bérubé call his “bewildering, dense” work) and to embrace his work
without having to normalize it.
In contrast, both Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer have been canon-
ized through the process of normalization. Hughes is represented in anthol-
ogy after anthology by short lyrics from his early work, rather than by the
Afro-Modernist ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ , while Cane ’s
multigenre innovation is often erased by plucking individual lyric poems
from Toomer’s volume and placing them out of context in many of the same
anthologies. Because Tolson was writing Afro-Modernist epics beginning in
the 1940s, his work is much more problematic for the anthologist because
there are fewer discrete lyric poems to reprint.
In contrast to the notes that simply list a title, others contain extended
anecdotes or quotations that are linked to a single word in the poem. There
appear to be two kinds of notes, then, one that opens out onto an entire text
or texts and another that closes down into a singular quotation. Both types,
however, are “open,” in that each leads out into an ever more intricate web
of knowledge. The poem becomes, then, less about singular narrative or the
“necessary communication” and more a collaborative learning event, in part
because of the astonishingly diverse array of allusions drawn from multiple
intellectual traditions.10 Libretto is more of a task than a text. It is an ongo-
ing conversation, ready to be reentered whenever the reader chooses to pick
up the text again, like a telephone line that stays perpetually open. The
reader who wants to keep up his or her end of the exchange must have an
array of foreign language dictionaries; reference books; and literary, philo-
sophical, and historical texts at the ready on the telephone table. The task
is one that may continue days, months, or years for this is not a text to be
mastered. Tolson consciously resists mastery. He is the professor who has
laid out a syllabus for his students who are eager to learn, but who will never
master the master himself, Tolson.
Poet Laureate
Tolson’s unusual journey into becoming Poet Laureate of Liberia, and writ-
ing the Libretto for that country’s centennial, reflects the conflicts and com-
plexities contained within diasporic identities. The odyssey began when he
was bestowed the honor of “Poet Laureate of the Liberian Centennial and
Peace Exposition” at a ceremony at the Liberian Embassy in Washington,
DC, in July 1947 (Farnsworth 108). The views of the members of the
Liberian Centennial Commission who requested Tolson’s poem reflect the
optimism embodied in the Libretto itself. As John Cullen Gruesser asserts,
if immigrants to Liberia could “create a nation that would not only stand
for over a century as the sole black African republic but also aid the Allies in
defeating Fascism, then this same idea can enable humankind to transcend
its current economic, national, racial, and political divisions to usher in a

new era of cooperation, equality, and prosperity” (122–123). The Liberian
Centennial was also of great interest to many African Americans. The
Centennial Commission, based in Washington, DC, distributed a reprint
of an editorial from the Oklahoma newspaper The Black Dispatch dated
December 28, 1946, that states: “All of the 13 million Negroes in the United
States should be intensely interested in the Liberian Centennial which will
be celebrated by the Republic of Liberia July 26, 1947. Founded by ex-slaves
100 years ago, Liberia is today the only republic in Africa in which Negroes
control their own government” (“Liberian Centennial”). Liberia thus served
as a model for independent black rule to a Jim Crow America.
The Evening Star in Washington, DC, proclaims that Tolson achieved
his laureate status “by virtue of having won in 1947 the National Poetry
Prize of the American Negro Exposition” (“Liberian Laureate”). This detail
is repeated in a Washington Post article taped to the same piece of paper
in Tolson’s archive in the Library of Congress and hand-dated January 17,
1954. However the date in the articles—1947—is incorrect. The intended
reference may be to Tolson’s first prize award for his poem “Dark Symphony”
that he won at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago, but that event
took place in 1940, not 1947.11
Tolson biographer Robert F. Farnsworth finds that the critical and popu-
lar success of Tolson’s previous collection Rendezvous with America (1944),
of which the award-winning poem “Dark Symphony” is a part, played a
major role in Tolson being named Poet Laureate of Liberia. Farnsworth
remarks upon two aspects of the Rendezvous collection: “the strong assertion
that Tolson makes for black Americans being part of the national American
identity from its beginning” and Tolson’s view of America “playing a part in
the worldwide movement toward democratic self-realization,” an important
issue in colonial Africa following World War II (108).
Farnsworth also states that Tolson’s appointment to the Poet Laureate
position was enabled by Tolson’s connections at historically black Lincoln
University, the school established for African American men in Pennsylvania
from which both Tolson and Hughes graduated. (Kwame Nkrumah, prime
minister and later president of Ghana, which became in 1957 the first coun-
try in Africa to achieve independence from colonial rule, also graduated
from Tolson and Hughes’s alma mater.) Horace Mann Bond, also a Lincoln
alumnus and member of the Lincoln debate team along with Tolson, was a
member of the Liberian Centennial Commission. Bond was named presi-
dent of Lincoln in 1945. Farnsworth conjectures: “Bond’s appointment as
president of Lincoln University unquestionably enhanced his position as a
member of the Liberian Centennial Commission. It seems reasonable to
assume that he thus played a key role in the appointment of Tolson” to the
position of Poet Laureate of Liberia (108).12
Bond’s position with the Liberian Centennial Commission was also
strengthened by Lincoln’s historical connection to Liberia: Lincoln University
was originally named Ashmun Institute after Jehudi Ashmun, who played
a role in the creation of the modern nation of Liberia. The American
Colonization Society (ACS), which sponsored the Liberian venture, also
established Ashmun Institute, renamed Lincoln University in 1866 after
President Abraham Lincoln (Farnsworth 108).13 The “ACS was formed in
1817 to send free African-Americans to Africa as an alternative to emancipa-
tion in the United States. In 1822, the society established on the west coast
of Africa a colony that in 1847 became the independent nation of Liberia. By
1867, the society had sent more than 13,000 emigrants” (“Colonization”).
Illustrating the Lincoln University-Liberia connection, Tolson writes in end-
note 245 to Libretto that “the memory of the white pilgrim [Jehudi Ashmun]
survives in old Ashmun Hall and in the Greek and Latin inscriptions cut in
the stones sacred to Lincoln men.”
The programs of the ACS were controversial among abolitionists, and the
missionary aspects of the ACS mirror those of Lincoln University, examples
of which are praised in a 1928 issue of the Lincoln University Herald.
When the dedicatory sermon was preached at the founding of Lincoln

University (then Ashmun Institute), Rev. C. Van Rensselaer, D.D., the
preacher, took as his theme, ‘God will be glorified in Africa.’ The mis-
sionary purpose in the founding of the institution has been carried out
not only by its first graduate, but by some thirty others who have gone as
missionaries to South Africa, Liberia, Nigeria, and during the war to the
native troops in East Africa. (“Foreign Missionaries” 5)
Although “back to Africa” movements in divergent forms, from the ACS

to Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association, appeared to
contain liberating potential, one also recognizes the oppressive influence of
the goal of “Christianizing and civilizing” Africans, as missionaries from
Lincoln University sought to do, a justification also used for the continua-
tion of slavery in North America and for European colonization of Africa
and the Caribbean.
Nearly 80 years before this issue of the Lincoln University Herald was
published, Frederick Douglass clearly recognized the ways in which the
colonization project could be used to extend the reach of slavery throughout
the United States. In a column in The North Star dated January 26, 1849, he
calls the Liberian venture the “wrinkled old ‘red herring’ of colonization,”
and “a ruse to divert the attention of the people from the foul abomina-
tion which is sought to be forced upon the free soil of California and New
Mexico, and which is now struggling for existence in Kentucky, Virginia
and the District of Columbia” (“Colonization”).14
William Lloyd Garrison, while initially a supporter of the ACS’s mandates,
finally came out in strong opposition to them, recognizing, as William E.
Cain shows, that “some members [of the ACS] did promote emancipation
and the return of slaves to their own continent. But the overriding desire in
the society was to siphon off free blacks who jeopardized Southern slavery
and white supremacy” (9). In a strongly worded letter dated July 30, 1831,
Garrison explains his moral objections to colonization:
The moving and controlling incentives of the friends of American

Colonization may be summed up in a single sentence: they have an antip-
athy against the blacks. They do not wish to admit them to an equality.
They can tolerate them only as servants and slaves, but never as brethren
and friends. They can love and benefit them four thousand miles off, but
not at home. (qtd. in Cain 10)
In addition, Garrison recognized the potential for calamity in American

colonization of the west coast of Africa. In a pamphlet entitled Exposure of
the American Colonization Society (1852), Garrison presciently notes: “I avow
it—the natural tendency of the colony of Liberia excites the most melan-
choly apprehensions in my mind. Its birth was conceived in blood, and its
footsteps will be marked with blood down to old age—blood of the poor
natives—unless a special interposition of Divine Providence prevent such a
calamity.” Indeed, the importation of European-American culture by blacks
from America who colonized Liberia resulted in strange confluences:
In many respects, emigrants to Liberia re-created an American society

there. The colonists spoke English and retained American manners,
dress, and housing styles. Affluent citizens constructed two-story houses
composed of a stone basement and a wood-framed body with a portico
on both the front and rear, a style copied from buildings in the south-
ern American states from which most of the emigrants came. Liberia’s
president lived in a handsome stone mansion that resembled a southern
plantation house. (“Liberia”)
Surely there is something bizarre about a black American immigrant build-

ing a “southern plantation house” in which to reside while ruling over indig-
enous Africans. The colonizer’s influences thus produced tensions between
the immigrants and indigenous Africans, putting in motion the strife we see
in Liberia today.15 Although descendants of freed slaves from the Americas
constitute only about 5 percent of Liberia’s current population, members of
this group have continued to rule the country (“Overview”).
As Garrison predicted, Liberia’s history does continue to be marked in
blood, blood of indigenous Africans in particular. In 2007, warlord-turned-
president of Liberia, Charles G. Taylor, was brought before a United Nations-
backed tribunal at The Hague on charges of war crimes.16 “A descendant of
the freed slaves who returned from North America to found Liberia in the
19th century, Mr. Taylor became notorious during his years in power for
the treatment of the children who were pressed into the armies he raised”
(“Charles G. Taylor”).17 In April 2012, Taylor was sentenced to 50 years in
prison for crimes against humanity and war crimes. “Mr. Taylor was the
first former head of state convicted by an international tribunal since the
Nuremberg trials in Germany after World War II” (Simons and Goodman).
Despite such historical consequences of the colonization project that we
must consider from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the text
Tolson produces for the Liberian Centennial Commission enacts a unique
celebration of modern diasporic identity as imagined by him in the late
1940s and early 1950s, when there was optimistic news coming from Liberia
heralding the country’s “progress” and celebrating Liberia’s support of the
Allies in World War II, on which Tolson focuses. Moreover, while it is dif-
ficult to imagine this Libretto actually being sung, the way in which it serves
as an archive of the literature, history, and philosophy of people of African
decent, marks a celebratory mid-century modernist moment in which
African Americans’ achievement of modern citizenship can be imagined.
Prefaces and Reviews

Bérubé’s Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers (1992) provides an extended analy-
sis of the lasting effects of the prefaces to Tolson’s two final volumes. For the
purposes of this discussion, it is important to note that Allen Tate’s preface
to the Libretto for the Republic of Liberia states that Tolson “assimilated com-
pletely the full poetic language of his time, and by implication, the language
of the Anglo-American tradition” while Karl Shapiro countered with the
assertion in the introduction to Harlem Gallery Book I: The Curator that
“Tolson writes and thinks in Negro” (13). It is clear that Tate and Shapiro
both used Tolson’s texts as a field upon which to wage their own personal
battles with one another. Bob Perelman notes: “Both Shapiro and Tate had
been on the committee that gave Pound the Bollingen Prize for The Pisan
Cantos; they were bitterly opposed to one another.” The endurance of their
remarks is evident in Tolson’s obituary in the New York Amsterdam News. It

opens with Shapiro’s quote:
Poet Karl Shapiro once said of Dr. Melvin B. Tolson, past laureate of
Liberia, that he “writes and thinks in Negro, which is to say, a possible
American language.” Explaining what clearly was intended to be a great
comment to Dr. Tolson, Shapiro added: “He is therefore performing the
primary poetic rite for our literature, complicating it, giving it the gift of
tongues.” (“Dr.” 6)
The obituary goes on to note that Tolson “was considered one of America’s
great poets, although he was unknown to the public” (6).
Until recently, the prefaces did receive more critical attention than the
poems themselves. As Nielsen explains in 1992: “The terms of the critical
argument over [Tolson’s] corpus seem to have been set by the authors of the
prefaces to his two last books” (“Deterritorialization” 241). Indeed, through-
out the history of Tolson scholarship, it is obvious that some critics drew
their knowledge more from the books’ prefaces than from the poems. The
extent to which the Tate and Shapiro prefaces came to stand in for Tolson’s
writing, as well as the extent to which Tolson’s works themselves are not
read, is especially clear when we consider the publishing history of Libretto
for the Republic of Liberia.
Tate’s preface to Libretto, which appeared in the July 1950 issue of Poetry,
was intended to announce and legitimize the forthcoming Tolson work, with
the full text of Libretto to follow on the heels of Tate’s preview. Interestingly,
Tate’s preface is the lone work in the “Opinion” section of the magazine,
separate from the “Reviews” section. The “Ti” section of “Libretto” is also
included in the magazine, though it is labeled only as “From LIBRETTO
FOR THE REPUBLIC OF LIBERIA” (no section title given). However,
the plan to publish the book immediately following the appearance of the
Poetry issue was dashed when Ervin Tax of Decker Press, who was to pub-
lish Libretto, was killed in an accident in 1950 and the press subsequently
went under. Following Tax’s death, Tolson had some difficulty in finding
another publisher; Twayne Publishers finally brought out the work in 1953.
Thus Tate’s preface appeared in print three years before the complete Tolson
poem, exacerbating the strange circumstances in which the preface nearly
came to stand in for the poem. Bérubé explains: “Tate’s preface becomes
neither the poem’s pre-text nor part of its critical context but, more oddly,
the ‘real text’ of the poem itself—so much so that it was reprinted in Jet as
well as in Poetry ” (146–147). Since Phillis Wheatley’s book of poems, promi-
nent whites have played the role of authorizing black textual production in
the form of a preface. Unfortunately that act is replayed with Tate’s preface
to the Libretto, as well as Shapiro’s writing on Harlem Gallery. Although
Tolson was in fact willing to be “prefaced”—he invited Tate to write for
Libretto18 —the content of Tate’s and Shapiro’s writings did not ultimately
efface Tolson’s own political commitments.
Despite the persistent presence of Tate and Shapiro’s prefaces in the criti-
cal discussions since the mid 1960s, Bérubé argues that the effect of the
Libretto’s preface was not the same in the early 1950s when the preface and
poem first appeared. Moreover, he states that “when we historicize Tate’s
preface, we find that although it raised a good number of critical hackles in
1965 and has heavily contributed to Tolson’s neglect or rejection by African-
American critics ever since, it was not immediately the barrier to Libretto’s
reception which it later became” (172). Tate writes:
It seems to me only common sense to assume that the main thing is the
poetry, if one is a poet, whatever one’s color may be. I think that Mr. Tolson
has assumed this; and the assumption, I gather, has made him not less
but more intensely Negro in his apprehension of the world than any of his
contemporaries, or any that I have read. But by becoming more intensely
Negro he seems to me to dismiss the entire problem, so far as poetry is con-
cerned, by putting it in its properly subordinate place. (Tate n.p.)19
From our current vantage point, it is impossible not to ask what it might
mean to become “more intensely Negro” or to note how one’s “Negro-ness”
is itself cited as a “problem” by Tate. In addition, how does one become
“more intensely Negro” at the same time as dismissing it (“the problem”) by
making race subordinate? It seems that Tate has caught himself in an equa-
tion in which he wants to praise Tolson as being “more than” Negro while
not appearing overtly to make Negroes “less than.” In addition, Tate wants
to subordinate race to some mythical poetic universal that “is about the
world of all men,” but which, unfortunately for Tate, does not exist.
However, when we look into the preface, it is evident that Tate strikes a
lukewarm note at points:
The poem is in eight sections mounting to a climax which is rhetorically

effective but not, I think, quite successful as poetry. The last section
begins in a six-line stanza which is controlled with considerable mastery,
but the movement breaks down into Whitmanesque prose-paragraphs
into which Mr. Tolson evidently felt that he could toss all the loose ends
of history, objurgation, and prophecy which the set theme seemed to
require of him as official poet. (n.p.)
The effect of this as a preface is quite strange in the context of the 1953
Twayne book edition. While Tate’s preface originally appeared as an “opin-
ion piece” in Poetry magazine, and makes more sense in that context, as a
preface to the published book, Tate’s piece neither really introduces, nor
in actuality, fully endorses the poem. In addition, Tate appears to know
little about Tolson: there is a good deal of “wondering,” and “guessing,” and
“curiosity” in the piece. The piece becomes more about Tate, and less about
the actual poem.
Nonetheless, Bérubé asserts that when the preface was first published,
black poets and critics either accepted its congratulatory flavor, or ignored
Tate altogether. Arguing that at the poem’s release “African-American crit-
ics take issue instead with the Libretto itself” (172), Bérubé says that the
objections often took the form of a “replay of the very early reaction to The
Waste Land, a debate over whether a ‘poem’ can be composed of a battery of
ill-embedded allusions and untranslated snippets of European (or African)
languages” (172–173). Bérubé finds that for Tolson’s African American crit-
ics the issue was fundamentally whether he “abandoned his responsibility to
communicate to any but the most elite audiences” (173) and this is partly the
case. Well-known African American literary critic and historian J. Saunders
Redding exemplifies this position, strongly criticizing the form of the poem,
stating his
fundamental objection to poetry which the author must himself interpret

for his readers in an addendum of notes. At best, such notes indicate one
of two things, and at worst, both things: that the poet found his talents
unequal to the full requirements of the particular necessary communi-
cation; or that he was deliberately uncommunicative and obscure—in
which case his notes are a patronizing gesture to minds the poet assumes
to be less recondite or subtle or appreciative than his own. (2)
Here we find evidence of the debate that surrounds Tolson and other African
American poets to this day: What, for black poets, is “the particular neces-
sary communication?” And what form must it take? “Footnotes to historical
references perhaps one can forgive,” writes Redding, “But why a prose line
of explanation for every two or three lines of poetry? Is poetry supposed to
communicate, or isn’t it?” (2). To whom must the black poet communicate,
and how?
However, in contradistinction to Bérubé’s argument, Redding takes Tate
on twice in this review of Libretto in the Baltimore Afro-American newspa-
per, first by calling Tate’s claim that the “poet has assimilated completely
the full poetic language of his time and, by implication, the language of
the Anglo-American poetic tradition” “nonsense on its face” (2). “What,”

inquires Redding, “is ‘the full poetic language of his time’ or of any time?”
(2). Second, Redding rejects Tate’s placement of Libretto in a lineage of
poems by white modernists arguing that “commonly, the scintillating lines
are the simplest lines, and the simplest lines are those that comprise that sec-
tion titled ‘Ti,’ the ‘Selah’ passages, which Mr. Tate notwithstanding, find
their inspiration in Du Bois rather than in Hart Crane” (2).
Redding does have praise for Libretto. Disposing of the irritating “thorns”
posed by Tate, Redding writes: “There is balm in Libretto for the Republic of
Liberia to soothe the pricks. It is in the poem’s virtuosity: in its often bril-
liant ‘poetics’: and in those frequent lines that scintillate like jewels in the
sun” (2). He also states that in the “Ti” section “Mr. Tolson is writing with
that intensity and concentration and clarity that mark genuine poetry” (2).
Yet he goes on to state that “the other five parts, some of which are now
and again graphic, melodious and ringing, make music but even after a
close attention to the notes, little sense. This is the irony of the over-intel-
lectualized” (2). He concludes: “Libretto for the Republic of Liberia is a much
better poem than Liberia had any right to expect, but I cannot imagine the
Liberians either liking it or understanding it” (2).
Tolson adamantly disagreed with Redding’s assessment; he voiced his
objections in a letter addressed to the president of the Afro-American, Carl
Murphy, who had sent Tolson a copy of the review. Though Tolson tries to
avoid personalizing the argument, he appears, at times, defensive.
I have faced mobs for the rights of my people in the Deep South; so I do
not have to protest my love. As to my standing among the major poets
of England and America, one can easily discover my status. I would not
hit one key on this typewriter to try to prove myself a poet. The critics
of the New York Times, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Accent, etc., will have to
determine that; and there’s nothing—absolutely nothing—that M. B.
Tolson can do about that. The “Libretto” is in the lap of the Gods—as
we used to say at Lincoln. (Farnsworth 167)
It appears that Tolson, frustrated at being labeled elitist and patronizing, as

well as being told that his talents are “unequal” to the task, does indeed have
to protest his love for his people and prove himself as a poet.
He then proceeds to school Redding in modern poetry.
Now, Mr. Redding did not review the book: he reviewed his prejudices
against modern poetry. Let us look at some of them. He is against “an
addendum of notes.” This bias started in 1800, when William Wordsworth
published the Preface to “Lyrical Ballads.” For two hundred years poets
have given prefaces or notes to readers. T. S. Eliot, the only American poet
to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Master of the super-intellectuals,
added notes to his epic, “The Waste Land.” . . . Furthermore, those distin-
guished poets have had their works explained by the best critics in all the
little magazines and countless books of criticism. (Farnsworth 167)
Obviously Tolson was concerned about assuring his own place in modernist
literary history and there were some signals that other critics might help to
assure him that place. None other than Alain Locke responded positively
to Libretto in his “Inventory at Mid-Century: A Review of Literature of the
Negro for 1950” for Phylon20 calling the poem “challenging and signifi-
cant” (10). Phylon was established in 1940 at Atlanta University (now Clark
Atlanta University); W. E. B. Du Bois was the founding editor. Of Tolson’s
Libretto Locke writes, “Modelled on the ultra-modernistic idiom, includ-
ing the language echoes of the Eliot-Pound tradition, this is a heavy heave
against trite traditionalism, of which indeed we have had and still have too
much” (10). Locke also calls Tate’s statement that black poets not “limit
themselves to a provincial mediocrity in which one’s feelings about one’s dif-
ficulties become more important than poetry itself” “sound advice” (10).
Writing for The Nation in 1954, poet and scholar John Ciardi begins a
review of “Recent Verse” with Tolson’s Libretto, remarking that it is “cer-
tainly the most ambitious and in some ways the most compelling of the new
books”21 (183). Ciardi warns that “there are times when Tolson’s heaping
on of image after image and of phrases from German, Spanish, French, and
from African languages as well, leaves the reader knocked out, too much is
happening too fast, and the result seems to be not exaltation but dizziness”
(183). Ciardi’s review, however, ends on a positive note, noting that when
Tolson succeeds, “one feels a force of language and of rhythm as breath-
taking as anything in the range of American poetry” and he calls Libretto
“a book to return to” (183). Other poets do not fair as well under Ciardi’s
scrutiny. Harvey Shapiro though of “real talent” is called “strained,” while
May Sarton is labeled “high-pitched” (184).
Lorenzo D. Turner writes the most positive review by far for Poetry maga-
zine in 1955. Significantly, Turner was an early forefather of diaspora stud-
ies, whose painstaking research on the Gullah people’s language use in the
Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia resulted in a landmark book,
Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (University of Chicago Press, 1949). Turner
was the first to prove the existence of Africanisms in Gullah speech that con-
nected the Gullah people with their African ancestors in eighteenth-century
Sierra Leone. Turner, who earned a PhD at the University of Chicago,
founded the African Studies program at Fisk University in Nashville.

Among a group of African American intellectuals whose theorizing of mod-
ern African American identity was forged through original research on the
African diaspora, Turner was in many ways Tolson’s ideal reader. An aware-
ness of Turner’s work shows that at the time the Libretto was written, Tolson’s
poetics was not merely idiosyncratic. Rather, there was a group of writers
with whom Tolson’s vision of Liberia resonated. Citing some of the same sec-
tions that other critics found nonsensical, Turner finds that
the poet gets many interesting effects by the skillful use of novel stanzaic
patterns and by variation in the length and arrangement of lines. The very
end of this section is clearly reminiscent in style of much of Whitman’s
poetry but far more erudite. Here are frequent repetitions, inventory pas-
sages, and masses of details, all of which contribute to the total imagery of
the poem as well as reveal the robust optimism of the poet. (175)
Turner places the poem within the tradition of the ode. “The poem, which
is more nearly an ode than any other of the lyrical forms, obviously was
written to be read before an audience. Its rhymes and other sound-patterns,
its richly resonant diction, and the general rhythm of its lines are admirably
suited to oral reading” (175). Where other critics, such as Selden Rodman
found “balderdash,” Turner cites interesting uses of “rhythm and sound as
well as figurative and experimental language” (176). Finally, Turner declares
Libretto “a triumph of poetry on the grand scale” (176).
Rodman’s review of Libretto published in the New York Times Book Review
(1954) is among those that are lukewarm. He initially places Libretto in the
same company as now-canonized modernist long poems, offering Tolson
praise:
It is not only by all odds the most considerable poem so far written by
an American Negro, but a work of poetic synthesis in the symbolic vein
altogether worthy to be discussed in the company of such poems as “The
Waste Land,” “The Bridge,” and “Paterson.” (10)
Rodman goes on to make an extended comparison between Tolson and Eliot,

finding many similarities in their use of language and form. Referencing
Tate’s introduction to the Libretto, Rodman writes: “Mr. Tate compares
Mr. Tolson’s style to that of the late Hart Crane, and the poem is indeed
comparable to ‘The Bridge’ for the ambition with which it seeks to animate
an idea; but the method seems to me much more like that employed in ‘The
Wasteland’” [sic] (10). For evidence of this connection, Rodman comments
on Tolson’s formal choices: “The stanzas of the later sections are composed
of quotations, proverbs, invocations and clichés rendered in the languages
from which they are lifted and explicated (when it suits the author’s fancy)
in voluminous, pedantic notes” (10).
Rodman, however, does not find this form to be successful.
Tolson’s weaknesses are the weaknesses one encounters in “The Wasteland”

[sic]. At Tolson’s worst these are magnified into balderdash . . . This kind
of writing becomes at its best academic and at its worst intellectual exhi-
bitionism, throwing at the reader undigested scraps of everything from
Bantu to Esperanto in unrelaxed cacophony. (10)
In the final Tolson/Eliot comparison, Tolson loses: “Eliot’s taste was equal
to giving the results of such a method dignity; Tolson’s taste is much more
uneven” (10). It is odd that for Rodman, the final test comes down to “taste,”
not skill or even talent. Is Tolson’s failure, then, the result of bad taste? If he
had a taste for something other than Bantu or Esperanto would he have been
more successful? It seems, then, that a black poet can enter the modernist
canon, but only as a kind of poor cousin, one who lacks taste.
Arthur P. Davis of Howard University reviewed Libretto for Midwest
Journal along with Lincoln University Poets (an anthology including Tolson’s
work edited by Waring Cuney, Langston Hughes, and Bruce Wright with an
introduction by J. Saunders Redding). Davis reveals the importance Lincoln
University played in the development of black male poets, including Tolson
and Hughes. Though Davis offers mostly praise for the anthology, his assess-
ment of Libretto is mixed. Davis begins his discussion of Libretto by stating
that Tate’s assertion that Tolson has “a great gift for language, a profound
historical sense, and a first-rate intelligence at work in this poem from first to
last” is “perhaps the highest [praise] that any Negro poet has received from an
American critic of Allen Tate’s rank” (75). He then goes on to assert: “In the
face of such a statement, I hesitate to say what I must in all honesty say, which
is simply this: for me Libretto is not a completely successful work; in spite of its
astonishing word-magic and its undoubted power, it doesn’t quite come off as
a poem” (75–76). Davis admits that when he first read the work, he “was con-
vinced that it was pure nonsense—pure, unadulterated, verbose nonsense”22
(76). Davis then appears to have a change of heart: “In spite of such pas-
sages, however, I discovered that after three more readings and a close study
of the footnotes . . . the poem began to take on meaning and significance. Far
from being nonsense, the work began to assume impressive proportions” (76).
Through this action of reading and rereading, Davis has enacted the readerly
position that Tolson prescribes: “This is a book to be chewed and digested,” or,
as he reportedly told one reader: “It took me six years to write it. Is it surprising
that it takes more than one reading to understand it?” (Flasch 81).
However, Davis still wants to give credit to Tolson. “With this short-
coming and with others that one could mention, Libretto for the Republic of
Liberia is still an impressive and significant work” (77). Davis’s reasons for
Libretto’s importance are especially interesting: “Because of its word-magic,
because of its astounding versatility and energy, and because of its endorse-
ment by Allen Tate, it will become a landmark in Negro literature” (emphasis
added) (77). Tate’s preface, then, holds tremendous import for Davis as it
is the ultimate reason that Libretto will become a work of some standing.
However, Davis chooses his words carefully: to say that Libretto will become
a “landmark” is not the same as saying that it is a great poem.
In the decades following the publication of Libretto, when black crit-
ics chose to write about Tolson at all, it was to single him out for special
criticism. Put simply, there were some critics eager to criticize Tolson for not
being “black enough.” In 1966 Sarah Webster Fabio wrote:
Melvin Tolson’s language is most certainly not “Negro” to any signifi-

cant degree. The weight of that vast, bizarre, pseudo-literary diction is
to be traced back into the American mainstream where it rightfully and
wrongmindedly belongs.
For Fabio, there are only two ways to be a black artist: one is either “truly
Negro,” or one falls prey to the mainstream, that is, becomes a hopeless
parody of whiteness. Nielsen asserts that such criticism leveled at Tolson by
black critics pained him.
Among his papers is a telling note in which he speaks of himself in the

third person, remarking that the Poet Laureate of Liberia “was warned to
stop using complex words that did nothing but give delirium tremens to
poetry readers of the Black Gazette or Ebony and The Negro World.” On
the reverse side of this note Tolson has written starkly: “Negro critics beat
poets of color / Keep step in the coffle” (cont. 4). (“Deterritorialization”
243–244)
In 1973, Ronald Lee Cansler began to chart a way out of these oppositions:
Tolson chose to be a Negro, but he also chose to work in the poetic form
and tradition most effective for him. Surely, it is time to stop wrangling
over any supposed dichotomy of form and content and to start evaluating
Tolson’s work as it exists in its own organic self. (115)
Cansler’s assessment of the continuing critical division between form and

content in African American poetries is prescient. In addition, it provides
a way to start to think about African American and African historical con-
tent within a modernist form, for it is important to note that when Tolson
chose to write in the “poetic form and tradition most effective for him,” this
involved a self-conscious immersion in modernist poetics combined with
African and African American idioms.
However, in 1980 in The Journey Back, Houston Baker still echoes Fabio,
stating, that the Libretto’s “game is not worth the candle” because “each of
the poem’s gestures seems to seek the vast stolen stores of the West as a final
reference” (74). Bérubé correctly reads the implication of Baker’s remark:
“his primary intention is to close off discussion of Libretto. A closer reading
than this, says Baker, is fruitless” (136). The history of Tolson’s work is inti-
mately bound with the history of African Americanist reading practices, and
Baker’s assessment of Tolson reflects a strong desire among some African
American critics to stress what they judge to be positive representations of
blackness. The effect that this had on the reception history of Tolson and the
making of the African American canon is profound. Tolson’s work was long
out of print until the University Press of Virginia issued “Harlem Gallery”
and Other Poems in 1999.
Contemporary Critical Response

Among contemporary critics, Lorenzo Thomas (2000) uniquely places
Libretto’s formal properties and subject matter within the context of the epic:
“The classical Greek epics, recited today, perform a ritual re-membering of
heroes whose deeds were accomplished in an epic that was ancient even to
Homer. Taking advantage of this feature of epic form, Tolson’s Libretto rep-
resents an effective ‘correction’ of white supremacist ideas” (111). Thomas
goes on to describe: “Tolson’s deliberate attempt to demonstrate parity
between the wisdom and elegance of the great texts of European literature
and the proverbial wisdom of the African griots—the oral historians and
traditional bards that he describes as ‘living encyclopedias’” (111). Therefore,
what might appear to some to be a series of incongruous juxtapositions in
the poem is instead, according to Thomas, a result of Tolson’s aim to place
the wisdom of griots and Europe’s “great texts” on the same plane. In Black
on Black : Twentieth-Century African American Writing About Africa (2000),
Gruesser praises the form of the Libretto, but does not place it in the epic tra-
dition: “By successfully integrating various poetic styles to form a coherent
hybrid, in the Libretto Tolson provides his readers with an exemplification
of the ideal of progressive synthesis he champions in the poem” (134). He
finds that Tolson has also chosen the appropriate form for his subject mat-
ter, noting that “only recently have critics begun to argue that Tolson’s form
in the Libretto suits both his subject matter (Liberia specifically and Africa
more generally) . . . Tolson’s Libretto signifies on both modernist poetry and
Africanist discourse, repeating and intertextually revising them with a black
difference” (121).
Like Thomas, Nielsen (1992) stresses the manner in which the Libretto
reenvisions history, displacing white supremacy:
In writing Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, which is organized in sec-

tions following the Western musical scale, Tolson, who had already begun
to rearticulate modernism as virtuoso African-American form, undertook
a confrontation with American history on a transformed ground, displac-
ing White experience from its position of centrality and refiguring both
the Middle Passage and the Pilgrim story. (“Deterritorialization” 250)
The temporal crossings in Tolson’s Libretto are generated both thematically

and formally, in part through the intertextual project enacted by his own
style of modernist endnotes. Such experimental forms produce a fluidity
that allow the poem to flow both backward and forward in historical time,
and in and through a multiplicity of identities reflecting a futuristic, global
understanding of the construction of the self.
“Globe-traversing influences, energies, and resistances—far from being
minor deviations from nation-based fundamentals,” Jahan Ramazani asserts,
“have arguably styled and shaped poetry in English from the modernist era
to the present” (332). Transnationality takes on particular importance for
mid-century African American poets whose agencies as “Americans” were
still subjected to legal restriction, putting the concepts of citizenship and
nationhood into flux, and under critique. Moreover, the “globe-traversing”
that Tolson undertakes in Libretto is rooted in his historical understandings
of the conditions of slavery and the international slave trade.23
Among more recent books of poetry criticism, readings of Libretto appear
in a volume on the bardic tradition in African American poetry (Leonard
2006) and on modernism and the “synthetic vernacular” (Hart 2010). In spite
of such promising recent additions to Tolson scholarship, however, the body
of work on Tolson is still very small compared to scholarship on other African
American poets, for example, Gwendolyn Brooks or Langston Hughes. Thus,
Libretto remains a rather obscure text. Michael Bérubé conjectures:
Libretto for the Republic of Liberia is doubtless worthy of similar attention

[to Harlem Gallery]; but one can more easily, even cynically, understand
the American academy’s inattention to this bewildering, dense, 770-line

poem to an African nation founded by American ex-slaves, if only because
most Americans tend not to think about tiny African nations founded by
American ex-slaves, should they want to think about American ex-slaves
at all. (11)
In fact, Bérubé’s excellent volume offers little itself in the way of close read-
ing of Libretto.
Interestingly, a 2005 article in Antioch Review begins with a question
(rather than a recommendation): “Has the time come to read Melvin B.
Tolson?” (Taylor 590). Though mostly positive toward Tolson, author John
Taylor eventually equivocates. He does allow for the “barriers to the imme-
diacy of a reader’s experience” that Tolson’s poems offer, but argues that
the barriers “are not lasting, nor built up as such in order to show off (as he
was accused of doing). Rather, the barriers are integral elements of a long-
pondered and deeply-felt poetics” (593). Yet, what is the reader left with in
the face of such difficulty? Taylor writes: “It seems possible to read his poems
as interrelated expositions of diversity and endless contradiction, as if no
ultimate synthesis were discernible or even imaginable by man” (593). The
reader who opens Tolson with a question is left, it seems, with more ques-
tions. For contemporary readers, this reading process may be difficult, pon-
derous, even unsatisfying, if one is left with “no ultimate synthesis”—that
satisfying nugget of “meaning.” Taylor does not manage to give an outright
recommendation to this audience; he can only ask the question: “Has the
time come?”
However, the appearance of this article in 2005 in a column called
“Poetry Today” suggests some potential for the reception of Tolson in the
twenty-first century. The very suggestion that a reader of contemporary
literature—one among a limited group engaged enough to pick up the
Antioch Review to be sure—may have a reading interest in Tolson is new.
Tolson had a readership at points in the 1940s and 1950s; both Rendezvous
with America and Libretto were reviewed in a variety of publications, as was
the later Harlem Gallery. After his death in 1966, however, the readership
dwindled to a very small number of academic specialists as his work went
out of print. For some writers influenced by the Black Arts Movement, such
as Fabio, or for scholars transcribing the boundaries of an emergent African
American literary canon, Tolson did not represent “blackness” in quite the
correct fashion. However, Black Arts Movement practitioner Amiri Baraka
has been consistently interested in Tolson’s project. Before Baraka, Tolson
embraced a variety of literary influences, while also staking claim to his
own poetic vision. In many ways, Tolson’s later works embrace rather than
eschew conflict about such topics as race and modernism, making them
texts as much about modernism as they are an articulation of Tolson’s own
Afro-Modernist aesthetic
For example, in response to comparisons made between his work and
Eliot’s, Tolson writes to former student Benjamin Bell in 1961:
My work is certainly difficult in metaphors, symbols, and juxtaposed

ideas. There the similarity between me and Eliot separates. That is only
technique, and any artist must use the technique of his time. Otherwise,
we’d have the death of Art. However, when you look at my ideas and
Eliot’s, we’re as far apart as hell and heaven. (Farnsworth 145)
Of course, Tolson’s own predilection for grand performative gestures, in

this case the 1948 announcement at Kentucky State College concerning the
importance of Eliot for black writers and professors, helped to set the stage
for future comparisons between himself and Eliot. Yet Tolson continued to
see the importance of negotiating his own modernist political aesthetic. In
Libretto, Tolson’s optimism distinguishes him from Eliot,24 which is evident
in a specific reference to Eliot’s famous poem: Tolson notes that Africa is
“No waste land yet” (50). As Nielsen writes, Africa is “neither the dark con-
tinent portrayed by Eliot, Conrad, Stein, and Crane nor the waste land that
Eliot’s Europe had become—but out of Africa had come much of the most
provocative aesthetics of the modern” (“Deterritorialization” 250). Indeed,
Tolson purposefully signifies on negative depictions of Africa undertaken
by white modernists.
In tracking our received histories of modernism, it is worth considering
the extent to which the canonized modernist texts by such authors as Eliot,
Crane, and Williams to which Tolson’s Libretto is sometimes compared, are
both like and unlike one another. A more fruitful comparison may in fact
be made between Paterson and Libretto, than Paterson and The Bridge or The
Waste Land. In fact, in Paterson Book Four (1951), Williams specifically pays
homage to Tolson’s Libretto:
—and to Tolson and to his ode

and to Liberia and to Allen Tate
(Give him credit)
and to the South generally
Selah! (182)
The intended personal reference in the line “(Give him credit)” may be to
Tate, which would make sense in terms of both grammar and proximity,
but is also open enough in this stanza to include Tolson and his “ode.” This
passage occurs within a section playing with the shades of meaning of both
“credit” and “money” (and the relationship between them). For example:
. credit, stalled
in money, conceals the generative
that thwarts art or buys it (without
understanding), out of poverty of wit, to
win, vicariously, the blue ribbon. (Paterson 182)
Williams is surely making a distinction between economic credit (con-

trolled by banks) that he opposed, and the more capacious ideology of Social
Credit,25 seeing Tolson and Tate’s work functioning in the latter realm. Alec
Marsh argues that this section of Paterson works to show that “the old money-
making mechanism, which now benefits the few at the expense of the many
by monopolizing credit, should continuously distribute credit throughout
the republic as a form of energy” (213). The homage to Tolson, however, is
made explicit by the fact that Williams borrows from the structure of the
“Selah ” passages of “Ti” in his stanza mentioning Tolson—and for several
more at the conclusion of Paterson Book Four, Section II. Williams would
have read, and taken note of, the “Ti” section of the Libretto in the July
1950 issue of Poetry Magazine, and incorporated it almost immediately into
his manuscript. Williams’s attempts to represent, speak to, or speak for the
citizens of Paterson, New Jersey—including his use of dialect—are complex,
his concern with place and community make Paterson in many ways more
like the later Harlem Gallery than the modernist epics to which it is usu-
ally compared. One of the stakes of recognizing Afro-Modernist works is to
clear the way for new productive comparisons. Working critically in such a
fashion more accurately represents the ways in which literary relationships
work, both relationships between authors, and between authors and texts.
CHAPTER 3
“In the Modern Vein”:

Tolson’s Harlem Gallery
Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator

In an interview conducted the year before his death, Tolson gives the follow-
ing reply to the question “I understand that you have lived a varied, and, in
many instances, a hazardous life?”
Tennyson’s protagonist says in Ulysses, “Much have I seen and known . . .”

And, again, “I am part of all that I have met . . .”—as shoeshine boy, ste-
vedore, soldier, janitor, packinghouse worker, cook on a railroad, waiter
in a beach-front hotel, boxer, actor, football coach, director of drama, lec-
turer for the NAACP, organizer of sharecroppers’ unions, teacher, father
of Ph.D.’s, poet laureate of a foreign country, painter, newspaper colum-
nist, four-time mayor of a town, facer of mobs. I have made my way in
the world since I was twelve years old. (“Interview” 184)
Though Tolson certainly was given to flights of verbal arabesque, an exami-

nation of his biography reveals this self-description to be accurate. An
African American man who compares himself to Tennyson’s Ulysses—and
quotes Tennyson at will—Tolson has defied categorization. In life, as well
as in art, Tolson was dynamic, slippery, complex, and never easily under-
stood. An English professor (he taught for more than 40 years at historically
black colleges: Wiley College in Texas and Langston College in Oklahoma)
Tolson quotes, or specifically refers to the work of, not only Tennyson, but
also Heraclitus, Cocteau, Pound, Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Saul Bellow, Freud,
Proust, Victor Hugo, Whitman, Hart Crane, Jelly Roll Morton, and Plato,
amongst others in this one interview.
Dedicated to freedom for African Americans, Tolson also understood
that there was no essential black experience; his own life defied any such
definition. Therefore there was also no singular black audience. Instead,
Tolson had a sense of writing for what John Ciardi in 1958 termed the
“vertical audience” (as opposed to the “horizontal audience”): “the hori-
zontal audience consists of everybody who is alive at this moment. The
vertical audience consists of everyone vertically through time, who will
ever read a given poem . . . All good poets write for the vertical audience.
The vertical audience for Dante, for example, is now six centuries old. And
it is growing” (“Dialogue” 42). Ciardi, who became a significant profes-
sional connection for Tolson, nominated him for a Bread Loaf Fellowship
in 1954, calling Tolson “the most rocket-driven poet we have”—a most apt
description of Tolson’s work (Farnsworth 133). Ciardi’s support helped to
embolden Tolson to pursue a vision that included both populist and mod-
ernist impulses.
With Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), Tolson completed his
first Afro-Modernist epic, a project that he had been contemplating since
the 1930s. However, a work of more sweeping scope was still on his mind,
which is evident in his conception of Harlem Gallery as a grand epic in
five books representing the black diaspora. The intended sequence was as
follows: Book I: The Curator, Book II: Egypt Land, Book III: The Red Sea,
Book IV: The Wilderness, and Book V, The Promised Land. Though portions
of a possible Book II are in Tolson’s papers, he only lived to complete the
first book, and we are left to speculate how the other four books would have
responded to the book of the Curator that was published in 1965. Quite
different than Book I, the titles of the proposed books mirror the Jews’ bib-
lical struggle from slavery in Egypt to redemption. In his plan to produce
the grandest of African American epics, the proposed book titles mirror,
perhaps, what an epic “should” contain. Yet it appears that his own poetic
process led him again and again to a meditation upon constructions of race,
the artist’s place in the community, and most specifically, the black artist’s
relationship to modernism. It is within this specificity that Tolson achieves
his greatest Afro-Modernist epic: Harlem Gallery. While he had publicly
proclaimed the importance of Eliot, in Tolson’s later career he moves toward
a Poundian-influenced poetics with a project that would have rivaled the
Cantos in scope. Moreover, in Harlem Gallery, Tolson not only stakes out
the modernist and populist subject position that we see in his earlier works,
but he also raises the level of poetic discourse to make the poem an analysis
of these subjects. He puts these debates into motion amongst a memorable
“In the Modern Vein” ● 67
group of characters in Harlem venues, notably an art gallery and a bar called
the Zulu Club.
Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator (1965) is made up of 24 sec-
tions following the Greek alphabet from Alpha through Omega. In it
Tolson employs the centered stanza format that we first see in sections
of Rendezvous With America (1944). Throughout the long poem, Tolson
initiates multiple sets of contexts, juxtaposing popular and high culture, as
well as ancient and modern history. Michael Bérubé finds the first five sec-
tions of Harlem Gallery “among the poem’s most difficult, partly because
of their extraordinary density and range of allusion” (66). Harlem Gallery
shares with Libretto this quality of opening with stanzas of great complex-
ity, making the poem difficult to enter. It is as if Tolson erected an initial
barrier to keep out all but the most dedicated readers. The difficulty is
enhanced by the fact that the poem does not perform its cultural work for
a predefined audience with a known set of references. Rather the range of
references from just the first stanza of Harlem Gallery includes the follow-
ing examples amongst others: a species of African hornbill, a false king
of the Israelites and multiple other Biblical allusions, Francisco Goya’s
“The Second of May,” W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn, and figures from
French history and philosophy.
The Harlem Gallery, an Afric pepper bird,

awakes me at a people’s dusk of dawn.
The age altars its image, a dog’s hind leg,
and hazards the moment of truth in pawn.
The Lord of the House of Flies,
jaundice-eyed, synapses purled,
wries before the tumultuous canvas,
The Second of May —
by Goya:
the dagger of Madrid
vs.
the scimitar of Murat.
In Africa, in Asia, on the Day
of Barricades, alarm birds bedevil the Great White World,
a Buridan’s ass—not Balaam’s—between no oats and hay. (209)1
The range of allusions only becomes wider and often unexpected as the
poem develops. However, the dislocation the reader may experience amongst
such references, with, for example, the placement of African proverbs next
to Western images is not simply an effect of experimental form, but rather
a reflection of a modernist African American poet’s worldview, of which

dislocation is a defining feature.
While dislocation, especially from rural to urban environments, is a
frequently discussed feature of modernity, we must reformulate this con-
cept when considering the modern African American subject, recognizing
the extent to which modern black subjectivity was formed from a state of
forced movement and loss as a result of the slave trade and global diaspora.
As Josef Ja řab writes: “Mobility, movement, journeys, uprooting, passing,
becoming . . . all these manifestations of change brought about by modernity
naturally became the subject matter of artistic works produced by minority
artists” (7). In this space Tolson formulates meaning from the fragments of
his diasporic inheritances, drawing from the multiple lineages that become
his—whether from Africa, Europe, the Americas, or Asia. With this syn-
thesis, Tolson’s poetics provide an African American response to modern
poetries from the free verse of Edgar Lee Masters to the modernism of
T. S. Eliot.
The result of Tolson’s long engagement with modernism, Harlem Gallery
presents a complex dialectical understanding of common dichotomies of
race (black/white), culture (high/low), and speech (standard/dialect) that
ultimately revises the narratives of modernism and of African American
poetry, and exemplifies Afro-Modernist poetics. An important marker of
Tolson’s Afro-Modernist poetic practice is his dialectical engagement of these
dichotomies. A close reading reveals that within the poem this engagement
of opposites results in constant oscillation—a kind of call and response—
which produces a negation of oppositions.
Tolson sets up a visual image for this oscillation with a reference to
Buridan’s ass in stanza one of “Alpha,” the previously quoted first section
of Harlem Gallery : “In Africa, in Asia, on the Day / of Barricades, alarm
birds bedevil the Great White World, / a Buridan’s ass—not Balaam’s—
between no oats and hay” (209). Editor Raymond Nelson explains that the
ass, placed equidistant between two attractive options, loses its ability to
choose (370). Buridan’s ass is, so to speak, “neither here nor there,” or—in
the language of the poem—“between no oats and hay.” Thus, for Tolson,
there is little to be gained from settling with either side. The emphasis
is placed on not choosing, and instead insisting upon dialectical recom-
bination (not “a” or “b,” but “a” and “b”). This position “bedevils” what
Tolson calls the “Great White World” throughout the poem. In stanza
three, the use of “dead wool” (gathered from a dead sheep) and essentially
“live wool” (“fleece wool” is gathered from a live sheep) is another invoca-
tion of opposites:
dead wool and fleece wool

I have mustered up from hands
now warm or cold: a full
rich Indies’ cargo; (209)
Here the speaker holds both warm and cold in his hands at the same time:
again engaging opposites simultaneously. This dialectical position, which
sets the philosophical tone of the poem, has particular implications for theo-
rizing race in America.
The Curator
Indeed, the greatest of the oppositions that Tolson engages is the position of
the Curator, the main character of Harlem Gallery, between the black and
white worlds. A character named “The Curator” is mentioned in the open-
ing poem of Tolson’s work from the 1930s, A Gallery of Harlem Portraits,
but not further developed. Thus, in Harlem Gallery, Tolson takes the seed of
the idea that was conceived in the earlier Portraits collection and develops it
into a meditation on the role of the black artist in America, using the figure
of the Curator as conduit. The Curator’s meditations on art open the poem,
and additional give and take on art and politics takes place in discussions
between the Curator and Africanist Dr. Obi Nkomo, as we will see. The gal-
lery setting allows Tolson to juxtapose “highbrows, lowbrows, and middle-
brows” or high, popular, and bourgeoisie culture, and to enact a collision
between the artist’s intention and the marketplace (Flasch 100).
In a radio interview conducted in 1965, Tolson describes the Curator:
The Curator is of Afroirishjewish ancestry. He is an octoroon, who is a

Negro in New York and a white man in Mississippi. Like Walter White,
the late executive of the NAACP, and the author of A Man Called White,
the Curator is a “voluntary” Negro. Hundreds of thousands of Octoroons
like him have vanished into the Caucasian race—never to return. This
is a great joke among Negroes. So Negroes ask the rhetorical question,
“What man is white?” (Flasch 100)2
In constructing a central speaker who is physiologically racially indeter-

minate, Tolson removes the so-called biological determinates of race, and
forces the reader to confront the ways in which race is socially and culturally
constructed. Tolson’s narrator—who could pass for white—does not do so;
he is a “voluntary Negro.” He occupies a liminal space in which he could be
“Negro” in New York, but at the same time “white” in Mississippi. It is the
Curator’s very liminality between blackness and whiteness, and his ability
to negotiate various cultural positions, that gives him the perspective and
insight to evaluate art.
Tolson’s description of the Curator continues: “He is cosmopolite, a
humanist, a connoisseur of the fine arts, with catholicity of taste and inter-
est” (Flasch 100). Interestingly, during the course of the interview, Tolson
describes both the Curator and himself as having “catholicity of taste and
interest.” In emphasizing this descriptive phrase, Tolson conveys the value
he placed upon wide reading, cultural, social, and political knowledge, and
the extent to which he eschewed parochial narrow-mindedness.
Tolson extends his dialectical examination of opposing categories in his
analysis of the role of art, illustrating that the black artist’s place between the
opposing black and white worlds mirrors the Curator’s position:
Poor Boy Blue,

the Great White World
and the Black Bourgeoisie
have shoved the Negro artist into
the white and not-white dichotomy,
the Afroamerican dilemma in the Arts—
the dialectic of
to be or not to be
a Negro. (336)
Here Hamlet’s dilemma becomes the black artist’s dilemma and both the
“Great White World” and the “Black Bourgeoisie” are at fault in trying to
box the Negro artist into predetermined categories, as some critics have tried
to do with Tolson.
For example, Sarah Webster Fabio in her essay “Who Speaks Negro?”
disparagingly calls the language in Harlem Gallery “vast, bizarre, pseudo-
literary diction” (55). Fabio’s occasionally self-contradictory article is framed
as an argument with Shapiro’s introduction to Harlem Gallery in which he
states: “Tolson writes and thinks in Negro.” Fabio’s most famous remark in
the article, a dispute with Karl Shapiro’s also-famous remark in the intro-
duction to Harlem Gallery, states that “Melvin Tolson’s language is most cer-
tainly not ‘Negro’ to any significant degree” and calls for “the weight of that
vast, bizarre, pseudo-literary diction” to be “placed back into the American
mainstream where it rightfully and wrongmindedly belongs” (55).
Fabio goes on to set out her definition of “Negro language”: “The language
of the Negro is classical in the sense that it never gets too far from concrete
realities, from the ‘thingy’ quality of objects, persons, places, matter perceived
in all its immediacy by the senses and not through oblique references and
artificially created allusory illuminations” (55), that is, “Negro language,”
according to Fabio, relies on immediate sensory perception, not literary allu-
sion. Fabio then further asserts her definition of Negro language:
Such a language is truly poetic in its lyrical impulse and cannot be faked.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Phyllis [sic] Wheatley, Bessie Smith, Mahalia
Jackson, Ray Charles, Willie Mae Thorton, Langston Hughes and LeRoi
Jones can come to a lyric with a widely diverse body of diction and still, I
think, speak “Negro.” Karl Shapiro is not expected to understand this. (55)
This is where Fabio’s logic is most strange of all. How is it possible to allow
for such a “widely diverse body of diction,” including Wheatley’s neoclassical
work that emulates Alexander Pope, but not allow for Tolson? In addition,
Fabio’s argument does not account for Hughes’s or Jones/Baraka’s complex
usage of intertextuality and literary allusion.
She further emphasizes her bias against literary language:
“Negro,” if anything, is a language—largely unassimilated and unlet-

tered—which cuts through, penetrates things as they are reflected in
spirituals, blues or jazz lyrics to a core of meaning eliciting a soulful
response to a moment of realization of what it means to be a human being
in a world with a stranglehold on this awareness. (55)
Though many of her terms are vague, the key words here are “unassimilated”
and “unlettered.” If one becomes too educated, apparently one becomes
less “Negro.” In addition, Fabio’s assessment of “Negro language” as lack-
ing “oblique reference and artificially created allusory illuminations” and
instead relying on “concrete realities” does not allow for such black oratori-
cal and literary practices as signifying, which instead of directness and con-
creteness, enacts double-entendres and multidirectionality.
In Blues People, Amiri Baraka writes: “In language, the African tradition
aims at circumlocution rather than at exact definition. The direct statement
is considered crude and unimaginative; the veiling of all contents in ever-
changing paraphrase is considered the criterion of intelligence and person-
ality” (31). Tolson also was aware of the “double talking” tradition within
African American vernacular:
You know, poets like to do a great amount of double talking. We think

very often that the modernists gave us that concept of poetry, which is
untrue. Because I can go back into the Negro work songs, the spiritu-
als and jazz, and show you that double talk of poetry. And I can even
[clicking his fingers for emphasis] go to Africa, as I shall do tonight
and show you that double talk of poetry, especially in metaphors and
symbols. So I’m doing some double talk here. (Library of Congress
reading)3
Here, Tolson asserts African roots for modernist forms. As Aldon Nielsen
explains: “In his effort to rearticulate modernism as a populist American
aesthetic with African roots, Melvin Tolson reconfigured the audience
for modern art, revising and reappropriating Eliot’s objective correlative”
(“Deterritorialization” 246). Tolson also provides an effective alternative to
Fabio’s reductive definitions.
Artists, Poets, and Other Characters

While Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) mentions a vast number of
historical figures, but does not focus on particular personalities, Harlem
Gallery contains several developed characters in addition to the Curator.
Though the surface of the poem belies a linear reading, Harlem Gallery
does in fact contain narratives, characters, and various plot lines. Yet,
despite the liveliness of the stories that eventually emerge, decoding these
narratives is not without difficulty. Bérubé observes: “Not until the sixth
section, ‘Zeta,’ in which the Curator visits John Laugart, do we get any
idea that the poem is a narrative” (66). Therefore one must work through
the first five sections, all of which focus on the Curator, without a generic
frame that would aid in deciphering the poem’s direction. However, sev-
eral reviewers noted the success of the characterization when the poem
was first released. For example, a reviewer for the journal Phylon asserts
that “Tolson’s characters are stunningly believable and undoubtedly will
live for years to come” (Thompson 409) and Virginia Scott Miner of the
Kansas City Star contends: “There are, in this Gallery, characters likely to
become part of the language” (5D).
The artist characters in the poem—John Laugart, Hideho Heights,
and Mister Starks—each occupy multiple social positions simultaneously,
and the writer figures also perform what I might call a “Tolson function,”
that is, they reflect a different part of Tolson’s own artistic persona. Each
artist is complex, even contradictory, rather than representative of a single
facet of the African American artist. Bérubé calls painter John Laugart a
“representative of the marginal artist, the neglected, avant-garde visionary”
(65), but ironically, Laugart’s masterpiece is called Black Bourgeoisie. Poet
Hideho Heights, Bérubé says, “is a self-proclaimed people’s poet and singer
of extempore blues and jazz ballads” (65) yet, significantly, Heights is also
author of a secret modernist poem. Composer Mister Starks has written two
major classical works, Black Orchid Suite and Rhapsody in Black and White,
but has also gotten rich from the sales of a best-selling boogie-woogie record,
“Pot Belly Papa.”
For the variety of artists represented in Harlem Gallery, the apparent
contradictions in their identities are in fact examples of radical synthesis
(though Tolson purposely emphasizes the split identity of Hideho Heights).
For Tolson such synthesis is necessary for true artistic success. For example,
Tolson uses Mister Starks to illustrate the realization that the artist must
“abandon all ideas of absolute racial or aesthetic distinctions” (Hansell
124). This is achieved through Starks’s realization that Black Orchid Suite,
a piece of music influenced by both jazz and classical masters, is a profound
artistic success even though it does not achieve public acclaim. Tolson held
the same faith in the artistic success of Harlem Gallery; thus, the poet char-
acters reflect aspects of Tolson’s own development as a poet. For example,
composer Mister Starks is also a poet, and his Harlem Vignettes mirror
Tolson’s poems from the 1930s, Gallery of Harlem Portraits. Moreover,
Heights may be the “people’s poet” on the streets, but the name of his
secret modernist poem has the same title as a poem of Tolson’s that signals
his incorporation of modernist method. Tolson has included in the poem,
then, aspects of what we might call both his premodernist and modernist
poetic selves.
Ja řab notes that modernist minority artists “were regularly, and also by
the then-current definition of art and literature, considered parochial, pro-
vincial, and marginal. Or non-existent” (7). This paradox is encoded within
the poem when the Curator discovers Hideo Heights’s modernist poem, and
the reader discovers one of the great jokes in the poem: the poem’s name,
“E. &. O. E,4” is the name of an important poem written by Tolson, as men-
tioned above. We learn in “Chi” that the Curator has seen the poem when
returning a drunken Heights to his home—“one night I brought Hideho
home, / dead drunk, / in a Zulu Club taxicab” (336). The discovery of the
poem leads the Curator to the following observation: “here was the eye-
sight proof / that the Color Line, as well as the Party Line, / splits an art-
ist’s identity” (337). The fact that the poet’s modernist work has been kept
secret indicates the split identity that black modernist artists confronted.
The Curator describes Heights’s dilemma as follows:
He didn’t know
I knew
about the split identity

of the People’s Poet—
the bifacial nature of his poetry:
the racial ballad in the public domain
and the private poem in the modern vein. (335)
Here the poet struggles with tensions between form and content, as well as
between individual and community. Is it possible to be “the People’s Poet”
and also be a modernist? Or must the poet who speaks for the people only
produce a “racial ballad?” When Du Bois proclaimed: “Thus all art is pro-
paganda and ever must be,” does such “propaganda” preclude or include
Afro-Modernist writing? (“Criteria” 103). Tolson’s Afro-Modernist work
consciously interrogates designations such as these that are policed by both
the color line and any aesthetic party line.
Bérubé asserts that the fundamental conflict in the poem is between the
Curator and Hideho Heights.
In poetic practice, the struggle takes place between the Curator’s arcane
and ambiguous interior monologues and Hideho’s accessible, declama-
tory, narrative performance poems—the ballads to John Henry and
Louis Armstrong, and a verse parable in “Phi” on the “sea turtle and the
shark” . . . I cast this opposition as a struggle between competing concep-
tions of poetry as either written or oral discourse. (68)
We learn in “Chi” that Heights’s modernist poem “E. & O. E” was previ-
ously unknown to the Curator and perhaps to the rest of the Zulu Club
Wits. Though Heights does suffer from a split identity, he strives to cre-
ate his modernist work anyway. In addition, he declaims that a black poet
should not have to be divided against himself.
“A man’s conscience is home-bred.

To see an artist or leader do
Uncle Tom’s asinine splits
is an ask-your-mama shame!” (338)
At this point the Jamaican bartender declares, “The drinks are on the house
Poet Defender!” (338). Heights, then, rather than cementing a division
between public and private discourse, or oral and written poetry, is ques-
tioning the very structures that would require an African American poet to
make such untenable choices. He continues his speech stressing the impor-
tance of personal integrity:
“Integrity is an underpin—
the marble lions that support
the alabaster fountain in
the Alhambra.” (338)
Without integrity there is simply collapse, and the artist must ultimately
maintain fidelity to his own art.
The difficulty that the Curator experiences when finding Height’s “E. &
O. E.” is that he cannot initially recognize a black modernist poet.
The Hideho Heights that Afroamerican Freedom, Inc.,

glorified
had recognition marks—plain
like the white tail of an antelope;
in the subterrane
of this poem, however,
the protagonist aped the dubiety
of a wet cake of soap. (338)
“The Hideho Heights that Afroamerican Freedom, Inc., / glorified,” the

poet who offers straightforward, positive representations of black life has
“recognition marks.” However, the modernist black poet is slippery (like a
“wet cake of soap”) and not so easy to understand or identify. This stanza
is a commentary on formal choices in poetry and the decision to employ
masks, irony, and double-entendres. The protagonist of the modernist
poem is not dubious, instead he enacts possibilities that put multiple identi-
ties, or “slipperiness,” into action. These multiple identities mirror those
of Heights’s life where he experiences roles as both the “people’s poet” and
a modernist; he refuses to reject one in favor of the other. However, he is
finally unable to unite the two. Tolson is portraying a condition similar to
double-consciousness here, and revealing the conditions and expectations
that required a black artist in the 1950s and 1960s to contend with a split
identity. Yet Tolson strongly believed that an artist must also work in the
“modern idiom” of his time and Heights chooses to do so in “E. & O. E,”
as did Tolson.
Significantly, the central metaphor in “E. & O. E.” is the unity of oppo-
sites, further proving that unification of split identities is Heights’s goal.
I think

I am what I am not:
if Nazarene
by lot,
if no Hellene
in the Old Gadfly’s sense,
I am perhaps, a Roman and no Roman, save
among the dense. (“E. & O. E.,” 135)
The speaker is both “a Roman and no Roman”; he is a unity of opposites.

We can see Heights, then, as striving toward the unity of public and private,
oral and written, populist and modernist.
The fact that Tolson chose “E. & O. E.” as Height’s modernist poem—
the lines quoted in Harlem Gallery are the same as Tolson’s “E. & O. E.”
with the exception of one word5 —places further emphasis upon the
importance of modernist poetics, for “E. & O. E.” is about the role of poet
as prophet. “E. & O. E.,” writes Nelson in the notes to “Harlem Gallery”
and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson, “is a dense, allusive, psychologically
turbulent poem about the power and responsibility of the poet—the poet
as prophet—in his particular parenthesis of eternity. It is Eliotic in idiom
and in its fear of spiritual inadequacy before the great prophetic tasks”
(452). Included under the heading of “Fugitive Poems” in the University
Press of Virginia edition (as if it were one who got away or who breaks
the law) “E. & O. E.” is highly intertextual and emphasizes the divine
nature of the poet. A meditation upon the divine is therefore enabled by
modernist poetics in the world of Harlem Gallery. Thus, though Heights
experiences internal conflict about his roles as a poet, it is incorrect to
single him out as only representative of oral or populist poetics, for he
enacts the dualities that Tolson himself experienced as he developed as a
modernist author.
Laugart, presented as prophet and visionary, is the poem’s model of artis-
tic integrity, believing until the end that
“A work of art
is an everlasting flower
in kind or unkind hands;
dried out,
it does not lose its form and color
in native or alien lands.” (229)
A true work of art is not altered by its context; its form and color are
retained “in native or alien lands.” In contrast to Heights’s artistic dual-
ity, Laugart’s painting Black Bourgeoisie is significantly described as a
“synthesis”: “this, somehow, a synthesis / (savage—sanative) / of Daumier,
Gropper and Picasso” (228). E. Franklin Frazier’s study of the same name,
Black Bourgeoisie (1957), is highly critical of middle-class blacks who lose
their connection with the black community, while simultaneously emulat-
ing the values of a white bourgeois who will never accept them. Laugart’s
painting is critical of bourgeois values, much like the work of visual artists
Daumier, Gropper, and Picasso, yet while mounting a “savage” critique,
Laugart’s work is also “sanative,” that is, it provides a curative to these social
divides.
Laugart suffers economically and physically for his art. He is half-blind
and his place of residence is “a catacomb Harlem flat / (grotesquely vivi-
sected like microscoped maggots)” (227). In addition, fame and success
in the marketplace have eluded him; for his masterpiece Black Bourgeoisie
Laugart has received only
a bottle of Schiedam gin

and Charon’s grin
and infamy,
the Siamese twin
of fame. (232)
However, fame would not serve the artist either, being the “Siamese twin”
of infamy. Though Laugart has suffered, his dedication to his art is intact.
He teaches the necessity of an artist crossing boundaries no matter what the
cost.
His glance
as sharp as a lance-
olate leaf, he said:
“It matters not a tinker’s dam
on the hither or thither side of the Acheron
how many rivers you cross
if you fail to cross the Rubicon!” (232)
Thus, the artist must completely dedicate him or herself to the work.
Suffering is of no consequence. Traveling through the underworld is not
even sufficient; the artist must go beyond “the point of no return.”
The cost of this defiance of middle-class norms is, however, very high.
In addition to his physical and economic suffering, and the fact that fame
has eluded him, at the end of Zeta, we learn that Laugart “was robbed and
murdered in his flat, / and the only witness was a Hamletian rat” (232). The
allusions to Acheron and Charon in this section foreshadow his demise.
Though he has achieved greatness in art, the physical world cannot con-
tain him. The prophet/artist must ultimately be a saint, rather than merely
human.
The Regents of the Gallery work against the artists and stifle the work
of the Curator. The Regents are described as being “eye- / less as knitting
needles” and they “suffer the carbon monoxide of ignorance” (228, 230).
For the Curator, this threatens the viability of the Gallery.
The Regents of the Harlem Gallery

suffer the carbon monoxide of ignorance
which—undetected in the
conference chamber—
leaves my budget as the
corpse of a chance. (230)
It is because Laugart’s Black Bourgeoisie “will wring from their babbitted

souls a Jeremian cry!” (228) that the Curator is unable to pay the painter
properly. Here, “babbitted” is used to describe those persons such as the
Regents who complacently subscribe to materialistic, middle-class ideals.
Mr. Guy Delaporte III, Gallery Regent and patron, represents the stran-
gling effects of capitalism and bourgeois accumulation upon art. Delaporte
is “President of Bola Boa Enterprises, Inc.” (254), a company name made up
of two deadly forces: the boa constrictor, which squeezes its prey to death,
and the bola, which Nelson explains is “a weapon that consists of two or
more stone or iron balls attached to the end of a cord, used for hurling at
and entangling an animal” (n12, 404). In colloquial terms, Delaporte is
dangerous because he can either choke you or trip you up. He is described in
“Kappa” in very unflattering terms:
His
soul of gold,
like the Ark’s mercy seat,
Mr. Guy Delaporte III is the symbol
of Churchianity
at Mount Zion,
the bethel of the Sugar Hill elite—
say the valley people of Mount Sinai
as they wash each other’s feet. (254)
A professed Christian, Delaporte instead represents the falsehoods of

“Churchianity.” A member of Harlem’s bourgeoisie (“Sugar Hill elite”),
Delaporte’s soul is not dedicated to God; he worships money. Also in Kappa,

Delaporte first sees Laugart’s painting, Black Bourgeoisie:
Before the bête noir of John Laugart’s

Black Bourgeoisie,
Mr. Guy Delaporte III takes his stand,
a wounded Cape buffalo defying everything and Everyman! (255)
Laugart’s critique of the black bourgeoisie, of which Delaporte is a part,

causes Delaporte to respond dangerously, like a wounded animal.
Dr. Obi Nkomo, “the alter ego / of the Harlem Gallery” (233) and “old
Africanist” (242) is the final central character introduced in the poem.
Nkomo is a skilled verbal wit, whose verbal acrobatics and self-description
also reflect aspects of Tolson. We meet Nkomo in Section VII, “Eta” at
“Aunt Grindle’s / Elite Chitterling Shop” (233). In this section, Nkomo is
asked three times who he is. After he declares, “The lie of the artist is the
only lie / for which a mortal or a god should die” (233), mirroring the inter-
rogation of Christ, “Mr. Guy Delaporte III cried out before the Regents, /
Mr. Curator, what manner of man / is this?” (234). In the Chitterling Shop
a “giraffine fellow” who is sniffing dope demands to know, “Mister, who are
you?” (239). Nkomo responds:
“Obi Nkomo, my dear Watson; but that is nil,

a water stair that meanders to no vessel. If you ask
what am I, you dash on rocks the wisdom and the will
of Solon and Solomon.
Am I a bee
drugged on the honey of sophistry?
Am I a fish from a river Jordan,
fated to die as soon as it reaches an Asphalt Sea?” (239)
When his questioner responds with silence, Nkomo continues: “What am

I? What are you? / Perhaps we / are twin colors in a crystal” (240). He then
goes on to tell “an old-wives tale / for seven-foot-spear Chakas to be” that
he heard when he was a “Zulu / lad” about an eagle who thinks that he is a
chicken (240). Nkomo, then, is a source of African folktales, proverbs, and
wisdom that must be decoded by the listener (reader) in order to discover
the message. In addition, as Nelson notes: “He is a Bantu—of the linguistic
group characterized by its artistic and intellectual legacy—and a Zulu, of
the Bantu tribe famous for courage and martial exploits” (389).
Nkomo's final reply as to his identity has a Tolson-sounding air about it,
as Nkomo describes his own exploits:
“The golden mean

of the dark wayfarer’s way between
black Scylla and white Charybdis, I
have traveled; subdued ifs in the way;
from vile-canaille balconies and nigger heavens, seen
day beasts and night beasts of prey
in the disemboweling pits of
Europe and America,
in the death-worming bowels of
Asia and Africa;
and, although a Dumb Ox (like young Aquinas), I
have not forgot
the rainbows and the olive leaves against the orient sky. (243)
Nkomo’s verbal repartee is on display throughout the poem in his exchanges

with the Curator about art and identity. Nkomo poses such questions to the
Curator as this:
“Curator of the Harlem Ghetto, what is a masterpiece?

A virgin or a jade,
the vis viva of an ape of God,
to awaken one,
to pleasure one—
a way-of-life’s aubade.” (236)
In addition, Nkomo is a key figure in the “Zulu Club talk-around” in

Upsilon, Section XX (307).
These exchanges show how Tolson, developing his highly imbricated
allusions, utilizes high modernist compositional strategies along with black
vernacular forms such as the dozens—a form of verbal repartee marked by
hyperbole, metaphor, and humor—showing his interest in the cultural con-
tradictions and clashes that are fomented in the African American context.
A body of work such as Tolson’s that simultaneously embraces diverse poetic
practices necessitates diverse reading strategies as well. Tolson’s work affords
us the opportunity to explore race as both often-manipulated metaphor and
lived experience that must be read within a sociohistorical context. Thus
we investigate both the pitfalls of racial essentialism and racialized forms
of power simultaneously. M. M. Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotype, “an
optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system
from which they spring” is helpful here (426). Imagining Harlem Gallery as
an x-ray of its racial and cultural moment helps to reveal the deeper inner
workings of the text.
If we consider the relation of speech-based forms to black modernist
compositional structures, it is possible to uncover the dialogic function
that vernacular plays in black poetry. In “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin
claims that poetic genres display a unitary language system, while novels
require what he terms a “social heteroglossia.”6 If we read carefully into
black modernist expression it becomes apparent that, contrary to Bakhtin,
vernacular processes in African American poetry are fundamentally dia-
logic, displaying the heterogeneous formulations of African American iden-
tities. In fact, Bakhtin’s description of the features of “authentic novelist
prose” applies to African American modernist poems. They are “multiform
in style and variform in speech and voice” (261). In them, the reader “is
confronted with several heterogeneous stylistic unities, often located on
different linguistic levels and subject to different stylistic controls” (261).
This simultaneity is put in motion in Harlem Gallery in part because for
Tolson, an interest in what he called authentic forms of folk expression
such as the blues—or here the dozens—did not preclude a commitment to
modernism.
The dozens—a specifically African American vernacular form—is used
as a compositional structure in much of Harlem Gallery. Portions of the
“Upsilon” section of Harlem Gallery read as a souped-up version of this ver-
bal battle of wits.
Hideho Heights
downed his Zulu Chief in a gulp,
palmed his chin, and said:
“As my ante in the jack pot, I’d say
Obi Nkomo is a St. John who envisions
a brush turkey that makes
a mound of the Old World’s decaying vegetables
To generate heat and hatch the eggs of the New.”
The aged Africanist looked up surmisingly,
his gaze leveled at Hideho Heights
as straight as the zone axis of a crystal.
“Only an Aristotelian metaphorist,”
he said,
“could conjure up an image like that !” (308)
To compete in this version of the dozens, one must be well versed in Aristotle’s
Poetics. Here the invocation of Aristotle is an honorific, for Aristotle notes
in Poetics 1457b–1458: “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of meta-
phor . . . it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intui-
tive perception of the similarity in dissimilars” (qtd. in “Harlem Gallery”
441). In this way, Obi Nkomo takes Hideho Heights’s intended insult and
reverses it into a complement. Nelson’s annotations to the text also inform
us that the “zone axis of a crystal” is “a straight line through the center of a
crystal, to which all faces of a given plane are parallel” (n175, 441). The fact
that the gaze that Nkomo “levels” at Heights is a point at which all faces are
parallel also illustrates the extent to which Nkomo’s reply “levels” the verbal
playing field.
Tolson also collected “metaphysical African proverbs,” another vernacu-
lar form of interest to him, which he recorded in verse and used in Libretto
for the Republic of Liberia, as well as Harlem Gallery. The proverb “Where
would the rich cream be without skim milk?,” which appears in the fifth
section of Libretto, provides an overlay for continuing to read the Upsilon
Section of Harlem Gallery. The debate over milk and cream is introduced in
“Upsilon” as follows:
While The Curator sipped his cream

and Doctor Nkomo swigged his homogenized milk,
I tried to gin the secret of
the mutuality of minds
that moved independently of each other —
like the eyeballs of a chameleon. (312)
Though the Curator’s and Nkomo’s minds are “mutual” they also “move
independently of one other.” Thus, it is not possible to determine which
character, or ideological position, is being privileged over the other, or if any
privileging is even the intended result.
“Why cream, O Nestor, instead of milk?”

Doctor Nkomo’s guileless question
was a whore at the altar in a virgin’s wedding gown. (312)
While Nestor, from Homer’s Iliad, was “the oldest and wisest of the Greek
generals who fought at Troy, a constant source of sage advice” (n285, 443),
it is clear that the description of Nkomo as a “whore at the altar in a virgin’s
wedding gown” is sarcastic—he is not what he appears to be. This form of
questioning is a continuation of the protocols of the dozens.
The Curator’s reply

had Taine’s smell of the laboratory.
Whether that’s good or bad
depends on one’s stance,
upstage—or—downstage.
As The Curator spoke, there was no
mule-deer’s-tail contrast
of white and black in the way he said it:
“I remain a lactoscopist
fascinated by
the opacity of cream,
the dusk of human nature,
‘the light-between’ of the modernistic.” (312–313)
Hippolyte Taine was a French critic and historian whose “theories were sci-
entific in the sense that he mistrusted intuition and emphasized formula
and system” (443). Here the reader is left to determine whether such a sci-
entific attitude is “good or bad” and is informed that such a determination
“depends on one’s stance, / upstage—or—downstage.” Here “upstage” or
“downstage” also denotes social positioning, highlighting the relativity of
perspectives depending upon one’s station. Tolson’s play with racial meta-
phors extends to the “mule-deer’s-tail contrast of white and black.” Here
there is no obvious contrast between these colors.
Yet, the Curator is still fascinated by “the opacity of cream.” Nkomo’s
retort is swift and harsh:
Doctor Nkomo’s snort

was a Cape buffalo’s.
“You brainwashed, whitewashed son
of bastard Afroamerica!” (313)
Here the Africanist accuses the Curator essentially of being an Uncle Tom,
of buying into white norms of social hierarchy.
As a Bach fugue piles up rhythms,

The Africanist heaped his epithets:
“Garbed in the purple of metaphors,
the Nordic’s theory of the cream separator
is still a stinking skeleton!” (313)
Nkomo explicitly rejects white-centered hierarchies—“the Nordic’s theory of

the cream separator”—yet the poem complicates the Western/Non-Western
dichotomy by comparing the Africanist’s reply to a “Bach fugue,” a Western

musical form. Nkomo continues:
“Gentlemen,
perhaps there is a symbolism
—a manna for the darker peoples—
in the rich opacity of cream
and the poor whiteness of skim milk.” (315)
Here Tolson has complicated the picture even further, for cream, that product
considered “richer” or “better,” is not truly white. Heavy cream has an almost
yellowish tinge; skim milk is in fact much “whiter” in color. Through this
use of the dozens, and playing off the African proverb, Tolson finds another
way to ask, “What man is white?” and to interrogate the social implications
of such designations.
Reviews
Due to negative evaluations of Tolson, especially comments made by Fabio
and Houston Baker, achieving currency in much of the criticism, readers
may be surprised to learn that many reviewers, including those writing for
African American publications, responded positively to Harlem Gallery
when it was first published. Reviewers, including such notable black lite-
rati as poet Gwendolyn Brooks, found Harlem Gallery to be a significant
accomplishment.
Its roots are in the Twenties, but they extend to the present, and very
strong here are the spirit and symbols of the African heritage the poet
acknowledges and reverences. He is as skillful a language fancier as the
ablest “Academician.” But his language startles more, agitates more—
because it is informed by the meanings of an inheritance both hellish and
glorious. (Brooks 51)
Writing for Negro Digest, Brooks does not believe that Tolson has received
proper respect, noting that “many of his fellows” in the academy “do
not concede his presence at the table, they do not look at him. But like
the Silent Brother at other feasts, he is there—and honeying his bread
with the handsomest of them” (51). She concludes (with an apparent
references to the “news” that is modernism) that Tolson will eventually
receive that recognition due to him: “Although this excellent poet’s ‘news’
certainly addresses today, it is very rich and intricate news indeed, and
I believe that it will receive the careful, painstaking attention it needs and
deserves when contemporary howl and preoccupation are diminished”
(52). Brooks also takes brief but effective aim at Karl Shapiro’s charac-
terization of Tolson is his introduction to Harlem Gallery : “Karl Shapiro
(who writes ‘in Jew’ to the extent that Tolson writes—quoting Shapiro
‘in Negro’)” (51).
Dolphin G. Thompson, writing for Phylon, begins his review by stressing
that Tolson has finally received some deserved recognition:
When Melvin B. Tolson read from his works at the Library of Congress
in Washington, D.C., last October (1965), he was receiving one of
the top honors of America as a first rate poet. Again, one week before
Thanksgiving the Ambassador of Liberia held a reception in his honor,
and in March (1965) the President of the United States invited him to
the White House to present an autographed copy of his new book. This
kind of unique recognition testifies that Tolson has achieved a significant
place in world literature. (Thompson 408)
Thompson has high praise for Harlem Gallery, noting that this new book
“justifies every honor given [Tolson] and should be the basis for the high-
est awards the literary world can give” and concludes that “it is a book that
should be on every bookshelf” (408).
Not only does Harlem Gallery assure Tolson’s place in “world lit,” accord-
ing to Thompson, it also is “the great American poem.” “The vast mosaic,
covering America’s people,” writes Thompson, “makes Gallery the great
American poem” (409). Black Americans, then, are “America’s people” and
Tolson has assured the strength of America’s own poetic tradition. “In addi-
tion to mastering poetical techniques, he has initiated a style of dramatically
lifting the Negro experience to a classical grace. Moreover, the staggering
design of the theme, which calls for a second volume, argues the point most
successfully that the criteria for poetry are not in Europe, but in America—
Tolson’s America” (409). Thompson, then, has no difficulty with a Afro-
Modernist text in 1965.
Robert Donald Spector of the Saturday Review also calls Tolson a “great
American poet” (29). In his review, which includes a discussion of Harlem
Gallery along with a reading of W. H. Auden’s About the House, Spector
finds that the “poetic establishment” has unjustly neglected Tolson. Yet,
Spector writes: “Here is a poet whose language, comprehensiveness, and val-
ues demand a critical sensitivity rarely found in any establishment” (29).
Spector asserts that “Tolson’s achievement defies easy illustration”; however,

he provides a summary reading of Harlem Gallery as follows:
What Tolson does in this volume is to respond to Gertrude Stein’s charge

that the Negro “suffers from Nothingness.” Here, in the richness and vari-
ety of his characters, with an allusiveness that absorbs classical, Biblical,
oriental, and African references, he has demonstrated the ludicrousness
of that fatuous remark. There is a “somethingness” that stirs in all his
characters: desires, ambitions, frustrations, and failures. (29)
Indeed, Tolson pointedly alludes to Stein within the poem:
Listen, Black Boy.

Did the High Priestess at 27 rue de Fleurus
assert, “The Negro suffers from nothingness”? (264)
Furthermore, in the 1965 interview he asserts: “Gertrude Stein’s judgment

that the Negro suffers from Nothingness revealed her profound ignorance
of African cultures” (“Interview” 185). Spector closes his review by noting
“the fantastic way in which discussion of esthetics are turned into social
comment” in the poem and “the incredible manner in which Tolson ranges
over every field of art” and “plays adroitly with language” (29).
Writing for the Fort Wayne News and Sentinel, Mary Rose Delancey agrees
that Tolson is responding to Stein, as she names “the two basic themes” of
the poem as “the nature of art and the accusation of Gertrude Stein that the
Negro ‘suffers from nothingness’” (4-A). Delancey describes Harlem Gallery
in straightforward terms, having no apparent problem with the poem’s
style or difficulty: “Truly this book, which is labeled Book I of a projected
‘Odyssey’ of the American Negro, displays a vast fund of knowledge of art,
literature, and philosophy. The 24 poems are written in a form similar to the
ode; however, they are actually narrative in style” (4-A).
Josephine Jacobsen devotes the majority of her review in the Baltimore
Evening Sun to arguing with Karl Shapiro’s statement in his introduction to
Harlem Gallery that Tolson “contravenes” “the ruling Greco-Judaic-Christian
culture” and “is in effect the enemy of the dominant culture of our time and
place.” Jacobsen finds this assertion of Shapiro’s “untenable” and his intro-
duction as a whole “singularly unpersuasive” (A20). Jacobsen, rather, finds a
major reason for lack of appreciation of Tolson to be his admirable “refusal to
be pushed into an inflexible stance, his ground held between two schools of
absolutists” (A20). Jacobsen does not specify what those two schools might
be, though a position of ground held between absolutists is a good description
of Tolson’s poetics. Continuing her argument with Shapiro, Jacobsen states:

“Not only does [Tolson’s] work do nothing so simplistic, and irrelevant to his
poetry, as ‘contravene’ an entire culture; he considers, tragically, wittily and
with great flexibility, the underside of that culture’s accomplishment” (A20).
She finds that Tolson’s “cast of Afro-Americans—beatnik bards, blues-sing-
ers, Africanists, bourgeois, dancers, reactionaries and racketeers—all are
alive, unexpected yet logical” and suggests that Book I of Tolson’s promised
series “promises a valuable and possibly even major work” (A20).
In dramatic fashion, John Sherwood of the Washington, DC, Evening
Star celebrates Tolson’s triumph in publishing Harlem Gallery 30 years after
his attempts to win a publisher for A Gallery of Harlem Portraits.
Melvin Beaunorus Tolson was trying to peddle his epic poem on Harlem
in the midst of the world’s greatest depression, but 340 solid pages of
classical hip poetry did not mix with apples and bread and the national
chant of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” in the early 1930s. So
Tolson waited. As janitor, actor, prizefighter, stevedore, trucker, waiter
in Philadelphia, short-order cook on the old St. Paul and Milwaukee
Railroad out of Kansas City . . . the former shoe-shine boy at Jack’s Barber
Shop in Independence, Mo. waited. (E-2)
The review features quotes from Tolson and an announcement, small town
newspaper-style, that “this relatively unknown poet is now visiting his son,
Wiley Wilson Tolson, of 717 Decatur St. NE, a biochemist with the Food
and Drug Administration” (E-2) showing the currency that poetry once had
in daily life in the United States.
Under headlines that declare “Tolson’s ‘Gallery’ Termed a Classic”
and “Langston Poet May Signal New Era,” Jack M. Bickham of the Daily
Oklahoman predicts an assured place for Tolson in literary history: “He may
be breaking through traditional forms and modes of expression toward a new
kind of verse for our new kind of world. If so, he will surely be remembered
as one of American’s greatest literary figures of all time” (10). He describes
the experience of reading Harlem Gallery as being plunged “unaware and
shattered into a kind of awareness that few could experience without a
broadening of understanding” (10).
Bickham tentatively disagrees with Shapiro’s statement about Tolson
writing “in Negro,” but goes on to describe Harlem Gallery in broader, and
ultimately more accurate, terms:
There is simply no way to crystallize or sum up the content or approach

of Tolson’s new book of verse. It’s a kind of stroll through Harlem, where
symbolic characters are met, with each adding to the basic story line. For
an idea of the kind of poetry it is, start with the brilliance of a T. S. Eliot,
add the earthy power of Whitman, toss in a dash of Frost, overlay with
the Negro viewpoint from Louis Armstrong to Malcolm X to Martin
Luther King, and perhaps you have a hint. (10)
For Bickham, Tolson represents a radical synthesis of American poetics,

including, quite perceptively, Eliot, Whitman, and Frost. In addition, he is
able to discern that one must consider Malcolm X and Martin Luther King
as part of Harlem Gallery ’s multivalent narrative viewpoint, in addition to
black artists like Armstrong. It is remarkable that reviewers at the time were
able to accept Tolson’s complexity in a way that even allows his seeming
contradictions, while some literary critics from the 1960s to 1980s were only
able to read Tolson reductively. Bickham is able to allow the poem to be
multilayered in both form and content. Moreover, there is no hint that the
majority of reviewers found Tolson’s approach to be inconsistent either with
black identity or with the black literary tradition.
Miner remains consistent with other reviewers in placing Tolson amongst
multiple lineages, modernist and nonmodernist: “The subject matter and
author’s attitude combine into a synthesis which absorbs earlier works of
comparably ambitious design, yet it still is uniquely itself. It is the heir of
Hart Crane, of Eliot and Pound, of Vachel Lindsay, and of Edith Sitwell’s
‘Façade’” (5D). Miner, whose review was published in the Kansas City Star,
also attributes the delayed recognition of Tolson to his formal choices, in this
case to his use of the modernist long poem. “It is his use of the long poem,
indeed, which may at least partially account for the tardiness of general
recognition. Had Mr. Tolson’s major efforts been devoted to short poems of
merit comparable to that of his extended works, then surely his name would
long since have become generally known” (5D). The public’s preference for
short, digestible poems that are easily consumed and do not offer resistance
or difficulty is one that continues in many circles to the present moment.
Toward the end of his life, Tolson was able, in his own unique fashion, to
counter the critical controversies that had followed his career. Discussing the
Curator from Harlem Gallery in an interview conducted in 1965,7 Tolson’s
terminology echoes that of Shapiro: “He and his darker brothers think in
Negro” (emphasis added). However, Tolson does not intend the essentialist
definition that Shapiro’s words suggest, which is clear as we read further into
the interview. In response to Shapiro’s assessment, Tolson states:
I am no soothsayer talking to Virgil’s dark Aeneas, before his descent

into the lower world of the black ghetto; however, I hazard that Shapiro
has pillaged my three books and discovered that I, as a black poet, have
absorbed the Great Ideas of the Great White World, and interpreted them
in the melting-pot idiom of my people. My roots are in Africa, Europe,
and America. (“Interview” 184)
In addition to engaging Shapiro here, Tolson also “talks back” to Tate,

engaging Tate’s controversial statement by stating that he (Tolson) has
“absorbed the Great Ideas of the Great White World.” However, Tolson
goes on to make clear that his intellectual traditions are rooted first in
Africa, in addition to Europe and America. In this one quote, Tolson man-
ages to comment on both Shapiro’s and Tate’s assessment of his work, neatly
incorporating—yet rejecting—both views. Tolson thus deftly constructs
for himself a dialectical position between the opposing views articulated by
Tate and Shapiro. Such rhetorical maneuvering gets Tolson out of the tight
places created for him by his critics, constructing instead a flexible position
from which to articulate his own Afro-Modernist ideology.
CHAPTER 4
Bound By Law—Langston Hughes in/

and the 1950s
“Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History Poem”

In “Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History Poem” (1951), Langston Hughes
writes and unwrites history, reflecting the mobility and stasis, the starts
and stops, on the path toward achievement of modern selfhood in a cul-
ture determined to infinitely defer African Americans’ freedoms. First pub-
lished in the February 1951 issue of Crisis, “Prelude” is a 208-line, 38-stanza
poem. In Crisis, it ran for four pages (87–90) while in The Collected Poems of
Langston Hughes (1995) it runs for six (379–384). Thus, it is not one of the
short lyrics to which present-day readers of the canonical Hughes may be
accustomed. For example, more than half of the Hughes poems in the sec-
ond edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2004)
are short lyrics from the 1920s—those poems for which Hughes is most well
known such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) and “Danse Africaine”
(1922). However, Hughes’s works that were first published in the 1950s that
are collected in the anthology (“Juke Box Love Song,” “Dream Boogie,”
“Harlem,” and “Motto”) that appear to be short lyrics as well, are all actu-
ally part of Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). Yet there is no indication
of that, leading readers to believe that Hughes’s poetics had not shifted in
30 years.
What does remain consistent is Hughes’s focus on African Americans
as a collective—specifically the so-called common people of “The Negro
Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), that is, poor and working-class
blacks. As Arnold Rampersad notes of the years 1948–1950 in Hughes’s
life: “While his own dream of solid, professional success and a home had
apparently come true, the hopes that had brought black folk north by the
millions remained either largely unrealized or so tainted by racism, poverty,
crime, and vice that the dream had turned bitter for many. Their plight
haunted him” (Life Vol. II 151). Though Hughes’s subject remains consis-
tent, his poetics does not. “Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History Poem,”
first presented publicly in 1950 and published in 1951, signals that Hughes’s
concern with the African American collective began to require a longer form
as he wrote works containing large swaths of diasporic history. The flower-
ing this global diasporic consciousness is informed by an understanding that
the flow and collision of peoples and cultures result in identities that are in
flux, rather than fixed. “Prelude,” a poem focused on history, is essential to
understanding how Hughes’s work transforms from the lyricism of “The
Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) to the more radical Afro-Modernist epic
experimentation of ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ (1961).
In “Prelude,” Hughes investigates African American collectivity by gaug-
ing the status of African Americans at mid-century against the master nar-
rative of American history, illustrating through the poem how achievement
of modernity has been repeatedly stalled for African Americans. In Turning
South Again (2001), Houston A. Baker, Jr., “re-thinks” his own theory of
black modernism, pointing out:
Primarily, black modernism signifies the achievement of a life-enhancing

and empowering public sphere mobility and the economic solvency of
the black majority . . . black modernism is coextensive with a black citizen-
ship that entails documented mobility (driver’s license, passport, green
card, social security card) and access to a decent job at a decent rate of
pay (33).
Baker also highlights the achievement of voting rights as evidence of

black modernism. It is important to note that in order to become “mod-
ern,” African Americans needed to secure rights that were already given to
the white majority. These public sphere rights are under investigation in
“Prelude to Our Age.” Without these legal rights, African Americans’ his-
tory in Hughes’s poem “shadows” the narrative of American nationhood, as
a ghost whose silhouette is cast from the margins.
For mid-century African American poets whose agencies as “Americans”
were still subjected to legal restriction, the very notion of nationhood in
their work is in flux, and under critique. Critical race theory pioneer Richard
Delgado explains: “Stories, parables, chronicles, and narratives are power-
ful means for destroying mindset—the bundle of presuppositions, received
wisdoms, and shared understandings against a background of which legal
Bound By Law ● 93
and political discourse takes place” (“Storytelling” 2413). As a document of

its legal and historical context, Hughes’s “Prelude” intervenes in the narra-
tives of citizenship and nationhood; Hughes’s “chronicling” serves to both
fill in the blanks in the parable of the nation, as well as represent the legal
and identitarian stasis that African Americans experienced in the nation
under Jim Crow. Representing this stasis, Hughes illustrates the traumas of
slavery, both those of the past and those reverberating into the then present
that prevent change and will not allow the future to be imagined.
In a time out of joint, American history as portrayed in “Prelude” is
haunted by both past and then-present African American figures. The
presence of these specters represents an “incomplete mourning” of racial
traumas, and without an incorporation (a “successful mourning”1) of that
material, the path to the future remains forever unseen. Thus, in “Prelude”
Hughes writes: “On all these rolls landmarking man, / The shadow of my
hand: / Negro” (Collected 379). Here the black man’s hand remains but a
shadow, a ghost haunting recorded history: “The shadow of my hand /
Across the printed word” (Collected 379). According to Jean-Michel Rabaté:
“To haunt signifies to ‘frequent’ a place, to inhabit it frequently, but to do so
in the mode of an obsessive absence, of nameless remorse” (4). The shadow
in “Prelude” exists in a state of being and not being, as implied in the term
“obsessive absence.” Further, the history of slavery and the histories of black
people’s triumphs “shadow” American history, and the remorse for slavery’s
impacts is indeed “nameless.” As Hughes’s title illustrates, this poem is a pref-
ace, or a precursor, representing a preliminary condition.2 Thus the “Prelude
to Our Age” is “A Negro History Poem,” illustrating that “our age”—that of
the American empire—is built upon the backs of black people. In addition,
the entire poem is a prelude to another age gestured toward, but never fully
realized in the poem. This new age of achievement of modern selfhood can-
not be conjured because the historical and legal narrative of nationhood that
defined the citizenry still excluded African Americans.
The “rolls landmarking man” in Hughes’s “Prelude” are official histo-
ries that exclude black people’s accomplishments, and despite the shadow
that the Negro’s hand casts over the printed word, the rolls are still visible,
readable. The African American body is twice disembodied here: First the
hand is separate from the body that animates it, and second the hand itself
is invisible; we only see its shadow. That shadow, or haunt, indicates an
unseen body, and importantly, a body without language. The histories of
these bodies are absent, then, not represented in the record. In contrast, the
struggle that Rabaté outlines in his study of what he terms “Anglo-Saxon
‘high modernism’” is an internal one. Indeed Rabaté’s central metaphor is
“the transformation of the writer into a specter, because his own past returns
whenever he imagines that he can predict, arrange, or control the future”

(3). However, in the world conjured by Hughes, the dramatization of this
conflict occurs in the social, rather than in the individual, realm. The ghost
in Hughes’s poem—of black peoples’ histories and the black body itself—is
both dead and undead, yet never alive, and haunts presently from its place
within the shadows, casting itself as palimpsest on the “rolls landmarking
man.”
Emphasizing the motif of written and unwritten histories in the third
stanza of the poem, Hughes initiates a minitour of the move from oral to
written forms of communication:
At first only
The spoken word of bard or chief
And the beaten drum
That carried instant history
Across the night,
Or linked man with the mystery
Of powers beyond sight.
Pictures on stone, hieroglyphics,
Parchment, illuminated scrolls. (Collected 379)
Hughes begins this stanza within an Africanist context, taking note of the
“spoken word of bard or chief” and the beating of the drum that carries
“instant history.” Significantly, the bard and the chief play the same role
here, signaling the African griot, the public singer who carries his or her
people’s history. Hughes acknowledges “the mystery / Of powers beyond
sight” held by the spoken word and beating drum3 —forms of history not
written, that is, not “seen”—but moves quickly in the last two lines of the
stanza through technologies of writing, from hieroglyphics found on stone,
to illuminated scrolls. At the end of this history, the poem (and the reader’s
eye) lands upon an indented couplet: “Homer’s / ‘Blameless Ethiopians’.”
The couplet appears between the stanza quoted above and a tercet that is
repeated throughout the poem, becoming a kind of chorus:
On all these rolls landmarking man,

The shadow of my hand:
Negro. (379)
Hughes thus moves smoothly from an Africanist context out to a Western

context, and back to an Africanist context once again, while drawing atten-
tion to the presence of African people in two foundational Western texts,
Bound By Law ● 95
The Iliad and The Odyssey, and thus to Africans’ repressed placement at the
center of Western culture.
The spacing in the poem lines up and thus draws a direct connection
between the “Blameless Ethiopians” of Classical texts and the modern
Negro.
Homer’s
“Blameless Ethiopians”
On all these rolls landmarking man,
Negro. (379)
This move early in the poem helps to lay the foundation for the develop-
ment of a diasporic consciousness. Rampersad asserts: “The reputation of
the Ethiopians for piety was established by the time of composition of the
Homeric epic poems (around 800 B.C.E.)” (Collected 669). In addition, such
information was in circulation amongst black intellectuals during the 1940s
and 1950s. “Hughes probably found this information,” Rampersad contin-
ues, “as well as other material in the poem, in Arna Bontemps’s The Story of
the Negro (1948), a volume dedicated to Langston Hughes” (669).
In beginning the poem with Homer’s Ethiopians, Hughes draws the
reader’s attention to the fact that in both The Iliad and The Odyssey, the
Ethiopians are in a position of high privilege: they are visited by both gods
and kings. In The Iliad 1.423–4, Zeus and the other gods feast with the
“Aithiopians”: “For Zeus went to the blameless Aithiopians at the Ocean /
yesterday to feast, and the rest of the gods went with him.” At the outset
of The Odyssey 1.22–4, the god Poseidon visits the “Aithiopians” as well:
“But Poseidon was gone now to visit the far Aithiopians, / Aithiopians, most
distant of men.” He returns from Ethiopia in 5.281. King Menelaos also vis-
its the Ethiopians. Describing his sufferings in 4.83–5 Menelaos recounts:
“I wandered to Cyprus and Phoenicia, to the Egyptians, / I reached the
Aithiopians, Eremboi, Sidonians, / and Libya where the rams grow their
horns quickly.” Calling Homer’s “Ethiopians,” “perhaps wholly fairy-tale”
J. W. Gardner asserts: “There is general agreement that from Homer
onwards references in Classical writers to Ethiopia and the Ethiopians are
almost never to modern Ethiopia or to the highland peoples who were the
ancestors or predecessors of present-day inhabitants of the Ethiopian pla-
teau” (185). Nonetheless, he agrees that for Classical authors “one area in
particular came to be thought of as the land of the Ethiopians—Nubia, now
part of the Sudan” (185). The Ethiopians assume a status in Homer’s texts
that is both mythic and actual. The interventions of “Prelude” are thus liter-
ary and historical, textually grounded and historically instructive.
Such an assertion of what Lorenzo Thomas calls “the Negro’s eternal
presence—and participation in the great works of many civilizations—
is one of the arguments put forward by black nationalists to counter the
racist charge that people of African ancestry have had no significant role
in history” (185). However, the ideology operating within “Prelude” is
not Afrocentric; neither does the poet seek to raise the status of Africans
by privileging their relation to the Classics. Rather, Hughes displays a
diasporic consciousness that operates dialectically between these two poles.
The ideological position that the poem assumes allows for a fluidity that
encompasses the range of experiences, and historical contributions, of peo-
ple of African descent throughout the globe. The poem says, in effect, we
(people of African descent) are here (and here and here) and always have
been. The poem does, then, emphasize “the Negro’s eternal presence” as
Thomas points out; however, the poem also demonstrates that “the move-
ments of groups always necessarily intersect, leading to exchange, assimi-
lation, expropriation, coalition, or dissension,” as Brent Hayes Edwards
posits in his theorizing of the term “diaspora” (Practice 3). African cultures
have affected, and been affected by, the cultures encountered through the
movements of people under globalization, or in an illustration from the
poem itself: “Arab and African; the Moors / Gave Spain her castanets / And
Senegal her prayers” (379). Thus Hughes’s diasporic consciousness operates
across national boundaries,4 displaying in the poem an understanding of
the development of racial identities within conditions of diaspora that fore-
shadows the development of contemporary critical theory, including criti-
cal race theories developed by legal scholars in the late twentieth century.5
For example, Hughes’s global consciousness allows him to demonstrate
that blackness is not an unchanging, ahistorical identity—a concept central
to critical race theory. As John Calmore explains, “Critical race theory begins
with a recognition that ‘race’ is not a fixed term. Instead, ‘race’ is a fluctuat-
ing, decentered complex of social meanings that are formed and transformed
under the constant pressures of political struggle” (2160). Critical race theo-
rists also illustrate the ways in which law actually shapes definitions of race.
Working with an understanding of the construction of race that mirrors these
recent theories—though preceding them by several decades—Hughes’s poem
also illustrates that the “exchange, assimilation, expropriation, coalition, or
dissension” brought about through diaspora creates multiple black identities
that are dependent, in part, upon local historical and political conditions.
This understanding of the multiplicity within diasporic “blackness”
becomes important because Hughes distinguishes between “Negro” (African
Bound By Law ● 97
American) identity and those subject positions available to people of African

descent elsewhere around the globe. This focus on the construction of
African American identity is emphasized by the fact that Hughes italicizes
“Negro” throughout the poem. The only other words italicized in the work
are lyrics from the spirituals. But while Jeff Westover argues that Hughes is
seeking in this poem to “imaginatively realiz[e] an ideal diasporan unity”
between America and Africa, my view is that Hughes purposely upholds the
contrast between African American identity and other national identities in
order to highlight the devastating effects of slavery on African American cul-
ture (1221).
Emphasizing this contrast in “Prelude,” Hughes compares people of
African descent in America with those throughout Europe and Asia. In a
parallel move, Hughes highlights the contrast of the written and the unwrit-
ten, noting in his Pan-Africanist vision of history that “In other lands Dumas
and Pushkin wrote—” (380). Hughes was, of course, making the point that
both Frenchman Alexandre Dumas, author of The Count of Monte Cristo
and The Three Musketeers, and Russian Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin,
author of Boris Godunov, were of partial African descent. While such works
of literature earned wide acclaim, in America, under conditions of chattel
slavery, “we, / Who could not write, made songs.”6
Swing low, sweet chariot,

Coming for to carry me home . . .
Oh, I looked over Jordan
And what did I see— (380)
Who one sees in the poem follows in the next verse: “Phillis, Crispus,
Toussaint, / Banneker, Dumas, Pushkin” (380). The linking of these his-
torical figures highlights Hughes’s global consciousness:
All of these were me—

Not free:
As long as one
Man is in chains.
No man is free. (381)
Hughes recognizes the connection of the Negro’s struggle in America

with those of people of African descent worldwide. The difference in
America, Hughes stresses, is that due to the history of slavery, blacks in
the United States during this time were forced to find their voices through
song—through the unwritten. And although Hughes does draw attention

to the soundings of black culture with his inclusion of what W. E. B. Du
Bois calls the “Sorrow Songs,” (Souls 2) in this poem silence is specifically
marked by exclusion from written history.
Hughes deepens this contrast by punning on “right” and “write” when
introducing verses of the songs. Here we see Hughes’s understanding of
archive as law (in the Derridian sense): in order to achieve legal rights, one
must first be written into the record. Thus, the first spiritual is introduced:
“those of us who had no rights / made an unwritten song”:
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt land,
And tell old Pharaoh
To let my people go . . . (380)
The second spiritual (“Swing low, sweet chariot,”) is introduced as fol-

lows: “we, / Who could not write, made songs” (Collected 380). Thus the
reader visually and aurally links the acquisition of rights with the act of
writing: “those of us who had no rights” and “we, / Who could not write,”
while also showing that African Americans during slavery rebelled through
making unwritten songs. With the gesture linking rights with writing,
Hughes aligns himself with the themes of the classic slave narrative, such as
Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself (1845), which demonstrates
that literacy is the first step toward both mental and physical freedom. In
Douglass’s Narrative, Douglass’s master, Mr. Auld, upon finding that his
wife has begun teaching Douglass “the A, B, C,” states: “If you give a nigger
an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his
master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in
the world . . . It would forever unfit him to be a slave” (78). As represented in
this text, learning does in fact “spoil” Douglass, leading him to the realiza-
tion that he can no longer live under the conditions of chattel slavery, and he
eventually plans and executes a successful escape.
Hughes, however, is careful to make clear that the silent, or unlettered,
status of the African American is not race-specific. By drawing the reader’s
attention to the accomplishments of Dumas and Pushkin, for example,
“Prelude” illustrates that the silence of African Americans is a country-
specific predicament brought about by the historical conditions of slavery,
and therefore not an inherent feature of the supposed racial inferiority of
people of African descent. Thus, the United States is specifically indicted
for its repression of black history and culture through outlawing, and
Bound By Law ● 99
in other ways impeding, African Americans’ acquisition of literacy. For

example, in 1830–1831, the state of North Carolina passed a law prevent-
ing all persons from teaching slaves to read or write, because literacy “has
a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insur-
rection and rebellion” (Marable and Mullings 41). In addition, as critics
from Douglass onward have noted, whites’ claims that blacks were infe-
rior due to lack of “higher reasoning” skills such as reading, were unwit-
tingly undercut by the need to pass repeated anti-literacy laws to ward off
the “danger” of large numbers of slaves and ex-slaves learning to read. If
people of African descent were in fact incapable of learning to read, there
would have been no need for such laws. Indeed, the poem teaches us that
elsewhere throughout the diaspora (France, Russia), writers of African
descent contribute to great national literatures.
Hughes makes clear that the politics of the written page are always at
stake throughout the poem, as this poem assumes the task of filling in those
pages previously left blank in the historical record. As the maker of the
poem, Hughes’s, or the poet’s, hand possesses the power to bring African
American history out of the shadows. As the work develops, the reader is
instructed that the Negro’s hand in the poem is not only in shadow in con-
trast to official, dominant culture versions of history. The Negro is also in
the shadow of global diasporic histories in which people of African descent
play central roles: for example, the Ethiopians in the Homeric epics; “Aesop,
Antar, Terence, / Various Pharaohs, / Sheba, too”; and the Moors (Collected
379), in addition to the previous examples of Dumas and Pushkin. Writing
onto America’s (literal and figurative) blank page, Hughes uses “Prelude” to
record the contributions of African Americans to the “ever growing history
of man.” As African American intellectuals and African American publica-
tions come onto the scene, the speaker in “Prelude” notes: “All the time the
written record grows—” (Collected 383).
With the advent of African American publications including The Afro-
American, The Black Dispatch, The Crisis, Phylon, Opportunity, and Native
Son,
Papers, stories, poems the whole world knows—

The ever growing history of man
Shadowed by my hand:
Negro. (Collected 383)
Although the speaker asserts that these are publications “the whole world
knows—” it as if they are struggling to “catch up” to the advancing his-
torical record in America, as the black hands that created these African
American texts still remain in shadow. The official American historical

record does not recognize or include these black-authored publications.
The “Negro” sees but is not seen, despite the prestige of the black histori-
cal figures whom Hughes catalogs. The men mentioned in just one stanza
(listed in the poem by last name only) include W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G.
Woodson, E. Franklin Frazier, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, Claude McKay,
and Countee Cullen. For those perhaps lesser-known figures here, Hughes
includes full names: Chicago Defender founder Robert S. Abbott, and former
slave and radical journalist T. Thomas Fortune. Hughes makes sure that
they are seen while at the same time illustrating their invisibility.
In Specters of Marx, Derrida writes of “the visor effect ” (7), “the power to
see without being seen” (8). The specter that Derrida theorizes, however,
is quite different from that of the disembodied hand conjured by Hughes:
Derrida writes of Hamlet’s father. The “visor effect” of the king’s armor
when he reappears as a ghost creates “the basis [from] which we inherit the
law” (7). Even when the visor is raised, “its possibility continues to sig-
nify that someone, beneath the armor, can safely see without being seen or
without being identified” (8). Yet African Americans do not represent law
in Hughes’s poem—quite the opposite. “Even when it is raised,” Derrida
writes, “the visor remains, an available resource and structure . . . [which]
distinguishes a visor from the mask with which, nevertheless, it shares this
incomparable power, perhaps the supreme insignia of power: the power to
see without being seen” (8). The African mask, however—what Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. terms the “mask in motion”—is inseparable from its performative
functions, and “with its immobilized features all the while mobile, itself
is a metaphor for dialectic—specifically, a dialectic or binary opposition
embracing unresolved or potentially unresolvable social forms, notions of
origins, or complex issues of value” (Figures 168). The mask contains, as well
as reflects, “a coded, secret, hermetic world, a world discovered only by the
initiate” (Figures 167). The mask, then, divides those who can decipher the
codes, from those who cannot.
This reference to a “coded, secret, hermetic world,” leads us to Du Bois’s
metaphor of the veil, which further elucidates the African American experi-
ence of seeing without being seen. Though the veil obstructs, shutting the
young Du Bois out of the white children’s world (Souls 4), there is also move-
ment within the veil “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman,
the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with
a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world” (Souls 5). Like
the baby born with the caul, the Negro is “gifted with second-sight,” special
knowledge, prescience. Within the veil there is knowledge of the “deeper
recesses” of Negro life, “the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human
Bound By Law ● 101
sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls” (Souls 2), the information that
Hughes also archives in “Prelude to Our Age.” Thus, although the place-
ment of the veil “only lets [the Negro] see himself through the revelation of
the other world” creating the condition of double consciousness (Souls 5), it
is important to remember that Du Bois leaves open the possibility for move-
ment and self-possession, for only the African American sees both within
and through the veil. This possession of second sight differs from that of
a white American who, without recognizing it, sees only the veil, or in the
words of Paul Laurence Dunbar, “the mask that grins and lies” (71). Within
Hughes’s poem the Negro sees his own history, and that of the larger white-
dominated American historical record, but the official record does not see
or recognize him.
The poem, therefore, represents the movement of black history within
the veil, detailed by Hughes’s many lists. In the twelfth stanza, for exam-
ple, Hughes mentions Crispus Attacks, a black man who was the first
casualty of the American Revolution in 1770; Benjamin Banneker, a free
African American born in 1731 who wrote his own almanac; and Toussaint
L’Ouverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution. As the poem moves forward
in history,
Lincoln:
1863.
Once slaves—
“Henceforth and forever free.” (381)
Hughes uses a Whitmanian anaphora, to record the following in the twenty-

fourth stanza:
Free to build my churches and my schools—

Mary McLeod Bethune.
Free to explore clay and sweet potatoes—
Dr. Carver.
Free to take our songs across the world—
Anderson, Maynor, Robeson,
Josephine Baker, Florence Mills (382)
This stanza also mentions sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson; lawyer

and civil rights activist William H. Hastie; composer and organizer of
the School of Music at Tuskegee Institute William I. Dawson; minister
and elected official Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.; and blood banking inven-
tor Charles Richard Drew. These lists starkly contrast with the inertia and
lack of progress where the official “rolls landmarking man” ignore African
Americans’ contributions.
Significantly, the final enactments of this contrasting mobility and iner-
tia occur in the poem in the legal realm, for the African American subject
cannot speak the law but is, instead, subject to it. Even by the end of the
poem, when it appears to the reader that Hughes has succeeded in display-
ing African Americans’ contributions to democracy, written them into his
own archive, the black man still remains in shadow:
Thus I help to build democracy

For our nation.
Thus by decree across the history of our land—
Negro (384)
The opening lines here “Thus I help to build democracy / For our nation,”
illustrate that African Americans’ contributions to democracy necessitate a
legal claim for inclusion in “the history of our land.” By this same “decree”;
however, the Negro is in shadow, and he is placed there by legal requirement.
The word “decree” is crucially located in the center of this section so that
it is possible to interpret the stanza in these two ways simultaneously: the
Negro helps to build democracy for our nation, showing his foundational
contributions to American nationhood, yet he is decreed outside of the legal
privileges of that nation at the same time. “Decree” works to link the content
of the first three lines, thus legislating the inclusion of blacks “across the
history of our land.” In addition, “decree” links the last three lines together:
“Thus by decree across the history of our land— / The shadow of my hand: /
Negro” (384). The dash also does essential work, underscoring the linkage of
the first three lines, while setting off the last two. The line proceeding the
dash, “Thus by decree across the history of our land” therefore works as a
kind of toggle, linking up or linking down.
The court cases that Hughes cites at the end of the poem mirror this
action. Although blacks are decreed equal “All the way from a Jim Crow
dining car / To the United States Supreme Court—” (383–384) they also
remain immobilized because “although the Supreme Court ruled in 1946
that a Virginia statute requiring segregated seating interfered with interstate
commerce and was thus invalid, . . . Jim Crow travel laws remained in force
until 1954” (“Digest Of Jim-Crow Laws”). Thus blacks are immobilized
within the mobilization of the train, moving and yet not moving.
Hughes wrote “Prelude” specifically for the twenty-fifth anniversary of
the Schomburg Collection,7 an archive begun in 1926 when the personal
collection of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg was added to the Division of

Negro Literature of The New York Public Library. Notably, the Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture endures as one of the most signifi-
cant African American archives. At the dedication exercises and celebra-
tion on October 15, 1950, Hughes presented the poem publicly for the
first time (Collected 669). An occasional poem written to celebrate an
archive, “Prelude” also functions as an archive. Intervening in the voids in
official records, Hughes writes his own national history, highlighting the
fact that the construction of the archive—of memory—must constantly
be tended.
The importance of archives lies not only in the ways in which their con-
tents can be used physically to mark history; as Jacques Derrida shows, the
archive also creates within it implications extending to the exercise of power
and social control. In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Derrida explains
that the term archive “coordinates two principles in one”: “commencement”
and “commandment.” Beginning with the Greek arkhe¯ , Derrida joins
the first principle, “there where things commence,” the “physical, histori-
cal, ontological principle,” with the second, the legal valence “there where
men and gods command,” which is also importantly “there where author-
ity, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given” (1).
The historical and social implications of the making of the archive are thus
always contested. In his work of the 1950s, Hughes intervenes into the con-
struction of the archive of US history, using his poems to comment upon the
making of national identity. As an African American situated under the his-
torical weight of the state using the entire force of its various apparatuses—
religious, economic, and legal—to destroy the history and culture of people
of African descent in order to preserve the institution of slavery, Hughes
“writes back” by using the poem form to archive African American accom-
plishment. Hughes writes into the voids in official records, making his own
histories, highlighting the fact that the construction of the archive—of
memory—must constantly be tended.
“There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of
memory,” Derrida reminds us, “Effective democratization can always be
measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to
the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation” ( Archive 4). Combating
potential effacement by the social and legal conditions of daily life for black
men in mid-twentieth century America, Hughes presents a revisionist agenda
constituted not only by the conscious, assertive actions of writing people of
African descent into the historical record, but also by a palimpsestic writing
onto an action of overwriting. In doing so, he overwrites accepted narratives
of American nationhood.
Exploring further the origins of the meanings of the archive (or the archive
of meaning), Derrida asserts that the initial meaning of “archive” derives
from the Greek arkheion: “a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of
the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded” (Archive 2).
The archons are not only entrusted with guarding the documents in the
archive; they are also charged with interpreting them: “Entrusted to such
archons, these documents in effect speak the law” (2). The “dwelling” of
the archons and the archive importantly “marks this institutional passage
from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret
to the nonsecret,” a process that has significant implications for assigning
and consolidating meaning (2–3). “By consignation,” Derrida writes, “we
do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act of assigning
residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in
a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through gathering
together signs” (3). Further, “consignation aims to coordinate a single cor-
pus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity
of an ideal configuration” (3). Centering African American history within
the narrative of an American history that ignored people of African descent,
as Hughes does in “Prelude,” disrupts the unitary system of belief necessary
to cohere national identity in the 1950s.
The process of gathering and classifying that Derrida describes is not
neutral; it contains—and conceals—within it the power to assign and inter-
pret meaning, to “speak the law” (Archive 2). This power is played out in
the institutionalization of the archive: “A science of the archive must include
the theory of this institutionalization, that is to say, the theory both of the
law which begins by inscribing itself there and of the right which authorizes
it” (4). The implication of archive as law has particular import for African
American poets writing in pre–civil rights America, as I shall demonstrate by
taking Derrida’s theory of the archive—and its Freudian underpinnings—
and moving African American experience to the center.
Using African American theorists to engage Freud requires that the
psychoanalytic paradigm be redrawn. Derrida’s psychoanalytic frame—an
analysis of the Freudian “death drive”—exposes the “fever” of the uncon-
scious to both save and destroy. Also called the “destruction drive” or the
“aggression drive,” the death drive is, for Freud, originally a process working
within (and upon) the individual. When African Americans are brought
into this psychoanalytic context, however, it becomes apparent that one sig-
nificant manifestation of the death drive is the death drive that comes from
without, not from within, the self (for example in the terror imposed by
whites lynching blacks). Freud himself suggests a mirroring of the processes
of the individual unconscious in group dynamics in his assertion in Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego that “the contrast between individual
psychology and social or group psychology, which at a first glance may seem
to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is exam-
ined more closely” (627). In fact, Freud found individual and group psy-
chology to be essentially the same. Published in 1921, Freud’s comments on
group psychology, which he defines as being “concerned with the individual
man as a member of a race, of a nation, of a caste, of a profession, of an insti-
tution, or as a component part of a crowd of people who have been organized
into a group at some particular time for some definite purpose” (627–628),
provide a useful follow-up to his postulations on the death drive in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920.
What I am terming a culture of the death drive works to strip African
Americans of humanity, language, and lineage.8 In reordering the focus of
death-drive theory to include the specific circumstances of African American
life, we can begin to see the significance of the archive as law for African
American poets—particularly those living and writing in the Jim Crow
era. In “Prelude to Our Age,” Hughes not only addresses his contemporary
moment but also confronts the weight of the effacement of black people’s
agency that was initiated in America’s prenational period even as the col-
onists spoke out for autonomy from Great Britain. In a letter to Samson
Occum published in 1774, Phillis Wheatley elegantly analyzes the multiple
hypocrisies of colonists who fought for their own freedom while holding
slaves, decrying the “strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and
Actions are so diametrically opposite.” She wryly concludes: “How well the
Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive
Power over others agree,—I humbly think it does not require the Penetration
of a Philosopher to determine” (225).
Furthermore, Hughes challenges the construction of Eurocentric his-
torical philosophies that in various ways conflate blackness with absence. In
addition to the impact of G. W. F. Hegel’s broad pronouncement that the
entire continent of Africa existed outside of history, a viewpoint mirrored
by Europe’s colonialist programs, Hughes wrote in a context within which
the racial politics of some white modernist writers reinforced ideologies such
as Hegel’s.9 White modernists working in a variety of styles employed the
metaphor of blackness to express such themes as silence and abjection. These
metaphors traverse both unconscious and conscious states. Consider Laura
(Riding) Jackson’s “O Vocables of Love”:
O vocables of love,
O zones of dreamt responses
Where wing on wing folds in
The negro centuries of sleep

And the thick lips compress
Compendiums of silence— (Jackson 97)
In a poem struggling to express “the last crushed vocable,” blackness per-

forms the act of silencing: “the thick lips compress / Compendiums of
silence—.” Inside “the negro centuries of sleep,” there is no history, no lan-
guage (97).10
In addition, Michael North argues that some white modernists relegated
black culture to the role of the “primitive,” a category they believed they
could exploit as a kind of storehouse of new energy for their own work. In
The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth Century Literature
(1994), North shows how these modernists experimented with a kind of
blackface dialect, which he links to the American tradition of minstrelsy:
“Mimicry of blacks is a traditional American device allowing whites to rebel
against English culture and simultaneously use it to solidify their domina-
tion at home” (81). Thus white modernists could distinguish themselves
as “American,” throwing off English orthodoxy via blackface masquerade,
while also blindly reinforcing white racial domination in America. Working
against such multiple forms of erasure, Hughes produces accounts of the
accomplishments of people of African descent not only in America, but also
throughout the diaspora.
Despite the warnings Derrida outlines, he sounds a positive note toward
the end of Archive Fever : “The archontic is at best the takeover of the archive
by the brothers. The equality and the liberty of brothers. A certain, still viva-
cious idea of democracy” (95). Noting Freud’s illumination of the archon-
tic principle of the archive, Derrida writes: “No one has analyzed, that is
also to say, deconstructed, the authority of the archontic principle better
than he” (95). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Freud’s legacies, it is through
the lens of gender that Derrida’s optimistic view of the potential effects of
the “takeover of the archive” begins to unravel. Derrida admits that “in
[Freud’s] theoretical theses as in the compulsion of his institutionalizing
strategy, Freud repeated the patriarchal logic” by naming the patriarchal
right (Vaterrecht) as “the civilizing progress of reason” (95). This Vaterrecht
has been so successful that “certain people can wonder if, decades after his
death, his sons, so many brothers, can yet speak in their own name” (95).
And, finally, Derrida wonders what would happen if Freud’s daughter ever
came to life, if she “was ever anything other than a phantasm or a specter”
(95). So too is the black man’s hand in Hughes’s “Prelude” cast in shadow,
a specter haunting recorded history: “The shadow of my hand / across the
printed word” (379).
At the time of the poem’s publication, “the NAACP was beginning to

support challenges to segregation at the elementary school level [and] [f]ive
separate cases were filed in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, the District
of Columbia, and Delaware” (“Teaching With Documents”).11 The final
decision in Brown vs. Board declaring “separate but equal” public schools
unconstitutional was handed down in 1954, three years after “Prelude” was
published in Crisis. The year of the poem’s publication thus represents a
kind of tipping point where African Americans were on the verge of achiev-
ing some legal victories, but are still subject to the tyrannies of Jim Crow.
Although Brown was decided in 1954, actual changes in the daily lives
of African Americans were slow to come. Critiquing “triumphalist history,”
critical race theory shows that favorable precedent such as Brown v. Board
“tends to deteriorate over time, cut back by narrow lower-court interpretation,
administrative foot dragging, and delay” (Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race
5). For example, the first attempts to integrate public schools in Memphis,
Tennessee, the city where Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered, did not
occur until 1958 when the mother of eight-year-old African American Gerald
Young attempted to enroll him in the fourth grade at Vollentine Elementary,
an all-white school. Gerald and his mother were denied entrance and Gerald
was sent back to Hyde Park, an all-black school, even though the all-white
school was closer to his home. By 1961, seven years after Brown, there were
still no blacks in Memphis enrolled in white schools. Hughes’s metaphors of
deferral and stasis have anchors in these real life experiences.
After several attempts to convince the Board of Education to volun-

tarily desegregate the schools were ignored, Gerald Young and seventeen
other Black school children filed suit on March 31, 1960 in the federal
district court in Memphis . . . The case, entitled Northcross v. Board of
Education, was heard more than a year later. On May 2, 1961, the judg-
ment from District Judge Marion Boyd delivered a victory for the Board
of Education, denying the requested injunction and plan for compulsory
integration. (Kiel 270–271)
The black students’ fight for access to schools in Memphis continued for
three decades in the courts before the case was finally dropped. The state
of inequality that presaged the case, however, remains unremedied, in part
because of massive “white flight” to surrounding majority-white county
schools and private, religious-based schools. Kiel explains: “On April 23,
1999, the Northcross case was formally discharged. The case was not dis-
missed because the plaintiffs had achieved their initial goals; rather, by the
1990s, it was clear that desegregating the Memphis City Schools was no
longer an accomplishable task” (296). Indeed, Memphis City Schools still

remain separate and unequal.12
Law professor Derrick Bell’s landmark analysis of Brown argues that
rather than a moral victory over the immoral acts of racism, the Supreme
Court’s decision was a response rooted in “changing economic conditions
and the self-interest of elite whites” (Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race
22). After all, “The NAACP Legal Defense Fund had been courageously
and tenaciously litigating school desegregation cases for years, usually losing
or, at best, winning narrow victories” (Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race
22). Although Bell’s analysis was decried by many when it was published in
the Harvard Law Review (1980), legal historian Mary Dudziak later uncov-
ered further information in the archives of the US Department of State
and US Department of Justice that buttresses Bell’s argument. “During that
period, as well, the United States was locked in the Cold War, a titanic
struggle with the forces of international communism for the loyalties of the
uncommitted emerging nations, much of which were black, brown, or Asian”
(Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race 23). Furthermore, “When the Justice
Department intervened on the side of the NAACP for the first time in a
major school-desegregation case, it was responding to a flood of secret cables
and memos outlining the United States’ interest in improving its image in
the eyes of the Third World” (Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race 23–24).
Thus, it was prudent for the Justice Department to decry racial segregation
in the United States in order to win the support of Third World nations
for the American government’s fight against the “spread of Communism.”
In the parlance of critical race theory, Bell’s analysis of Brown is called
“revisionist history,” the task of which is to reexamine “America’s histori-
cal record, replacing comforting majoritarian interpretations of events with
ones that square more accurately with minorities’ experience. It also offers
evidence, sometimes suppressed, in that very record, to support those new
interpretations” (Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race 24). Significantly, this
is also an apt description of Hughes’s project in “Prelude.”
As Hughes continues to probe the definitions and boundaries of nation-
hood and citizenship in “Prelude,” it is important to remember when read-
ing the poem that the repeated legal efforts to include African Americans
within the category of “citizen” achieved success only incrementally, which
the necessity for the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth Amendments to
the Constitution illustrates. Significant legal arguments about the confer-
ring of citizenship to blacks also surrounded the Dred Scott Decision.
Debates about racial prerequisites to citizenship arose at the end of the

Civil War when Senator Charles Sumner sought to expunge Dred Scott,
the Supreme Court decision which had held that Blacks were not citi-
zens, by striking any reference to race from the naturalization statute.
His efforts failed because of racial animosity in much of Congress toward
Asians and Native Americans. (Lopez 3–4)
As Ian F. Haney Lopez explains in White By Law (1996), “In its first words
on the subject of citizenship, Congress in 1790 restricted naturalization to
‘white persons’” (1). In 1870, Congress elected to allow “persons of African
nativity, or African descent” (Lopez 31) to naturalize, while persons of other
races were not extended this same right. “Though the requirements for
naturalization changed frequently thereafter,” the initial proscription set by
Congress in 1790 specifying racial prerequisites to citizenship “endured for
over a century and a half, remaining in force until 1952 ” (emphasis added)
(Lopez 1).
While the debates over whom to include in the citizenry moved out of
the black-white binary, the law, however, simultaneously enforced it, unable
to account for persons considered neither “black” nor “white.” Lopez cites
a number of cases in which persons of Asian heritage, for example, are not
granted citizenship as “white” persons, but neither were they considered to
be “black.” The terms of the naturalization cases cited in White By Law
illustrate the stark “white” / “non-white” binary inscribed by the law, show-
ing that “to be unfit for naturalization—that is to be non-White—implied
a certain degeneracy of intellect, morals, self-restraint, and political values”
(16). Furthermore, although the rights of blacks were seemingly protected
by inclusion in the citizenry by both birthright and naturalization, the his-
tory of Jim Crow proves otherwise.
Naturalization is defined as “the conferring of the nationality of a state
upon a person after birth, by whatever means” (Lopez 227). As descendants
of slaves who were property and not persons, and therefore not citizens, it
is appropriate historically to also consider African Americans as stateless
within the boundaries of their own state. In the Convention relating to the
Status of Stateless Persons held in 1954, The Office of the United Nations
High Commissioner for Human Rights passed a resolution defining a “state-
less person” simply as “a person who is not considered as a national by any
State under the operation of its law” (Office). Article 26 of the Convention,
“Freedom of movement,” states: “Each Contracting State shall accord to
stateless persons lawfully in its territory the right to choose their place of
residence and to move freely within its territory, subject to any regulations
applicable to aliens generally in the same circumstances” (Office). Keep in
mind that Jim Crow travel and housing practices were still active at this
time, restricting African Americans’ choice of residence and ability to move
freely. Though not, of course, considered refugees by the UN, blacks in

America in the 1950s still faced these and other restrictions and dangers of
the “stateless persons” the UN sought to protect. By showing the separation
of the Negro from the narrative of American nationhood, Hughes illustrates
in “Prelude” the complexities of the Negro’s continuing “non-citizen” status
under Jim Crow.
The inertia present in “Prelude” (one that will be freed up in the move-
ment of ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ a decade later) is
given an image in “Consider Me”: that of being caught and immobilized
by hierarchies of power, a condition of being subject to dominant culture
violence, rather than modern, self-owning subject. Hughes demonstrates in
“Consider Me,” also published in 1951, that the black man is still immobi-
lized, “Caught in a crack.” The “colored boy” who is “Downtown at eight /
Sometimes working late,” apologizes to his “Sugar” because “One don’t
make enough / For all the stuff / It takes to live” (Collected 386):
Forgive me
What I lack,
Black,
Caught in a crack
That splits the world in two (Collected 386)
Significantly, there is no way out of the polarizing oppositions of black and

white, of rich and poor in this poem. Hughes also demonstrates the extent
of the emasculation performed by Jim Crow by describing the protagonist
as a “colored boy” and rhyming “Black” with “lack.” In emphasizing that
race itself was used as a reason to deprive African Americans of economic
opportunities, Hughes also demonstrates the dangers of attempting to fight
back: one may indeed be “caught.” This inertia becomes the “nothing” in
Montage of a Dream Deferred:
A certain
amount of nothing
in a dream deferred.
....................
A certain
amount of impotence
in a dream deferred. (Collected 427, 428)
The “nothing,” or lack, becomes the ultimate symbol of emasculation:

impotence.
The inertia present in this nothing, we might also call a sense of futility
that Hughes increasingly felt about the possibility for African Americans to
achieve self-realization within the structures of a racist society.
In his grandest artistic guise, when he assumed the mantle of poet of his
people, Langston Hughes was the Dream Keeper, who urged others to
“Hold fast to dreams” . . . Now, ironically, the personal realization of his
dream of owning a home apparently triggered in him a heightened sense
of the futility of Harlem dreams—not completely futile, perhaps, but
delayed so persistently that it amounted to a denial. (Rampersad, Life
Vol. II 152)
Thus, Hughes does not anticipate what will be written upon the page of
tomorrow in “Prelude.” Bound in the restrictions of Jim Crow America, it is
as if the imagination cannot move forward; the song we anticipate to follow
the “Prelude,” cannot be written until the conditions of today are recognized
and rectified.
All this
A prelude to our age:
Today.
Tomorrow
Is another
Page. (384)
Montage of a Dream Deferred

Drawing on African American popular music, what Hughes describes in his
note at the beginning of the poem as “jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-
woogie and be-bop” (Collected 387), Montage of a Dream Deferred is made
up of 87 parts and shows Hughes’s first conception of the poem both as an
epic and a book-length work. In the epigraph to Montage, Hughes writes:
“This poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflict-
ing changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken
rhythms, and passages sometimes in the matter of the jam session” (387).
Yet, Montage is not well-known as a complete epic, despite Hughes’s status as
the most canonical of African American poets. Individual parts of Montage,
presented as singular lyrical poems in anthologies, have come to stand in
for the whole poem. When a section of Montage is excerpted and treated as
an individual lyric, and thus decontextualized from what Hughes clearly
intended to be a single long poem (he calls it “this poem”), it is impossible

to know its full meaning, including its rhythmic place within what Hughes
conceived of as a “jam session.” Furthermore, printing an individual section
as a stand-alone poem effectively changes its genre: from epic to lyric, from
collective (jam session) to individual.
Importantly, Hughes’s use of the epic genre in the late 1940s and early
1950s13 signals that his concern with African American collectivity began
to require a longer form. This formal shift also signals his move toward
Afro-Modernist experiment. Rampersad notes that Hughes now believed
that “the crucial medium of the twentieth century was probably the mon-
tage (the composite, swiftly changing picture) or the collage (the inspired
arrangement of still fragments)” (Life Vol. II 151), which Hughes found
particularly important as he “sought to catch in verse the variety of Harlem
life” (Life Vol. II 151–152). Thus, Hughes embraces modernist forms
while confronting the forces that stall African Americans’ achievement of
modernity.
As part of the critical maneuvering to reform the modernist canon, schol-
ars have embraced the New Negro, or Harlem, Renaissance as an integral
part of American modernism. This argument operates within a definition of
modernism that sees the movement as historically bound, lining up writers
labeled as being part of the Harlem Renaissance (variously dated as begin-
ning around 1917 and extending to early 1930s), with other poets writing
during the same time period they were now called “modernists.” Though
important in bringing Harlem Renaissance writers more visibly into the
larger canon, a time-bound theory is insufficient for discussing modernist
aesthetic practice in African American poetry. We must consider the larger
context of African American cultural production, while also looking closer
at individual poems—placing them within the complete arc of a poet’s
career. Thus, Hughes is a particularly interesting case. If we begin at the
beginning, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” it is clear that as a young writer
Hughes already has a sense of a modern African American subject who has
“known rivers ancient as the world and older than the / flow of human
blood in human veins” (Collected 23). As it traces the collective speaker’s his-
tory, the poem follows the history of the diaspora through the movement of
the Euphrates, Congo, Nile, and Mississippi Rivers. The poem also suggests
that human history begins in the areas of Western Asia and Africa through
which the Euphrates and Congo Rivers run.
Yet as one studies the form of the poem on the page, the influence of the
modern free verse of the Chicago school—not modernist experimentation—
is predominant. Hughes was exposed to the Chicago school (notably Vachel
Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg) as a high school student
in Cleveland, and Yusef Komunyakaa argues that Sandburg was Hughes’s

“greatest influence in the matter of form” (1143). It is possible to read another
poem by Hughes from the 1920s, “Young Prostitute,” as displaying Imagist
technique as defined by F. S. Flint in his statement on Imagism published
in Poetry Magazine in 1913, as I argue in chapter 1. However, the bulk of
Hughes’s early work, like Tolson’s, displays phrasally based enjambment
based on prose rhythms, for example: “Summer nights on the front porch /
Aunt Sue cuddles a brown-faced child to her bosom / And tells him stories”
(Collected 23). I would make the distinction, then, as I did with Tolson, that
Hughes’s early work is certainly modern in content—though not modernist
in its form.
Understanding Hughes’s work from the late 1940s to the 1960s as mod-
ernist instead requires additional contextual framing, for such a label is out
of sync with most timeframes of literary criticism. As I argue in the Preface,
in defining Afro-Modernism more specifically, I am placing Hughes’s
work within the social and artistic context of African American cultural
production at mid-century. In Race Music: Black Cultures from Be-Bop
to Hip Hop (2003), Guthrie Ramsey argues that in the 1940s, African
American music became “a site for expressing some of the paradoxes, con-
tradictions, tensions, and, of course the joys of African American life in
those years. The musical expressions that circulated these social energies
articulated what I am calling here Afro-modernism, a concept whose gen-
esis belongs to the previous decades but which ripened in the 1940s” (97).
Ramsey explains that most broadly he uses the term “Afro-modernism”
to describe African Americans’ responses to modernity and asks: “What
was modernity to African Americans at the historical moment under con-
sideration? How were their attitudes about it worked out artistically and
critically?” (97).
As an example, Ramsey cites Dizzy Gillespie’s composition “A Night in
Tunisia,” the formal qualities of which Gillespie saw “as representing artistic
innovation in modern jazz and as a way to situate himself and his artistic
contributions in history and in the African Diaspora” (97–98). According
to Ramsey: “The repetitive ostinato bass pattern that begins the composi-
tion linked [Gillespie’s] sonic experiment to an African past, to his South
Carolinian not-so-distant past, and to an Afro-Cuban future for jazz music”
(98). Gillespie thus develops his own artistic response to the conditions
of modernity within the larger, transnational and transcultural history of
the African diaspora, as Hughes was doing in his poetry of the same time
period.
For Hughes, of course, cultural exchange across the diaspora was not
merely a concept. It is worth noting, as argued by Faith Berry, that Hughes
did some of his best translations of Spanish-language poetry during the

1950s, including the work of Chilean poet Gabriel Mistral and The Gypsy
Ballads of Frederico Garcia Lorca (1951). Moreover, Berry writes: “Even if
Hughes had never translated a Hispanic poet, his reputation in the Spanish-
speaking world would have been assured. Widely known for his writing
on the Spanish Civil War, he had been acclaimed as a poet in Mexico and
Cuba from the early thirties and his critical reputation in Latin America had
grown in leaps and bounds” (321). Moreover, poets of African descent in
Latin America, such as Afro-Uruguayan poet Pilar Barrios, “hailed Hughes
in verse and song” (321).
Frank Guridy adds: “Hughes’s writing on Cuba and his translations of
Afro-Cuban poetry that appeared in black periodicals Crisis and Opportunity
enabled him to shape African American understandings of Afro-Cuban writ-
ers and artists during the Afro-Cubanism era” (124). Noting that although
Hughes’s work as a translator is well documented, Guridy adds that Hughes’s
“well-known, but still understudied, travels to Cuba in 1930 and 1931 docu-
ment his role in the forging of linkages between the movements in Harlem
and Havana” (124). Hughes’s interest in Cuba may also have been stimu-
lated by his encounters with Afro-Cuban music in New York (125). In fact,
in The Big Sea (1940), Hughes describes traveling to Cuba specifically to
find an Afro-Cuban musician with whom to work.
Contributing to a further understanding of jazz aesthetics, Ingrid
Monson explains in her work on the 1950s that “individual jazz musicians
drew from one or more aesthetic perspectives and often combined them in
novel ways to produce an alternative aesthetics of modernism at once more
populist than its European art music counterpart, yet committed to articu-
lating its elite position relative to the more commercial genres of R&B and
rock and roll” (71). In my argument concerning the diasporic, transnational
consciousness present in Afro-Modernist poetry I am making a similar
claim concerning the ways in which this poetry combines multiple aesthetic
perspectives to create a new aesthetic category that I term “Afro-Modernist.”
I also argue for the populist perspective apparent in Hughes’s concern with
the African American collective.
Monson concurs with Amiri Baraka’s argument in Blues People that
African American be-bop represented a victory over mass-marketed white
swing music. Yet, Monson develops the argument further in her theoriza-
tion of a specifically African American modernist aesthetic: “The ultimate
victory of hard bop styles in defining the aesthetic center in this canonic
period of jazz,” Monson suggests, “represents a blackening of modernist aes-
thetics, which would ultimately serve as the standard against which any
player of jazz would be evaluated.” In Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out
to Jazz and Africa (2007), Monson calls this aesthetic “Afro-modernism.”

She cites John Coltrane as a musician displaying this aesthetic, showing
how what she calls his “deeply personal musical synthesis” “simultaneously
embraced his cultural identity as an African American and refused to be
contained by it” (302). Likewise, in considering Hughes’s lineages and artis-
tic influences, we must recognize the importance of, for example, both Carl
Sandburg and be-bop.
Considering further the impact of jazz, Scott Saul elucidates the con-
nections between what he calls “hard bop” and progressive social politics,
arguing that “the fortunes of hard bop were linked to the fortunes of the
civil rights movement” (5). “Around 1955,” Saul writes:
As the [civil rights] movement began asserting an unexpected kind

of black grassroots power, jazz critics minted the term “hard bop” to
describe how several new jazz combos—especially Horace Silver and
Art Blakey’s gospel-inflected Jazz Messengers—were tilting away from
the well-tempered sound of cool jazz; Mingus’s Jazz Workshop and
Miles Davis’s quintet with John Coltrane were also launched at this
moment (5).
He concludes that hard bop was “a musical facet of the freedom movement,”
(5) seeing the musicians’ mode of interplay and improvisation as “a dynamic
community that was democratic in ways that took exception to the suppos-
edly benign normalcy of 1950s America” (6). This display of community
interaction evident in hard bop strongly influences the form of Hughes’s
first epic, Montage of a Dream Deferred.
However, the shape of Montage, published during this time period, was
a long time in coming, which is evident if we pay attention to its various
components. In fact, Montage contains a piece published as early as 1924
(a version of “Brothers” appeared in Crisis in February 1924). The rest of
the collection is made up of poems published throughout the 1940s, 1950s,
and 1960s (though none of the political poems of the 1930s). Perhaps, then,
anthologists are not to be given too much fault in publishing only individual
poems, considering that Hughes did so himself. However, it is essential to
understand that when publishing Montage as a book, he fully intended the
work to be read as one poem, and that he took this formal structure from
the jazz composition: the “impudent interjections” and “broken rhythms” of
the jam session. Rampersad notes that the poems are “unified technically,
in Hughes’s art, by a centripetal appeal to the rhythms of the new, ‘be-bop’
jazz” and that the “idea for the new book probably came during the compo-
sition of One-Way Ticket, one section of which is called simply ‘Montage’”
(Life Vol. II 152). As an exemplary moment of rhythms of be-bop, Rampersad

cites the opening poem of Montage, “Dream Boogie”:
Good morning, daddy!

Ain’t you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred (Collected 388).
“Dream Boogie” concludes:
Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!
Y-e-a-h! (Collected 388)
Daniel C. Turner writes: “In Montage of a Dream Deferred, Hughes

adeptly exploits both the visual and auditory connotations of montage,
interweaving the conceit of a visual montage with the conceit of a mon-
tage of musical images, drawn from the modernist art of bebop jazz perfor-
mance” (24). In my reading, the section that comes closest to approximating
visual montage is “Neon Signs” (397). In “Neon Signs,” capitalized place
names (presumably of bars or jazz clubs) are lined up on top of one another
and separated visually on the page with a repeated diamond shape made up
of four dots, one dot for each corner of the diamond. The be-bop rhythm
is emphasized with well-chosen rhymes throughout the poem: “WONDER
BAR / SHALIMAR” and “MONTEREY / MANDALAY.” An echo cre-
ated through rhyme resounds throughout this section, created through the
placement of “WONDER BAR” on the first line, while “SHALIMAR” is
the last place named. Moreover, the final stanza provides a visual image for
be-bop sound:
Mirror-go-round
where a broken glass
in the early bright
smears re-bop
sound (Collected 397)
As printed in the book, the lines above also approximate a diamond shape.
Translating sound into image, the “re-bop” sound bounces off the broken
glass, causing a swiftness of repetition wherein the sound “smears.” The
“mirror-go-round” is much like the echo chamber created through the rhyme
scheme, with multiple rhymes bouncing off of one another and repeating,
as in an image bouncing off two mirrors facing one another. The term “re-
bop” itself indicates repetition: re-bopping, resounding, repeating. The jazz
composition consists of repeated elements: vamp, chorus, break, and the
musicians mirror elements back to one another, at times as in a funny house,
broken mirror as they improvise through the changes.
The most obvious element of repetition in Montage, as other critics
remark, is “The boogie-woogie rumble / Of a dream deferred” (Collected
388). The rumble becomes a series of unanswerable questions in “Tell Me”:
Why should it be my loneliness

Why should it be my song,
Why should it be my dream
deferred
overlong? (Collected 396)
The dream deferred appears in another song, “Boogie: 1 a.m.” (Collected

411) and in a narrative poem “Deferred” in which a number of desires are
delayed: for example, the desire to graduate from school, the want of a white
enamel stove, the longing to learn French, the wish for a decent radio, and a
yearning to take up Bach (Collected 413–414). The wishing picks up speed
in the middle of the poem through a series of short stanzas:
Someday,
I’m gonna buy two new suits
At once!
All I want is
one more bottle of gin.
All I want is to see
my furniture paid for.
All I want is a wife who will
work with me and not against me. Say,
baby, could you see your way clear? (Collected 414)
There is also a “Nightmare Boogie” (Collected 418), a “Dream Boogie:

Variation” (Collected 425–426), and a poem called “Harlem [2]” (Collected
426). Though few readers know it by its title, “Harlem [2]” contains the
famous questions, “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up /
like a raisin in the sun?” (426).
In other parts of the poem, however, the inertia is broken through the use
of humor. In “Jam Session,” “midnight” is let out on bail for trying to catch
a “dreamer” by sprinkling salt on his tail:
Letting midnight
out on bail
pop-a-da
having been
detained in jail
oop-pop-a-da
for sprinkling salt
on a dreamer’s tail
pop-a-da (Collected 408)
According to folklore, you can catch a bird (or prevent it from flying) by
sprinkling salt on its tail. Though the tale seems to indicate that salt has
the power to cast a spell over the bird, in fact, if one were able to get close
enough to a bird to actually sprinkle salt on it, catching it would appear to
be a simple matter. Here, “midnight” attempts to catch the “dreamer,” but
the dreamer appears to have gotten away. Energy is added to this joke in the
poem by the fact that the darkness of night is also detained. When midnight
is freed, all participate in a jam session complete with scat lyrics. Hughes’s
humor becomes much more pointed in ASK YOUR MAMA, and Montage is
the necessary step Hughes took on the way to the creation of that final, tri-
umphalist epic, ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ. In Montage,
he suggests through juxtaposition and accumulation the political statements
that will be more pointed and directive in ASK YOUR MAMA.
CHAPTER 5
Toward An Afro-Modernist Future:

Langston’s Hughes’s ASK YOUR
MAMA: 12 MOODS
FOR JAZZ
ASK YOUR MAMA: An Overview

In his jazz poems of the 1960s, Langston Hughes’s use of the page as a field
allows for visual and verbal play, noise rather than silence, bringing the move-
ment of performativity into and onto the former immobility of the black-
and-white page. In ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ (1961), the
first of 12 sections, “CULTURAL EXCHANGE,” enacts diasporic identity
through the musical instructions printed down the right-hand side of the
page, sections written in italics that play off the left-justified “poem” section
written in all capital letters.
IN THE The
IN THE QUARTER rhythmically
IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES rough
WHERE THE DOORS ARE DOORS OF PAPER scraping
DUST OF DINGY ATOMS of a guira
BLOWS A SCRATCHY SOUND. continues
AMORPHOUS JACK-O’-LANTERNS CAPER monotonously
AND THE WIND WON’T WAIT FOR MIDNIGHT until a lonely
FOR FUN TO BLOW DOORS DOWN. flute call
high and
BY THE RIVER AND THE RAILROAD far away,

WITH FLUID FAR-OFF GOING merges
BOUNDARIES BIND UNBINDING into piano
A WHIRL OF WHISTLES BLOWING variations
NO TRAINS OR STEAMBOATS GOING— on German
YET LEONTYNE’S UNPACKING. lieder (3–4)1
Here, the “rough / scraping / of a guira,” a Latin American percussion instru-

ment, is followed by a “lonely / flute call ” that merges into piano variations on
German lieder all played against a scene in which “AMORPHOUS JACK-
O’-LANTERNS CAPER” “IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES”
(3–4). This scene, where boundaries both “bind” and “unbind,” gradually
changes into traditional 12-bar blues “up strong / between verses”
until
African
drums
throb
against blues (4)
The music, therefore, illustrates a transnational weltanschauung, encompass-

ing several traditions worldwide, including those from Europe, the Caribbean,
and the United States. The poem also develops a Pan-Africanist ideology,
connecting struggles amongst blacks worldwide, from those in the Southern
United States struggling under Jim Crow, to those in South Africa suffering
under apartheid, and beyond. The Afro-Modernist epic form, including his
use of the “Dozens,” brings energy and movement onto the page along with a
tone of scorching irony with which Hughes can finally have his say.
Moreover, as the poem’s political commentary makes clear, ASK YOUR
MAMA illustrates that Hughes did not radicalize in the 1930s, only to
renounce his politics and retreat following his forced testimony before
Senator Joseph McCarthy’s committee in 1953. Instead, the poem takes aim
at white American politicians who were segregationists, exposing the con-
tinued racial and economic segregation of African Americans. Furthermore,
Hughes specifically indicts government harassment of its citizens and the
tactic of “red-baiting.” In fact, the poem “names names” of specific poli-
ticians who engaged in such practices. As a close reading of ASK YOUR
MAMA shows, Hughes’s career as a poet is marked by an increasingly radi-
cal poetics and politics, rather than renunciation of his radical views.
ASK YOUR MAMA is a long, visually experimental poem with, as the
title indicates, 12 sections or “moods”: “CULTURAL EXCHANGE,”
Toward An Afro-Modernist Future ● 121
“RIDE, RED, RIDE,” “SHADES OF PIGMEAT,” “ODE TO DINAH,”

“BLUES IN STEREO,” “HORN OF PLENTY,” “GOSPEL CHA-CHA,”
“IS IT TRUE?,” “ASK YOUR MAMA,” “BIRD IN ORBIT,” “JAZZTET
MUTED,” and “SHOW FARE, PLEASE.” Each of the 12 sections follows
the two-column format of the section quoted at the outset, with the capitalized
“poem” printed on the left side of the page, and the italicized musical instruc-
tions running in a column down the right. The poem ends with an additional
section, a series of “LINER NOTES” in the mode of an LP. The poem is dedi-
cated to Louis Armstrong, “the greatest / horn blower / of them all.”
Section 1, “CULTURAL EXCHANGE,” sets up the themes of the
book, a comparison between the status of African Americans where racial
segregation still rules the land, and people of African descent in other parts
of the world. Part of the “cultural exchange” occurs through the figure of
an African sent by the State Department to meet the blacks in the “quarter
of the Negroes.” Another character, “Leontyne,” is unpacking in Section 1.
The liner notes tell us that for most of the blacks in the quarter, “there is not
much chance of going anywhere else. Yet always one of them has been away
and has come home” (85).
Opening with strongly trochaic lines, the words of the poem “throb”
like the beat of an African drum that accompanies them beginning with
trochaic monometer (“IN THE”), then moving to trochaic dimeter (“IN
THE QUARTER”), the poem then follows with two lines of distinctive tro-
chaic tetrameter (“IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES / WHERE
THE DOORS ARE DOORS OF PAPER”) (3). One of the most well-
known examples of trochaic tetrameter in English is Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow’s 1855 epic “The Song of Hiawatha.” A fictional portrayal of
a Native American hero (though Longfellow argued for its authenticity),
this controversial poem is sometimes employed in contemporary times as a
campfire chant accompanied by drums.2 It is reasonable to suggest, given
ASK YOUR MAMA’s biting humor, that Hughes is signifying on Longfellow,
an author he read as a child: “The only poems I liked as a child were Paul
Lawrence (sic) Dunbar’s. And Hiawatha” (Big Sea 26).
In Longfellow’s introduction, he calls the audience to listen to the “plain
and childlike” song of Hiawatha:
Ye who love a nation’s legends,

Love the ballads of a people,
That like voices from afar off
Call to us to pause and listen,
Speak in tones so plain and childlike,
Scarcely can the ear distinguish
Whether they are sung or spoken;

Listen to this Indian Legend,
To this Song of Hiawatha! (Longfellow)
In contrast, Hughes begins his text with actual African and African
American historical figures who are neither plain nor childlike, but instead
display wit and talent, and ultimately defy racial stereotyping.
The phrase “IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES” is repeated
throughout the poem, at times with variation: “WHERE THE SHADOWS
OF THE NEGROES” (50), “FROM THE SHADOWS OF THE
QUARTER” (55, 61), “IN THE NEGROES OF THE QUARTER” (77),
casting the phrase as jazz theme and variation. Hughes’s employment of this
distinctive, incantory meter indicates that ASK YOUR MAMA is intended for
performance. (An extended close reading of “CULTURAL EXCHANGE”
is undertaken in the second section of this chapter.)
Section 2, “RIDE, RED, RIDE,” takes us to the Caribbean, a shift indi-
cated by the music that draws Section 1 to a close: “The Saints Go Marching
In” accompanied by maracas. The liner notes state: “In the restless Caribbean
there are the same shadows as in Mississippi” (86) as a voice inquires repeatedly
about grandmother: “TU ABUELA, ¿DÓNDE ESTA´?” indicating a loss of
origins and connections (14). A subversive Santa Claus first appears in Section 2,
whose “DOLLS ARE INTERRACIAL” (14). A searing comment on the gov-
ernment harassment of its citizens, the speaker warns Santa about his interracial
dolls: “YOU’LL BE CALLED BY EASTLAND. / WHEN THEY ASK YOU
IF YOU KNEW ME, / DON’T TAKE THE FIFTH AMENDMENT”
(14). This is an allusion to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, led by
James O. Eastland of Mississippi—the counterpart to the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) led by Joseph McCarthy. More specifically this
reference is to the Eastland hearings of March 1954 in which members of the
Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) were subpoenaed. Members of
“SCEF pursued a single program: ending segregation in the South immediately
through Negro and white people working together” (Brown 97) and thus pre-
sented a strong affront to Jim Crow policies.
After members fled SCEF in response to the hearings—for fear of being
labeled “Communists”—whites Carl and Anne Braden accepted the chal-
lenge of becoming field secretaries for SCEF in September 1957, travel-
ing throughout the South to educate whites about why they too should
join in the fight to dismantle racial segregation. Anne Braden documented
the relationship between HUAC and Eastland’s committee in the Senate,
while carrying out her antiracist work in the South. Cynthia Stokes Brown
reports: “In her pamphlet, [Anne] Braden shows that if one traces each
charge of subversion, one finds the same common source: either HUAC; its
counterpart in the U.S. Senate, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee,
headed by James O. Eastland of Mississippi; or one of several state commit-
tees modeled after these” (Brown 100).
These intimidation tactics grew out of the rhetoric of the Cold War.
Although some gains were made by African Americans during this time,
including the successful campaign that led to President Truman’s 1948
order abolishing segregation in the armed forces, James Smethurst notes
the extent to which, following on the Cold War’s emphasis on fighting
Communism for democracy, “organizations and individuals that had led
the struggle for African American equality during the 1930s and 1940s
were destroyed, discredited, isolated, or forced to bend over backward to
prove their anticommunist purity, as in the case of the NAACP, which
supported the government persecution of W. E. B. Du Bois” (“Adventures”
151). With the charge of Communism in their arsenal, Southern segrega-
tionists including Eastland, Rep. John Rankin of Mississippi, Rep. John
Wood of Georgia, and Rep. Edwin Willis of Louisiana were able to disguise
their racist program as a fight for democracy (Brown 100).
Hughes, however, was not left to stand alone when he drew criticism for
his 1930s poetry. In fact, he received support from Melvin B. Tolson when
one of his more radical poems was published in the United States. When
Hughes’s poem “Goodbye Christ,” originally published in a European
Communist publication, was reprinted in the Baltimore Afro-American on
December 31, 1932, and drew heavy criticism from black readers, Tolson
publicly defended the poem in the February 2, 1933, edition of the Pittsburgh
Courier. He termed the poem an “outgrowth of tragic modern conditions,”
and called Christians to task:
The disciples of Karl Marx carry his teachings forward with a verve and
courage that are admirable; the followers of Christ, on the other hand,
enter into bootless denunciations. The leaders of Communism starve
for hunger and die to put over the teachings of Marx; the leaders of
Christianity live in comfortable homes and ride around in big cars and
collect the pennies of washerwomen. Magnificent edifices are erected,
while people go hungry and naked and shelterless. Preachers uphold or
see not the ravages of “big business.” (qtd. in Farnsworth 38)
These are strong words from a man who oftentimes described himself (per-
haps hyperbolically) as “the son of a preacher who was the son of a preacher
who was the son of a preacher” and demonstrates the long personal and
professional connections between Hughes and Tolson.
Section 3, “SHADES OF PIGMEAT” reaches out through the African

diaspora where “BELGIUM SHADOWS LEOPOLD” and “EASTLAND
AND MALAN DECEASED / DEAD OR LIVE THEIR GHOSTS CAST
SHADOWS / IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES” (19). King
Leopold II of Belgium colonized the area now known as the Democratic
Republic of Congo and turned the country into a labor and death camp while
growing rich off the exploitation of the country’s natural rubber resources.3
A BBC journalist who has worked in the area argues: “Of the Europeans
who scrambled for control of Africa at the end of the 19th century, Belgium’s
King Leopold II left arguably the largest and most horrid legacy of all”
(Dummett). While claiming that he was saving the people from Arab sla-
vers and, like slaveholders in the United States, saving the Africans through
Christianity, Leopold contributed to the deaths of “perhaps 10 million inno-
cent people” (Dummett). In this stanza, Hughes also links white American
segregationist Eastland with apartheid ruler Daniel Francois Malan, the
South African prime minister whose regime set in place the legal founda-
tions for apartheid in South Africa beginning in 1943. Whether dead or
alive, Eastland and Malan’s racist programs continue to haunt blacks in the
American South: “THEIR GHOSTS CAST SHADOWS.” American seg-
regation and South African apartheid are cast as parallel.
“ODE TO DINAH,” Section 4, takes us to a harsh Christmas in Buffalo
“WHEN NIAGARA FALLS IS FROZEN” (26). “Niagara” is also a refer-
ence to the Niagara Movement founded by W. E. B. Du Bois as a more radi-
cal alternative to Booker T. Washington’s conciliatory approach to whites.
A manifesto written by the group, which formed in 1905, demands rights:
“We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American,
political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to
protest and assail the ears of America” (Wormser). The repeated references to
Niagara Falls being frozen (this is where the group first met) indicate that the
movement toward African Americans’ achievement of the rights guaranteed
to all citizens is also “frozen” at this historical moment.
To show the realities in many black communities in the mid-twentieth
century (a great contrast to what the Niagara Movement envisioned at the
beginning of the century) this section also focuses on the effects of pov-
erty on black families, with children growing up so fast one becomes “30
WHEN YOU’RE 20 / 20 WHEN YOU’RE 10” (31). “WHITE FOLKS’
RECESSION” the poem tells us “IS COLORED FOLKS’ DEPRESSION”
(32). The recurring voice of a child who becomes an important speaker
throughout the poem first appears in this section: “I WANT TO GO TO
THE SHOW, MAMA” (30).
Section 5, “BLUES IN STEREO,” continues with the narrative of child

and family begun in Section 4, stretching out into longer lines:
DOWN THE LONG HARD ROW THAT I BEEN HOEING

I THOUGHT I HEARD THE HORN OF PLENTY BLOWING.
BUT I GOT TO GET A NEW ANTENNA, LORD—
MY TV KEEPS ON SNOWING. (37)
The snowing at Niagara Falls is linked with the “snowing” of the TV—both
indicate an obliterating whiteness.
Beginning with a list of prominent black singers, dancers, and musicians,
Section 6, “HORN OF PLENTY” tells the story of blacks who have “made
it” and “WHO BREAK AWAY LIKE COMETS $ $ $ $ $ $ / FROM
LESSER STARS IN ORBIT $ $ $ $ $ $ $” (42) and move out to the sub-
urbs. Emphasizing the economics of black entertainment, the first part of
this section contains repeated dollar and cent signs:
TO MOVE OUT TO ST. ALBANS $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $

WHERE THE GRASS IS GREENER $ $ $ $ $ $ $
SCHOOLS ARE BETTER FOR THEIR CHILDREN $
AND OTHER KIDS LESS MEANER THAN ༫ ༫ ༫ ༫
IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES ༫ ༫ ༫ ༫ ༫ (42)
Note also, as the narrative shifts from the suburbs, to the quarter of the
Negroes, the symbols change from dollars to cents, illustrating economic
disparity.
“GOSPEL CHA-CHA,” Section 7, pays equal homage to “gods who
come in various spiritual and physical guises and to whom one prays in vari-
ous rhythms in various lands in various tongues” (90). Figures mentioned
in this section include Voodoo priestess Marie Laveau; the Yoruban god of
iron, Ogoun; Damballa Wedo, the snake god of Voodoo; and John Jasper,
a gifted pastor of Sixth Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia,
who lived from 1812 to 1901 (51). The section closes with reference to a
black Jesus:
WHEN I GOT TO CALVARY

UP THERE ON THAT HILL
ALREADY THERE WAS THREE—
AND ONE, YES, ONE
WAS BLACK AS ME. (52)
Presenting African world religions as equal with Christianity—in addition

to a black Christ—Hughes’s diasporic imagination challenges hegemonic
Christianity in the United States.
Section 8, “IS IT TRUE?,” draws attention to the unrecorded history of
Negroes in the quarter: “NOT EVEN FOLKWAYS CAPTURE(s)” their
voices (55). Folkways Records, who recorded Hughes, cannot reach into the
quarter. Beginning with lost histories, the section ends with a fiction, as the
liner notes explain: “Everybody thinks that Negroes have the most fun . . .”
(90). Whites’ curiosity about Negro life (and their simultaneous secret hope
that Negroes really don’t have the most fun) becomes a question at the end
of “IS IT TRUE?”: “THEY ASKED ME AT THE PTA / IS IT TRUE
THAT NEGROES ——? / I SAID, ASK YOUR MAMA” (58). This ques-
tion certainly has an implied sexual valence (as seen in the retort) but the
blank space could stand in for any number of intrusive questions that whites
press upon blacks in their midst.
The section (number 9) titled “ASK YOUR MAMA” takes a tour of
black communities around the world, beginning in the United States at “5th
AND MOUND IN CINCI, 63rd IN CHI” (61) to “FILLMORE OUT IN
FRISCO, 7th ACROSS THE BAY” (63) and widening out to Kingston,
Lagos, Dakar, and Paris (63). Hughes describes an African student at the
Sorbonne and finally takes us back to the quarter “WHERE NO SHADOW
WALKS ALONE” (65). The struggles of people of African descent connect
across continents as “AZIKIWE’S SON AMEKA,4 / SHAKES HANDS
WITH EMMETT TILL5” (64). The son of anticolonial Nigerian leader
Benjamin Nnamdi “Zik” Azikiwe represents hope for the youth of Africa,
extending courage and understanding to young African Americans strug-
gling against the violence of Jim Crow. Emeka Azikiwe and Emmett Till’s
handshake is also a show of Pan-Africanist brotherhood. In Section 9, the
economic struggles of daily life continue to haunt: the credit office pursues
a third-floor tenant and still there is no money for the child to go to the
picture show.
Section 10, “BIRD IN ORBIT,” is named for Charlie Parker and begins
with a list of black entertainers. In addition, continuing the Pan-Africanist
point of view, in this section “ALIOUNE AIMÉ SEDAR SIPS HIS
NEGRITUDE” (70). Senegalese writer and editor Alioune Diop founded
the influential anticolonial journal Présence Africaine that helped further
the development of the Négritude Movement. Future Senegalese president,
poet, and theorist Léopold Sédar Senghor, was a frequent contributor to the
magazine. Poet Aimé Césaire of Martinique, credited with coining the move-
ment’s name, also wrote Discourse on Colonialism (1950), essays that helped
establish the ideology of Négritude. Here we see these leaders drinking in
(in the language of the poem) the ideology of Négritude, a movement theo-
rized by these poets.
Arguing that Présence Africaine was “expressly conceived as an African
incursion into modernity” (“Uses” 47) and commenting upon Diop’s article
“Niam N’Goura, or raison d’être,” that appeared in the first issue of the
journal (October–November 1947) Brent Hayes Edwards writes:
It should not be surprising that the journal was conceived in the European
metropolis [Paris] by a group of “overseas students” (étudiants d’outre
mer —more precisely students from the overseas French colonies, or
France d’outre mer), who felt following the ravages of war that they con-
stituted “a new race, mentally mixed [mentalement métissée],” and who
began to reconsider their position in European discourses of “universal”
humanism. Présence africaine, as the title announces, inscribes an African
presence into modernity and inaugurates the “re-creation” of the human-
ist project through that intervention. (“Uses” 48)
An expression of revolt against French colonialism and racism, as well as a

rejection of the “universal” humanism of Western philosophy, Négritude
emerged from interactions among students in Paris from different French
colonies: Césaire of Martinique, Léon Gontran Damas from Guiana, and
Senghor of Senegal.
Damas came to Paris to study Law while Césaire had been accepted at
Lycée Louis Le Grand to study for the highly selective test for admission
to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure on rue d’Ulm. Upon his
arrival at the Lycée on the first day of classes he met Senghor who had
already been a student at Louis le Grand for three years. (Diagne)
While their opportunities to study in Paris are exceptional, “being colo-

nial subjects meant that they all belonged to people considered uncivilized,
naturally in need of education and guidance from Europe, namely France”
(Diagne). Having arrived in the French “homeland” actually underscores
that these black colonial subjects are forever excluded from the “brother-
hood” (“Liberté, égalité, fraternité ” ) of France.
The context in which the images in “BIRD IN ORBIT” appear must
be traced back to the previous section, and to the image of an African stu-
dent who wears horn-rim glasses and has six classes at the Sorbonne: “IN
THE SHADOW OF THE CLUNY / CONJURES UNICORN” (64).
The first reference to the unicorn is to the spires of France’s Cluny Abbey, a
visual image that does indeed “conjure” a unicorn’s horn. Studying in Paris,
the African student’s identity is formed through diasporic, transcultural

exchange, as shown through language (“SPEAKS ENGLISH FRENCH
SWAHILI”), food (“HAS ALMOST FORGOTTEN MEALIE”), and dress
(“NIGHT IN A SÉKOU TOUR É CAP / DRESSED LIKE A TEDDY
BOY / BLOTS COLORS OFF THE MAP”) (64). Mealie is a cornmeal sta-
ple used throughout sub-Saharan Africa, which has been “almost forgotten”
by the student while in Paris. The distinctive cap taken up by the student
was worn by Touré, the first president of postcolonial Guinea, while the
“teddy boy” style grew out of a British working-class youth culture attracted
to American rock-and-roll. An exaggeration of earlier Edwardian style (thus
the name “Teddy”) that was popularized in Britain in the 1950s, Teddy
Boys wore drape jackets with velvet collars and “drainpipe” pants. (A similar
style is evident in later twentieth-century American rockabilly.) The African
student, who employs such different cultural styles at different moments,
is beyond essentialist racial identities and thus “BLOTS COLORS OFF
THE MAP.”
It is also possible to discern an implicit critique of the student’s choices
as representing affectation and rejection of his home culture, yet after the
line about the student almost forgetting mealie, the stanza continues with
these two lines: “BUT WHY RIDE ON MULE OR DONKEY / WHEN
THERE’S A UNICORN?” (64). The unicorn, then, may represent hope
and imagination, a flight-bound fantastical animal in contrast to the earth-
bound mule or donkey, but the poem suggests there is a place for “mules,”
“donkeys,” and “unicorns.” “BIRD IN ORBIT” ends back in the quarter
of the Negroes, where “LITTLE MULES AND DONKEYS SHARE /
THEIR GRASS WITH UNICORNS” (65). African drums accompanying
these stanzas fade into a steady beat “ like / the / heart ” (64) signaling that
the student’s African identity still beats within him. “Up-tempo blues” (65)
accompanies the mules, donkeys, and unicorns that all share the grass in
the quarter, each having an equal place. Thus, when “KING MOUNTS
HIS UNICORN / OBLIVIOUS TO BLOOD” (70) in the next section,
the image may suggest a lack of realism on the part of Dr. King, but it also
suggests bravery. Moreover, we are again taken back to the church’s spires,
reaching toward heaven and salvation.
The subversive Santa Claus with his interracial dolls also reappears in
Section 10, along with a menacing demand rendered in a white Southern
dialect to “INVESTIGATE THEM NEGRAS . . .” (73). Santa appears in
a long list of people who must be investigated for being “red”: “THOSE
SIT-IN KIDS,” (73) Kenyatta, Castro, Nkrumah, political scientist and
diplomat Ralph Bunche, educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod
Bethune, and Dr. Robert Weaver. The first black cabinet member, Weaver
served as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President

Johnson: “AIN’T YOU GOT NO INFORMATION” on Weaver, the inter-
rogator demands (73). The section concludes with a “GENTLEMAN IN
EXPENSIVE SHOES / MADE FROM THE HIDES OF BLACKS” (74).
The “gentleman” tiptoes around the quarter “SOAKING UP THE MUSIC”
(74), an example of whites becoming prosperous perpetrating black geno-
cide, while simultaneously exploiting black culture for entertainment.
Section 11, “JAZZTET MUTED,” takes place back in the quarter
where because of social inequities “PRESSURE OF THE BLOOD IS
SLIGHTLY HIGHER” (77). “JAZZTET MUTED” is explosive, about to
ignite: “SUDDENLY CATCHING FIRE / FROM THE WING TIP OF
A MATCH TIP / ON THE BREATH OF ORNETTE COLEMAN” (77)
with
very
modern
jazz
burning
the
air (77)
The poem concludes with the great symbolic deferral of the poem: the pain
of the young child’s unfulfilled desire to go the movies. Section 12, “SHOW
FARE, PLEASE” ends with the musical accompaniment, “The Hesitation
Blues,” played loud and raucously:
building full
blast to a
bursting climax. (83)
The explosion suggested in Montage of a Dream Deferred (“Does it explode?”)

actually occurs here—which is a crucial difference between Montage and
ASK YOUR MAMA.
At the end of the poem, Hughes has added the “LINER NOTES” section
(humorously labeled “For the Poetically Unhep.”) For each of the 12 sections
of the poem, Hughes has written a companion piece; several are only one sen-
tence long, while one contains several paragraphs. Calling these prose pieces
at the end of the poem “LINER NOTES,” underscores the poem’s musical
form. Moreover, like Tolson’s modernist endnotes to Libretto for the Republic
of Liberia (1953), Hughes’s liner notes can function as their own canto.
While these prose sections do offer information that may aid in decoding
their companion poems, the liner notes also function on their own as a series
of prose poems. For example, the “LINER NOTES” for the “CULTURAL
EXCHANGE” section of the poem, end with the following commentary:
“What—wonders the African—is really happening in the shadow of world
events, past and present—and of world problems, old and new—to an America
that seems to understand so little about its black citizens? Even so little about
itself. Even so little” (86). The echoing of the phrase “even so little” leaves the
section resounding hollowly, with the “nothing” of deferral from his previous
work in Montage of a Dream Deferred, although by the end of the poem, ASK
YOUR MAMA, there is movement away from it.
The liner notes also appear at times epigrammatic: of the African “SENT
BY THE STATE DEPARTMENT / AMONG THE SHACKS TO MEET
THE BLACKS,” (4) Hughes writes: “Although he finds that in the American
social supermarket blacks for sale range from intellectuals to entertainers, to
the African all cellophane signs point to ideas of change—in an IBM land
that pays more attention to Moscow than Mississippi” (86). Thus, despite
the seeming success of “blacks for sale” such as actor and director Sidney
Poitier, soprano Leontyne Price, and singer and actress Pearl Mae Bailey
(who are listed in the same stanza of section 1 with other entertainers), white
America still understands very little about African Americans. In fact, in
the capitalist “IBM land,” news tends to focus on the Red Scare symbolized
by Moscow, rather than on the realities of Jim Crow in Mississippi, realities
that stand, in Hughes’s words, “in the shadow of world events” (86).
“Cultural Exchange” in Performance and on the Page

ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ was reissued as a stand-alone
book on the occasion of the March 16, 2009, world premiere performance at
Carnegie Hall. Originally published by Knopf on July 17, 1961, ASK YOUR
MAMA did not go into a second printing until May 1969 (after Hughes’s
death). A description of the 2009 Carnegie Hall performance states that
Hughes “conceived ASK YOUR MAMA as an interdisciplinary creation,
actually penning an imaginary soundtrack in the margin of each page as
an accompaniment to his words” (Ask). While this description seemingly
renders the “soundtrack” to the status of informal marginalia, Hughes was
very concerned with how the parts of the poem appeared together on the
page. In fact, Hughes’s attention to visual placement is so exact at this point,
that the phrase “between verses” in the right-hand column is actually placed
between the verses of the poem in the column in the left.
Merging from the blues to African drums and back again, Hughes creates
the diasporic modernist form that performs a modern black identity that
crosses both racial and national borders. Having the African drums “throb
against” the blues also creates a temporal crossing, in palimpsestically over-
laying the African sounds that preceded it onto twentieth-century African
American blues music. Moreover, the African sent to meet the blacks in a
section tellingly entitled “CULTURAL EXCHANGE” enacts another Afro-
diasporic crossing, and also demonstrate Hughes’s consistently Pan-Africanist
vision.
The opening page of ASK YOUR MAMA (before Section 1) begins with
12 measures of “HESITATION BLUES (Traditional )” followed by instruc-
tions for the musicians. “The traditional folk melody of the ‘Hesitation Blues’ ”
is described as the “leitmotif ” of the piece. “In and around ” “Hesitation
Blues,” “other recognizable melodies [are] employed.” In addition, “there is
room for spontaneous jazz improvisation, / particularly between verses, / where
the voice pauses” (n.p.). Thus, the exact placement of the phrase “between
verses” noted above, in the right-hand column of the poem is a purposeful
gesture arising from the performance architecture of the piece. Not only
does the appearance of the phrase in the gap between the verses on the left
function as a kind of visual humor for the reader of the poem, it also under-
scores the musical instructions directing the musicians to play “Hesitation
Blues” with the:
full band
up strong
for a chorus
in the clear
between verses (5)
Showing that the musicians are present for the entire performance, in the
places at which there are no instructions as to musical composition or instru-
mentation, Hughes has written “TACIT,” meaning silent.
As in other of his later poems, such as “Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History
Poem” (1951), Hughes illustrates the contrast between African American
identity and African identities elsewhere throughout the diaspora. As ASK
YOUR MAMA develops, the postcolonial independence movements on the
African continent create a contrasting example of freedom in opposition to
the conditions “IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES.” Indeed, after
the listing of the African American entertainers (Leontyne Price; Sammy
Davis, Jr.; Harry Belafonte; Sidney Poitier; etc.) Hughes draws the reader’s
attention to daily life for African Americans under segregation. For exam-
ple, African Americans wishing to see these black entertainers would have
to do so in a segregated theater in many locations in the United States, using
the entrance “UP AN ALLEY UP THE SIDE” and even public laundries
are segregated: “WE BETTER FIND OUT, MAMA, / WHERE IS THE
COLORED LAUNDROMAT, / SINCE WE MOVED TO MOUNT
VERNON” (5). Through the poem’s insistence upon the importance of
daily life in the African American community, Hughes illustrates the per-
sistence of spatial, social, and economic segregation based upon perceived
racial difference. Larry Scanlon argues that “the poem takes Eliot’s claim
of historical paralysis literally, but insists on its materiality, embodied in the
paralytic state of current race relations” (51) and thus fundamentally reori-
ents the perception of modernity cast by Eliot’s The Waste Land. Hughes
does so through illustrative details of the economic realities in the Negro
quarter “WHERE THE DOORS ARE DOORS OF PAPER” (3) and by
showing that the quarter itself is located on the margins “BY THE RIVER
AND THE RAILROAD” (4).
In the “CULTURAL EXCHANGE” liner notes, Hughes adds: “In
Negro sections of the South where doors have no resistance to violence, dan-
ger always whispers harshly. Klansmen cavort, and havoc may come at any
time. Negroes often live either by the river or the railroad, and for most there
is not much chance of going anywhere else” (85). Thus, the “paper” doors
can keep out neither the wind nor dangerous Klansmen, and though the
Negroes live side by side with modes of conveyance (river, railroad) they are
unable to move to a safer location with “NO TRAINS OR STEAMBOATS
GOING” (4) This stasis is another example of deferral, the “nothing” of a
Montage of a Dream Deferred.
Hughes himself makes an appearance in his own poem as the narra-
tive turns to writers: “COME WHAT MAY LANGSTON HUGHES,”
this self-referentiality, a sign of the humor, present in a poem named for
“Ask Your Mama” jokes (5). Hughes’s humor is scorching at times: “AND
THEY ASKED ME RIGHT AT CHRISTMAS / IF MY BLACKNESS,
WOULD IT RUB OFF? / I SAID, ASK YOUR MAMA” (8). (In the ver-
sion of ASK YOUR MAMA printed in The Collected Poems, the text reads
“WOULD I RUB OFF?” (480). This is clearly an error. In the first edi-
tion of ASK YOUR MAMA, the question is printed as “WOULD IT RUB
OFF?” In addition, on a Buddha Records recording, Hughes clearly says
“it” and not “I” when he reads this line. Several scholars have repeated
this error from The Collected Poems6 though the evidence is clear that
Hughes intended the line to read “IF MY BLACKNESS, WOULD IT
RUB OFF?”). Underscoring this pointed humor, the first page of the poem
(before “CULTURAL EXCHANGE” opens) informs us: “The musical
figurine indicated after each ‘Ask your mama’ line / may incorporate the
impudent little melody of the old break, / ‘Shave and a haircut, fifteen
cents’” (n.p.). The inclusion of the musical scoring for this “impudent” fig-
ure highlights the ritualized insult of the Dozens that the “Your Mama”
jokes draw upon to “talk back” to racism (“WOULD IT RUB OFF? / I
SAID, ASK YOUR MAMA”).
An interesting variation, after the joke in “CULTURAL EXCHANGE,”
the musicians are instructed to
Figure impishly
into “Dixie”
ending in high
shrill flute call. (8)
Underscoring the irony of playing the Southern anthem “impishly” right

after the “Ask Your Mama” joke, the poem then turns into “DREAMS
AND NIGHTMARES . . . / NIGHTMARES . . . DREAMS! OH!” in
which blacks of the South have taken over and “VOTED ALL THE
DIXIECRATS / RIGHT OUT OF POWER—” (8). In what Hughes
calls “THE COLORED HOUR,” “WHITE SHARECROPPERS WORK
THE BLACK PLANTATIONS, / AND COLORED CHILDREN HAVE
WHITE MAMMIES” (8). The joke is definitely on the segregationists for
whom the “white mammies” are named: “Mammy Faubus” for Arkansas
governor Orville Faubus, “Mammy Eastland” after Mississippi senator James
Eastland, and “Mammy Patterson” for Alabama governor John Patterson.7
Simply combining the white politicians’ names with the moniker “Mammy”
is a biting indictment as Hughes reverses a racist justification with the
statement “DEAR, DEAR DARLING OLD WHITE MAMMIES— /
SOMETIMES EVEN BURIED WITH OUR FAMILY!” (9). By mak-
ing “mammies” white, an image that would incite white segregationists—
even those who would insist that their own black mammies are “part of the
family”—Hughes indicts racism from slavery to Jim Crow.
The title of Section 1, “CULTURAL EXCHANGE” accrues double
meaning as the section closes.
DEAR OLD
MAMMY FAUBUS!
CULTURE , THEY SAY, IS A TWO-WAY STREET:
HAND ME MY MINT JULEP, MAMMY.
MAKE HASTE! (9)
Thus, culture is a two-way street when white privilege is “exchanged” for the
oppression experienced by blacks in Hughes’s “COLORED HOUR.”
This material had already made its way into another genre of Hughes’s
work, as shown by Daniel Won-Gu Kim. In 1959, Hughes published a series
of five dreams in his Chicago Defender column in which “Simple” dreams
that
Black people have “taken over” the South and have reversed the tables on
Jim Crow . . . Whites are now relegated to the lowest and servant classes.
White mammies serve black families, and . . . white supremacist Georgia
Governor Eugene Talmadge becomes “Uncle Tom Talmadge” and the
notorious Governor Faubus of Arkansas has his mother turned—dozens
style—into a house servant, “Won’t white folks ever learn to know their
place? Mammy Faubus, bring me a julep!” (Kim 429)
In his reading of several of Hughes’s uncollected “Simple” columns, Kim

argues that “we begin to see that in the 1950s Hughes not only participated
in but sought to lead the broader radicalization of the US black political
imagination—inspired by the ascendant African freedom struggles—more
often associated with the ‘60s” (420). Kim also argues that ASK YOUR
MAMA has its origins in these “Simple” columns. Rather than locating the
origins of ASK YOUR MAMA’s in a singular text or event, I assert that the
broader point to be made is that during the 1950s and 1960s, Hughes was
not in retreat or simply trying to repackage the so-called failed radical verse
of his youth. Rather, the radicalism in both poetic form and politics that
continues to develop throughout Hughes’s career shows a traceable continu-
ity that remains invisible if Hughes is viewed only, or primarily as, a Harlem
Renaissance writer.
From the music and instrumentation, to the range of references present
in the first section of the poem, ASK YOUR MAMA is transnational in
scope.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE NEGROES

NKRUMAH
NASSER NASSER
ZIK AZIKIWE
CUBA CASTRO GUINEA TOUR É (6–7)
Kwame Nkrumah, a graduate of Hughes’s alma mater, Lincoln University

in Pennsylvania, was prime minister and later president of Ghana, which
became in 1957 the first country in Africa to achieve independence from
colonial rule. Ghana was the former Gold Coast, a British colony known
for its plantations that was also the world’s largest producer of cocoa.
Later in the same stanza Hughes links the oppression of colonial rule in
Africa with slavery and imprisonment in the Americas: “THE COCOA
AND THE CANE BRAKE / THE CHAIN GANG AND THE SLAVE
BLOCK / TARRED AND FEATHERED NATIONS” (7). Slavery in the
Americas, and the practice of colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean,
are driven by economic interests: here, the global market for cocoa and
sugarcane.
The poem shows that as African Americans struggled against the
entrenched practices of Jim Crow, oppressed people outside of the United
States rebelled against colonial and monarchial rule. Smethurst explains the
connections between anticolonial movements in the so-called Third World
and the growing Civil Rights movement in the United States:
While not exactly the same as U.S. racism, the ideological underpinning
of colonialism rested to a large extent on notions of white supremacy.
As a result, the peoples of European and American colonies and neo-
colonies were extremely interested in and identified with the conditions
and struggles of black people in the United States where the fight against
white supremacy had been sharper and antiracism more clearly articu-
lated than in any other country. (“Adventures” 149)
Thus, the figures mentioned with Nkrumah in this section of the poem
are likewise leaders of revolutions: Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt helped to
depose the Egyptian monarchy; “Zik” Azikiwe was the first president of
Nigeria after the country achieved independence; Fidel Castro led the revo-
lution in Cuba; Ahmed Sèkou Tourè helped to gain Guinea’s independence
from France; and Jomo Kenyatta led the independence movement in Kenya.
However, these names are not mere literary allusions. Hughes, for example,
was invited by Azikiwe to attend his inauguration ceremony in Nigeria.
Graduates of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, Hughes and Azikiwe
enjoyed a long-lasting literary and intellectual friendship.8 Hughes attended
Azikiwe’s inauguration along with other notable African Americans includ-
ing Ralph Bunche, W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Martin
Luther King, Jr. Azikiwe reserved a special honor for Hughes: “After taking
the oath of office, [Azikiwe] closed his address with a recitation of Hughes’s
‘Poem’ from The Weary Blues” (Kim 420). Hughes’s Pan-Africanist ideology
is realized here with the transnational exchange among notable persons of
African descent, and we see a remarkable example of the role poetry can play
in the social world.
Yet Hughes places these leaders in the poem between the lines and “IN
THE SHADOW OF THE NEGROES.” Thus, the poem illustrates that
although people on the African continent and of African descent elsewhere
are achieving unprecedented freedoms in the twentieth century, the state
of unfreedom in what Hughes calls the Negro quarter (calling to mind
slave quarters) casts a shadow over these world events. While anticolonial
fighters were interested in the campaign against white supremacy in the
United States, African Americans were becoming frustrated with the lack
of progress in their own country. And although the new postcolonial repub-
lics emerging in Africa inspired them, African Americans are pushed to the
margins of American society through economic and physical segregation,
and acts of violence.
The prolonged frustrating accompanying the long fight for rights in
America is underscored by the musical accompaniment on the right side of
the page. “Delicate / lieder / on piano” (6) merges:
into the
melody of the
“Hesitation
Blues” asking
its haunting
question,
“How long
must I
wait?
Can I
get it
now—or
must I
hesitate?” (7)
By placing “wait” and “hesitate” in single word lines, and through their
rhyming, Hughes emphasizes the language of deferral. Though inspired by
the postcolonial republics forming in Africa and the revolutionary leaders
named in the text on the left, African Americans still wait on Hughes’s
“dream deferred” as indicated in the musical instructions on the right. That
these concepts appear on the page side by side highlights this contrast.
The section ends with the playing of “When the Saints Go Marching In,”
“ joyously for two / full choruses / with maracas . . .” (9), showing a contrast-
ing energy and optimism. Here, culture is exchanged through the diasporic
experiences of people of African descent, illustrated through the African
American spiritual accompanied by a Latin American instrument. Indeed,

this exchange is joyous, an energetic celebration contrasting sharply with the
inertia of segregation and colonialism. Segregation seeks to cement the old,
while the exchange of diasporic cultures shown by Hughes births cultural
forms that are entirely new.
The Dozens
In 2002, Larry Scanlon wrote: “It is fair to say the poem remains largely
unanalyzed. Its general tenor may seem clear, but much of its complex politi-
cal and poetic vision remains more than half-hidden in the difficulties of
its experimental form” (50), an observation that remains accurate. For in
2009, Arnold Rampersad argues that “Ask Your Mama is easily Hughes’s
most neglected book of poetry” (v). The book is not widely recognized as an
epic recounting of diasporic history, as a score that enacts the poem both on
and off the page, or as the radical political statement that it becomes when
read in its entirety.
The “general tenor” that Scanlon refers to, I believe, is the humor of the
Dozens. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., notes that not only do the Dozens structure
the book “as a mode of discourse,” but also the book has a dozen sections
(Signifying 100). An additional “dozen” present in the book is the 12-bar
blues, which multiplies the joke even further. Meta DuEwa Jones adds that
“the excess” of such repetitions “renders a phrasal working and reworking
that is modeled after developments of chordal and modal improvisation
of bebop and post-bop jazz” (Muse 61), showing how the poem’s form is
also aligned with elements of jazz performance. Gates further notes: “The
poem itself imitates the dozens in its use of witty puns, in its urge toward a
narrative (which, in this case, amounts to a twelve-section history of Afro-
America, complete with a roll call of cultural heroes), but especially in the
frequent repetition of the phrase, ‘Ask Your Mama’” (Signifying 100–101).
Gates asserts that the poem’s unity depends upon the repetition of that
phrase (Signifying 101).
In introducing his theory of signifying, Gates recounts a story in the
New York Times about a group of African American high school students
who devised their own test for McGraw-Hill employees called “The In Your
Face Test of No Certain Skills” to “get even” with the company for produc-
ing the standardized tests that seemed to serve no other purpose than to
cause the students to feel academically inferior (Signifying 65–66).9 Gates
explains the following of the student-written test: “One of the test’s ques-
tions is an example of the most familiar mode of Signifyin(g). The question
reads, ‘Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?’ The proper response to this question
is ‘your mama’” (Signifying 66). Gates states that “it is difficult to explain
why this response is so funny,” (Signifying 66) but perhaps it is easier than he
suggests. The humor lies first in the fact that the response is entirely unex-
pected; there is an element of surprise. Moreover, in a verbal battle of wits,
even a “friendly” insult directed toward one’s mother is perhaps the deadliest
blow (especially in communities with a tradition of respect for motherhood),
the highest form of repartee against which there is no retort. The level of
hyperbole elevates the humor in such “Your Mama” jokes as the following:
“Your mama is so skinny she can hula-hoop a Cheerio,” and “Your mama’s
hair is so short she can roll it with rice.”
One of the most scathing jokes in the poem occurs in Section 6,
“HORN OF PLENTY,” which recounts the various ignorant comments
that whites make to an African American man who has “MOVED OUT
EVEN FARTHER FURTHER FARTHER” (43) to the suburbs on Long
Island where he and his family are the only African Americans living on
the block. Yet, bourgeois blacks who seemingly seek to distance themselves
from the African American community also become a subject of Hughes’s
critique:
HIGHLY INTEGRATED
MEANS TOO MANY NEGROES
EVEN FOR THE NEGROES—
ESPECIALLY FOR THE FIRST ONES
WHO MOVE IN UNOBTRUSIVE
BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH IN CASES
SEEKING SUBURB WITH NO JUKEBOX
POOL HALL OR BAR ON CORNER (44–45)
Yet even these Negroes who accept an assimilated, middlebrow culture rep-
resented by the “unobtrusive” Book-Of-The-Month Club, can be pushed
too far, as Hughes shows us in the closing stanza of this section: “THEY
RUNG MY BELL TO ASK ME / COULD I RECOMMEND A MAID. /
I SAID, YES, YOUR MAMA” (46). To emphasize the joke, this section
concludes with the musical figurine that is repeated throughout the text,
“Shave and a Haircut.”
The “Ask Your Mama” trope has an additional, poignant valence as well.
Throughout the text, a child asks his mama a series of questions. The child’s
voice first appears in “ODE TO DINAH,” Section 4: “I WANT TO GO
TO THE SHOW, MAMA” (30). This desire to go to the show is repeated
several times, though the answer is always the same: there is no money to go.
In “BLUES IN STEREO,” the child represents the language of deferral:

“WHAT TIME IS IT, MAMA? / WHAT TIME IS IT NOW? ” (36). The
child’s repeated desire to know the time illustrates impatience, waiting for
a desire to be fulfilled, although it never will be. Hughes uses the child to
represent the effects of racial and economic inequalities on the daily lives of
black families. An entire section “SHOW FARE, PLEASE,” Section 12 of
the poem, is dedicated to this narrative.
TELL ME, MAMA, TELL ME,

STRIP TICKETS STILL ILLUSION?
GOT TO ASK YOU—GOT TO ASK!
TELL ME, TELL ME, MAMA (81–82)
Young children, of course, are famously impatient and desirous of things

they cannot have, but here the request seems relatively simply: a desire to
go to the movies where the tickets are “in long strips” as they “come from
the slots inside the cashier’s booth at the movies” (92). “SHOW FARE”
can also be read as a pun on “SHOW FAIR,” meaning show “fairness” as
justice (show this child some justice), or “fairness” as skin color (only the
fair-skinned child will be admitted to the movie).10 The black child can only
dream of going to the movies.
The child’s long-held hope to go to the movies, and the economic impos-
sibility of his mama ever taking him, is such an important metaphor that
Hughes closes the final section of the book (before the liner notes) with the
child’s voice. The final quatrain reads:
THE TV’S STILL NOT WORKING

SHOW FARE, MAMA, PLEASE.
SHOW FARE, MAMA . . .
SHOW FARE! (83)
“SHOW FARE!” becomes a kind of command, like a train conductor

demanding proof of payment for passage, underscoring the impossibility
of the Negroes in “the quarter” ever being able to leave, for want of money
for a ticket.
Designing ASK YOUR MAMA

In the criticism on ASK YOUR MAMA scant attention has been paid to the
book’s material features, although the volume is a striking visual object.
The typography, binding, and jacket design of the first edition of the book
(1961) is by Vincent Torre. Torre, an artist, printer, book designer, and
poet has designed a number of other books, including those under his own
imprint, Inkwell Press. Every detail in the book is carefully chosen, down to
the “Egyptian” serif typeface, sometimes also called block or square serifs.
This bold typeface is associated with advertising, headlines, and posters.
Designed during the nineteenth century, the aim of the new typeface was to
“grab the viewer’s eye amid a busy urban milieu” (Eskilson 25). According
to a text on graphic communications: “Some designers feel that square ser-
ifs are great for headlines, posters, and as a display face, but they tend not
to be reader-friendly as text” (Ryan 3). The typeface is particularly fitting,
however, for what might be called the “in your face” style of the poem. In
fact, by printing the left side of the poem in all capital letters, the entire
book becomes a headline. Indeed, the material in the book is drawn from
the headlines: from the Civil Rights Movement in the United States to the
revolutions in Africa. This style also follows on Hughes’s previous interests
in the forms of advertising, as shown in the poem “Advertisement for the
Waldorf Astoria” (1931).
The rectangular-shaped book is printed on a creamy peach paper with
blue and sepia ink alternating on each pair of facing pages (verso and recto
blue, then verso and recto sepia, etc.). The paper is so magnificent that its
maker gets its own credit (“Paper made by Curtis Paper Company, Newark,
Delaware”). Modernist geographic images, with overlapping angular and
smooth shapes (much in the manner of Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings of
1925: “Balancement” or “Im Blau”) are used on the title page of each sec-
tion. The jacket cover plays on the geometric figure as well, but in striking,
bright colors: red, blue, and green contrasting with black, brown, and white.
The boldness of these images, like the boldness of the typeface, underscores
the Afro-Modernist form of the poem, an experiment that results in daring
juxtapositions like the bright, even cacophonous, layering of sounds laid out
by the jazz ensemble.
However, for those reviewers who were, in the words of Hughes, “unhep”
to the project of ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ , the book’s
arresting appearance did little to aid in its reception. For example, Roy Z.
Kemp of the Greensboro News quips: “The publisher, apparently, has tried to
issue an attention-getting volume to compensate for the lack of literary merit
of the contents” (Qtd. in Dace and Inge, 640). Yet, despite the mixed reviews
issued in 1961, and the relatively small amount of contemporary critical
work on the poem, ASK YOUR MAMA is an essential Afro-Modernist epic,
as well as a text that must be understood in order to comprehend the com-
plete arc of Hughes’s poetry career.
Composition and Performance

A little-known recording of Hughes reciting the poem was produced by
Buddha Records as part of a five-volume set on “Black America.” Although
“The Black Verse” album, featuring Hughes, appeared in 1961, the five LPs
are listed as a group (erroneously, it would appear, under the heading “New
Classical Releases”) in the May 3, 1969, issue of Billboard magazine (54).
The LPs are as follows:
“Black America Volume 1: The Buffalo Soldiers,” Nathaniel Montague11

“Volume 2: The Man of Love,” Dr. Martin Luther King
“Volume 3: The Black Pace Setters,” Nathaniel Montague
“Volume 4: The Struggle,” James Baldwin
“Volume 5: The Black Verse,” Langston Hughes
Hughes’s poetic transition to the experimental book-length epic reaches

its highest incarnation in this piece; he consistently refers to the book as
“this poem” in his introductory comments on the recording.12 With a bit
of hesitation, the “Poet Laureate of Harlem” known for vernacular blues
poems states: “In fact I think one might call the book a single poem because
although it is divided into twelve sections its thematic unity holds together
I believe” (“Black Verse”).
He goes on to describe the process of composing the poem, explain-
ing that, “this poem was written in segments beginning at Newport, the
Newport Jazz Festival in fact, two summers ago” (“Black Verse”). Scott Saul
provides further context. According to Saul, the backdrop against which
Hughes wrote the poem was not just the festival; it was a riot by whites at
the festival. In his Chicago Defender column of July 23, 1960, Hughes notes
the following about the riot: “The rioters were not lovers of jazz, but young
beer drinkers who had nothing better to do than throw their beer cans at
the cops. (Incidentally, according to the police records there was not a single
Negro among them: and the riots had no racial angles)” (10). In response to
the City Council of Newport, Rhode Island’s decision to cancel the festival
due to the violence, some black musicians organized their own event. On
July 2, 1960, “While unruly white crowds threw bottles at cops in the streets
and forced the festival’s cancellation, a group of musicians led by Charles
Mingus and Max Roach held a Newport festival of their own—a ‘Newport
Rebels’ festival.” (Saul 123). The counter-commercialist tenor of the alterna-
tive festival, organized by black musicians not considered headliners in the
Newport Festival, is captured in the following image: “Rather than promote
the counterfestival with paid advertising, Mingus simply roared through
town in a convertible, standing on the seat and shouting, ‘Come to my fes-

tival!’ (Someone else drove the car)” (Saul 125).
Saul reports that “while the National Guard took control of the region
later that weekend, Langston Hughes sat in his room at the Newport’s Hotel
Viking and started composing a poem” (123) that became ASK YOUR
MAMA: 12 MOOD FOR JAZZ .13 Saul argues that the poem “set out to
bewilder the rioters and white America generally through well-crafted mock-
ery” (123). Hughes’s description on the Buddha recording of composing the
poem at Newport is, however, much more benign. “I suppose that is why
as I wrote most of it I could hear jazz music behind it,” Hughes explains,
“and so when I gave the first readings of some segments of this poem they
were read to jazz. However, the poem may be read with or without music of
course” (“Black Verse”). Hughes’s comments suggest multiple performance
possibilities for the piece, from the mode of recitation he presents on the LP,
to multimedia stagings.
The dust jacket for the first edition of the book notes: “Ask Your
Mama has already had preview hearings in California and in New York
City, where Mr. Hughes makes his home.” A recent multimedia presen-
tation was performed at Carnegie Hall on March 16, 2009, a collabo-
ration between composer Laura Karpman and soprano Jessye Norman.
Other performances include a show in December 1994 at the Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, for
which Hale Smith was responsible for the original music and arrange-
ment (“Schomburg”). Few people have seen a production of ASK YOUR
MAMA, however, because there have not been any long-running, large-
scale performances.
While Saul argues that ASK YOUR MAMA is a direct response to the
riot at Newport, I read the poem’s intentions more broadly, encompass-
ing a range of targets, as it were, from white Southern segregationists, to
Northerners who fail to materialize an actual alternative to Jim Crow, to a
system of economics that cements racial inequality. Saul’s work is, however,
helpful in contextualizing the radicalization of both Hughes’s aesthetics and
his politics during the 1950s and 1960s. Smethurst explains the critical ten-
dency to “dismiss [Hughes’s] early Black Power–period poems as weak and
opportunistic efforts to repackage [his] work in order to find a niche in
changing times” (“Adventures” 141). In seeing the actions of those associ-
ated with the counterfestival as directly related to the Civil Rights freedom
struggle, as well as a link to the politics that became represented by the
phrase “Black Power,” Saul provides an alternate frame with which to view
Hughes’s late work—one that is more in tune with the messages of ASK
YOUR MAMA.
Precursors
ASK YOUR MAMA is an expansion of the poetics at work in Hughes’s ear-
lier career, as well as a reaffirmation of the radical politics that some believe
Hughes sought to diminish following the government harassment of writers
and artists in the 1950s. ASK YOUR MAMA is an extension of the poetics of
Montage of a Dream Deferred and a further radicalization of the possibilities
of juxtaposition as poetic method. However, in its presentation on the page,
the works that ASK YOUR MAMA resembles most closely are Hughes’s
political poems from the 1930s, including “Advertisement for the Waldorf
Astoria” (1931) and “Wait” (1933), as well as the dramatic poems published
in The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations (1931), showing a con-
tinuity that is unrecognized in Hughes scholarship.
In The New Red Negro, Smethurst comments on the singularity of
“Advertisement for the Waldorf” amongst Hughes’s poems of that decade
noting that unlike many of Hughes’s poems from the 1930s, which “often
feature a racially ambiguous generically ‘hard-boiled’ working-class speaker
whose diction derives as much from pulp fiction and the movies as from any
actually spoken English,” (110) in “Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria,”
“an African-American voice erupts from within the address of the ‘hard-
boiled’ speaker” (110).
Say, you colored folks, hungry a long time in 135th Street—

they got swell music at the Waldorf-Astoria. It sure is a
mighty nice place to shake hips in, too. There’s dancing
after supper in a big warm room. (Collected 145)
In The Big Sea (1940) Hughes writes: “The hotel opened at the very time
when people were sleeping on newspapers in doorways, because they had
no place to go. But suites in the Waldorf ran into thousands a year, and
dinner in the Sert Room was ten dollars! (Negroes, even if they had the
money, couldn’t eat there. So naturally, I didn’t care much for the Waldorf-
Astoria)” (321). “Hallelujah! under-cover driveways!” shouts the speaker
in the “Negroes” section of “Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria,” “Ma
Soul’s a witness for the Waldorf-Astoria!” (145). Such scorching irony also
marks ASK YOUR MAMA.
Modeled on an advertisement for the hotel in Vanity Fair, the poem also
collages other texts, including the menu of Waldorf Astoria’s restaurant.
CRABMEAT IN CASSOLETTE
BOILED BRISKET OF BEEF
SMALL ONIONS IN CREAM

WATERCRESS SALAD
PEACH MELBA
Have luncheon there this afternoon, all you jobless.
Why not? (Collected 144)
In Hughes’s repurposing of the language of the media, specifically the lan-

guage of advertising, Robert Shulman places him among poets of the Left
who “engaged and tapped into the energy of influential ‘low’ forms and
turned them from their prevailingly commercial to left uses” (269).14 In ASK
YOUR MAMA, Hughes also borrows the structure of other popular forms,
including the liner notes of the LP.
“Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria” has six section titles, each in
capital letters: “LISTEN, HUNGRY ONES!,” “ROOMERS,” “EVICTED
FAMILIES,” “NEGROES,” “EVERYBODY,” and “CHRISTMAS CARD.”
The blocks of texts framed by capital letters appear similar to the blocky
printed appearance of ASK YOUR MAMA. The first five section titles of
“Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria” call out for those members of
the “chorus” who will speak each section, while “CHRISTMAS CARD”
dares to instruct the Virgin Mary that socialist revolution will supersede
Christianity, as the red flag literally covers over the baby Jesus: “Listen, Mary,
Mother of God, wrap your new born babe in / the red flag of Revolution.”
(Collected 146).
However, the poems whose layouts appear most similar to ASK YOUR
MAMA are the dramatic poems published in The Negro Mother in 1931.
These poems, “The Colored Soldier,” “Broke,” “The Black Clown,” “The
Big-Timer,” “Dark Youth,” and “The Negro Mother” were published as
a pamphlet by Golden Stair Press, a collaborative effort between Hughes
and lithographer and painter Prentiss Taylor who created illustrations for
Hughes’s work. In addition, four of the poems were issued as broadsides.
Carl Van Vechten introduced the two men in 1931. Taylor, the young white
artist, was 23-years old at the time; Hughes was 29.15
Each of the dramatic poems, like ASK YOUR MAMA, is scripted for
performance. For example, “The Colored Soldier” begins with the follow-
ing instructions: “A dramatic recitation to be done in the half-dark by a
young brown fellow who has a vision of his brother killed in France while
fighting for the United States of America” (Collected 147). Following this
set-up, Hughes describes the music for the piece in a prose block at the top
of the page: “Martial music on a piano, or by an orchestra” should “softly
echo” wartime melodies such as “Over There” (147). Beneath these prose
instructions that appear on the top of the page, Hughes has produced two
columns of text. Running down the left side are instructions printed in ital-
ics describing the “THE MOOD.” On the right are verses printed in roman
labeled “THE POEM.” In The Collected Poems, a vertical line separates the
two columns. There is no vertical line between the columns in the original
Golden Stair Press publications. Without the line of separation, the begin-
ning of the poem appears like this:
THE MOOD THE POEM

Calmly My brother died in France—but I came back.
telling We were just two colored boys, brown and black,
the story. Who joined up to fight for the U.S.A.
(Collected 147).
It is evident in the line breaks that Hughes is thinking about the relationship
between the two vertical stanzas, considering multiple reading possibilities
(reading left to right across the page; reading down the left column, then
down the right). Although the placement of the columns in ASK YOUR
MAMA is the opposite (“the poem” on the left and “the mood”—in this
case musical instructions—on the right) the similarity in form of the two
texts is immediately apparent when they are placed side by side. This rela-
tionship of ASK YOUR MAMA to the dramatic poems becomes even more
interesting upon realizing that Hughes intended the dramatic poems “for
the masses of the Negro people,” not considering them in the least “high
brow” or “experimental.”
Promotional materials created by Hughes and Taylor for the pamphlet
and broadsides produced under the Gold Stair imprint state that the poems
(described as “ballads”) are “passionately lyrical presentations of widely
known and well-beloved Negro characters delineated in a broadly popular
manner not associated with Negro poetry since the death of Paul Laurence
Dunbar, [that] are suitable for recitation by amateurs in schools, churches,
and clubs.”16 In a letter dated October 13, 1931, that is contained in the
Prentiss Taylor Papers (with no addressee, though one assumes it is Taylor)
Hughes writes: “I have written ‘THE NEGRO MOTHER’ with the hope
that my own people will like it, and will buy it.” If this plan is successful
Hughes plans to produce more such works “in this unpretentious fashion,
to sell for as reasonable a price.” In this letter, which he states is personal
and “not for publication (please)” Hughes also asserts that “the modern
Negro Art Movement in America has been largely over the heads, and out
of the reach, of the masses of Negro people.” He believes that such work has
appealed to a “small group of ‘intellectuals’” and notes that “most colored

folks have not been able to pay two dollars or more for volumes of novels or
poems” in any case. Finally, although Hughes’s jazz poems are often con-
sidered to be in the “vernacular” of a “people’s poet,” Hughes writes: “[most
colored folk] have not cared for jazz, poetry, or low-down novels—and one
can’t blame them much—since they usually know such things all too well in
life.” Thus Hughes’s descriptions of the poems run counter to contemporary
critical responses.
The poems from The Negro Mother were available for order through the
offices of Crisis, Opportunity, and Golden Stair Press. Hughes also sold, and
gave away, large numbers of the pamphlets and broadsides during a read-
ing tour throughout the South, for which he had received a grant from the
Rosenwald Foundation. Drawing from Arnold Rampersad’s work, Smethurst
writes: “These readings, largely at African American educational institu-
tions, were predominantly attended by ‘middle-class’ African American
audiences” (“Adventures” 143), although that view is not consistent with
Hughes’s letters to Taylor. Of the “Dark Youth” broadside, Hughes writes in
a letter to Taylor dated February 1, 1932: “Those I am using entirely as gifts
to youngsters and teachers in little schools too poor to buy anything.” Those
Hughes paid for himself. Taylor kept the receipts and bills associated with
press business, and he and Hughes signed an official contract witnessed by
Carl Van Vechten. Copies of all of these documents, in addition to the cor-
respondence between Taylor and Hughes, are included in the Prentiss Taylor
Papers at the Archive of American Art.
The broadsides created by Hughes and Taylor were very popular. In the
same letter of February 1, 1932, Hughes states that they have only a hundred
copies of “The Negro Mother” broadside left and that he “can probably sell
at least 500 more on tour.” The poems also had broad appeal nationwide;
a letter dated February 10, 1932, was sent to the Golden Stair office from
as far away as Aberdeen, South Dakota, with payment for a copy of the
pamphlet. Belle S. Roberts of Aberdeen also requests information about the
poems for preparing a talk on Negro poets and poetry. By February 17,
1932, according to another letter from Hughes to Taylor, the “The Negro
Mother” had nearly sold out again. However, these sales did not prevent
problems in paying their printer, William J. Clark, and Golden Stair pro-
duced only two projects.
The dramatic poems in The Negro Mother are important because they
are obviously formal antecedents to ASK YOUR MAMA. Given Hughes’s
experience as a playwright, and his feeling that the form of the dramatic
recitation would have broad appeal amongst blacks who had not previously
purchased poetry, he conceived of the poems as a popular (not “high culture”
form) and perhaps (for him) an obvious choice. Though ASK YOUR MAMA
is obviously more densely allusive, the form of the poem that has troubled
contemporary readers and critics alike has clear antecedents in Hughes’s
political poems of the 1930s.
Describing his methods for his work with Hughes in a document dated
1967, Taylor writes: “For my earlier Winter Wheat Press offerings, zinc line-
cuts were used, often to be enhanced with hand coloring. This method was
continued in the first set of illustrations for the Golden Stair Press, which
Langston Hughes and I established in 1931 to publish The Negro Mother
and Other Dramatic Recitations.” The other collaborative effort between
Hughes and Taylor published under the Golden Stair imprint is Scottsboro
Limited; Four Poems and a Play in Verse (1932), a work written to raise money
for the Scottsboro Defense Fund. Nine black youth on a train bound for
Memphis where they were going to seek work were wrongfully convicted
in 1931 of raping two white women; the alleged crimes never occurred. For
Scottsboro Limited, Taylor began to work in lithography. Smethurst argues
that Scottsboro Limited “is a testament to Hughes’s embryonic attempts to
imagine an African American popular radical art that would appeal to a
broad black audience beyond a relatively small cadre of organized radicals”
(“Adventures” 145). This assessment is in accord with the plan described by
Hughes and Taylor.
Hughes and Taylor maintained a long and affectionate correspondence
from their first meeting in 1931 to Hughes’s death in 1967. Their letters
help to illuminate the daily lives of writers and artists in the mid-twentieth
century. For example, in 1948, Taylor writes to tell Hughes about his work
with the “criminally insane” at St. Elizabeths Hospital where he did art ther-
apy with patients, including Ezra Pound. In 1951, Taylor writes to Hughes:
“Ezra Pound has lent me his copy of your Montage . . . We’ve had a good
couple visits lately & he still seems anxious to get square away as not being
anti-Negro, as he told you was he was called on the East German Radio.”
Reassessing Hughes’s “Social Poetry”

Reconsidering ASK YOUR MAMA, a text rendered by critics an outlier
in the Hughes oeuvre, demonstrates some of the distinctive continuities
in Hughes’s large and diverse body of work. Though little discussed, ASK
YOUR MAMA is also part of a unique group of Afro-Modernist epics and
continues to influence contemporary authors. Discussion of the poem
requires a revision of the status of Hughes the poet in the larger African
American and American literature canons. For example, although readers
often singularly romanticize Hughes as a “poet of the people,” some of “the
people” held differing opinions. In fact, as he recounts in an article pub-

lished in 1947, his first experience with censorship occurred “in a colored
church in Atlantic City shortly after my first book, The Weary Blues, was
published in 1926” (“My Adventures” 206). Hughes was still a student at
Lincoln University at the time.
During the course of my program I read several of my poems in the form

of the Negro folk songs, including some blues poems about hard luck and
hard work. As I read I noticed a deacon approach the pulpit with a note
which he placed on the rostrum beside me, but I did not stop to open the
note until I had finished and had acknowledged the applause of a cordial
audience. The note read, “Do not read any more blues in my pulpit.” It
was signed by the minister. (“My Adventures” 206)
Thus, while critics tend to align Hughes’s early blues poems with “the peo-
ple’s” vernacular, this black minister found the low down blues to be inap-
propriate material for his congregation. This is important because although
contemporary critics also celebrate the African American sermon as a ver-
nacular form, the blues and the sermon come from two very different social
milieus. Hughes, of course, recognized such divisions as early as 1926, in
a comment on the sidelining of Negro spirituals by some black churches:
“Many an upper-class Negro church, even now, would not dream of employ-
ing a spiritual in its services. The drab melodies in white folks’ hymnbooks
are much to be preferred” (“Negro Artist” 1312).
Thus, Hughes first came into contact with censorship not from whites,
but from within the black community, and not all African Americans
found Hughes’s work to be representative of them. While, conventionally,
Hughes’s blues poems are viewed in the criticism as among those works that
make him the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” Hughes argues that this is not
the case: black folks have had enough of the blues in real life. In addition,
while the form of the dramatic poems—and the correspondingly distinct
two-column format in ASK YOUR MAMA —seem experimental to contem-
porary readers, Hughes wrote the dramatic poems specifically for everyday
black people. Taking this under consideration should encourage critics to
reassess the “outlier” status of ASK YOUR MAMA.
In the same essay quoted above, Hughes also describes being detained
by authorities in Japan and Cuba, nearly being run out of the University of
North Carolina, losing his patron, and being picketed by followers of Aimee
Semple McPherson, illustrating the opposition that his “social poetry” faced
from various sides. Yet, Hughes’s politics and poetics, through various arcs
of development, also maintain a consistent vision: “I have never known the
police of any country to show an interest in lyric poetry as such,” Hughes

writes, “But when poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention
poverty, trade unions, color lines, and colonies, somebody tells the police”
(“My Adventures” 205). This statement might well have been made by
Amiri Baraka, who finds a model in ASK YOUR MAMA for his own retell-
ing of African diasporic history in Wise Why’s Y’s: The Griot’s Song (Djeli Ya)
(1995), his music-inflected Afro-Modernist epic. Before Why’s Wise Y’s is
finished, Baraka specifically claims ASK YOUR MAMA as part of his own
lineage.
CHAPTER 6
Amiri Baraka’s Wise Why’s Y’s:

Lineages of the Afro-Modernist Epic
I
As an aesthetic exclamation point
Think of music
as the only
soul
God
cd
have (Wise Why’s Y’s 120)
Conducting an interview with Amiri Baraka published in African

American Review in 2003, Kalamu ya Salaam posits: “For all artists there
are moments of clarity that are so absolute everybody can see them . . . For
example, Kind of Blue will always be one of Miles’s more definitive state-
ments” (225–226). He then asks Baraka: “In terms of your writing, what
is your Kind of Blue, your Love Supreme ?” and Baraka replies: “Why’s actu-
ally says that in a lot of ways” (226). Despite Baraka’s assertion that Wise
Why’s Y’s may represent his “definitive statement,” critics have ignored
it. Wise Why’s Y’s: The Griot’s Song (Djeli Ya) (1995) is, however, a major
Afro-Modernist epic that is part of a tradition that includes Melvin B.
Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) and Harlem Gallery
(1965), and Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) and
Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), as well as Gwendolyn Brooks’s
“The Anniad” from Annie Allen (1949).
As Baraka’s epic was being composed, sections of it appeared in several

venues, giving readers insight into Baraka’s writing and revision process.
William J. Harris first introduced 13 sections of the poem-in-progress,
then called “Why’s/Wise,” in his 1985 study of Baraka’s jazz aesthetic,
printing them together in a special appendix. Harris writes: “Currently,
Baraka is composing a long historical poem—perhaps book-length—that
examines Afro-American slavery, both actual and spiritual, before and
after the American Civil War. He expects it to take several years to com-
plete” (Poetry 117). According to Harris, at the time of the publication of
his book in 1985, poems from “Why’s/Wise” had appeared in the Campus
Exchange Forum , a publication of the Black Faculty and Staff Association
at SUNY Stony Brook, where both he and Baraka were on the faculty,
and in the journal Unity (Poetry 168). In 1985, poems from “Why’s/Wise”
were also published in Southern Review and Forward: Journal of Socialist
Thought.
The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, published in 1991, which was
edited by Harris in collaboration with Baraka, contains the same 13 sec-
tions of the poem as Harris’s earlier monograph. However, an important
apparatus has been added: each section of the poem is now paired with
a song.1 The first song is “Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen.” The sec-
tions following (2–13) are accompanied by songs from Charlie Parker,
Grachan Moncur III (Wise 3 and Wise 6), David Murray, Baby Dodds,
“Papa” Jo Jones, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Rev. Pearly Brown, Rev. R. Wilkins,
Jelly Roll Morton, “Old” George Lewis, and Pine Top Smith. This change
in the poem as a whole is signaled in the published version of “What about
Literature? W-15” published in Southern Review (1985). There, as part of a
short introduction to the poem, Baraka writes: “I’ve been working on the
piece now for almost two years; there are some 25–30 parts, which are just
now beginning to appear. Also each part of the poem carries music with it”
(801). The Southern Review publication itself gives no indication as to what
that music might be. However, a working manuscript from Baraka’s archive
lends additional information. Baraka tucked a photocopy of the Southern
Review publication into its numerical position (#15) into a working draft of
the larger piece, the typescript of which is now housed in the Amiri Baraka
Papers at Columbia University.2 On the first page of that copy in the upper-
right corner he has typed, “Creole Love Call —Duke / Sidney Bechet ver-
sion.” In the complete poem, published as a book in 1995 by Third World
Press, a song title and musician are printed in the upper-right corner of each
section’s opening page. This chapter examines Baraka’s poem in its shorter
form, first called “Why’s/Wise,” through its composition and revision to
the longer, book-length work entitled Wise Why’s Y’s: The Griot’s Song (Djeli
Amiri Baraka’s Wise Why’s Y’s ● 153
Ya), published by Third World Press four years later (1995). Through this
process, we witness Baraka’s jazz epic evolve.
The use of music to impart African American history has long been an
essential tenet of Baraka’s philosophy. In the introduction to Blues People
(1963), Baraka recalls how, under the tutelage of Sterling Brown, he learned
the following:
But as I began to get into the history of the music, I found that this
was impossible without, at the same time, getting deeper into the his-
tory of the people. That it was the history of the Afro-American people
as text, as tale, as story, as exposition, narrative, or what have you, that
the music was the score, the actually expressed creative orchestration,
reflection, of Afro-American life, our words, the libretto, to those actual
lived, lives. (ix)
To write an Afro-Modernist epic, as we shall see, the inclusion of the musi-

cal text becomes essential to the telling of collective African American
history.
The final version of Baraka’s epic is book-length, contains 40 sections,
and is 132 pages long. Some sections are simply numbered (“Wise 1,” “Wise
2,” etc.), while others contain more elaborate titles that play off of the book’s
title, such as “19th Century Moment—Y’s Up (27)” (93) and “At The
Colonial Y They Are Aesthetically & Culturally Deprived (Y’s Later) (31)”
(99) and “‘There Was Something I Wanted to Tell You.’ (33) Why?” (106).
Baraka employs a variety of line lengths, from lines that stretch across the
page, to single word lines, though short, abrupt lines predominate. He uses
the page as a field: the entire page is used, with exacting placement of words
and active white space. The poem becomes more visual, painterly toward
the end of the book, where actual solid and dashed lines, and symbols are
added to the text. He employs a variety of registers, using some collaged
portions, with a predominance of vernacular speech, puns (double voicing),
and hyperbole.
The book provides an African American history lesson covering topics
including the genocide of slavery, Reconstruction and the oppressive Black
Codes, the Great Migrations, and the shift to an urban Black population.
Throughout the text, Baraka also addresses the development of African
American literature, the struggles to create a modern black identity in the
twentieth century, and how previous struggles manifest in different forms
in human history. Throughout the book, Baraka provides the musical score
that accompanies this journey. Moreover, the epic is a commentary on the
writing of history itself, presenting history as a “spiral” (rather than linear
narrative), singing African Americans’ diasporic history from West Africa

through the Middle Passage and slavery and into the present. The complete
book reads like a score for a performance piece containing poetry, music, and
visual art. African American music, particularly jazz, is central to its overall
meaning and method. This focus becomes evident as the poem develops
throughout Baraka’s long writing process.
Having access to several versions of the poem-in-progress gives us a sense
of Baraka’s composition and revision, as well as his evolving vision of his own
literary lineages. Considering these lineages makes it possible for readers to
more fully comprehend the imagination of Baraka whose work encompasses
a literary heritage that includes Ezra Pound and Melvin B. Tolson, Fenton
Johnson and T. S. Eliot, as well as Dadaists and Pan-Africanists. In fact,
this crossing of racial, national, and aesthetic boundaries is one of the most
salient and interesting features of Baraka’s Afro-Modernist work. Analyzing
Baraka’s often-neglected work from the latter twentieth century also neces-
sitates a reconceptualization of the narratives describing the historical devel-
opment of Baraka’s career.
Major studies of Baraka’s work have often taken an ideological/chrono-
logical approach to mapping his career. If we read outside of these chro-
nologies, however, which render formal innovation secondary to political
ideology, we can begin to see how Baraka’s career forces a revision of liter-
ary history, while clarifying the development of Afro-Modernism. His pro-
lific work as poet, playwright, fiction writer, theorist, and activist affords
us a long view of a complex writer’s development. While some black experi-
mental writers, such as Tolson, suffer neglect from being uncategorizable to
many readers, Baraka, in contrast, has suffered misreadings brought about
by a profusion of labels. Baraka is rightly associated with his leadership in
the Black Arts Movement; however, some have dismissed him as an art-
ist because of his cultural nationalist period, or the more recent contro-
versy over his position as Poet Laureate of New Jersey. Baraka himself has
reached the point where he has been able to participate in reenvisioning his
own life history and development as a writer more than once. In the Leroi
Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, Baraka addresses Harris’s mapping of his career
in that text, while acknowledging the drawbacks of such a chronology.
“The typology that lists my ideological changes as ‘Beat-Black Nationalist-
Communist’ has brevity going for it, and there’s something to be said for
that, but, like notations of Monk, it doesn’t show the complexities of real
life” (Reader xi).
Harris divides Baraka’s work into four chronological periods. “Since Baraka
is a process artist—one who reflects the daily ‘zoom’ of his life in his art—I
have arranged his work chronologically . . . the Beat Period (1957–1962), the
Transitional Period (1963–1965), the Black Nationalist Period (1965–1974),
and the Third World Marxist Period (1974– )3” (Reader xv). Harris’s chronol-
ogy bears similarities to that of Werner Sollors in his 1978 monograph on
Baraka’s “quest for a populist modernism.” Sollors charts Baraka’s chronol-
ogy as follows: “Beat/Bohemianism” (1958–1960), “New Left” (1960–1965),
“Black Cultural Nationalism” (1964–1974), “Marxism Leninism Mao-Tse-
Tung-Thought” 1974– (8). Because Baraka has famously and dramatically
shifted political directions several times, such chronologies provide a use-
ful framework for understanding the development of his work. However, by
making ideology, chronology, or theme primary, attention is also diverted
from the formal properties of Baraka’s texts. Furthermore, within such divi-
sions, Baraka’s contribution to American modernism is obscured, though
evidence of it remains.
This chapter explores the evolution of Wise Why’s Y’s,4 while also tracing
the relationship of the poem to the Classical epic, the early twentieth-cen-
tury American modernist long poem, and the West African griot tradition.
While drawing on multiple epic traditions, Baraka’s Afro-Modernist epic is
unique in several respects. First, Baraka’s epic is a song of the collective rather
than of the individual hero. Moreover, the Afro-Modernist epic is transna-
tional, rather than an agent of coalescing a unitary national consciousness,
as in the Classical epic. This transnationality is made evident by the fact that
the history made in Baraka’s epic is fundamentally diasporic, as well as mul-
tiracial. Although there is certainly a recent precedent for transnationality in
the epic—think of Pound’s Cantos —Baraka chooses cultural references that
specifically draw from the lineages of the Afro-Modernist subject brought
about by diaspora. By proceeding from a diasporic worldview, Baraka inter-
rogates the definition of nation and the meaning of national belonging.
In this way, he uses the genre of the epic that at its foundation coalesces
national identity to question those very foundations.
Furthermore, Wise does not follow the traditional narrative of the epic
journey; the African American collective is unable to return to a physical
location called “home.” Instead, Wise improvises a home for the African
American collective through the act of performance. The jazz melodies that
accompany the final text are essential to this process. In his interview with
Baraka, Salaam hones in on the performative nature of Wise in his sug-
gestion that it is actually a score rather than a book of poetry: “I mean,
you indicate the musical references, but until you hear it recited, sung and
played, you haven’t really dug it. You can’t fully appreciate it just by reading
the score; you’ve got to hear it” (226). In this way, Baraka has created a piece
in the form of Hughes’s experimental jazz poem ASK YOUR MAMA: 12

MOODS FOR JAZZ . Baraka responds to Salaam saying, “I think you were
right in saying that Why’s is a musical score. It is in a lot of ways. It lays out
that music to show you the kind of feeling that the words are supposed to
be attached to” (226).
Fred Moten, in a chapter focusing primarily on Baraka’s work from 1962
to 1966, suggests a method for understanding Baraka’s interweaving of
visual and aural elements on the page that is also pertinent to Wise.
The relation between a musical score and the music is like the relation
between the page and poem. That which appears on the page is not the
poem but a visual-spatial representation of the poem that would approxi-
mate or indicate its sound and meaning, form and content, and the par-
ticular sculpted manifestation of language as their interanimations, the
orchestration or arrangement of the body. (96–97)
Thus, like Hughes’s ASK YOUR MAMA, Wise suggests a performance that
is always in the process of occurring elsewhere (besides the book). What we
call the “poem,” then, exists simultaneously both on and off the page, as well
as somewhere in between the two, as constructed in each reading.
Emphasizing the poem’s performative aspect in the book published in
1995 is a new, important section not present in the iterations printed while
the poem was still in progress, detailing how the piece is to be presented.
In these notes preceding “Wise 1,” Baraka suggests that the performance,
like the past being evoked, has not only preceded us as readers, but is also
a process that is ongoing. “Before Wise 1,” Baraka writes, “there is a long
improvisation, not yet completely transcribed” (5). The improvisation may
be in the process of transcription because it has already happened (but
has yet to be written down), or because it is always still happening within
the text (and is thus always in the process of remaking itself). Of the
“long improvisation, not yet completely transcribed,” Baraka writes: “It is
called, in its entirety, PRE-HERE/ISTIC Sequence” and it is divided into
five sections called “DAT,” “DEUCE,” “TREY,” “FO’,” “FI’” (i.e.: one,
two, three, four, five) (5–6). In calling the sequence “PRE-HERE/ISTIC ,”
Baraka shows that this performance has come before us. It precedes us; it
is “PRE-HERE .” The title of the sequence also conveys that the poem will
be a heuristic (HERE/ISTIC ). As a heuristic text, the poem encourages dis-
covery in order to teach African American history. This process involves
trial and error, both within the text and within the mind of reader. These
shades of meaning are applicable to the text itself, the process of making
it, and the process of performance that the poem encodes. This process is
also reflected in the book’s title, a kind of meditation on the interrogative

“Why?”
The five sections of the “PRE-HERE/ISTIC Sequence” are as follows:
DAT—Africa (Drums-RWalker)
DEUCE— Ghost (Snake Eyes) (“Space Spy ”—Moncur)
TREY—My Brother the King (3/4 solos & Dun Dun)
FO’—Railroad of African Bones (Under water
(Box Cars) African Funeral Music)
FI’—I Aint From Here (Wade in The Water
Afro-Xtian Lament) (5–6)
Africa, in this poem, is “Dat,” “that,” number one, or the origin. The music
here is that of “RWalker.” Drummer Rudy Walker plays with Baraka’s group
Blue Ark, in which Baraka performs spoken word accompanied by jazz
music. Walker plays both jazz and African drums. According to his biog-
raphy: “While considering himself a classical jazz drummer, West African
rhythms and the blues cannot be separated from [Walker’s] style” (Walker,
“Rudy’s Bio”). Therefore, to represent the origin in his epic, Baraka chooses
what I term an “African American diasporic drummer,” rather than only
the soundings of African drums. Within Walker’s diasporic performance,
“home” can be transformed into a way of being that connects him to lost
ancestral cultures that are transformed in the Americas. “Even though they
are different styles of drumming (Jazz and African), for me, they are very
connected. I guess it’s because I hear a certain swing in all of the drumming
that I do,” Walker states, “I hear that swing that came here with my ancestors
on those slave ships. That swing that even they had no idea they would pro-
duce. So in that way, when I play, it’s all African to me” (Walker, “African”).
Both section DEUCE and section FO’ evoke a game of craps where
one might roll a two (“snake eyes”) or twelve (“box cars”). In addition,
this reference might suggest Stéphane Mallarmé’s experimental method in
Un Coup de Dés (A Throw of the Dice) (1897). The music for section two
(DEUCE) is that of jazz trombonist Grachan Moncur III. Moncur’s “Space
Spy” was recorded on his New Africa LP issued by French label BYG Actuel
in 1969, after he had left Blue Note. Moncur is also included elsewhere
in the text: Moncur’s “Hipnosis” appears with “Wise 3” (10) and his song
“Jimmy’s Blues” with “Wise 6” (16). Joyce Morgan notes: “During the Jackie
McLean/Grachan Moncur III era, historical Jazz albums were recorded, One
Step Beyond, Evolution, Destination Out, Some Other Stuff, and the classic
jazz series double album Hipnosis.” Recorded on the Blue Note label, these
albums feature Moncur as both trombonist and composer, leading to “the
acceptance of what has been termed ‘Avant Garde’ opening the door for
other musicians to record ‘new music’” on Blue Note (Morgan).
In the liner notes to the 1967 album Hipnosis, Ben Sidran calls the title
track “a snake charmer kind of vamp” emphasizing that “of particular note is
the way drummer Higgins and pianist Lamont Johnson interweave the bas-
ket out of which emerge the serpentine horn lines of Jackie and Grachan.”
The song is carried by the repetition of a beat laid down by the drums and
piano that both begins and ends the piece. Initially joining the percussion
in unison, the horns eventually climb higher and higher into their own solo-
ing, interrupted by a piano interlude around minute eight of the ten-minute
song. When the horns rejoin, the piano returns to the initial beat, and the
horns eventually rejoin that same measure with which they started at the
outset. In “Wise 3,” which this songs accompanies, the speaker describes a
son singing who “fount some / words” and
. . . Think
he bad. Speak
they
language (10)
The poem repeats this phrase three times, and concludes:
‘sawright
I say
‘sawright
wit me
look like
yeh, we gon be here
a taste (10–11)
The speaker, whose spirit of rebellion is described in “Wise 2” and “Wise 4,”
settles into the repetition, like the song’s continued beat. The horns’ flights
signify the search for freedom that the speaker of the text imagines, even as
he realizes “we gon be here” (enslaved) for a long while.
Section 3 of the PRE-HERE/ISTIC Sequence, “TREY—My Brother the
King,” is located in Africa where the long-ago brothers of African Americans
may still reign. The music is “3/4 solos” and Dun Dun, the so-called talk-
ing drum of Nigeria. Section 4 (FO’) is described as “Railroad of African
Bones (Box Cars)” and the music is “Under water African Funeral Music ” (5).
This section denotes the Middle Passage. In Blues People, Baraka notes: “So
that moving from the middle passage forward (and backward), as Jacques
Roumaine said, from that ‘railroad of human bones . . . at the bottom of the
Atlantic Ocean,’ one traced the very path and life and development, trag-
edy, and triumph of Black people” (x). The railroad is a recurrent African
American trope taken from major events in African American history—
from the railroad of human bones in the Middle Passage (death) to the
abolitionists’ Underground Railroad (freedom) and finally to the rail routes
African Americans rode north during the Great Migration.
This first reference to box cars in the PRE-HERE/ISTIC Sequence also
gestures toward the connections the poem will make between the genocide
of the Middle Passage and the genocide of the Holocaust. For example, in
“#20 Borders (Incest) Obsession,” a section in which the first two lines are
“The Slave is obsessed / w/ being Out!” (73), the figure of the box cars is
used in the context of the Holocaust:
As the box cars line up

a jig to their hang
the insignia changed
But the murders still the game (76)
The murder of Africans in the Middle Passage, and the murder of Jews,
Gypsies, and others during the Holocaust are repetitions of the same human
tragedy. The poem expands these connections with lines such as “And who
is more famous / than Hitler?” and the ironic call: “‘The People must be /
Christianized!’” (76), a statement that can apply to the genocides perpe-
trated through the Holocaust, slavery, and colonialism. Section 4’s musical
accompaniment, under water funeral music in the place of the dead (those
lost during the Middle Passage), also constitutes a visit to underworld in the
Classical epic sense. The speaker communicates with the dead throughout
the poem:
dialogue dead people

their cynical
quiet
the burn (75)
Finally, section five “FI’— I Aint From Here ” lands us in slavery with slaves
singing the sorrow song, “Wade in The Water,” which Baraka describes
as an “Afro-Xtian Lament” (6–7). We begin, therefore, in the time of
slavery and the sorrow songs, but the music is already working as a tool of
resistance.
This sequence, however, should not be misconstrued as a table of con-
tents for the text that follows. Rather, the PRE-HERE/ISTIC Sequence
is more a model for the method underlying the poem. The poem moves
through the themes and stages described in the beginning sequence, but
does not dispense with them in a linear fashion. In fact, the poem represents
history as circular (a spiral) rather than as linear. In “#19 Death Parallels,”
this philosophy is laid out:
Understand
the life
Spiral. Infinity
Stood up on its
head
(tail)
it all
comes
back
on “higher
ground.”
These conflicts
(for instance)
are centuries
old!!
Sd it was gone
but
here it come
again (67)
In this cyclical version of history, humans repeat the same conflicts, and
the beginning and ending (head and tail) overlap. This Marxian use of the
Hegelian spiral is employed throughout the poem.
In the performance notes preceding Wise 1, Baraka also explains that
the work is aural as well as visual: “Each of these sections is accompa-
nied by a piece of music. The work is meant to be visualized by painters
Vincent Smith and Tom Feelings” (5). Moten further elucidates a mul-
tisense, whole body method for reading the visual and aural elements of
Baraka’s work:
And don’t let any artificial hierarchy of the senses keep you from the mys-
terious holoesthetic experience of ensemble Baraka’s poems approach.
One must have an ear and eye, skin and tongue, to perceive the poems’
publication, aural reproduction, and their effects. We see the poem, read
it, hear it, feel it—is it, in the midst of these various experiences, the
same? Does it change? Where is the poem? Is the entirety of the poem
ever present to us in any of its manifestations? (96)
In order to more fully grasp Baraka’s instructions in Wise, it is important

to consider, however briefly, the work of the artists that Baraka selects to
visualize this work. Award-winning painter and illustrator Tom Feelings
(1933–2003), who is also the cover artist for Wise, is well known for his
illustrations of children’s books such as Soul Look Back in Wonder (1993). A
Feelings biographer notes that he was “passionately committed to the mis-
sion of encouraging black children to understand their own spiritual and
physical beauty” (Wolf and Pendergast). Feelings is also remembered for his
masterpiece, Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo (1995), black pen-and-
ink drawings with white tempura that he worked on for more than 20 years
after returning to the United States from Ghana. This collection of drawings
was published the same year as Baraka’s Wise. The published version of Wise
18 in Forward, which Baraka titled “YYYYYYY (18),” illustrates a multime-
dia presentation that combines text and painting. The poem, printed over
eight pages (109–116) in the journal, includes images of three paintings by
Feelings on pages 111, 112, and 116 that are interspersed with the text.5
Feelings’s haunted images in Middle Passage, created in a process that
allowed the ink, water, and paint to run and bleed into each other, depict
Africans’ suffering through the slave trade beginning with kidnapping and
continuing through the brutal journey to the Americas. Feelings intended
this work to educate adults, as well as young people, about the history of
slavery (Wolf and Pendergast). According to Rudine Sims Bishop, Feelings
“calls himself a storyteller, and regards his picture-book illustration as an
extension of the African oral tradition, the tradition of the griot and of the
storyteller.” Feelings explains his position as follows:
When I am asked who I am, I say, I am an African who was born in America.
Both answers connect me specifically with my past and present . . . therefore
I bring to my art a quality which is rooted in the culture of Africa . . . and
expanded by the experience of being in America. I use the vehicle of “fine
art” and “illustration” as a viable expression of form, yet striving always to
do this from an African perspective, an African world view, and above all
to tell the African story . . . this is my content. (“Artist”)
This statement is also illustrative of the ethos operating in Wise; both works
proceed from an understanding and analysis of African American experi-
ence rooted in a diasporic consciousness.
In contrast to Feelings’s ghostly black, white, and gray images in Middle
Passage, fellow Brooklynite and Black Arts Movement painter Vincent Smith
(1929–2004) created canvases awash in a variety of colors. Baraka writes of
Smith’s work: “Sisters smile a little, buildings hang stiff in Smithspace, flow-
ers glow indelibly, into the consciousness, civil rights leaders and militants are
caught in paint like fixed artifacts of the black creative aesthetic, their politics
collected forever in colors and forms” (qtd. in Fitzgerald). Smith’s portrait of
attorney Reginald Lewis, the first portrait of an African American to hang
in Harvard Law School, is described by one observer as follows: “The colors
embraced by the black liberation movement work distinctly with strong yel-
lows, rich purples and pinks, lime greens and azure blues. The patterns—
streaks of drapery, a mottled suit, checkered stained glass—create movement
and hold the viewer in constant surprise, while sculpted forms keep the focus
on Lewis’ humanity” (Fitzgerald). Smith’s tactile creations, he explains when
describing his own work, are composed of a variety of materials “oil and sand
dry pigment and collage and pebbles and dirt and so forth,” creating a highly
textured surface (Fitzgerald). Feelings’s work in Middle Passage grasps at a
history that is always slipping away, just as the water and paint in his artwork
threatened to obliterate the drawings in their making, while Smith’s works
are built up, layered, concrete. Baraka’s choice of artists with such contrasting
styles evokes the range of tonalities that he expects in performances of Wise
and that are present within the text itself.
As mentioned above, it is also dictated in the improvisation transcribed
prior to “Wise 1” in the final version of the poem that each section will have a
musical accompaniment. “Wise 1” is to be accompanied by “Nobody Knows
The Trouble I Seen.” This spiritual precedes what is traditionally thought
of as the poem, that is, the text: “WHY’s Intro: NOBODY KNOWS THE
TROUBLE I SEEN / Traditional / (Trombone Solo)” (6). Thus the mourn-
ful sound of the trombone is already in progress before the text of “Wise
1” begins, and continues throughout it. The text is layered with sight and
sound, but this textual inscription is haunted and threatening to slip away
like the “oom boom ba boom” in “Wise 1.”
If you ever find

yourself, some where
lost and surrounded
by enemies
who won’t let you
speak in your own language

who destroy your statues
& instruments, who ban
your oom boom ba boom
then you are in trouble
deep trouble
they ban your
oom boom ba boom
you in deep deep
trouble (7)
The “oom boom ba boom” encompasses those elements of the African past—
language, religion, and culture (statues and instruments)—banned by slave
owners in the Americas and which people of African descent struggle to
maintain and make anew. In Blues People, Baraka asserts: “But to be brought
to a country, a culture, a society, that was, and is, in terms of purely philo-
sophical correlatives, the complete antithesis of one’s own version of man’s
life on earth—that is the cruelest aspect of this particular enslavement” (1).
Of this “deep trouble” of slavery, Baraka writes in the poem:
humph!
probably take you several hundred years
to get
out! (7)
The text thus begins within a past evoked in the present, a past notated as
warning.
Moten offers the following important reminder: “The tragic in any tradi-
tion, especially the black tradition, is never wholly abstract. It is always in
relation to quite particular and material loss” (94). In his reading of Baraka’s
“BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS,” Moten asserts: “This is what [the poem]
is about: the absence, the irrecoverability of an originary and constitutive
event; the impossibility of a return to an African, the impossibility of an
arrival at an American, home” (94). While Wise also constitutes an originary
loss of home and culture, the performance of African American history in
the text offers a way of being, that if not quite “home,” at least cannot be
eradicated. The improvisation generates a manner of being and becoming,
of giving and taking, which is created continuously anew. The model for
such improvisation is the jazz ensemble in which each musician’s “signa-
ture” is developed through the musical responses given to him or her by
the group’s other members. The final performance is more than the sum of
individuals, but is the result of their interactions. So, too, Baraka’s epic is not
the story of an individual hero, but represents collective struggle—as well as
a renewal that is created through the arts.
The continued making, sometimes grasping, sometimes landing, only
to be unmoored again and eventually finding solidity that occurs in a jazz
performance is made manifest and is repeated throughout Baraka’s text. It is
also present in the process of struggle with the legacy of slavery that the text
describes. Baraka attempts to find solid meaning in “Wise 2” as he asks:
/What vision in the blackness

of queens
of kings
/What vision in the blackness
that head
& heart
of yours
that sweet verse
you made, I still hear (8)
The “vision in the blackness” is a vision of the blackness of African people

but also a struggle to see, to have vision, against the obliteration of his-
tory. The queens and kings are not the ancestors of African Americans, but
instead those whose “own hand sold you” (9). Royalty was not sold into
slavery.
The speaker of the poem identifies instead with those who were
enslaved:
And I am not a king

nor trader in flesh
I was
of the sufferers
I am among those
to be avenged! (9)
Likewise, the Homeric epics; the battle epics of the Germanic, Anglo-Saxon,
and Romance cycles; as well as the ancient Sanskrit epics identify with those
who have been wronged, and all contain revenge plots (Newman 362). For
example, Achilles seeks to avenge the death of his friend Patroclus, Odysseus
kills Penelope’s suitors because they have violated the laws of hospitality,
and “the Bharatas in the Sanskrit epic pursue the war against their cousins
both because they have cheated them in a game and because they . . . have
refused to honor their promise and . . . relinquish the kingdom they wrong-
fully hold” (Newman 362). As is evident, all of these epics across different
time periods and cultures “are intimately connected with the heroic codes
of their societies. All agree that a violation of honor must be requited and
revenge for a slain friend, dishonored spouse, or wronged family member
undertaken” (Newman 362). But what form is that revenge to take in the
Afro-Modernist epic? As poet/prophet, Baraka fights back through the mak-
ing of art that acts as an agent of change in society. The arts are not only
concerned with aesthetic pleasure: they create movement and change in the
experiential world. This epic tale, moreover, represents a collective history
put in motion by an ensemble of poets, artists, and musicians.
Such a collective “we” is spelled out in “What about Literature? W-15”
(40–44):
Can you see

the baton? (Well
Feel
It!)
From Fred to E.B.
to Langston
to (Zora to Richard & Ted &
Jimmy &)
Margaret
to
WE! (44)
From Frederick Douglass through to twentieth-century authors including

James Baldwin and Margaret Walker, the “baton” is passed. Significantly it
is through the literary ancestors that is found:
… the thread
of track
where we runners
spin
fast faster
than
light (43)
Baraka envisions the baton being passed not only to him as an individual
author, but also to the African American community as a whole.
The difference between the revenge plots of the other epic traditions
that I have described above, and that of the Afro-Modernist epic, becomes
evident in “Wise 2.” Here, the slave trade has compelled “confusion” and
“sickness,” but the speaker still hears the song of “that sweet verse / you
made” (8):
that song, son

of the son’s son’s son’s
son
I still hear that
song,
that cry (8)
That song, “cries / screams / life exploded” is heard throughout the reverber-
ations of generations and the speaker carries it within his physical body: “I
still bear that weeping in my heart / that bleeding in my memory” (9). Thus,
the effects of slavery’s past are still present; the ancestors’ voices are still
heard: “that sweet verse / you made, I still hear” (8). “Wise 2” continues:
I was of a people
caught in deep trouble
like I scribe you
some deep trouble, where
enemies had took us
surrounded us/ in they
country
then banned our
ommboom ba boom (8)
It is in the face of such cultural genocide that the speaker cries out for ven-
geance (9). Of Wise 2, Harris notes: “Here Baraka exploits the richness of
several tongues. In the context of the poem, ‘scribe’ is a fabricated word sug-
gestive of both ‘describe’ and ‘scribe’ (as in ‘write’); the latter inspires images
of ancient civilizations. Together, both associations create a kind of modern-
ist pun” (Poetry 118). Such practice encompasses epic traditions from ancient
to modern.
However, the musical accompaniment selected here does not continue
the plaintive tone of “Wise 1.” Instead, Baraka chooses Charlie Parker’s
“Billie’s Bounce,” a be-bop variation played over a 12-bar blues structure
in F Major (McElrath). While the blues is the foundation of the piece, the
song is lively, even upbeat. The poem exemplifies continued struggle even
in the face of what may seem to be hopeless circumstances, such as being
surrounded by one’s enemies “in they / country” (8). Not only is the speaker
surrounded by enemies, but he has also been kidnapped and now lacks the
rights of citizenship and personhood. Yet, layering this text with “Billie’s
Bounce” illustrates that the speaker’s people resist and rebound through the
creation of new, expressive artistic forms—particularly jazz.
Revolutionary moments in history and culture, what might be called
“fragments of a revenge plot,” occur throughout the poem. For example,
in Wise 7:
Back in the forest

the maroons laid
outraged by slavery, & split
from it, when the bombs burst
across the air, and fire tore
mens hearts, they knew some new
joint change was upon the time
and so emerged, a gun in one hand,
something funky, in the other. (18)
The poem chronicles numerous episodes of struggle and resistance, yet even
in Wise 7 we do not see the maroon’s revenge achieved. The maroons do,
however, emerge with the tools of resistance: a gun and “something funky.”
The “funky” as expressed in Wise is manifest in cultural and artistic forms of
resistance, just as the maroons escaped slavery and resisted cultural occupa-
tion through the formation of their own societies.
As might be expected by readers of Baraka’s Blues People, the jazz musi-
cian emerges at points in Wise as a possible hero/avenger. In “Wise 4,” a slave
who “has never got nothing but / killer frustration/” and who is warmed by
talk of rebellion, dreams, “my profile melted into the black air / red from the
flame of the burning big house” (13). The poem continues:
in those crazy dreams I called myself

Coltrane
bathed in a black and red fire
in those crazy moments I called myself

Thelonius
& this was in the 19th century! (13)
Because history in this poem is a continuing spiral in which the beginning

and the end overlap, different points in history can meet and connect. The
Hegelian theory of the spiral of history, as used by Marx and Engels, dem-
onstrates that historical events repeat (though presumably on a higher level
on the spiral). Putting into action this Marxist philosophy, Baraka illus-
trates the repetitions of history, using examples to show the commonalities
of oppressed people throughout history and throughout the globe. Thus, in
Baraka’s epic, the spirits of twentieth-century jazz musicians John Coltrane
and Thelonius Monk are alive in the collective black consciousness, appear-
ing in the dreams of the nineteenth-century slave who sings the spirituals
and imagines rebellion.
In Blues People, Baraka refers to Coltrane as one of “this new generation’s
private assassins” as Baraka writes about the transformative powers of the
jazz musicians of the late 1950s and 1960s (228). “Their music, along with
the products of other young American artists seriously involved with the
revelation of contemporary truths, will help define that society, and by con-
trast, the nature of the American society out of which these Americans have
removed themselves” (233). While the young be-boppers of Blues People may
have imagined separateness from bourgeois America, and a black national-
ist Baraka may have sought separateness from whiteness and racism, the
speaker Baraka renders in Wise conjures a connectivity of spirit shared by the
African American collective, as well as by other marginalized people.
Baraka’s deeply spiritual connection to music is expressed in “Why Don’t
You Fight? #37 (One Mo’ Time)”:
As an aesthetic exclamation point

Think of music
as the only
soul
God
cd
have (120)
As the poem comes to a close, it is alive with singing:
Singing slaves the

slaves
Singing
They sing Africa spiritual
scat blues
rag
swing (120)
By literally drawing a line from “sing” in the second stanza above, to “swing,”
Baraka illustrates that it is from the slave songs that contemporary African
American musical forms derived; in fact, the history of black music outlined
in section #37 is quite close to that explained in Blues People. Baraka’s belief
in the power of the arts to transform American culture is the animating
force behind Wise Why’s Y’s. Moreover, the evolution of the earlier drafts
into a complete jazz poem is what makes it “wise.” No longer can wisdom
be exchanged with a question as in the original title: “Why’s/Wise.” In the
concluding section of the poem, “Y The Link Will Not Always Be ‘Missing’
#40,” Baraka emphasizes the wisdom of jazz, fittingly sending us out as
Trane’s “The Wise One” plays (132). Coltrane becomes private assassin,
prophet, and seer. The reader who has reached the end of Baraka’s Afro-
Modernist epic journey now knows that this is the only possible song that
could move us into the future (132).
II
The Muse stirred the singer to sing the famous actions
of men on that venture, whose fame goes up in the wide heaven.
—The Odyssey of Homer VIII.73–74
If we return to The Odyssey, one possible source of the epic tradition that
Baraka expands, we are reminded of the epic’s connection to empire. David
Quint points out that the “imaginative and aesthetic power” of the Homeric
epic “is inseparably bound up with its representation of the power of the hero,
for the ends of empire: as a source of inspiration or authorizing model for
political domination on a mass scale” (7). Thus, unlike the Afro-Modernist
epic, the Homeric epic is a genre concerned with the individual hero’s role
in coalescing imperial power. Therefore, Quint tells us: “The stakes in the
Iliad and in the epic genre it founds are higher than the aesthetic pleasure
that the display of power affords. For the utmost expression of this power
is to kill, and on the fate of the individual fighter Hector hangs the doom
of a city and a people” (4). The epics written by African American poets
Baraka, Tolson, and Hughes, on the other hand, are those of the collective:
the individual hero is not metonymic for the nation. Furthermore, in the
African American historical context, the very notion of possession of indi-

vidual subjectivity and national belonging is called into question. Denied
rights of citizenship including voting, education, and freedom of movement
throughout much of the twentieth century that many white citizens take
for granted, African American poets, including Baraka, write transnational
epics reflecting diasporic history and identity, performing a kind of epic
intervention that unmakes and remakes “America.”
Quint identifies two rival traditions in his study of the politicization
of the epic: one created by Virgil, the other by Lucan. “These define an
opposition between epics of the imperial victors and epics of the defeated, a
defeated whose resistance contains the germ of a broader republican or anti-
monarchical politics” (8). Quint displays how Lucan, in the Pharsalia,
implicitly equated the Aeneid ’s poetic imitation of the Iliad and the
Odyssey —Virgil’s extraordinarily daring emulation of Homer, his con-
tinuing the story of the Trojans—with the chain of political imitation,
drawing at its outset on the aesthetic power of the Homeric epics to fuel
ambitions of imperial power, which had produced a Xerxes, an Alexander,
a Caesar, and Caesarism. (7–8)
Aesthetic power in this case fuels political power. Quint goes on to explain
through Lucan how “Virgil’s epic is tied to a specific national history, to
the idea of world domination, to a monarchical system, even to a particular
dynasty” (8). The Aeneid, then, becomes a crucial touchstone in epic history.
“From now on,” Quint concludes, “future epic poets would emulate the
Aeneid itself along with the Homeric epics” (8). Quint examines a number of
texts in addition to the Pharsalia and the Aeneid (most notably Paradise Lost)
in creating his useful analogy of the “epic of the victors” versus the “epic
of the defeated.” If we utilize his interpretation of epic history to enhance
our understanding of the Afro-Modernist epic, we might place Baraka with
Lucan and the narratives of the defeated, though I would label the Afro-
Modernist epic an epic of critique and renewal instead.
While illustrating that which has been destroyed in African American
history, Baraka simultaneously builds a new Afro-Modernist identity. His
epic fills in that which was previously absent, stolen, erased. Indeed, while
the Homeric hero’s journey is built around the seeking of Nostos or home-
coming, African American subjects grapple with being torn from a home
that can never be regained. Thus, in Baraka’s epic, the act of making rather
than finding a home is highlighted. “Home” is created in the performance
that knits the African American collective back to multiple origins. The
result is not the linear “back to Africa” narrative that helped to shape African
American identity at points in the early and mid-twentieth century; rather

this epic journey accounts for the multiple vectors of the poet’s inheritances.
The fluidity of this Afro-Modernist subject position allows the poet to draw
from multiple national lineages, which are in fact part of his historical heri-
tages as an African American. The Afro-Modernist epic partakes of models
from the poets’ diasporic inheritances, while creating something new where
the ideas of home, hero, and history are remade.
III
If you want to buy some cloth, go to the weaver. If you want a hoe, ax or
knife, then go to the blacksmith. But if you want to know the history of
the people, you must go to the Griots.
—Foday Musa Suso
Gambia-born Mandinka Griot
An essential source to consider in Baraka’s Afro-Modernist history is the

griot tradition of West Africa. The importance of the griot tradition to
Baraka’s epic emerges with the publication of the complete poem. The role
of the griot is now highlighted, as shown in the full title of the book—the
poem is now called Wise Why’s Y’s: The Griot’s Song (Djali Ya) —and the fact
that the poet signs his name here as “Amiri Baraka, Djali.” By naming him-
self “Djali,” Baraka pays homage to the musical roots of the Afro-Modernist
poet in the fusing of the roles of poet, historian, and musician, showing
that poetry is an art rooted in performance. Baraka also rewrites the poem’s
epigraph a final time, using the term “Djali” followed parenthetically by
the word “Griot.” (“Griot” appears by itself and is footnoted in Reader).
The new sentence reads: “Why’s/Wise is a long poem in the tradition of the
Djali (Griots) but this is about African American (American) History” (3).
In the final book, he does not footnote either term, perhaps signifying his
belief in the comfort a Third World Press audience will already have with
these terms. Or perhaps he chooses to no longer explain, letting the terms
stand on their own.
Griots are still active in many African societies. “There is so much his-
tory,” contemporary Mandinka Griot Foday Musa Suso explains, “Some of
our songs last two days. They speak of kings and how they fought for power,
and how they tried to make their kingdoms strong. In songs about slavery,
we sing about which kings fought each other and who was captured” (32).
Suso ends his description explaining: “Telling two hundred years of history
takes a long time” (32). In this way, the griot performs functions of the
singer of the Homeric epic, although the Greek rhapsode’s role in society
differed.
The epic poetry of Homer refers to epic poetry as a medium that was
performed in the context of an evening’s feast. And yet, we know that
the two epic poems of Homer, by virtue of their sheer length alone, defy
this context. If we look for the earliest historical evidence, we see that the
actually attested context for performing the Iliad and Odyssey was already
in the sixth century not the informal occasion of an evening’s feast but
rather the formal occasion of a festival such as the Panathenaia. The per-
formers at such festivals were rhapsōidoi, “rhapsodes.” (Nagy 6)
Rhapsodes recited epics as a group during festivals, taking turns to per-

form each part, but did not preside over the rituals of daily life with which
the griots are charged. Neither did rhapsodes compose epics for such occa-
sions; rather, they recited learned poems from memory. Furthermore, rhap-
sodes likely did not sing the epics at all—the mode of performance was
recitation.
Just as the Homeric testimony about the performance of epic by sing-

ers at feasts belies the synchronic reality of the performance of epic by
rhapsodes at festivals, so also the Homeric testimony about the singer’s
singing to the accompaniment of the lyre belies the synchronic reality of
the rhapsode’s reciting without any accompaniment at all. On the basis
of available evidence, it appears that rhapsodes did not sing the composi-
tions that they performed but rather recited them without the accompa-
niment of the lyre. (Nagy 6)
Barbara Graziosi further reveals that “sixth- and fifth-century sources focus
on the rhapsodes’ staffs, not on their supposed ‘stitching’ [of songs]; and the
staff is an object that distinguishes them from singers, who typically play
the lyre. When rhapsodes are depicted on vases, their staff is the prominent
element of their representation.” (23–24).
Griots, in contrast, are families of traveling musicians. Traditional griot
instruments include the kora, the balafon (or bala), and the nyanyer. Young
griots study these instruments by going to live with a teacher, such as an
uncle. Suso describes the kora as a “sweet-sounding, 21-stringed harp-lute”
and states that it is the most difficult African instrument to play (50). The
body of the kora is made from a calabash gourd and the skin is cowhide (58).
The pole of the kora is made of hard wood, called keno, while fishing line
is used for the strings (59). The oldest of the griot instruments, the balafon
resembles the xylophone. “The bala are hit with mallets that are made from
hard wood. When you hit the key, the sound is amplified by the calabash
gourd that lies beneath each note. The membranes, covering the tiny hole
in each gourd, are usually made from cigarette papers. The papers give the
gourds a buzzing timbre” (Suso 62). The last instrument Suso describes
is the nyanyer. “The nyanyer is an instrument of the Fulani people, who
migrated from Egypt and now live all over West Africa. It’s made of a small
gourd that’s covered by iguana skin. The one-stringed horsetail nyanyer fid-
dle is played with a horsetail bow” (64). The instruments of both the Fulani
and Mandinka Griots have historical connections to American blues music
(64). The griot musical group serves an important function for Baraka, who
recreates it with himself as griot, in his group Blue Ark. Moreover, the final
version of Wise is specifically modeled as a griot performance of African
American diasporic history, which Baraka expands by adding the backdrop
of visual art to the poetic and musical performance.
The existence of griots, and their roles in society, was first documented
in writing in the fourteenth century, according to Thomas A. Hale (“From
the Griot” 250). According to another source, Jali Kunda: Griots of West
African & Beyond:
In Mali, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau and The Gambia, the Griot (or Jali) is
an itinerant historian, musician and entertainer. For 800 years—since the
beginning of the Malian Empire—Griots have preserved their region’s
history and lore, passing them down orally through arduous apprentice-
ships, providing a cultural cohesion that endured both colonization and
its aftermath. (Kopka and Brooks, “Preface” 6)
Hale points out in his extensive study of griot cultures that there is great cul-
tural, linguist, and historical variety in how these traditions manifest. For
example, the functions performed by griots and griottes (female griots) are
numerous, and vary within different cultural contexts and communities.
Often described simply as “praise-singers” because singing praises is the

most obvious and audible function they perform, griots and griottes actu-
ally contribute to their own societies in so many other ways that “praise-
singer” becomes a far too limited description. For example, they are also
historians, genealogists, advisors, spokespersons, diplomats, interpreters,
musicians, composers, poets, teachers, exhorters, town criers, reporters,
and masters of or contributors to a variety of ceremonies (naming, ini-
tiation, weddings, installations of chiefs, and so on). (Hale, “From the
Griot” 250–251)
Griots have the power to name the past, as historians and genealogists for
example, and to put the future in motion—even helping to determine what
shape the future will take—in their roles as advisors, diplomats, and over-
seers of important rituals. Griot’s songs, then, both encompass and surpass
the societal functions of Classical literature, including Greek literature’s
focus on the praising of famous deeds. As Gregory Nagy explains: “All
Greek literature—song, poetry, prose—originates in kleos, the act of prais-
ing famous deeds, and never entirely loses that focus” (9).
The origin of the term griot is highly debated in the scholarly commu-
nity, even as to whether the word is of African origin. Citing a variety of
scholarly opinions, Hale explains that although the word may have African
origins, “in each African language there is not only one term for griot, but
often several words. In many cases, there is considerable ambiguity about
these local terms because of overlaps between the profession, the name of
the ethnic group, and the descriptor for the subgroup of artisans” (“From the
Griot” 260). For example, among the numerous West African societies that
include griots, some of the terms for this profession are “iggio (Moor), guewel
or géwél (Wolof), mabo or gawlo (Fulbe), jali (Mandinka), jeli (Maninka,
Bamana), geseré or jaaré (Soninké), jeseré (Songhay), and marok’ i (Hausa),
not to mention a variety of other terms” (Hale, “From the Griot” 251).
In Wise, Baraka aligns himself with several West African communities,
as Hale explains:
By including variant spellings in the subtitle (The Griot’s Song: Djeli Ya)
and in the listing of the author (Amiri Baraka, Djali), he embraces a large
swath of the Mande world, because djeli ya refers to the profession of
griot ( jeliya), griot is spelled jali in the western region (the Mandinka and
Khassonké areas of The Gambia and western Mali), and is heard as jeli in
the Bamana and Maninka regions of central Mali. (Griots 4)
Baraka’s choices here are indicative of the impossibility most African

Americans would face in trying to trace their genealogy to a single African
ancestor or culture. Instead, he embraces communities throughout the
region of West Africa from which many African Americans’ ancestors were
forcibly taken and from which griot cultures derive. Such a move reflects an
encompassing diasporic identity.
Baraka’s identification with the term “Djali” is also evident in his work
on the Jali Kunda project. Led by Mandinka Griot Suso, Jali Kunda con-
tains a CD of tracks by griot musicians from Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, The
Gambia, as well as collaborations between Suso and composer Philip Glass
and jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, along with an anthology of essays.
In “Griot/Djali: Poetry, Music, History, Message,” Baraka explains how the

poet/historian as musician highlights the role of performance or the “act”:
“So the word, Griot, the poet, musician, historian, story teller, is getting
known all over the world. Though ‘French’ as transmitted ‘symbol,’ it is best
known for the W. African Djali (or Djeli, but Djeli ya, also means the Djali’s
act, his ‘getting down’ to take us up and out)” (“Djali” 78). This “getting
down” is a process contained within, but also moving beyond, the printed
page. Though manifested uniquely in Baraka’s Afro-Modernist epic, the
traditions of performativity and orality are ancient in origin: “In the case of
Archaic Greece, as is evident from the heritage of words like apodeixis, the
traditions of song, poetry, and prose, all three, are fundamentally a matter
of performance. As such, they are oral traditions” (Nagy 9). Calling for a
“more comprehensive criticism” of Baraka’s aesthetics, Meta DuEwa Jones
asserts that “Baraka’s performance methods—including the noisy wailings
of his jazzed texts—formally express a key element of his aesthetic agenda,
namely, engaging the power and politics of sound” (“Politics” 251). While
analysis of Baraka’s performances is important to understanding his work,
as Jones illustrates, I want to also point out the ways in which performative
elements are contained on the page itself.
For example, in his essay in Jali Kunda, Baraka brings the movement
of performance onto the static page by enacting his own call-and-response
with an imagined audience: “You wants some Djali, and the Djeli Ya, the
get down, like we say,” he writes: “Well, begin with Djeli Roll Morton, who
invented Jazz (you mean ‘I AM!’ the come music? JA ZZ). He said that?”
(81). He takes the reader from a West African context (“You wants some
Djali”) to an American one (“Djeli” Roll Morton) while invoking jazz as the
music of God, the great “I AM!” showing it—and the griots’—universality
throughout the African diaspora and over time. He explains that “the Griot
has always been with us, even in the U.S.” (81). The “audience” then reacts
to the grandness of his proclamation concerning jazz (as well as the blas-
phemy of calling the music of God the “come music”): “He said that?” (81).
Baraka also brings movement onto the page in a version of jazz’s “chang-
ing same,” by multiplying homonyms in the book’s title: Wise Why’s Y’s.
The eye moves over the changing visual signs as the ear hears the repetition
of sound. In his essay on the griot, he also plays with the homonym, while
simultaneously teaching a potentially monolingual, English-speaking audi-
ence how to pronounce “Djeli,” as in “Djeli Roll Morton,” or “It must be
Djeli, cause Jam don’t shake like that!” (81). By invoking the Djeli in a com-
mon African American vernacular saying, Baraka also combines the West
African and American contexts, again illustrating the continuing presence
of the griot throughout the African diaspora.
In Africa, griots are commonly viewed across communities as being a

class apart from ordinary humans. Robert Palmer explains: “In each local-
ity, the Griots form a distinct, and often oppressed, social caste; in the past,
in certain regions of Senegal, deceased Griots were not buried in the com-
munity’s sanctioned cemetery plots but instead were left in the hollowed-out
interiors of baobab trees to slowly decompose” (10). The griot’s purported
link with the supernatural is cited by both Palmer and Hale as a possible
reason why the griot is regarded with such ambivalence in African com-
munities, “especially those who live in the cities of the Sahel and Savanna
region—Dakar, Senegal; Bamako, Mali; and Niamey, Niger” (Hale, “From
the Griot” 249). Hale notes that “one reason for this ambivalence is fear
of the power of words spoken or sung by griots” (249). Drawing connec-
tions between griots and African American bluesmen, Palmer writes: “Just
as bluesmen preserved elements of an earlier religion, and were demonized
by apologists for the dominant religion, their predecessors and present-day
relatives among the Griots have been attacked as ‘sorcerers’ and ‘pagans’”
(13). Palmer reports that when Suso was asked to comment on “the associa-
tions of Griots with the old religions, magic and the supernatural, he report-
edly declined to say anything, explaining, ‘Whatever I told you about it, you
would never believe it’” (14).
In contrast to the ambivalence felt toward griots among people in com-
munities on the African continent, in the contemporary American con-
text, to name someone “Griot” is almost certainly honorific, serving not
only to honor the person named, but also the unwritten history of African
Americans. Therefore, Baraka’s conflation of history and life within the
framework of the African griot in the epigraph to Wise/Why’s in Reader and
in the later poem, announces the crucial role played by the African poet/
singer who carries his or her community’s history, and the continuation of
that role throughout the African diaspora.
Griots communicate directly with the supernatural world, with messages
from animals and other sources. This tradition endowing the poet with
supernatural powers is ancient in origin—though in Greek literature the
Muses serve as intermediaries between the poet and the gods. Baraka’s foot-
note in Reader offers the following: “Griots were the African Singer-Poet-
Historians who carried word from bird, mouth to ear, and who are the root
of our own African-American oral tradition” (Reader 493). Thus, the griot
is a singer with a heightened sense of perception who can carry “word from
bird.” As the “root” of the people’s oral traditions, Baraka’s griot shares inter-
esting similarities with Walt Whitman’s new American bard. The “singing”
of the American bard, like that of the griot, is infused with knowledge from
the broader natural world to carry the “flights and songs and screams” not
just among humans, but originating within a conversation beyond human

language. Whitman’s ideal American poet has heightened sensory powers
like Baraka’s griot, and communicates with his brother bird:
With flights and songs and screams that answer those of the wildpigeon
and highhold and orchard-oriole and coot and surf-duck and redshoul-
dered-hawk and fish-hawk and white-ibis and indian-hen and cat-owl
and water-pheasant and qua-bird and pied-sheldrake and blackbird and
mockingbird and buzzard and condor and night-heron and eagle.
As conduit between humankind and the natural world, the poet also imparts
spiritual knowledge.
“Soon there will be no more priests,” Whitman famously declares, “Their
work is done. A new order shall arise, and they shall be the priests of man,
and every man shall be his own priest. They shall find their inspiration in
real objects to-day, symptoms of the past and future.” Whitman explains:
“To do this well is to compete with the laws that pursue and follow time.”
Thus, “Past and present and future are not disjoin’d but join’d.” Joining
past, present, and future, “The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is
to be, from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and
stands them again on their feet. He says to the past, Rise and walk before
me that I may realize you. He learns the lesson—he places himself where
the future becomes present.” Likewise, Mandinka Griot Suso alludes to the
prescience of the griots, who join past, present, and future: “The Griots are
walking libraries with knowledge of the past, present and future of our peo-
ple” (26). Baraka’s African American griot encompasses all temporal aspects
of the people’s history as well, as the poem rejects linearity and instead joins
temporalities in presenting history as a spiral.
Baraka first places his epic within the African oral tradition with his
invocation of the griot, but he quickly moves the reader back to America:
“but this is about African-American (American) History” (3). Putting the
parentheses around “American” in his preface demonstrates that African
American history is intrinsically American history, a view represented in
the work of Hughes and Tolson as well. Such a gesture also links Baraka
with writers associated with early twentieth-century African American
modernism. Along with proving intellectual accomplishment, James
Weldon Johnson in The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) seeks to
demonstrate that black culture is quintessential American culture: “The
Negro has already proved the possession of these powers by being the cre-
ator of the only things artistic that have yet sprung from American soil
and been universally acknowledged as distinctive American products”
(viii). Johnson states that these “distinctive American products” are the
Uncle Remus stories, spirituals or slave songs, the cakewalk, and ragtime.
Baraka himself demonstrates a clear view of what he believes constitutes
American identity. For example, of the relationship between African cul-
tures and American identity, Baraka writes: “U.S. culture is a pyramid of
African, European, Asian (Native). So that it is not a matter of ‘African
Survivals.’ To be an ‘American,’ north, south or central, is to be that as
well” (Griot 81). For Baraka, American culture is not conflated with white-
ness; rather, he embraces the multiracial, transnational character of that
labeled “American.”
Considering Baraka’s self-naming as “Djali” we should also remember
his long propensity for renaming. Though this history is often abbreviated
in the nomenclature “Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones),” there were several other
steps along the way, including “Imamu Amiri Baraka.” Imamu is a Swahili
name meaning “spiritual leader.” In choosing “Djali,” Baraka once again
claims a unique spiritual role for the poet. As an African American griot,
“Amiri Baraka, Djali” can act as spiritual leader, genealogist, historian, and
performer.
IV
An epic is a poem containing history.
—Ezra Pound, “Date Line” (86)
The poet’s role as a community’s singer of history is undertaken by the poet/

singer in several distinctive cultures. Pound reflects this ideology in his
famous dictum above. Pound, for our purposes here, recalls the early twen-
tieth-century long poem tradition: the modernist reengagement of the epic.
Interestingly, correlations between Baraka and Pound persist. While some
might still find it unusual for a young black poet to be interested in Pound,
Lorenzo Thomas finds connections: “Pound’s investigation of Provençal
balladry, for example, parallels the interest most African American poets
took in their own folk heritage” (97). Harris is another of several writers
to compare Baraka to Pound, which he does in his introduction to Reader :
“Baraka may be the most difficult American author to evaluate dispassion-
ately since the modernist poet Ezra Pound, another writer whose work still
evokes volatile response,” Harris writes, “Like Pound, Baraka has dared to
bring radical politics into the world of literature and to deliver his explosive
ideas in an inflammatory style” (xviii).
Such correlations have been made since the 1970s: In an article dis-
cussing Baraka in Salmagundi (1973) on “American Poetry Today,” M. L.
Rosenthal strikes his own comparison: “No American poet since Pound has
come closer to making poetry and politics reciprocal forms of action,” but
then Rosenthal disparagingly adds: “That is not necessarily a good thing”
(62). Baraka is highly aware of the persistence of the Pound comparison.
When I spoke with him at a conference on the Black Arts Movement held
at Philadelphia Community College in 2006, explaining briefly my project
on his work and that of Tolson, Baraka quipped: “Why, because we both
read Pound?”
Along with illustrating Baraka’s long interest in Tolson, and knowledge
of the critical arguments surrounding Tolson’s work, this characteristic
Baraka incisiveness does indeed raise some essential questions: What does
it mean for an African American writer to read Pound? Furthermore, given
the many and contradictory associations with Pound and his reputation,
what is actually being invoked when his name is cited? Pound may be the
symbol of so-called high modernism, more broadly an example of experi-
mentalism and allusiveness (or elusiveness), the one who “made it new” in
a “poem containing history,” or even a representative anti-Semite as some
believe Baraka to be.6
Despite, or indeed because of, the many questions to be raised about
the comparison of Baraka to Euro-American modernists, however, there
is information to be gained by thinking this through—especially given
Baraka’s capacious literary knowledge and his centrality to what became
known as the “New American Poetry” after World War II (and, for Baraka,
before Malcolm X was murdered). Thomas stresses the historical impor-
tance of Baraka’s involvement with Donald Allen’s anthology:
Baraka—unlike Fenton Johnson, who disappeared from the national lit-

erary scene in the early 1920s, or Tolson, who despite the honors bestowed
on him late in life remained a somewhat isolated voice at Oklahoma’s
Langston University—had a tremendous impact both as editor of Yugen
and as close advisor to Donald Allen’s seminal anthology, The New
American Poetry, 1945–1960. (Thomas 97)
As we will see, Baraka himself counts a number of Euro-American and

European modernists among his progenitors. Showing a variety of liter-
ary connections in “How You Sound??” published in the New American
Poetry (1960), Baraka declares: “For me, Lorca, Williams, Pound and
Charles Olson have had the greatest influence” (Reader 16). At this point
in his career Baraka calls for a “quantitative verse” (“the ‘irregular foot’
of Williams . . . the ‘Projective Verse’ of Olson”) (Reader 17). Baraka also
states: “Accentual verse, the regular metric of rumbling iambics, is dry as
slivers of sand” and declares: “We can get nothing from England” (Reader
17). He concludes that “the diluted formalism of the academy (the formal
culture of the U.S.) is anaemic [sic] & fraught with incompetence & unreal-
ity” (Reader 17).
Harris explains how Baraka’s early experiences as a poet in Greenwich
Village, and his interest in what Harris calls the white avant-garde, laid the
groundwork for what I term Baraka’s Afro-Modernist innovation.
Baraka’s years in Greenwich Village had made him a master of avant-

garde technique that he utilized in his own work and passed on to younger
black artists such as Nikki Giovanni and Haki Madhubuti. Ironically,
avant-garde ideas of form cohered perfectly with the new black artist’s
need to express his or her own oral traditions; the free verse and eccentric
typography of the white avant-garde were ideal vehicles for black oral
expression and experience. (Reader xxvii)
Baraka’s career highlights such cross-racial influences among American

writers and artists at mid-century, showing the need to read African
American poets as part of, and not only in opposition to, American mod-
ernism. In his meditation on the writing of literary histories in Repression
and Recovery, Cary Nelson cautions against the creation of false binaries as
a means of reforming the literary canon: “Such melodramatic oppositions
facilitate writing literary history by foregrounding conflicts that can easily
be presented in narrative form.” (22). Focusing on the victory of some “com-
batants” (Nelson discusses the narrative of the “victory” of experimental
modernism over the “genteel tradition”) has the effect of suppressing dif-
ference, variety, and nuance. “What’s more,” Nelson writes, “such models
operate very efficiently, creating a logical structure that seems complete: a
self-sufficient, balanced rhetorical system whose components can address
one another indefinitely” (22). A false binary that has persisted in shutting
down discussions of the varieties of African American writing—since the
earliest criticism of Phillis Wheatley in fact—labels a black author “authen-
tic” (writes and sounds “black”) or imitative (writes and sounds “white”).
By understanding how Afro-Modernism represents a diasporic self, one in
which origins are multiple and variegated, lost and remade, we can more
profitably discuss the varieties of black modernist writing without falling
into such binaries. For Baraka these origins range from America, to Europe,
to Asia, and Africa.
When comparing Baraka’s epic with that of Pound, however, it is impor-
tant to note the difference between “making” and “containing” history.
Pound’s notion of a poem containing history is markedly different than
Baraka’s focus on making history.7 To contain history in a poem preserves it,

yet holds it inert. History is not active in this sense; it may even be neutral.
Baraka, in contrast, actively makes a history that may otherwise remain
untold out of fragments, detritus, and silences. Baraka’s history thus fulfills
a need for the African American collective.
Among Euro-American modernists, William Carlos Williams is a more
apt allegory for Baraka’s epic (Pound, and T. S. Eliot at times, being more
appropriate for Tolson) in the example of Paterson’s multigeneric, multidi-
alect American pastiche.8 Indeed, in the prefatory note to the 13 sections
called “Why’s/Wise” published in Reader in 1991, Baraka places his Afro-
Modernist epic within multiple literary traditions, acknowledging Williams,
Tolson, and Charles Olson: “Why’s/Wise is a long poem in the tradition
of the Griots—but this is about African-American (American) History. It
is also like Melvin Tolson’s Liberia, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson,
Charles Olson’s Maximus in that it tries to tell the history/life like an ongo-
ing-off-coming Tale” (480). Though it may surprise some whose primary
reading of Baraka rests in works of his Black Nationalist Period that he
claims Williams as a literary ancestor, Williams’s multivocal, experimental
Paterson constructs a city out of language, much as Tolson constructed a
country in his Libretto. Moreover, Williams’s multigenre, long poem encom-
passes a freeing capaciousness in which to tell an American tale. Baraka use-
fully partakes of the models provided by both Williams and Tolson.
Critic Carla Billitteri shows in her reading of Paterson that “the poetry
makes space for poverty, ugliness, the common, but presents these things in
a variety of ways, including with sympathy” (44). This poetics of the ugly,
and of the everyday, is present also in Baraka’s work, such as the well-known
“Black Art” (1969): “Poems are bullshit unless they are / teeth or trees or
lemons piled / on a step” (Reader 219). Poems are “bullshit” unless they are
constructed of, and connected to, everyday life. The attitude of Baraka’s
speaker is one less of sympathy, however, and more of despair and outrage,
and “Black Art” calls for action. For example:
………………………… Stinking
Whores! we want “poems that kill.”
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. (219)
In calling at the conclusion of “Black Art” for a “black poem” and a “Black
World,” Baraka is calling for a forum in which Black people can speak: “And
Let All Black People Speak This Poem” (220). Poetry, then, not only repre-
sents the people’s history, the poem makes history.
Baraka articulates what I am calling a poetics of the everyday as early as
1960 in the New American Poetry:
I make a poetry with what I feel is useful & can be saved out of the
garbage of our lives. What I see, am touched by (CAN HEAR) . . . wives,
gardens, jobs, cement yards where cats pee, all my interminable arti-
facts . . . ALL are a poetry, & nothing moves (with any grace) pried apart
from these things. There cannot be closet poetry. Unless the closet be
wide as God’s eye. (Reader 16)
In making a poetry that is “useful,” Baraka is also a kind of archivist, but an

archivist who saves what artifacts can be gleaned from the “garbage.” Without
an attention to the artifacts of everyday life, Baraka finds that there can be no
poetry. In this way, Baraka is connected with Dadaists and Surrealists who
“identified everyday life under modernity as the central locus of sociocultural
inquiry, and they felt strongly that any viable politics of liberation would have
to be fought on this terrain” (Gardiner 24). For the Dadaists and Surrealists,
“daily life under capitalism . . . was becoming increasingly degraded, routin-
ized and ‘cretinized’, in that the individual’s capacity for autonomous action
and creative self-expression was being squandered in the pursuit of material
wealth and social status” (Gardiner 24). Though at the time of the publica-
tion of New American Poetry, Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) had yet to publicly
declare a Marxist politics, his insistence on a poetics engaged with “real life”
(“wives, gardens, jobs, cement yards where cats pee”) rather than a “closet
poetry” demonstrates movement toward a social critique of the place of the
artist in the community that foreshadows his later Marxist commitment.
Harris grapples with the issue of how to account for Baraka’s poetic influ-
ences in the Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (1985).
Though published more than 25 years ago, Harris’s book remains one of the
most salient studies of Baraka’s literary influences and his relationship to
what Harris calls the white avant-garde, as well as the only book to analyze
any version of Wise. Keeping in mind the historical context from which
Harris’s study emerges, I will discuss several of the interesting theories that he
advances. In first defining Baraka’s jazz aesthetic, Harris focuses on Baraka’s
transformations: “of avant-garde poetics into ethnic poetics, of white liberal
politics into black nationalist and Marxist politics, of jazz forms into literary
forms” (Poetry 13). “Because it emulates a transformation process typical
of jazz revision,” Harris writes, “I call Baraka’s method of transformation
the jazz aesthetic, a procedure that uses jazz variations as paradigms for the
conversion of white poetic and social values into black ones” (Poetry 13).
Harris links Baraka with the “aggressive strain” of the jazz moods embodied
by John Coltrane, Bessie Smith, and Charlie Parker (Poetry 14). Indeed,
Coltrane remains a central figure for Baraka from the 1950s through to the
twenty-first century. Harris asserts: “For Baraka, Coltrane epitomizes the
jazz aesthetic process: he is the destroyer of Western forms” (Poetry 14).
A central tenet of Harris’s theory is that Baraka learned from jazz “how
to reject, invert, and transform what the white avant-garde had taught him”
(Poetry 17). Harris writes convincingly about what he calls the “jazz inver-
sion” present in the idea of transformation or conversion with which he starts
his book (“the conversion of white poetic and social values into black ones,”
etc.) Yet, Harris is also attracted to the idea of destruction: “The black avant-
garde artist realizes his white counterparts’ ideology, embracing destruction
with delight and using it to wreck the white tradition. To destroy the domi-
nating tradition is to give the black the possibility of finding his own sense
of self and tradition” (Poetry 31–32). Underlying Harris’s analysis is a tension
between these two acts: transformation and eradication. While the music of
Coltrane, and the writing of Baraka, constitute a critique of whiteness and
of Western forms, for people of African descent in America, it would be dif-
ficult to argue from the current historical vantage point for the possibility
of what Harris calls, in 1985, the “non-Western self.” In modifying the epic
form for an African American purpose, Baraka presents instead a new model
for understanding the diasporic self.
Furthermore, particular branches of Euro-American modernism
(Williams, Pound), European modernism (Joyce, Lorca), and the white
American avant-garde (O’Hara, Olson) remain such a strong and consistent
influence on Baraka, as shown in interviews, statements, and his creative
work that I do not believe that his aim is their destruction. Clearly Baraka
is attracted to and learns from the work of these modernists and avant-garde
writers. In fact, Harris goes so far as to state that Baraka “learned how to
write and think about poetry” from Williams.
For instance, Baraka takes William Carlos Williams’s method of writ-

ing verse in the American idiom and repeats it. That is, Baraka writes
verse first in the white colloquial language that he, like Williams, learned
growing up in New Jersey, and then repeats it in an Afro-American trans-
formation of the American idiom that is more capable of reflecting the
rhythms of black life and speech. (Poetry 17)
Keep in mind (as Harris also shows) that Baraka is not merely imitative
of Williams, et al.; what Baraka creates is new, for some of his greatest
influences are also African American modernists (Tolson, Hughes) and

African sources. I would take Harris’s theory of transformation one step
further; Baraka does not just “invert” white cultural forms into black ones,
he takes all of the cultural forms that he has inherited and creates a new
understanding and representation of the diasporic self. The aim of Baraka’s
destruction, therefore, is variously capitalism, racism, and totalitarianism.
With the 1995 publication of Wise, this becomes evident.
However, given the development of Afro-Modernism in the United
States, we should not consider Baraka unusual in his claiming, and incorpo-
ration of, a diasporic people’s multiple lineages. For example, Thomas places
Baraka and Afro-Modernist Tolson in a line of African American modern-
ism going back to Fenton Johnson: “Tolson and Baraka are the legitimate
heirs of Fenton Johnson (1888–1958), the first African American poet to
explore the Modernist style in the years before the First World War and also,
naturally enough, the first—and (as Michael Bérubé’s research shows) for
many years the only—black poet to appear in the pages of Harriet Monroe’s
Poetry ” (95). In his influential Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), Johnson
draws attention to Fenton Johnson as well, saying he is a “young poet of
the ultra-modern school who gives promise of greater work than he has yet
done” (xliv). In recognizing the range of work done by these understudied
African American intellectuals, it becomes evident that these writers resist
any unitary definition of blackness.
Baraka is also a student of international modernism, indicated in “How
You Sound??” by his homage to Lorca. Baraka began this reading of inter-
national modernism in earnest when he served as a librarian in the Air
Force. Frederico García Lorca, who was part of a group of artists known as
Generación del 27 that included Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, had interna-
tional success as both poet and playwright and was already a strong influence
on a young Baraka in the 1950s. Lorca, whose interest in the Andalusian
folklore and song of his native Spain is evident in his writing, visited New
York in 1929. Spending most of his visit in Harlem, García Lorca was par-
ticularly interested in African American spirituals, which reminded him
of Spain’s “deep songs” (“Frederico”; Frederico [1895–1936]). Considering
Lorca’s accomplishments in poetry and drama, his interest in native folk-
lore, and the centrality of music to his work, it is easy to deduce why he was
an important model for Baraka.
However, Baraka’s interest in form, and his engagement with the pos-
sibilities of formal innovation, began with his earliest experience as a seri-
ous reader. In his biography, Baraka recounts discovering a bookstore in
Chicago called the Green Door while on leave from the Air Force.
I came to rest staring into the window. There were books there I didn’t
recognize, a few I did. Like we’d had Portrait of the Artist my first year at
Rutgers and I’d looked at it, but it was a school book and for that reason
I didn’t take it seriously. Though parts of it vaguely fascinated me even
then. A copy of this was in the window, and next to it Ulysses, the book
opening to the first page so you could see the words “Stately plump Buck
Mulligan . . . ” I stared at the words and tried to read them. I saw other
books, Pound, Eliot, Thomas, philosophy books, art books, statistics,
poetry. (Reader 343)
His encounter with these books causes a profound revelation in Baraka:

“What it was that seemed to move me then was that learning was impor-
tant . . . I vowed, right then, to learn something new every day. It was a deep
revelation, something I felt throughout my whole self” (Reader 343). The
books Baraka selects on that first visit to the Green Door are Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce and Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Dog by Dylan Thomas, and he returns in a couple weeks to purchase Joyce’s
Ulysses.
Of his encounter with Irish modernism, Baraka writes: “All kinds of new
connections yammered in my head. My heart beat faster my skin tingled.
I could understand now a little better what was happening. I needed to
learn. I wanted to study. But I wanted to learn and study stuff I wanted to
learn and study. Serious, uncommon weird stuff! At that moment my life
was changed” (Reader 344). Many years later in In the Tradition9 Baraka
continues to identify with Irish writers and their struggles for autonomous
identities.
(Like englishmen talking about great britain stop with tongues

lapped on their cravats you put the irish on em. Say shit
man, you mean irish Literature . . . when they say about
they
you say nay you mean irish irish literature you mean, for the
last century you mean, when you scream say nay, you mean
yeats,
synge, shaw, wilde, joyce, ocasey, beckett, them is, nay, them is
irish, theys irish, irish as the ira). (Reader 308)
Synge, an Irish writer whose play The Playboy of the Western World provoked
an outbreak of violence in 1907, created a unique dramatic language for his
plays, an English based on the syntax and rhythms of the Irish language
(“Synge”). Baraka’s interest in Synge’s work continues. James Campbell, who

interviewed Baraka in 2008, notes: “He expressed regret at having missed
an all-day program of six plays by one of his favorite dramatists, J.M. Synge,
staged during the previous summer at Lincoln Center by the Druid Theatre
Company of Galway. ‘Sixteen hours it lasted. You go in for the whole day. I
love the thought of that . . . A whole day of plays’” (Campbell 141).
Among these diverse influences, it is important to recognize that, in his
note at the beginning of “Why’s/Wise” in Reader, Baraka first acknowl-
edges neglected Afro-Modernist Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia
in his list of influential texts, making Tolson’s historical epic a primary
antecedent. Like Tolson before him, Baraka does not (even despite his own
statements to the contrary at various stages) limit himself in his choice of
literary progenitors, and Wise is indeed an epic of a stature to be consid-
ered not only alongside those of Tolson, Hughes, and Williams, but also
Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems as Baraka declares. His claiming of
Olson shows the continuing importance of the Black Mountain poets to
his work. Nathaniel Mackey finds correlations between the writing of
Baraka and Olson in a reading of Baraka’s “The Measure of Memory (The
Navigator),” from The Dead Lecturer (1964). “Adhering to and putting into
practice Olson’s dictum that ‘in any given poem always, always one per-
ception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER,’10 the
poem has a mercurial, evanescent quality, as though it sought to assassinate
any expectations of traceable argument or logical flow,” Mackey writes,
such poems “seek to circumvent stasis, to be true to the essential mobility
of the psyche” (374–375). In fact, this method is a hallmark of Baraka’s
poetics across genres.
For example, demonstrations of this approximation of the movement of
perception are operative in Baraka’s autobiography, The Autobiography of
LeRoi Jones, which was first published in 1984: “But the motion was constant.
And that is a standard as well. From Barclay to Boston (street) and the half-
dark of my grandmother’s oil lamp across the street. They had me stretched
out one night, buddeeee, and this red-freckle-face nigger was pickin’ glass
outta my knee. There were shadows everywhere. And mystery” (3). His writ-
ing illustrates a constant awareness that the quality of perception—and the
shadows, mysteries, even lies of memory—prevent a seamless translation of
perception into a predetermined narrative form (“logical flow”), if one is
attentive to language and the movement of the mind. Moreover, although
the epic traditionally follows a narrative (though it is written in verse), even
Homer’s Odysseus is “blown off course time and again” in an epic whose
overall conceit is that of wandering. It is in those episodes where the hero is
blown off that narrative course that the significant action takes place.
Put another way, Baraka is writing in the “break” in the terminology

commonly used by jazz musicians and writers, including Moten. This pro-
cess presents opportunities for individualized expression riffing off of and
away from the compositional line, much as experience and our later inter-
pretation of it, exists in the shadows and the lies outside of (or within) the
stories we tell ourselves, or even as we are “blown away.” The break becomes
as interesting and illuminating as the chorus. Albert Murray explains that
of the three elements of jazz composition (the vamp, the chorus, the break),
the break is
an extremely important device both from the structural point of view

and from its implications. It is precisely this disjuncture which is the
moment of truth. It is on the break that you “do you thing.” The moment
of greatest jeopardy is your moment of greatest opportunity. This is the
heroic moment . . . It is when you write your signature on the epidermis of
actuality. That is how you come to terms with the void. (112).
The heroic moment, the one in which the jazz musician comes into his own
subjectivity (writing his signature, doing his thing), occurs during the dis-
juncture. Moreover, “home” in jazz’s musical composition, like that of the
jazz text, is improvised from available materials—and through that impro-
visation, the void is overcome. It is this work that Baraka’s jazz epic under-
takes: the creation of home not as a physical location but as a state of being
that is improvised through collective performance.
When the book-length version of Wise Why’s Y’s was published, a number
of revisions and additions are evident, showing Baraka’s increasing discovery
that his epic is a jazz text. The list of poems to which Baraka compares Wise
now appears in the new “Introduction” as follows: “It is also like Tolson’s
Liberia, WCW’s Paterson, Hughes’ Ask Yr Mama, and Olson’s Maximus in
that it tries to tell the history/life like an ongoing-offcoming Tale” (3). Thus,
although Baraka has at various points seemingly attempted to repudiate past
connections and create new, separate identities for himself, Williams and
Olson remain strong influences on Baraka as a poet in both 1960, as evi-
denced in New American Poetry, and 1995, the year of the book publication
of Wise. In addition to recognizing the piece as part of the American long
poem tradition including Tolson, Williams, and Olson as he did previously,
Baraka’s addition of Langston Hughes’s ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS
FOR JAZZ to his list of poems “like” his, places Wise, along with Tolson’s
Libretto, among unique Afro-Modernist epics rooted in performative tra-
ditions. Like Libretto and ASK YOUR MAMA, Wise is rooted both for-
mally and thematically in musical forms and displays a capacious diasporic
consciousness in its processes of representing and (re)representing African

American identities and histories, and through the jazz idiom, Baraka con-
nects specifically with Hughes.
Finally, Baraka’s epigraphs, in which he pays homage to a diverse range of
literary influences, illustrate the necessity of understanding American mod-
ernism, and African American poetry’s place within it, more synthetically
than some current histories allow. Drawing together such diverse vectors,
Baraka intervenes on the plane of history, revising our understanding of
twentieth-century literary chronology to reveal, as Baraka writes in his 1969
poem, “Return of the Native,” a modernism that is both “violent and trans-
forming” (Reader 217). Afro-Modernism represents this change.
Notes
Preface
1. I am not suggesting that the Afro-Modernist epic is exclusively a male con-
struct; on the contrary, a book on women writers’ participation in this genre is
waiting to be written. Rather, I am arguing for the particularly strong connec-
tion between these three writers (in fact a direct lineage from Tolson through
Hughes to Baraka) and their epic poems, a connection that has not previously
been recognized by scholars.
2. In the anthology of twenty-first century women’s poetry she coedited with
Claudia Rankine, Juliana Spahr defines “innovative poetry” as follows:
“Innovative is a word that is as hard to define as lyric, but for the most part
here it means the agrammatical modernist techniques such as fragmentation,
parataxis, run-ons, interruption, and disjunction, and at the same time the
avoidance of linear narrative development, of meditative confessionalism, and
of singular voice” (2).
3. I wish to thank Lyn Hejinian for a conversation at the Kelly Writers House at
the University of Pennsylvania that aided me in clarifying my own thinking on
this topic.
4. Significantly, Cary Nelson finds Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia
(1953) to be one of the last great texts of American modernism. Nelson marks
the end of American modernism with the publication of Robert Lowell’s Life
Studies (1959), a collection that moves autobiography to the forefront (101).
1 Modern, Modernist, Afro-Modernist:

Melvin B. Tolson in the 1930s and 1940s
1. In Crossroads Modernism (2002), Edward M. Pavlić distinguishes between
European and American modernist influenced “Afro-modernism” and
“diasporic modernism,” seeing the former as more solitary and the latter as
more communal. In addition, he describes Afro-modernism as, for example,
“foregrounding vertical processes,” while diasporic modernism “emphasizes
190 ● Notes
bringing modernist insights into contact with horizontal social and cultural
milieux” (5–6).
2. A work of more sweeping scope was on Tolson’s mind in his conception of
Harlem Gallery as a grand epic in five books representing the black diaspora.
The intended sequence was as follows: Book I: The Curator, Book II: Egypt Land,
Book III: The Red Sea, Book IV: The Wilderness, and Book V, The Promised Land.
Though portions of a possible Book II are in Tolson’s papers in the Library of
Congress, he only lived to complete the first book.
3. See Farnsworth’s 1979 debut of A Gallery of Harlem Portraits from University
of Missouri Press 273–275.
4. To elaborate, Nielsen writes: “Certainly Tolson has been flogged for his later
style, and the terms of the critical argument over his corpus seem to have
been set by the authors of the prefaces to his two last books, Allen Tate and
Karl Shapiro. Just as Shapiro’s preface was a response as much to Tate’s as to
Tolson’s verses, critics who have come at Tolson afterwards, Black and White
alike, have raged and ranged between the Scylla and Charybdis of Shapiro’s
two most provocative praises of Tolson’s poems: that they were ‘outpounding
Pound’ (12), and that in them ‘Tolson writes and thinks in Negro’ (13). Indeed,
many of Tolson’s earliest reviewers and critics seem to have been as exercised,
either favorably or negatively, by Shapiro as by Tolson. This is certainly the
case in Sarah Webster Fabio’s 1966 essay ‘Who Speaks Negro?’ and Josephine
Jacobsen, reviewing Harlem Gallery for the Baltimore Evening Sun, spends
roughly half of her print space arguing with Shapiro” (241–242).
5. Greenwood Press published The Harlem Group of Negro Writers in 2001.
6. For a detailed discussion of the periodization of early twentieth-century
African American poetry, see James Smethurst’s “Introduction” to The New
Red Negro.
7. Nielsen places Tolson’s modernist emergence chronologically later in his per-
suasive account of Tolson’s portrayal of the Africanist roots of modernism
in Libretto for the Republic of Liberia: “The ‘suddenness’ of Tolson’s stylis-
tic transformation is of course belied by those poems published between the
appearance of Rendezvous with America and Libretto for the Republic of Liberia”
(242).
8. Notable exceptions to this neglect include Keith D. Leonard’s Fettered Genius:
The African American Bardic Poet From Slavery to Civil Rights (2006) and James
Smethurst’s The New Red Negro: The Literary Left And African American Poetry
(1999).
9. Tolson’s naming of Hughes as “the poet of Lenox Avenue” is indicative that
Tolson based the character of Hideho Heights (“the vagabond bard of Lenox
Avenue”) from the later Harlem Gallery at least in part on Hughes. In addi-
tion, the name of the poet is most certainly borrowed from one of Tolson’s star
debate students, R. Henri Heights III (Farnsworth 104).
10. Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989.
11. Tolson also corresponded with Chicago Renaissance writer Theodore Dreiser.
Notes ● 191
12. Later, in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), Amy Lowell lists the six
rules as part of a larger essay.
13. The long poem titles in this sentence are in quotation marks, distinguishing
them from the section titles. Each section contains multiple poems.
14. Page numbers for all the poems collected in Rendezvous With America (1944)
are taken from “Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson (1999).
15. In “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” (1934) Zora Neale Hurston calls this
use of “verbal nouns” one of “the Negro’s greatest contributions to the lan-
guage” (1021).
16. Of Tolson’s World War II sonnets, Mootry writes: “Creative practice unites
hyperbolic conventions of American folktales with contemporary propagandist
mass-art techniques.” She sees the sonnets as equivalent to “poster art” (134).
17. This review is cited by Farnsworth as February 24, 1945, a date taken from a
hand-dated clipping in Tolson’s archives.
18. Bérubé cites the influence of Robert A. Davis, whose review of “Dark
Symphony” appeared in the Chicago Sunday Bee of September 21, 1941. Citing
Tolson’s “use of well worn allusions” that are “coupled with the obvious fault
of redundance,” he suggested that some sections were “far short of what the
author is capable of and intends” (qtd. in Bérubé 169). Davis contrasts the
poem’s “perfect” first six lines with its next six, protesting that “it is almost
sacrilege to follow such magnificent lines with others as flat and Pollyannaish”
as these (qtd. in Bérubé 169):
Men black and strong
For Justice and Democracy have stood,
Steeled in the faith that Right
Will conquer Wrong,
And Time will usher in one brotherhood.
Bérubé notes that “Davis’s objection is well taken, and apparently Tolson
thought so too” (169). The revised stanza that appears in the book Rendezvous
with America is as follows:
Waifs of the auction block,
Men black and strong
The juggernauts of despotism withstood,
Loin-girt with faith that worms
Equate the wrong
And dust is purged to create brotherhood. (169)
19. The other artists and scientists are somewhat more quiet; in this stanza they
“teach,” “lead,” and “create.”
20. In “Count Us In,” Sterling A. Brown writes: “Against the medical authorities
who stated there was no such thing as Negro blood, that the blood from the
veins of whites and Negroes could not be told apart, the Red Cross officially
sided with [Mississippi Congressman John Rankin] who saw in the proposal
that Negroes too might contribute much needed blood, a communist plot to
‘mongrelize America’.” (qtd. in Thomas 109).
192 ● Notes
2 A Poem for the Futurafrique: Tolson’s Libretto for

the Republic of Liberia
1. See, for example, Hughes’s poem “Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History Poem”
(1951) in which Hughes finds it impossible to imagine the future.
2. Farnsworth notes that he could find no instances of Tolson’s writing about
his experiences at the inauguration (218), but suggests that Melvin, Jr.’s mem-
ory of his father visiting him on a stopover in Paris confirms that a trip took
place (220). In any case, this trip would have taken place after Tolson’s book
appeared.
3. All line numbers for Libretto are taken from the original 1953 Twayne edition;
the text is not paginated.
4. Stanley is most well-known as the rescuer of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871,
greeting the lost explorer with the famous words: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
(“Henry Stanley”).
5. Maria K. Mootry finds this same formal structure in one of Tolson’s war son-
nets in Rendezvous With America (1944): “’The Braggart’ while rather simple
in its structure of a tale within a tale and its use of character, dialogue, and
concluding homily, achieves perhaps inadvertent complexity in its reversal of
call-and-response patterns in the premodernist, black oral tradition” (138).
6. John Cullen Gruesser suggests that Tolson is also punning on the “foot” in
“footnote”: “with the words ‘bunioned,’ ‘pedant,’ and ‘ladder,’ thereby contrast-
ing a plodding, earth-bound approach to life with the high-flying and mercu-
rial sparrow (Liberia).” (124).
7. “Selah,” a Hebrew word that is repeated throughout the Psalms, is thought to
have a range of meanings, both liturgical and musical. It may indicate, for
example, a pause for meditation, or a musical instruction. See the Babylon
Hebrew-English, English-Hebrew Dictionary (2012).
8. This poem is discussed in further detail in chapter 3.
9. “Tolson’s difficulties send the reader not to dictionaries, atlases, and encyclo-
pedias (as Dudley Randall has asserted) but to primary texts, as do the notes in
Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’.” (Woodson 34).
10. In his “Review of Libretto for the Republic of Liberia,” J. Saunders Redding finds
that Tolson’s use of endnotes indicates “that the poet found his talents unequal
to the full requirements of the particular necessary communication” (2).
11. See: Ramona Lowe, “Poem ‘Rendezvous With America’ Wins Fame For Melvin
Tolson,” The Chicago Defender April 28, 1945 National Edition: 18. Print.
12. Tolson’s son, Melvin, Jr., concurs with Farnsworth: “The original sponsor
of Liberia, the American Colonization Society, had also founded Lincoln
University, of which [Tolson’s] friend and schoolmate Horace Mann Bond had
recently become president” (398).
13. Espoused by influential persons, the colonization movement became quite pop-
ular. The ACS was founded in Washington, DC, in December 1816–January
1817 and “by 1833, there were 97 local colonization societies in the North and
136 in the South” (Cain 10).
Notes ● 193
14. For a discussion of various responses to the situation in Liberia in the early part
of the twentieth century, including critiques written by African American intel-
lectuals, see Hart 166–167.
15. In 2006, the BBC reported: “The country’s most recent troubles can be traced
back to the 1980 coup in which a group of army officers of indigenous tribal
origin led by Samuel Doe seized power. Doe forged closer ties with the United
States, visiting President Reagan in Washington, and received substantial
amounts of aid in return for exclusive trade agreements. His authoritarian
regime banned newspapers and political parties, and held staged elections.
Civil war broke out in 1989. In September 1990, Doe was overthrown and
brutally executed by forces loyal to rebel faction leader Yornie Johnson. The war
dragged on until 1996, and a year later warlord Charles Taylor . . . was elected
president. His autocratic rule saw opposition leaders targeted for assassination.
War broke out again in 1999. Taylor was eventually ousted in 2003, and exiled
to Nigeria” (“Liberia at-a-Glance”).
16. Taylor is charged with “instigating murder, mutilation, rape and sexual slavery
during intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone that claimed more than
250,000 victims from 1989 to 2003” (“Charles G. Taylor”).
17. Over the summer of 2010, Taylor’s trial was highlighted on the international
stage with testimonies by actress Mia Farrow and model Naomi Campbell con-
cerning Taylor’s possession of the so-called blood diamonds he allegedly used
to obtain weapons (Simons and Cowell).
18. Bérubé argues that Tolson “was convinced that he had broken into the mar-
moreal halls, that he had achieved an unprecedented academic recognition
of African-American poetry by means of the approbation of a major critic”
(141).
19. The 1953 edition of Libretto has no page numbers.
20. Also writing for Phylon in a review of Harlem Gallery in 1965, Dolphin G.
Thompson labels the lack of positive attention to Libretto a result of “artistic
jealousy and shame.”
Tolson demonstrated a superb poetic talent in Rendezvous with America ,
his first book. A second work, The Libretto for the Republic of Liberia ,
struck with a hurricane force in the citadel of letters, and it was promptly
consigned to death in a conspiracy of silence. An African proverb says,
“To die quickly saves the survivor pain and suffering.” Most poets and
critics know Tolson but have exhibited artistic jealousy and shame.
(Thompson 409)
21. The other books reviewed in the article are The Art of Worldly Wisdom by
Kenneth Rexroth; The Eye by Harvey Shapiro; Angel of Accidence by Peter
Kane Dufault; Animal, Vegetable, Mineral by Babette Deutsch; The Toy Fair by
Howard Moss; and The Land of Silence and Other Poems by May Sarton.
22. Within the context of the discussion it is interesting to consider the notion of
“purity” in all its forms: “pure nonsense,” “racial purity,” and so on. For Davis,
who prefers “normal conversational speech,” the implication of nonsense being
“pure” would not have occurred to him. For Tolson, poets function as purifiers
194 ● Notes
of language: “The poet is not only the purifier of language, as Eliot insists, but
the poet is a sort of barometer in his society. The Latin word for poet is ‘seer,’ a
‘prophet’.” (“Interview” 191).
23. Such consideration is absent in Ramazani’s account of Hughes’s transnation-
ality in which he links Hughes with D. H. Lawrence through their common
progenitor, Walt Whitman.
24. Tolson also took care to distinguish himself from Stein:
Listen, Black Boy.
Did the High Priestess at 27 rue de Fleurus
assert, “The Negro suffers from nothingness”? (Harlem Gallery 264)
Tolson’s work continued throughout his life to be a rallying cry against Stein’s
comment about the “nothingness” of Negro culture. In the 1965 interview, he
asserts, “Gertrude Stein’s judgment that the Negro suffers from Nothingness
revealed her profound ignorance of African cultures.” (“Interview” 185).
25. See: Alec Marsh, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of
Jefferson (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1998). Print.
3 “In the Modern Vein”: Tolson’s Harlem Gallery

1. Page numbers for Harlem Gallery are taken from the University Press of Virginia
edition (1999).
2. Joy Flasch cites this portion of the interview as follows: “Cut B, manuscript
of tape made for University of Wisconsin educational radio station, May 23,
1965, p. 10.” It is unclear whether this is part of a larger interview conducted by
M. W. King, part of which is included Herbert Hill’s Anger and Beyond. The
interviews do, however, have the same date.
3. Quoted in Nielsen: “Deterritorialization” 247.
4. Tolson’s poem “E. &. O. E.” was published in Poetry 78 (September 1951).
The title is taken from the printer’s abbreviation for “errors and omissions
excepted.”
5. Nelson notes that “the brief excerpts from the poem that are attributed to
Hideho Heights in ‘Chi’ are (except for the shift of one article from ‘the’ to ‘a’)
verbally identical to Tolson’s ‘E. &. O. E.,’ while the line structure has been
adapted to fit the odic prosody of Harlem Gallery.” (451–452)
6. “In the majority of poetic genres, the unity of the language system and the unity
(and uniqueness) of the poet’s individuality as reflected in his language and
speech, which is directly realized in this unity, are indispensable prerequisites
of poetic style. The novel, however, not only does not require these conditions
but . . . even makes of the internal stratification of language, or its social hetero-
glossia and the variety of individual voices in it, the prerequisite for authentic
novelist prose” (Bakhtin 264).
7. The interview took place at Langston University on March 10, 1965. Tolson
was interviewed by M. W. King, a professor of English at Lincoln University
(Jefferson City, Missouri).
Notes ● 195
4 Bound By Law—Langston Hughes in/and the 1950s

1. Jean-Michel Rabaté describes “an ‘ethics of mourning’ identical with an accep-
tance of loss in order to go beyond mere repetition. A ‘successful’ mourning is
generally thought to lead to incorporation, which merely reproduces another
transpersonal and translinguistic ‘phantom,’ as Abraham and Torok have
argued. What occurs when mourning generates another text?” (13).
2. In The Oxford English Dictionary online, the first definition of the noun form of
prelude is, “A preliminary action, or condition, preceding and introducing one
of more importance; an introduction, a preface; a precursor.”
3. Westover argues that in “Prelude” and other poems, including “Drums” and
“Danse Africaine,” “Hughes makes the drum his instrument for the recupera-
tive work of memory,” (1215).
4. For an illuminating discussion of the historical development of Afro-diasporic
consciousness by participants in the Harlem Renaissance and the Afro-
Cubanism (afrocubanismo) movement, and Hughes’s influence on both, see:
Frank Guridy, “Feeling Diaspora in Harlem and Havana.” This essay shows
“how Afro-diasporic connections can be established across cultural differences”
illustrating “the process of diasporization, or the complex social, political, and
cultural interactions between people of African descent across national, cultural,
and linguistic boundaries that are based on a perceived commonality” (116).
5. Begun by legal scholars in the 1970s, “critical race theory builds on the insights
of two previous movements, critical legal studies and radical feminism . . . It
also draws from certain European philosophers and theorists, such as Antonio
Gramsci, Michel Foucalt, and Jacques Derrida, as well as from the American
radical tradition exemplified by such figures as Sojourner Truth, Frederick
Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, César Chávez, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the
Black Power and Chicano movements of the sixties and early seventies.”
(Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race 4–5).
6. Hughes’s identification with African Americans is evident in his use of the
pronouns “we” and “our” throughout the poem, naming America as “our land,”
for example: “Meanwhile Jamestown links its chains / Between the Gold Coast
and our land” (380).
7. Renamed the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in 1972.
8. Esther Sanchez-Pardo theorizes “cultures of the death drive” through a Kleinian
perspective.
9. In The Philosophy of History (1837), Hegel writes: “At this point we leave Africa,
not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no move-
ment or development to exhibit . . . . What we properly understand by Africa, is
the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere
nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the
World’s History” (99).
10. See also Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s reading of Wallace Stevens’s 1916 play Three
Travelers Watch a Sunrise, in which the two black characters “only serve; they
are completely silent or gestural” (DuPlessis 57).
196 ● Notes
11. The five cases are as follows: Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka,
Shawnee County, Kansas, et al.; Harry Briggs, Jr., et al. v. R.W. Elliott, et al.;
Dorothy E. Davis et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia,
et al.; Spottswood Thomas Bolling et al. v. C. Melvin Sharpe et al.; Francis B.
Gebhart et al. v. Ethel Louise Belton et al., (“Teaching With Documents”).
12. In December 2010, the Memphis City School Board, whose schools have an
85 percent black student population, voted to surrender its charter, attempting
to put into motion an eventual, forced consolidation with majority-white Shelby
County Schools. “Memphis schools began integrating in 1961 without the vio-
lence other Southern cities endured. White parents instead left the city for the
suburbs or put their children in private schools, effectively re-segregating educa-
tion into a mostly black city system and a largely white suburban system” (Sainz).
13. Hughes announced the completion of the book, Montage of a Dream Deferred,
in a letter to Arna Bontemps dated September 14, 1948 (Rampersad, Life Vol. II
151). It was published by Henry Holt in 1951.
5 Toward An Afro-Modernist Future: Langston’s

Hughes’s ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ
1. Quotations and page numbers taken from the first edition of ASK YOUR
MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ , New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1961.
2. Patricia Jane Roylance explains: “As critics accused Longfellow of plagiariz-
ing the Finnish epic Kalevala, they overwrote [“The Song of Hiawatha”’s] sig-
nificant debt to aboriginal imagination. Though Longfellow himself resisted
this trend toward cultural oversimplification and privileging Scandinavia over
Native America, his poetry nonetheless participated in and even helped to
encourage that practice” (436).
3. King Leopold II’s agents terrorized the native Africans, chopping off the
right hands of, or killing, men who failed to meet their quota for rubber
production.
4. The correct spelling is “Emeka.” Emeka’s full name was Nnaemeka Ndedi
Azikiwe. He died on March 15, 2011.
5. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till of Chicago, Illinois, was murdered by white
racists in Mississippi on August 28, 1955.
6. Scott Saul repeats this error in Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making
of the Sixties.
7. Faubus called out the National Guard to block the admission of nine black
pupils to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Eastland vig-
orously supported school segregation in public schools in Mississippi, and John
Patterson interfered with the Freedom Riders’ attempts to integrate buses and
interstate transportation.
8. An article by Obiwu, “The Pan-African Brotherhood of Langston Hughes and
Nnamdi Azikiwe” (2007) begins to lay out details of Hughes and Azikiwe’s
long friendship.
Notes ● 197
9. “Test on Street Language Says It’s Not Grant in That Tomb,” New York Times
April 17, 1983: 30. The eight McGraw-Hill employees who took the test all
scored C’s and D’s.
10. I thank Rachel Blau DuPlessis for her suggestions for elaboration on this
metaphor.
11. Nathaniel “Marvelous” Montague is an African American DJ and collector
of African American historical artifacts. His on-air catchphrase “Burn, Baby!
Burn!” was transformed into a slogan for the 1965 Watts uprising in Los
Angeles. His life is the subject of autobiography written with journalist Bob
Baker (Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2003).
12. A transcription of this introduction is printed on the front flap of the reissued
version of the book published in 2009. Although Hughes’s comments are in
quotes, there is no citation of the source.
13. In his introductory comments for the 2009 reissue of ASK YOUR MAMA,
Arnold Rampersad also provides an account of Hughes beginning the composi-
tion of the poem at Newport.
14. Shulman also mentions Muriel Rukeyser’s use of documentary and Kenneth
Fearing’s use of the movies.
15. For a more detailed account of Hughes’s relationship with Taylor, see Bruce
Kellner, “Working Friendship: A Harlem Renaissance Footnote,” The
Lithographs of Prentiss Taylor: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York : Fordham UP,
1996, 11–18. Print.
16. All sources quoted here concerning Taylor and Hughes’s work together have
been digitized from microfilm by the Archives of American Art. The physical
location of the Hughes material in the Archive is as follows: Prentiss Taylor
Papers Box 9, Reel 5921. The online summary of the Prentiss Taylor Papers,
1885–1991 is available at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/prentiss-taylor
-papers-9232. The original Hughes letters are housed at the Yale University
Library.
6 Amiri Baraka’s Wise Why’s Y’s: Lineages of

the Afro-Modernist Epic
1. In an email, William J. Harris reveals that “(t)here was always music with the
poems” but goes on to add that “(t)hey [the song titles] were handwritten and
just looked like add-ons.” This statement raises additional interesting questions
about what constitutes the “actual text” of “Wise Why’s Y’s.” The fact that
Harris, in preparing his 1985 monograph, did not include the song titles and
that Baraka published additional poems without the song titles printed on the
page demonstrates that the shape of the poem, and the configuration of the
page of the “score,” was still evolving (“Re : Wise”).
2. The “Wise Why’s Y’s” typescript currently is located in Box J056 Folder 2,
Amiri Baraka Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
Because this collection is currently being processed, the box and folder numbers
198 ● Notes
may change in the future. I offer special appreciation to Professor Brent

Hayes Edwards and Archivist Susan G. Hamson for giving me access to these
materials.
3. Harris explains: “I start the first period with 1957, because it is the year that
Baraka arrived in Greenwich Village. I begin the second with 1963, because
that year marks the approximate beginning of his serious doubts about white
bohemia. I start the third with 1965, since that was the year Malcolm X was
killed, and marked the beginning of a period when Baraka declared his opposi-
tion to white society and moved uptown to Harlem, where he declared himself
a black cultural nationalist. I begin the last with 1974, because that is the year
Baraka pronounced himself a Marxist-Leninist” (Reader xv).
4. The final book version is abbreviated hereafter as Wise.
5. No song is included in this publication of section 18. In the larger “Wise Why’s
Wise” typescript, Baraka has handwritten: “Ma Rainey / Explainin the Blues
(T. Dorsey)” on a photocopy of page 109 from Forward, indicating how Baraka
began to conceive of the poem as a multimedia jazz performance.
6. These charges, which resurfaced in relation to Baraka’s removal from the posi-
tion of Poet Laureate of New Jersey, do not escape his attention. New Jersey
governor Jim McGreevey demanded that Baraka apologize for the content of
“Somebody Blew Up America” and resign his position as poet laureate, and
“when he refused to do either, the governor took the extraordinary step of
abolishing the post.” (Campbell 139). The poem had been published widely
on the Internet before Baraka was appointed. In a recent interview with James
Campbell, Baraka expresses concern: “See, I have to carry that with me. Forty
years from now, some fool will say, ‘Baraka, the anti-Semite’” (140). In an arti-
cle updated in July 2003, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) asserts: “Amiri
Baraka, the former Leroi Jones, has a long history of hostility to Jews and
Jewish concerns” (“Amiri Baraka: In His Own Words”). The following lines in
“Somebody Blew Up America” drew criticism from the ADL:
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay away that day
Why did Sharon stay away? (203)
Campbell comments: “The prominent theme of the poem is the ruthless
instinct of the powerful for political advantage and the blindness of the public
at large to ‘terrorists’ in their own midst” (138), of which the following stanza
is illustrative:
Who killed the most niggers
Who killed the most Jews
Who killed the most Italians
Who killed the most Irish
Who killed the most Africans
Who killed the most Japanese
Who killed the most Latinos
Who/Who/Who (200)
Notes ● 199
Campbell also notes that the poem is not literal (which readers might have
guessed already); there were not 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers. The
poem, which repeats the interrogative “Who” throughout, contains a num-
ber of provocations, including those that condemn the perpetrators of the
Holocaust:
Who put the Jews in ovens,
and who helped them do it
Who said “America First”
and ok’d the yellow stars
WHO/ WHO/ (202)
However, as William J. Harris and Aldon Lynn Nielsen note in their nuanced
discussion, “Somebody Blew Off Baraka,” the four offending lines of the poem
cited above are not easily explicated.
7. I thank Robin Tremblay-McGaw for suggesting that I elaborate on this
difference.
8. James Smethurst also suggests a comparison between Paterson and Hughes’s
Montage of a Dream Deferred (“Adventures” 159).
9. Baraka had this poem printed privately in 1982, in pamphlet form, with a cover
by painter Vincent Smith (Reader 302).
10. Olson, “Projective Verse.”
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Index
Abbott, Robert S., 100 education in, 43

Aberdeen, South Dakota, 146 epic history and, 45
abolitionists, 48, 159 European exploration of, 41
About the House (Auden), 85 folktales from, 79
absence, 105 freedom struggles in, 134
see also nothingness, shadow history and, 59
academia, 6–7, 13, 84, 180, 193n18 Hughes and, 95–7, 103–6, 109
see also high modernism Libretto for the Republic of Liberia
Accent (journal), 54 and, 53, 60–2
Acheron, 77 masks and, 100
Achilles (Iliad), 164 modernity and, 127
“Advertisement for the Waldorf proverbs and, 67, 82, 84
Astoria” (Hughes), 140, 143–4 religions of, 126
Aeneas (Aeneid), 88 republics in, 46–7
Aeneid (Virgil), 170 revolutions in, 140
Aesop, 99 slavery and, 50
“A Few Don’ts By An Imagiste” Tolson and, 33–5, 72, 80, 86, 89
(Pound), 17 Whitman and, 42–3
Africa, 161, 163, 169, 194n24, 195n4, see also diaspora, slavery
196n3 African American Review (journal), 151
ASK YOUR MAMA and, 121, 124, African Americans, 123, 130–1, 153,
128, 135–6, 149 156, 159, 193n18, 194n24
“back to,” 170 archives for, 103
Baraka and, 157–9, 171, 176–8, 180, Baraka and, 162, 169–70, 179,
184 183–4, 188
Belgium and, 40 contributions by, 102
colonization and, 42 dialogism and, 81
dialect from, 55 diaspora and, 96, 112–14
diaspora and, 37, 56, 68, 112–14, economic opportunities of, 110
174–5 Eliot and, 37
drums and, 130–1 epic and, 66
214 ● Index
African Americans—Continued ideology and, 89

essentialism and, 80 innovations of, 180
eternal presence of, 96 Tolson and, 29, 31, 46, 62–3, 66,
freedom for, 66 68, 74
griots and, 171, 173–4, 176–7, 181 see also modernism
history and, 153 Aldington, Richard, 18
Hughes and, 91–3, 97, 101, 104–5, Alexander the Great, 170
107, 111, 120 Alfred A. Knopf (publishers), 130
Hughes identification with, 195n6 Alhambra, The, 75
identity and, 29, 40, 42 All Aboard (Tolson), 11
intellectuals and, 193n14 Allen, Donald, 179
invisibility of, 100 Allies (World War II), 39, 46, 50
language and, 70–1, 85 allusion, 19, 22, 37, 77, 80, 86, 191n18
law and, 100, 108 Hughes and, 135
life of, 5 Tolson and, 24, 29, 42, 46, 53, 67, 71
literacy and, 99 “Alpha” (Tolson), 68
literature and, 4 American Colonization Society (ACS),
Modernism and, 75, 81, 95 43, 48–9, 192n12–192n13
Montage and, 115–18 American Negro Exposition (1947), 47
Negro language and, 70 American Quarterly (journal), 38
Negro-ness and, 52 Americas, 68, 135, 163
nothingness and, 86 anaphora, 24–5, 32, 101
poetry and, 6 Andalusian folklore, 184
re-bop and, 115–17 Anderson, Margaret, 13
second-sight and, 100 Anderson, Marian, 26, 101
silence and, 98 Anderson, Sherwood, 13
status of, 121 Anglo-American Tradition, 3, 45, 50,
study of, 56 54, 93
Tolson and, 59–61, 68, 70–1, 87–8 see also England
viewpoint of, 88 Anglo-Saxons, 164
“African China” (Tolson), 11 Annie Allen (Brooks), 151
Africanism, 94, 190n7 Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 198n6
Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect Antioch Review (journal), 61
(Turner), 55 anti-semitism, 27, 179, 198n6
Afro-American (newspaper), 54, 99 see also Jews
Afrocentrism, 96 apartheid, 120, 124
Afro-Cubanism, 195n4 see also South Africa
Afro-Cuban music, 113–14 Appleseed, Johnny, 25
Afro-Modernism, 1–2, 7, 19, 25, 38, 42 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 80
Baraka and, 153–5, 165–6, 169–71, Arabs, 96, 124
175, 181, 184, 186–7 archivalism, 37, 50, 98, 101–4, 182
epic and, 189n1 law and, 105
Harlem Gallery and, 85 Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
Hughes and, 92, 112–15, 120, 140, (Derrida), 103, 106
147, 149 Archive of American Art, 146
Index ● 215
Aristotle, 82 Baker, Bob, 197n11

Aristotelianism, 81 Baker, Houston A., Jr., 3, 59, 84, 92
Armstrong, Louis, 74, 88, 121 Baker, Josephine, 101
art music, 114 Bakhtin, M. M., 80–1
Ashmun, Jehudi, 44, 48 Balaam’s ass, 67
Ashmun Institute, 48 bala (musical instrument), 172–3
Asia, 33, 67–8, 80, 86, 108–9, 178, 180 balafon (musical instrument), 172
diaspora and, 1, 97, 112 “Balancement” (Kandinsky), 140
“ASK YOUR MAMA” (Hughes), 121, Baldwin, James, 141, 165
126 ballads, 178
ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR Baltimore Afro-American (newspaper),
JAZZ (Hughes), 46, 92, 110, 53, 123
118–22, 141–2, 197n13 Baltimore Evening Sun (newspaper), 86,
Baraka and, 151, 156, 187 190n4
Christianity and, 123–6 Bamako, Mali, 176
colonialism and, 135–6 Bamana people, 174
performance and, 130–4, 137 Banneker, Benjamin, 101
precursors to, 143–7 Bantus, 57, 79
social poetry and, 147–9 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 173–5,
trope of, 138 178, 184–8, 189n1, 197n1,
visual design of, 139–40 198n3
“A Song for Myself ” (Tolson), 18 Blues People, 71, 114, 167–9
assimilation, 35 diaspora and, 154–5, 157, 162, 170–1,
Atlanta University, 55 173–5, 187
Atlantic City, New Jersey, 148 Hughes and, 149
Atlantic Monthly (magazine), 30 papers of, 152
Atlantic Ocean, 159 Suso and, 171–2, 174, 176–7
“At The Colonial Y They Are Tolson and, 1, 7, 61
Aesthetically & Culturally whiteness and, 168
Deprived (Y’s Later) (31)” Wise Why’s Y’s, 151–3, 158–61,
(Baraka), 153 163–7, 179–83
Attucks, Crispus, 29, 101 bardic traditions, 60
Auden, W. H., 85 Barrios, Pilar, 114
audience, 66 Beats, 154–5
authenticity, 194n6 Beatty, Talley, 13
Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, The be-bop, 111, 114–16, 137, 166, 168
(Baraka), 186 see also jazz
automobiles, 39–40 Bechet, Sidney, 152
avant garde, 158, 180, 182–3 Belafonte, Harry, 131
Azikwe, Benjamin Nnamdi “Zik,” 126, Belgium, 40, 124
134–5, 196n8 Bell, Benjamin, 62
Bell, Daniel, 108
Bach, J. S., 83–4, 117 Bellow, Saul, 65
“back to Africa” movements, 48 Benin, 39
Bailey, Pearl Mae, 130 Berry, Faith, 15, 113–14
216 ● Index
Bérubé, Michael, 2, 67, 72–4, 93, 184, Black on Black : Twentieth-Century

191n18, 193n18 African American Writing About
Tolson and, 30, 45, 50–3, 59–61 Africa (Gruesser), 59
Bess Hokin Prize, 42 Black Orchid Suite (Harlem Gallery), 73
Bethune, Mary McLeod, 101, 128 Black Pace Setters, The (Montague), 141
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), Black Power Movement, 142, 195n5
105 Blacks, see African Americans
Bharatas, 165 Black Samson, 26
Bible, The, 67, 86 Black Verse, The (Hughes), 141
Bickham, Jack M., 87–8 Blakeley, Art, 115
Big Sea, The (Hughes), 114, 143 blood, 33, 191n20
“Big-Timer, The” (Hughes), 144 Blue Ark, 157, 173
Billboard (magazine), 141 Blue Note (record label), 157–8
Billetteri, Carla, 181 blues, 10–11, 16, 81, 131, 137, 148,
“Billie’s Bounce” (Parker), 166–7 198n5
Bill of Rights, 30 Baraka and, 157, 167, 169, 173, 176
see also specific amendments vernacular and, 141
“BIRD IN ORBIT” (Hughes), 121, “BLUES IN STEREO” (Hughes), 121,
126 125, 139
“Black America Volume 1: The Buffalo Blues People (Baraka), 71, 114, 153, 159,
Soldiers” (Montague), 141 163, 167–9
“Black Art” (Baraka), 181 Boas, Franz, 25
Black Arts Movement, 6, 35, 61, 154, Bodenheim, Maxwell, 17
162, 179 body, 93–4
Black Bourgeoisie (Frazier), 77 Bola Boa Enterprises, Inc. (Harlem
Black Bourgeoisie (Harlem Gallery), 72, Gallery), 78
76, 78–9 Bollingen Prize, 50
“Black Clown, The” (Hughes), 144 Bond, Horace Mann, 47–8, 192n12
Black Codes, 153 Bontemps, Arna, 95
“BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS” Book of American Negro Poetry, The
(Baraka), 163 (Johnson), 177, 184
Black Dispatch (newspaper), 47 Boone, Daniel, 25
blackface, 106 “#20 Borders (Incest) Obsession”
Black Faculty and Staff Association (Baraka), 159
(SUNY Stony Brook), 152 Boris Godunov (Pushkin), 97
Black Gazette (newspaper), 58 bourgeoisie, 70, 77–9
Blacklisting, 6 Boyd, Marion, 107
Black Metropolis (Clayton), 13 Braden, Carl and Anne, 122
Black Mountain poets, 186 “Braggart, The” (Tolson), 192n5
black nationalism, 154–5, 181–2, 198n3 Brandeis, Louis, 25
see also African Americans, diaspora Bread Loaf Fellowship, 66
blackness, 58–9, 61, 70, 96, 106 break (jazz term), 187
absence and, 105 “Bridge, The” (Crane), 56, 62
Christ and, 125 British Broadcasting Company (BBC),
definition of, 184 124, 193n15
Index ● 217
“Broke” (Hughes), 144 Carver, George Washington, 101

Brooks, Gwendolyn, 13, 60, 84–5, 151 Castro, Fidel, 128, 134–5
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 35 cataloging technique, 15, 32
“Brothers” (Hughes), 115 Catlett, Elizabeth, 13
Brown, Cynthia Stokes, 122 “Caviar and Cabbage” (Tolson
Brown, Oscar, Jr., 13 column), 2, 34
Brown, Pearly, 152 censorship, 148
Brown, Sterling, 8, 23, 153, 191n20 Central High School (Little Rock,
Brown vs the Board of Education Arkansas), 196n7
(Supreme Court decision), 107–8 Césaire, Aimé, 38, 126–7
Brumidi, Constantino, 26 Chang and Eng (“Ti”), 42
Buddha Records, 132, 141–2 “Characteristics of Negro Expression”
Buffalo, New York, 124 (Hurston), 191n15
Bula Matadi (ocean liner), 39–40 Charles, Ray, 71
Bunche, Ralph, 128, 135 Charon, 77
Buñuel, Luis, 184 Charybdis, 42, 80, 190n4
Bunyan, Paul, 25 Chavez, César, 195n5
Buridan’s ass, 67–8 “Chiaroscuro” (Tolson), 11–13
Burke, Arthur, 22–3 Chicago, Illinois, 12–13, 15–16, 47,
BYG Actuel (record label), 157 112, 184
free verse and, 17
Caesar, Julius, 19, 170 Chicago Defender (newspaper), 23, 100,
Caesarism, 170 134, 141
Cahier d’un retour au pays natal Chicago Public Library, 13
(Césaire), 38 Chicago Renaissance, 12–13, 15–16,
Cain, William E., 49 190n11
cakewalk, 178 “Chicago” (Sandburg), 13
California, 49 Chicago School, 12, 112
call and response, 175, 192n5 Chicano movement, 195n5
Calmore, John, 96 “Chi” (Tolson), 73, 194n5
Campbell, James, 186, 198n6, 199n6 Christianity, 39, 48, 78, 86, 123–6,
Campbell, Naomi, 193n17 144, 159
Campus Exchange Forum (SUNY chronotypes, 80
Stony Brook), 152 Ciardi, Jon, 55, 66
Cane (Toomer), 46 citizenship, 50, 60, 93, 108–10, 167, 170
canon, 7, 17–18, 23, 57, 59, 61, 180 City Council of Newport, Rhode
Hughes and, 112, 147 Island, 141
modernism and, 45 civil rights movement, 115, 135, 140, 142
Cansler, Ronald Lee, 58–9 Civil War (United States), 108, 152
Cantos (Pound), 38, 66, 155 Clark, William J., 146
capitalism, 31, 78, 182, 184 Clark Atlanta University, 55
Caribbean, 43, 120, 122, 135 class, 16, 77–8
Carnegie Hall, 130, 142 classical literature, 10, 59, 86, 95–6,
Cartesianism, 42 155, 159, 174
Caruso, Enrico, 26 see also epic, Homer
218 ● Index
classical music, 73 Count of Monte Cristo, The (Dumas), 97

Claudius (Hamlet), 100 “Count Us In” (Brown), 191n20
Clayton, Horace R., 13 Crane, Hart, 54, 56, 62, 66, 88
Cleveland, Ohio, 113 cream metaphor, 82–4
Cluny Abbey, France, 127 credit, 63
cocoa trade, 135 “Creole Love Call” (jazz standard), 152
Cocteau, Jean, 65 Crisis (newspaper), 12, 22–3, 91, 99,
Cold War, 108, 123 107, 114–15, 146
Cole, Nat King, 13 critical legal studies, 195n5
Coleman, Ornette, 129 critical race theory, 92, 96, 107–8, 195n5
collage, 19 critical theory, 96
Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, The Crossroads Modernism (Pavlić), 189n1
(Hughes), 91, 132, 145 Cuba, 114, 134–5, 148
collectivity, 155, 164–5, 168–70, Cubism, 10
181, 187 Cullen, Countee, 4, 23, 100
Hughes and, 91–2, 112, 114 “CULTURAL EXCHANGE”
colloquiaisms, 183 (Hughes), 119–22, 132–3
colonialism, 49–50, 105, 126, 135–7, performance and, 130–1, 134–7
159, 173, 192n13 Cuney, Waring, 57
decolonization and, 1, 17, 42 Curator, The (Harlem Gallery), 69–72,
Europe and, 42, 48 74–5, 78–80, 82–3, 88
France and, 127 Cyprus, 95
see also Africa, diaspora
Color (Cullen), 23 Dadaism, 10, 154, 182
“COLORED HOUR” (Hughes), 133 Daily Oklahoman (newspaper), 87
“Colored Soldier, The” (Hughes), 144 Dakar, Senegal, 126, 176
Coltrane, John, 115, 167–9, 183 Dalí, Salvador, 184
Columbia University, 4, 9, 152 Damas, Léon Gontran, 127
common speech, 17 “Danse Africaine” (Hughes), 91, 195n3
see also vernacular Dante Alighieri, 66
Communism, 108, 122–3, 154 Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in
Seventh Congress of the Communist America (Emanuel and Gross), 22
International and, 15 “Dark Symphony” (Tolson), 18, 22,
see also Marxism 29–30, 47, 191n18
compositional structures, 81 “Dark Youth” (Hughes), 144, 146
Congo, Democratic Republic of, 40, 124 Darrow, Clarence, 9
Congo River, 112 “DAT” (Baraka), 156–7
Conrad, Joseph, 62 “Date Line” (Pound), 178
consciousness, 95–7, 105, 114, 162 Daumier, Honoré, 76
“Consider Me” (Hughes), 110 Davis, Arthur P., 57–8, 193n22
Convention relating to the Status of Davis, Miles, 115, 151
Stateless Persons, 109 Davis, Robert A., 191n18
Cornhuskers, The (Sandburg), 15 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 131
Cortor, Eldzier, 13 Dawson, William I., 101
counterpoint, 22, 26 Day of the Barricades (May 12, 1588), 67
Index ● 219
Dead Lecturer, The (Baraka), 186 Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire), 126

death, 104–5, 195n8 dislocation, 67–8
democracy and, 34 Division of Negro Literature (New York
“#19 Death Parallels” (Baraka), 160 Public Library), 103
Decker Press, 51 Dixie, 133
deferral metaphor, 107, 115–17, 132, Djali (poet-singer), 174–5, 178
136, 139 Dodd, Mead, and Co. (publisher), 18
see also Hughes, Montage of Dodds, “Baby,” 152
a Dream Deferred Doe, Samuel, 193n15
“Deferred” (Hughes), 117 Do-Re-Mi diatonic musical scale, 38
Delancey, Mary Rose, 86 Dorsey, Tommy, 198n5
Delaware, 107 “Do” (Tolson), 40–1
Delgado, Richard, 92 double consciousness, 101
Dell, FLoyd, 13 double talking tradition, 71–2
democracy, 30–2, 102–3, 106, 123 voice and, 153
death and, 34 Douglass, Frederick, 26, 48, 98–9, 165,
Derrida, Jacques, 100, 103–4, 106, 195n5
195n5 dozens, 13, 80–2, 84, 120, 133–4, 137–9
Destination Out (Moncur), 157 Dr. Obi Nkomo (Harlem Gallery), 69,
destructionism, 184 79–82, 84
“DEUCE” (Baraka), 156–7 Drake, St. Clair, 13
dialect, 63, 106, 128, 195n4 “Dream Boogie: Variation” (Hughes),
Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, 117
and Twentieth Century Literature, “Dream Boogie” (Hughes), 91, 116
The (North), 106 Dred Scott Decision, 108
dialogism, 81 Dreiser, Theodore, 13, 190n11
“Diamond Canady” (Tolson), 12–13 Drew, Charles Richard, 101
diaspora, 1, 6, 24, 189n1 Druid Theatre Company of Galway, 186
America and, 42 drums, 94, 120, 128, 130–1, 157, 195n3
Baraka and, 154–5, 157, 162, 170–1, “Drums” Hughes, 195n3
173–5, 187 Du Bois, Shirley Graham, 135, 195n5
consciousness and, 95–6 Du Bois, W. E. B., 4, 29–30, 54–5, 67,
epic and, 45 74, 135
Hughes and, 92, 99, 106, 112–14, 119, Hughes and, 98, 123–4
124, 126, 128, 130–1, 136–7, 149 veil metaphor of, 100
identity and, 35, 43 Dudziak, Mary, 108
self and, 180, 184 Dumas, Alexandre, 97–8
study of, 55 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 71, 101,
Tolson and, 37, 56, 66, 68 121, 145
unity of, 97 Dun Dun (drum), 158
see also Africa Dunham, Katherine, 13
diatonic musical scale, 38 Du Plessis, Rachel Blau, 195n10, 197n10
Dickinson, Emily, 20, 23 Dusk of Dawn, an Essay towards an
Dimaggio, Joe, 25 Autobiography of a Race Concept
Diop, Alioune, 126–7 (Du Bois), 29, 67
220 ● Index
“E. & O. E.” (Tolson), 42, 73–6, Tolson and, 1, 6, 9, 12, 26, 46, 59
194n4–n5 see also Afro-Modernism, classical
Earnest, Ernest, 9 literature, Homer
East Africa, 48 epistemology, 42
Eastland, James O., 122–4, 133, Eremboi, 95
196n7 Esperanto, 57
Ebony (magazine), 13, 58 essentialism, 80, 128
École Normale Supérieure, 127 “Eta” (Tolson), 79
economics, 110, 125–6, 142 “Etchings” (Tolson), 11
education, 45, 196n7, 196n12 eternal presence, 96
Africa and, 43 Ethiopia, 94–5, 99
Edwards, Brent Hayes, 96, 127 Euphrates, 112
Egypt, 66, 95, 135, 173 Eurocentrism, 105
Eliot, T. S., 1, 132, 154, 181, 185, Europe, 1, 3, 178–81, 183, 189n1
192n9, 194n22 Afro-Modernism and, 62, 68, 85,
African Americans and, 8, 37 89, 120
idiom of, 76 art music from, 114
modernism and, 16, 20, 38, 56–7 colonization by, 48–9
Tolson and, 3, 41, 62, 65–6, 68, exploration by, 41
72, 88 Hughes and, 97, 123, 135
Ellington, Duke, 152 metropolises of, 127
Ellison, Ralph, 34 philosophy from, 195n5
emancipation, 48–9 Tolson and, 40–3, 53, 59, 80
Emanuel, James A., 22 Evening Star (newspaper), 39, 47
empire, 41, 169–70 Evolution (Moncur), 157
Encyclopedia of Chicago, 13 Exposure of the American Colonization
Encyclopedia of the Chicago Literary Society (Garrison), 49
Renaissance, 13
endnotes device, see notes device Fabio, Sarah Webster, 58–9, 61, 70–1,
Engels, Friedrich, 168 84, 190n4
England, 60, 105–6, 128, 135, 180, 185 “Façade” (Sitwell), 88
see also Anglo-American Tradition Farnsworth, Robert M., 11, 20, 30, 34,
enjambment, 12, 18, 113 47, 192n2, 192n12
epic, 63, 66, 92, 95, 99, 111–12, 120 Farrow, Mia, 193n17
Afro-Modernism and, 37, 153, 155, Fascism, 31, 46
169–71, 175, 181, 186–7 “Fa” (Tolson), 43–4
America and, 25 Faubus, Orville, 133–4, 196n7
Baraka and, 153, 157, 159, 164–6, Fearing, Kenneth, 197n14
172, 177–8 “Feeling Diaspora in Harlem and
empire and, 169–70 Havana” (Guridy), 195n4
historical function of, 45 Feelings, Tom, 160–1
Hughes and, 137, 140–1, 149 feminism, 195n5
imagination and, 42 Fettered Genius: The African American
industrialism and, 31 Bardic Poet From Slavery to Civil
social poetry and, 147 Rights (Leonard), 190n8
Index ● 221
“FI’” (Baraka), 156–7, 159 Gambia, The, 171, 173–4

Fierefiz (Parzival), 39–40 Gardner, J. W., 95
Fifteenth Amendment, 108 Garrison, William Lloyd, 49–50
Fifth Amendment, 122 Garvey, Marcus, 48
Fine Clothes to The Jew (Hughes), 23 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 100, 137
Firestone Company, 39 gender, 106
Fisk University, 56 Generación del 27, 184
Flint, F. S., 16, 113 genocide, 153, 159
“FO’” (Baraka), 156–9 see also slavery
folklore, 79, 191n16 genre, 194n6
Andalusia and, 184 Georgia, 55
folk songs, 148 Germany, 50, 164
Folkways Records, 126 Ghana, 134–5, 161
footnotes device, see notes device Gillespie, Dizzy, 113
Formalism, 57 Giovanni, Nikki, 180
Fort Sumter, South Carolina, 27 Glass, Philip, 174
Fortune, T. Thomas, 100 globalism, 96–7
Fort Wayne News and Sentinel “Go Down Moses” (spiritual), 30
(newspaper), 86 Gold Coast, 135
Forward: Journal of Socialist Thought Golden Stair Press, 144–7
(journal), 152, 161 “Goodbye Christ” (Hughes), 123
Foucault, Michel, 195n5 “Good Gray Bard in Timbuktu
Fourteenth Amendment, 108 chanted, The” (Tolson), 42–3
France, 67, 99, 135, 144 “Good Morning, Revolution”
colonies of, 127 (Hughes), 6
Frazier, E. Franklin, 77, 100 gospel, 115
freedom, 91 “GOSPEL CHA-CHA” (Hughes),
movement and, 109 121, 125
Freedom Riders, 196n7 Goya, Francisco, 67
Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Gramsci, Antonio, 195n5
Jazz and Africa (Monson), 114–15 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck), 30
free verse, 10, 12–13, 16–18, 20, Graziosi, Barbara, 172
112, 180 Great Depression, The, 6, 87
Freud, Sigmund, 65, 104–6 Great Ideas, 89
Frost, Robert, 13, 88 Great Migration, 153, 159
“Fugitive Poems” (Tolson), 76 “Great White World” (expression), 68,
Fulani people, 173 70, 89
Fulbe people, 174 Greek literature, 59, 172, 174–6
Futurafrique, 37–9 archivalism and, 103–4
Futurism, 10, 38 Green Door (book store), 184–5
Greensboro News (newspaper), 140
Gallery of Harlem Portraits, A (Tolson), Greenwich Village, New York, 180,
8–11, 15–16, 18, 20, 69, 73, 87 198n3
free verse and, 12–13 “Griot/Djali: Poetry, Music, History,
Galway, Ireland, 186 Message” (Baraka), 175
222 ● Index
griots, 59, 94, 155, 161, 171–4 Harlem Group of Negro Writers, The
Baraka and, 175–8, 181 (Tolson), 2, 4, 38
terms for, 174 “Harlem” (Hughes), 91
see also oral traditions “Harlem (2)” (Hughes), 117
Gropper, William, 77 Harlem Renaissance, 3–7, 15–16, 112,
Gross, Theodore L., 22 134, 195n4
group dynamics, 104–5 Harlem Renaissance in Black and White,
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the The (Hutchinson), 15
Ego (Freud), 104–5 Harlem Vignettes (Harlem Gallery), 73
Gruesser, John Cullen, 46, 59, 192n6 Harris, William J., 152, 154–5, 197n1,
Guinea, 128, 134–5 198n3, 199n6
Guinea-Bissau, 173–4 Baraka and, 166, 178, 180, 182–4
Gullah peoples, 55 Harvard Law Review (journal), 108
Guridy, Frank, 114, 195n4 Harvard Law School, 162
Gypsies, 159 Hastie, William H., 101
Gypsy Ballads, The (Lorca), 114 Hausa people, 174
Havana, Cuba, 114
Hague, The, 50 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 17–18
Haitian Revolution, 101 Hecht, Ben, 13
Hale, Thomas A., 173–4, 176 Hector (Iliad), 169
Hamlet (Hamlet), 70, 77 Hegel, G. W. F., 105, 195n9
father of, 100 Hegelianism, 160, 168
hard bop, 114–15 Heights, R. Henri, III, 190n9
see also jazz Hellenes, 76
Harlem, New York, 4, 9–10, 148, 184, Henry, John, 25, 74
198n3 Henry, Patrick, 29
Chicago Renaissance and, 13 Heraclitus, 65
Hughes and, 67, 77, 87, 111–12, 114 “Hesitation Blues” (traditional), 131, 136
Sugar Hill section of, 78 Hideho Heights (Harlem Gallery),
see also Harlem Gallery, Harlem 72–6, 81–2, 190n9, 194n5
Renaissance hierarchy, 110
Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator high modernism, 7–8, 17, 45, 80, 93, 179
(Tolson), 35, 63, 65–8, 190n4, see also academia, Modernism
190n9, 194n5 Hilyer, Robert, 23
Baraka and, 151 Hipnosis (Moncur), 158
Bérubé and, 50, 52, 72–3 “Hipnosis” (Moncur), 157
blackness and, 60–1 history, 153–4, 156, 159, 170
bourgeosie and, 76, 79 Africans and, 59
Imagism and, 16, 18 allusions from, 67
intended sequence of, 190n2 Baraka and, 173–4, 176, 178–80, 188
modernism and, 1–3, 10, 28–9 epic’s function in, 45
reviews of, 84–9, 193n20 Eurocentrism and, 105
vernacular and, 81–2 Hughes and, 60, 92, 94, 100–101,
“Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems of 103–4, 108, 112
Melvin B. Tolson (Tolson), 3, 59, 76 making of, 181–2
Index ● 223
nationhood and, 93 performance and, 134–7

oral traditions and, 59 “Prelude to Our Age” and, 101,
paralysis and, 132 106–7, 110–11
spiral of, 153, 160 shadow and, 93–5, 99, 102, 106
see also diaspora, epic, slavery Hugo, Victor, 66
Hitler, Adolph, 159 humanism, 127
Holocaust, 159, 199n6 Human Rights Commission (United
homecoming, 170 Nations), 109
home (jazz term), 187 Hurston, Zora Neale, 8, 20, 191n15
Homer, 59, 82, 94–5, 99, 164 Hutchinson, George, 15
epic and, 170, 172, 186 Hyde Park School, 107
Hopkins, Lightnin’, 152
horizontal audience, 66 IBM, 130
“HORN OF PLENTY” (Hughes), 121, identitarian stasis, 93
125, 138 identity, 81, 88, 96–7
Hotel Viking, 142 African Americans and, 29, 40, 42
House Un-American Activities America and, 34
Committee (HUAC), 122–3 Baraka and, 153, 155, 170–1, 174,
Howard University, 57 178
“How You Sound??” (Baraka), 179, 184 diaspora and, 24, 35, 43
Hughes, Langston, 1, 189n1, 190n9, essentialism and, 128
192n1, 194n23, 195n4, 195n6 Hughes and, 119, 128, 130–1
Afro-Modernism and, 112–15 Law of Synthetic Identity and, 42
anthology by, 57 nationhood and, 103
ASK YOUR MAMA and, 118–22, splitting of, 74–5
127–8, 138–40, 144–8 Tolson and, 18, 20, 38, 56, 60, 73
Azikwe and, 196n8 see also Africa, African Americans,
Baraka and, 149, 151, 156, 169, 177, diaspora
184, 186–8 ideology, 19
blues and, 10 idiom, 188
Christianity and, 123–6 “Idols of the Tribe, The” (Tolson), 18,
citizenship and, 108–10 32, 35
collectivity and, 91–2 Iliad (Homer), 82, 95, 169, 172
colonialism and, 135–6 Imagism, 12, 17–18, 113
“CULTURAL EXCHANGE” and, manifestoes of, 16
130–3 “Imagisme” (Flint), 16
death and, 104–5 imagistes, des (Pound), 16
democracy and, 102–3 “Im Blau” (Kandinsky), 140
diaspora and, 96–7, 112–14 impotence, 110
Douglass and, 98–9 improvisation, 156, 163
dozens and, 133–4, 137–9 “In a Station of the Metro” (Pound), 12
juxtaposition and, 143 Indies, 69
Montage of a Dream Deferred and, individuality, 194n6
115–18 industrialism, 5, 28
Newport Jazz Festival and, 141–2 epic and, 31
224 ● Index
Inkwell Press, 140 Hughes and, 93, 102, 105, 107,

innovative poetry, 189n2 109–11, 120, 122
interstate commerce clause, 102 Liberia and, 47
intertextuality, 71 Tolson and, 9, 23, 31
In the Tradition (Baraka), 185 see also race
“Inventory at Mid-Century: A Review “Jimmy’s Blues” (Moncur), 157
of Literature of the Negro for John Laugart (Harlem Gallery), 72,
1950” (Locke), 55 76–9
“In Your Face Test of No Certain Johnson, Charles Spurgeon, 101
Skills, The” (student-designed Johnson, Elijah, 43
test), 137 Johnson, Fenton, 154, 179, 184
Ireland, 185–6 Johnson, James Weldon, 4, 177–8,
“IS IT TRUE?” (Hughes), 121, 126 184
Israelis, 198n6, 199n6 Johnson, John H., 13
Israelites, 67 Johnson, Lamont, 158
Johnson, Lyndon B., 129
Jackson, Laura Riding, 105 Johnson, Yornie, 193n15
Jackson, Mahalia, 71 Jones, Casey, 25
Jacobsen, Josephine, 86–7, 190n4 Jones, LeRoi, see Baraka
Jali Kunda: Griots of West African & Jones, Meta DuEwa, 137, 175
Beyond (Kopka and Brooks), Jones, “Papa” Jo, 152
173–5 Journey Back, The (Baker), 59
James, Jesse, 25 Joyce, James, 3, 18, 183, 185
“Jam Session” (Hughes), 118 “Juke Box Love Song” (Hughes), 91
jam sessions, 111–12, 115 juxtaposition, 143
Japan, 148
Jařab, Josef, 68, 73 Kalaidjian, Walter B., 6
Jasper, John, 125 Kalevala (Finnish epic), 196n2
jazz, 72–3, 113–15, 117, 122, 198n5 Kandinsky, Wassily, 140
Baraka and, 153–5, 157, 163, 167–9, Kansas, 107
175, 182–3, 187–8 Kansas City Star (newspaper), 72, 88
Hughes and, 137, 140, 142, 146 “Kappa” (Tolson), 78–9
see also be-bop, specific musicians Karpman, Laura, 142
Jazz Messengers (band), 115 Kemp, Roy Z., 140
“JAZZTET MUTED” (Hughes), 121, Kentucky, 49
129 Kentucky State College, 8, 62
Jazz Workshop, The, 115 Kenya, 135
Jesus Christ, 34, 79, 126, 144 Kenyatta, Jomo, 128, 135
blackness and, 125 Kenyon Review (journal), 54
Jet (magazine), 51 Khassonké region (The Gambia), 174
Jews, 30, 66, 85, 159 Kiel, Daniel, 107
culture of, 86 Kim, Daniel Won-Gu, 134
see also anti-semitism Kind of Blue (Davis), 151
Jim Crow laws, 126, 130, 133–5, 142 King, M. W., 17
Index ● 225
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 88, 107, 128, Liberian Motors, 39

135, 141, 195n5 Liberia Today (magazine), 39
Kingston, Jamaica, 126 Library of Congress, 17, 39, 42, 47, 85,
Kleinianism, 195n8 190n2
kleos (praising famous deeds), 174 Libretto for the Republic of Liberia
Komunyakka, Yusef, 113 (Tolson), 44–6, 48, 58, 66–7,
kora (musical instrument), 172 189n4, 190n7, 193n20
Ku Klux Klan, 27, 132 Allies and, 39
Baraka and, 151, 181, 186–7
labor organizing, 32 Bérubé and, 2, 50–1, 53, 72
La Guardia, Fiorello, 25 critical responses to, 59–63
Langston College, 4, 65, 179 diaspora and, 1, 35, 37
Lardner, Ring, 13 Hughes and, 129
Latin America, 114, 120, 137 modernism and, 25, 54–7
Laveau, Marie, 125 singularity of, 38
law, 98, 104, 108–9 Tate preface to, 3
apartheid and, 124 Twayne edition of, 44
archivalism and, 105 Whitman and, 18, 42–3, 52, 56
inclusion and, 102 Libya, 95
see also Jim Crow laws lieder (songs), 120, 136, 189n1
Law of Synthetic Identity, 42 Life Studies (Lowell), 189n4
Lawrence, D. H., 18, 194n23 Lincoln, Abraham, 25, 48, 101
layout, 29, 40, 144 Lincoln Center, 186
centering and, 26, 28, 40, 67 Lincoln University, 13, 134–5, 148,
left-flush margins and, 26 192n12
Leninism, 155, 198n3 Tolson and, 44–5, 47–8, 57
Lenox Avenue, Harlem, 190n9 Lincoln University Herald
Leonard, Keith D., 12, 42, 190n8 (newspaper), 48
Leontyne (“CULTURAL Lincoln University Poets (Cuney,
EXCHANGE”), 121 Hughes and Wright), 57
Léopold (King of Belgium), 40, 124, Lindsay, Vachel, 13, 15, 17, 88, 112
196n3 lineage, 88, 149, 151, 154, 171, 184
LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, The liner notes device
(Harris), 152, 154, 176, 178, 181, see also notes device
186 “LINER NOTES” (Hughes), 121, 129
Lewis, “Old” George, 152 liner notes technique, 122, 126, 129–30,
Lewis, Reginald, 162 132, 144
Liberia, 56, 60, 62, 85, 192n12, listing technique, 15, 23–4, 26, 101
193n14, 193n16 literacy, 98–9
Poet Laureate of, 46–50 Little Eva Winn (“Diamond
Tolson and, 35, 37–41, 43–4, 51, 54 Canady”), 13
see also Libretto Little Review, The (journal), 17–18
Liberian Centennial Commission, Little Rock, Arkansas, 196n7
46–8, 50 Livingstone, Dr. David, 192n4
226 ● Index
Locke, Alain, 4, 8–9, 55 Maynor, Dorothy, 101

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 121–2, McCall, Dan, 38, 41
196n2 McCarthy, Joseph, 6, 120, 122
Long Island, New York, 138 McGraw-Hill (publishers), 137, 197n9
Lopez, Ian F. Haney, 109 McGreevey, James, 198n6
Lorca, Frederico Garcia Lorca, 114, McKay, Claude, 4, 100
179, 183–4 McLean, Jackie, 157–8
Los Angeles, California, 197n11 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 148
Louis, Joe, 25 “Measure of Memory (The Navigator)”
Love Supreme, A (Coltrane), 151 (Baraka), 186
Lowe, Ramona, 23 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 32
Lowell, Amy, 10, 16–17, 191n12 memory, 37, 103, 195n3
Lowell, Robert, 189n4 Memphis, Tennessee, 107–8, 196n12
Lucan, 170 Menelaos, King of Sparta, 95
Lycée Louis Le Grand, 127 Mexico, 114
lynching, 104 Michelson, Albert, 25
“Lyrical Ballads” (Wordsworth), 55 middle-class, 77–8
lyric poetry, 6, 15, 46, 56, 189n2 Middle Generation, 6
Hughes and, 91, 97, 111–12, 149 Middle Passage, 35, 39, 43, 60, 154,
159
MacKail, J. W., 9 Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo
Mackey, Nathaniel, 186 (Feelings), 161–2
Madhubuti, Haki, 180 Midwest Journal (journal), 11, 57
Madrid, Spain, 67 Mills, Florence, 101
Make It New (Pound), 17 Miner, Virginia Scott, 72, 88
Malan, Daniel Francois, 124 Mingus, Charles, 115, 141
Malcolm X, 88, 179, 198n3 minstrelsy, 106
Mali, 173–4 Mississippi, 69–70, 130, 196n5
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 157 Mississippi River, 112
Mandinka people, 173–4 Mister Starks (Harlem Gallery), 72–3
Maninka people, 174, 177 Mistral, Gabriel, 114
Man of Love, The (King), 141 “Mi” (Tolson), 43
Maoism, 155 Modernism, 189n1–n2, 189n4, 190n7
Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Africa and, 127
Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of alternative aesthetics of, 114
the Canon (Bérubé), 2, 50 America and, 17
Marsh, Alec, 63 Baraka and, 153, 155, 177–9, 183–4,
Marx, Karl, 123, 168 188
Marxism, 15, 155, 160, 168, 182, 198n3 blacks and, 81
masculinity, 22, 25, 28–9, 189n1 canonization and, 45
emascualtion and, 110 Eliot and, 20
masks, 100–101 endnotes and, 44
Masters, Edgar Lee, 1, 9, 12–13, Harlem Gallery and, 1–3, 10, 28–9,
15–18, 68, 112 66, 68, 71–3, 75–6, 84, 88
Maximus Poems, The (Olson), 181, 186–7 high style of, 7–8, 17, 45, 80, 93, 179
Index ● 227
Hughes and, 92, 95, 105–6, 112, Murray, David, 152

130, 132 music, 153–4, 156, 169, 197n1
Irish and, 185 spiritual connection to, 168
Libretto and, 37–8, 50, 56–7, 59, 62–3 see also jazz
methods of, 19
notes and, 129 Nance, Ray, 13
prefaces and, 55 Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Proletarianism and, 7 Douglass, An American Slave,
serial and, 25 Written by Himself (Douglass), 98
Tolson and, 5, 10, 16, 18, 28, 32 Nashville, 56
whites and, 3, 40, 54, 62 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 134–5
see also Afro-Modernism Nation, The (magazine), 55
Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance National Association for the
(Baker), 3 Advancement of Colored People
Moncur, Grachan, III, 152, 157–8 (NAACP), 35, 65, 69, 107, 123
money, 63 Legal Defense Fund of, 108
Monk, Thelonius, 154, 168 National Guard, 142, 196n7
Monroe, Harriet, 5, 13, 184 nationalism, 154–5
Monrovia, 39 National Poetry Prize, 47
Monson, Ingrid, 114–15 National Urban League, 35
Montage of a Dream Deferred (Hughes), nationhood, 25, 92–3, 110, 131
91, 110–14, 118, 129–30, 132, 143 identity and, 103
re-bop and, 115–17 Native Americans, 109, 196n2
Montague, Nathaniel, 141, 197n11 Native Son (journal), 99
Moors, 96, 99, 174 Native Son (Wright), 31
Mootry, Maria K., 191n16, 192n5 naturalization statute, 109
Morgan, Joyce, 157 Nazism, 32–3
Morrisson, Mark, 17–18 Négritude Movement, 126–7
Morton, “Jelly Roll,” 66, 152, 175 “Negro Artist and the Racial
Moscow, USSR, 130 Mountain, The” (Hughes), 91
Moten, Fred, 156, 160, 163, 187 Negro Art Movement, 145
Motley, Willard, 13 Negro Digest (magazine), 84
“Motto” (Hughes), 91 Negroes, see African Americans
“Mountain Climber, The” (Tolson), 19 “Negro Mother, The” (Hughes), 144–5
Mount Sinai, 78 Negro Mother and Other Dramatic
mourning, 195n1 Recitations, The (Hughes), 143, 147
Mr. Auld (Narrative of the Life of “Negro Poets Issue” (Voices), 11
Frederick Douglass), 98 Negro quarter motif, 132, 136
Mr. Guy Delaporte III (Harlem “Negro Scholar, The” (Tolson), 11
Gallery), 78–9 “Negro Speaks of Rivers, The”
mulitvocal experimentation, 19 (Hughes), 6, 91, 112
multimedia, 198n5 Negro World (newspaper), 58
Murat, Joachim, 67 Nelson, Cary, 6, 180, 189n4, 194n5
Murphy, Carl, 54 Nelson, Raymond, 2, 3, 68, 76, 78, 82
Murray, Albert, 187 “Neon Signs” (Hughes), 116
228 ● Index
Nestor (Iliad), 82 Northerners, 142

New Africa (Moncur), 157 North Star, The (newspaper), 48
New American Poetry, The, 1945–1960 Norton Anthology of African American
(Allen), 179, 182, 187 Literature, 91
Newcomb, John Timberman, 5 nostos (homecoming), 170
New Critics, 7 notes device, 44–6, 53–5, 60, 129,
New Jersey, 183, 198n6 192n10
Poet Laureate of, 154 see also liner notes device
New Left, 155 nothingness, 86, 110–11, 194n24
New Mexico, 49 novels, 194n6
New Negro, The, 4, 7, 30–2, 42, 112 Nubia, 95
New Negro Renaissance, 8, 13, 42 Nuremberg Trials, 50
Newport Jazz Festival, 141–2, 197n13 nyanyer (musical instrument), 172–3
New Red Negro, The: The Literary Left
and African American Poetry, objective correlative, 72
1930–1946 (Smethurst), 7, 143, Occum, Samson, 105
190n8 octoroons, 69
New York Amsterdam News odes, 56
(newspaper), 51 “ODE TO DINAH” (Hughes), 121,
New York City, 4, 9–10, 16, 70, 184 124, 138
New York Public Library, 103, 142 Odysseus (Odyssey), 164, 186
New York Times Book Review, 23, 56 Odyssey (Homer), 95, 169, 172
New York Times (newspaper), 54, 137 “Of Men and Cities” (Tolson), 18,
Niagara Falls, 124 21, 31
Niagara Movement, 124 Ogoun (Yoruban God), 125
Niamey, Niger, 176 O’Hara, Frank, 183
“Niam N’Goura, or raison d’ être” Olson, Charles, 179, 181, 183, 186–7
(Diop), 127 One Step Beyond (Moncur), 157
Nielsen, Aldon, 1–3, 17, 190n4, 190n7, One-Way Ticket (Hughes), 115
199n6 Opportunity (journal), 99, 114, 146
Tolson and, 42–3, 45, 51, 60, 62, 72 oral traditions, 34, 161, 173, 175–7,
Nietszche, Friedrich, 44 180, 192n5
Nigeria, 48, 135, 158, 193n15 bardic traditions and, 60
“Night in Tunisia, A” (Gillespie), 113 forms of poetry and, 13, 56, 74,
“Nightmare Boogie” (Hughes), 117 76, 94
Nile River, 112 history and, 59
“19th Century Moment—Y’s Up (27)” oratory and, 11
(Baraka), 153 see also griots, vernacular
Nkrumah, Kwame, 47, 128, 134–5 “Over There” (Hughes), 144
Nobel Prize, 8, 55 overwriting, 103
“Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen” “O Vocables of Love” (Riding
(spiritual), 152, 162 Jackson), 105
Norman, Jessye, 142
North, Michael, 7, 106 paganism, 39
North Carolina, 99 Paine, Thomas, 25
Index ● 229
Palmer, Robert, 176 Playboy of the Western World, The

Pan-African Airways, 39 (Synge), 185
“Pan-African Brotherhood of Langston Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, 27
Hughes and Nnamdi Azikiwe, “Poem” (Hughes), 135
The” (Obiwu), 196n8 “Poet, The” (Tolson), 18–20
Pan-Africanism, 97, 120, 126, 131, Poetics (Aristotle), 82
135, 154 Poet Laureate of Liberia, 46–50, 58
see also diaspora Poet Laureate of New Jersey, 154, 198n6
Panathenia festival, 172 Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The
Paradise Lost (Milton), 170 Jazz Aesthetic (Harris), 182
Pardo-Sanchez Esther, 195n8 Poetry (journal), 13, 42, 53–5, 113, 184
Paris, France, 126–8, 192n2 Imagism and, 16–17
Parker, Charlie, 126, 152, 166, 183 Modernism and, 5, 28, 63
Parks, Gordon, 13 “Poetry Today” (Taylor), 61
Parsifal (Parzival), 39–40 Poitier, Sidney, 130–1
Parzival (von Eschenbach), 39 politics, 155, 170
passing, 69 polyphony, 10
“Pastels” (Tolson), 11 Pope, Alexander, 71
“Paterson” (Williams), 56, 62–3, 181, Popular Front, 7, 15
187 populism, 38, 66, 72, 76, 114, 147–8,
patriarchy, 106 155
Patroclus (Iliad), 164 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
Patterson, John, 133, 196n7 (Thomas), 185
Pavlić, Edward M., 189n1 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pearl Harbor, attack on, 27–8, 33 (Joyce), 185
Penelope (Odyssey), 164 portraiture, 9–10
People, Yes, The (Sandburg), 15 Poseidon, 95
Perelman, Bob, 50 post-bop, 137
performance, 130–3, 155–6, 164, 172, see also jazz
175, 187, 198n5 “Pot Belly Papa” (Harlem Gallery), 73
“CULTURAL EXCHANGE” and, Pound, Ezra, 1, 3, 12, 55, 65–6, 88,
134–7 190n4
see also jazz, oral traditions Baraka and, 154–5, 178–81, 183, 185
Pharsalia (Lucan), 170 Bollingen Prize and, 50
Philadelphia Community College, 179 Hughes and, 147
Philosophy of History, The (Hegel), 195n9 Modernism and, 16–18, 38, 45
“Phi” (Tolson), 74 poverty, 124–5
Phoenicia, 95 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 101
Phylon (journal), 21–2, 55, 72, 85, 99, power, 16, 80, 100, 103, 110, 170
193n20 praise, 173–4
Picasso, Pablo, 77 prefaces, 51–3, 190n4
pilgrims, 27, 31, 43, 60 Wordsworth and, 55
Pisan Cantos, The (Pound), 50 “Preface” (Whitman), 21
Pittsburgh Courier (newspaper), 123 “PRE-HERE/ISTIC Sequence” (Baraka),
Plato, 66 156–60
230 ● Index
“Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History theorizing of, 69

Poem” (Hughes), 91–2, 96, 101, see also African Americans
106–8, 110–11, 131, 195n3 Race Music: Black Cultures from Be-Bop
death and, 104–5 to Hip Hop (Ramsey), 113
democracy and, 102–3 radicalism, 147
shadow and, 93–4, 99 ragtime music, 178
Premier des Noirs, Le (airplane), 39 railroad trope, 159
Présence Africaine (journal), 126–7 Rainey, Lawrence, 16
Price, Leontyne, 130–1 Rainey, Ma, 198n5
“Primer for Today, A” (Tolson), 21 Raleigh, Walter, 44
primitveness, 106 Ramazani, Jahan, 60, 194n23
private and public, 74, 76, 104 Rampersad, Arnold, 91, 95, 112,
process artists, 154, 156 115–16, 137, 146, 197n13
projective verse, 179 Ramsey, Guthrie, 113
proletarianism, 5, 15–16, 38 Randall, Dudley, 192n9
Modernism and, 7 Rankin, John, 123, 191n20
propaganda, 74 Rankine, Claudia, 189n2
prose, 12, 40, 53, 81, 174–5, 194n6 R&B (Rhythm and Blues), 114
Hughes and, 129–30, 144 Reagan, Ronald, 193n15
polyphony and, 10 re-bop, 115–17
rhythm and, 18, 113 see also jazz
Whitman and, 52 “Recent Verse” (Ciardi), 55
Proust, Marcel, 66 Reconstruction, 153
Provençal ballads, 178 Red Cross, 33, 191n20
proverbs, 15, 21, 43 Redding, J. Saunders, 53–4, 57, 192n10
Tolson and, 57, 67, 79, 82, 84 Reds, 128
Psalms (Bible), 192n7 Reed, Brian M., 15
psychoanalysis, 104 Regents of the Gallery (Harlem
public and private, 74, 76, 104 Gallery), 78–9
purity, 33, 193n22 Rendezvous with America (Tolson),
Pushkin, Aleksandr, 97–8 2, 27–8, 30–4, 190n7, 191n18,
192n5, 193n20
Quint, David, 169–70 allusion and, 19
high modernism and, 7–8
Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 195n1 identity and, 18, 29
race, 16, 33, 52, 62, 68–9 Libretto and, 25, 47, 61
Baraka and, 168 praise for, 23
constructions of, 12, 66 proverbs and, 67
essentialism and, 80, 128 slavery and, 30
Hughes and, 93, 105, 131 Rensselaer, C. Van, 48
identity and, 96 repetition, 11, 27, 137, 168, 175, 195n1
metaphors for, 83 Repression and Recovery (Nelson), 180
racism and, 7, 25, 31, 111, 123, 184 “Re” (Tolson), 42–3
stereotyping and, 122 “Retrospect” (Pound), 17
Index ● 231
“Return of the Native” (Baraka), 188 Sanders, Pharoah, 174

revenge plots, 164–7 Sankoré, University of, 43
reviewers, 50–4 Sanskrit, 164–5
Tolson and, 84–9 Santa Claus, 122, 128
“Review of Libretto for the Republic of Sarton, May, 55
Liberia” (Redding), 192n10 Saturday Review (magazine), 85
revolution, 101, 144 Saul, Scott, 115, 141–2
rhapsodes, 172 Savanna region, 176
Rhapsody in Black and White (Harlem Scandinavia, 196n2
Gallery), 73 Scanlon, Larry, 132, 137
Richmond, Virginia, 125 scat, 169
“RIDE, RED, RIDE” (Hughes), 121, Schomburg, Arturo Alfonso, 100, 103
122 Schomburg Center for Research in
Riding, Laura, 105 Black Culture, 102–3, 142
rights, 98 school desegragation, 107–8
Rights of Man, The (Paine), 25 Scottsboro Defense Fund, 147
Roach, Max, 141 Scottsboro Limited
Robeson, Paul, 101 Four Poems and a Play in Verse
Robinson, Earl, 22 (Hughes and Taylor), 147
Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 13 Scylla and Charybdis, 42, 80, 190n4
rockabilly, 128 Sea Islands (South Carolina), 55
rock and roll music, 114, 128 “Second of May, The” (Goya), 67
Rockefeller Fellowship, 4 second-sight, 100–101
Rodman, Selden, 56–7 segregation, 35, 120–4, 131–3, 136–7,
Romance epics, 164 142, 196n7, 196n12
Romans, 76 schools and, 107–8
Romantics, 17, 43 “Selah” passages (Tolson), 54, 63, 192n7
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 34 Select Epigrams from the Greek
Rosenthal, M. L., 178–9 Anthology (MacKail), 9
Rosenwald, Julius, 25 self-portraiture, 9
Rosenwald Foundation, 11, 146 Senegal, 96, 173–4, 176
Roumaine, Jacques, 159 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 126–7
Roylance, Patricia Jane, 196n2 “separate but equal,” 107
Rubicon, 19, 77 sermons, 148
Rukeyser, Muriel, 197n14 Seventh Congress of the Communist
Russia, 99 International (1935), 15
Rutgers University, 185 “SHADES OF PIGMEAT” (Hughes),
121, 124
Sahel, the, 176 shadow, 93–5, 99, 102, 106
Salaam, Kalamu ya, 151, 155–6 Shakespeare, William, 8, 21–2
Salmagundi (journal), 178 Shapiro, Harvey, 55
Sandburg, Carl, 1, 12–13, 15–18, Shapiro, Karl, 3, 50–2, 70–1, 85–9,
112, 115 190n4
Sanders, Mark A., 7–8, 42 Sharon, Ariel, 198n6
232 ● Index
Shelby County Schools, 196n12 Some Imagist Poets (Lowell), 16

“Shipwright, The” (Tolson), 31 Some Other Stuff (Moncur), 157
“SHOW FARE, PLEASE” (Hughes), Songai (African kingdom), 43, 174
121, 129 “Song For Myself, A” (Tolson), 20–1, 23
Shulman, Robert, 144 “Song of Hiawatha, The” (Longfellow),
Sidonians, 95 121–2, 196n2
Sidran, Ben, 158 Soninké, 174
Sierra Leone, 55, 193n16 sonnets, 21–3, 191n16, 192n5
signifying, 137 “Sonnets” (Tolson), 18, 21–2
silence, 98, 105–6 sorrow songs, 30, 98, 159–60
“Silhouettes” (Tolson), 11 Soul Look Back in Wonder (Feelings), 161
Silver, Horace, 115 Soul’s Errand, The (Raleigh), 44
Simple (Hughes character), 134 South, the (United States), 33, 49, 54,
sit-ins, 128 62, 146
Sitwell, Edith, 88 Hughes and, 120, 122, 124, 128,
Sixth Mt. Zion Baptist Church 132–4, 142
(Richmond, Virginia), 125 South Africa, 48, 120, 124
Slave Coast, 40 South Carolina, 55, 107, 113
slavery, 30, 39–40, 43, 49, 60–1, 68 Southern Conference Education Fund
Baraka and, 152–4, 158–61, 163–4, (SCEF), 122
167–8 Southern Review (journal), 152
effects of, 97, 166 Southern Road (Brown), 23
emancipation and, 48 Southern Tenant Farmers Union, 15
Hughes and, 93, 103, 109, 124, “Space Spy” (Moncur), 157
133, 135 Spahr, Juliana, 189n2
Liberia and, 50 Spain, 96, 114, 184
narratives of, 98 Spanish Civil War, 114
Smethurst, James, 7, 123, 135, 142, Specters of Marx (Derrida), 100
146–7 Spector, Robert Donald, 85–6
Smith, Bessie, 71, 183 spiral of history, 153, 160, 168, 177
Smith, Hale, 142 spirituals, 30, 72, 97–8, 148
Smith, Henry Justin, 13 Baraka and, 162, 168–9, 178, 184
Smith, Hughie Lee, 13 Spoon River Anthology (Masters),
Smith, Pine Top, 152 9–10, 13
Smith, Vincent, 160, 162 Spring and All (Williams), 40
Social Credit, 63 St. Elizabeths Hospital, 147
social hierarchy, 83 St. John, 81
socialism, 144 Stanley, Henry Morgan, 40, 192n4
social poetry, 147–9 statelessness, 109–10
Sollors, Werner, 155 status, 121
“Sol” (Tolson), 43 Stein, Gertrude, 45, 62, 65, 86, 194n24
“Somebody Blew Off Baraka” (Harris Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 45
and Nielsen), 199n6 stereotypes, 122
“Somebody Blew Up America” Stevens, Wallace, 195n10
(Baraka), 198n6 Stony Brook, New York, 152
Index ● 233
Story of the Negro, The (Bontemps), 95 Three Musketeers, The (Dumas), 97

“Stray Document” (Pound), 17 Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise
Struggle, The (Baldwin), 141 (Stevens), 195n10
style, 194n6 Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietszche), 44
Sudan, 95 Tiajuana, Mexico, 9
Sugar Hill, Harlem, 78 Till, Emmet, 126, 196n5
sugar trade, 135 Tillman, Nathaniel, 22
Sumner, Charles, 108 Timbuktu, Mali, 43, 45
SUNY Stony Brook, 152 “Ti” (Tolson), 42, 44, 51, 54, 63
Surrealism, 38, 182 “To Elsie” (Williams), 40
Suso, Foday Musa, 171–2, 174, 176–7 Tolson, Melvin B., 1, 4, 15, 19, 23–5,
Swahili, 178 33, 46
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” allusion and, 42
(spiritual), 98 Baraka and, 151, 154, 169, 177, 179,
swing music, 114, 169 181, 184, 186–7
Synge, J. M., 185–6 critical neglect of, 45
syntactical parallelism, 15 critical responses to, 59–63
early work of, 16
Taine, Hippolyte, 83 Fabio on, 58–9, 61, 70–1, 84
Talmadge, Eugene, 134 formalism and, 57
“Tapestries of Time” (Tolson), 18, 33 free verse and, 10, 12–13, 16–18, 20
taste, 70 Harlem Gallery and, 8–11, 60, 65,
Tate, Allen, 3, 50–3, 62–3, 89, 190n4 68, 71–3, 76, 79–80, 82–3
preface by, 54–8 Harlem Gallery intended sequence
Tax, Ervin, 51 and, 190n2
Taylor, Charles G., 50, 193n15–n17 Harlem Renaissance and, 3–7
Taylor, John, 61 Hughes and, 113, 123, 129
Taylor, Prentiss, 144–7 Liberian laureate and, 46–50
Teapot Dome scandal, 27 Libretto for the Republic of Liberia
tempo, 30 and, 38, 40–1, 45, 50, 53–6, 58
tenant farmers, 15 Lincoln University and, 47
Tendencies in Modern American Poetry Master’s degree of, 4, 8
(Lowell), 191n12 “Negro Poets Issue” and, 11
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 65 obituary for, 51
Terence, 99 prefaces for, 50–4
“‘There Was Something I Wanted to Twayne edition and, 44
Tell You’ (33)” (Baraka), 153 Whitman and, 42–3
Third World, 108, 135, 155 Tolson, Melvin B., Jr., 38, 45, 192n12
Third World Press, 152–3, 171 Tolson, Wiley Wilson, 87
Thirteenth Amendment, 108 Toomer, Jean, 8, 34, 46
Thomas, Dylan, 185 Torre, Vincent, 140
Thomas, Lorenzo, 33, 59–60, 96, Toscanini, Arturo, 26
178, 184 totalitarianism, 184
Thompson, Dolphin G., 85, 193n20 Tourè, Ahmed Sèkou, 128, 134–5
Thorton, Willie Mae, 71 Toussaint L’Ouverture, 101
234 ● Index
“Traitor to France, The” (Tolson), 22 epic and, 25–6, 120

transformation, theory of, 184 “Great American poem” of, 85
transnationality, 60, 114, 120, 134–5, Harlem Gallery and, 80, 89
194n23 history of, 103
Baraka and, 155, 170, 178 Hughes and, 98, 100–101, 104, 108,
“TREY” (Baraka), 156–8 110, 124, 126
trochaic tetrameter, 121 identity and, 24, 34
Trojans, 170 idiom of, 183
Truman, Harry S, 123 imperialism and, 41
Truth, Sojourner, 195n5 Jim Crow and, 111
Tubman, William V. S., 39 literature and, 4
Turner, Daniel C., 116 modernism and, 8, 17
Turner, Lorenzo D., 55 nationhood and, 92–3
Turning South Again (Baker), 92 poetry and, 18
Tuskegee Institute, 101 pre-national period of, 105
Twayne edition (Libretto for the race theory and, 69
Republic of Liberia), 44, 51, 53 racism and, 7
12-bar blues, 120, 137, 166 segregation and, 35
see also blues Tolson and, 21, 30, 38, 40, 48,
typography, 140, 180 60–1, 72
white supremacists and, 136
Ulysses (Joyce), 185 United States Air Force, 184
Ulysses (Tennyson), 65 United States Congress, 109, 122–3
Unanism, 10 United States Constitution, 108
Uncle Remus stories, 178 United States Department of Housing
Uncle Tom (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), 74, 83 and Urban Development, 129
Un Coup de Dés (A Throw of the Dice) United States Department of Justice,
(Mallarmé), 157 108
Underground Railroad, 159 United States Department of State, 108
underworld, 77, 159 United States Senate, 123
United Nations, 50, 110 United States Senate Committee on
human rights and, 109 Government Operations, 6
United Nations, Limited, The (train), 39 United States Senate Internal Security
United Negro Improvement Subcommittee, 122–3
Association, 48 United States Supreme Court, 102,
United States, 5, 9, 15, 17, 189n1, 108–9
189n4, 193n15 Unity (journal), 152
ASK YOUR MAMA and, 144–5, 147 Université de Sorbonne, 126
Baraka and, 178–81, 183–4, 188 University of Chicago, 55
civil rights in, 140 University of Missouri Press, 11
“CULTURAL EXCHANGE” and, University of North Carolina, 148
131, 135 University Press of Virginia, 59, 76
cultural importation and, 49 “Upsilon” (Tolson), 80–2
diaspora and, 42, 106, 155 utopianism, 38
Index ● 235
Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, 27 Westover, Jeff, 97, 195n3

Vanity Fair (magazine), 143 “What about Literature? W-15”
Van Vechten, Carl, 144, 146 (Baraka), 152, 165
Vaterrecht (patriarchal right), 106 Wheatley, Phyllis, 51, 71, 105, 180
veil metaphor, 100–101 “When the Saints Go Marching In”
verbal nouns, 20, 25, 41, 191n15 (spiritual), 122, 136
vernacular, 153, 175 White By Law (Haney), 109
blues and, 141 White House, 85
Hughes and, 146, 148 whiteness, 26, 69–70, 84, 168, 178
Tolson and, 10, 13, 15–16, 60, 71, 80–2 parody of, 58
see also oral traditions whites, 33, 40, 101, 105–6, 141–2,
versification, 11 198n3
Vers Libre Prize, 17 avant-garde and, 182–3
vertical audience, 66 Baraka and, 180, 184
Victorians, 17, 42–3 curiousity of, 126
Virgil, 88, 170 Du Bois on, 100
Virginia, 49, 102, 107, 125 flight of, 107
Virgin Mary, 144 intellectual hegemony of, 45
visual design, 26, 139–40 modernism and, 54, 62
Voices (journal), 11 Modernists and, 3, 4
Vollentine Elementary School, 107 non-white binary and, 109
“voluntary Negroes” (expression), 69 riot by, 141
von Eschenbach, Wolfram, 39 slavery and, 49
voodoo, 125 social norms and, 83
voting rights, 92 supremacist ideas and, 59–60, 135
supremacy and, 136
“Wade in the Water” (sorrow song), 159 swing music and, 114
“Wait” (Hughes), 143 Whitman, Walt, 12, 16–18, 88, 194n23
Walker, Margaret, 13, 165 Africa and, 42–3
Walker, Rudy, 157 anaphora and, 101
Wall Street, New York, 27 Baraka and, 176–7
Washington, Booker T., 124 Libretto and, 18, 42–3, 56
Washington, D. C., 39, 49, 85, 107 prose and, 52
Washington Post (newspaper), 47 Tolson and, 20–1, 23, 28, 32, 66
Washington Tribune (newspaper), 2 “Who Said: ‘This Is a White Man’s
Waste Land, The (Eliot), 38, 53, 55–7, Country’?” (Tolson), 34
62, 132, 192n9 “Who Speaks Negro?” (Fabio), 70,
Watts uprising, 197n11 190n4
Weary Blues, The (Hughes), 135, 148 “Why Don’t You Fight? #37 (One Mo’
Weaver, Robert, 128 Time)” (Baraka), 168
West Africa, 35, 39–40, 49, 154–5, Wiley College, 4, 65
171, 173–5 Wilkins, Rev. R., 152
Western civilization, 83, 86, 94–5, 183 Williams, William Carlos, 40, 62, 179,
philosophy and, 127 181, 183, 186–7
236 ● Index
Willis, Edwin, 123 Wordsworth, William, 54

Winter Wheat Press, 147 working-class, 128
“Wise 1” (Baraka), 156, 160, 162, 166 World Trade Center, 198n6, 199n6
“Wise 2” (Baraka), 158, 164, 166 World War II, 27, 32, 34–5, 47, 50,
“Wise 3” (Baraka), 157–8 179, 191n16
“Wise 4” (Baraka), 158, 167 Wright, Bruce, 57
“Wise 6” (Baraka), 157 Wright, Richard, 13
“Wise 7” (Baraka), 167 writing, 99
“Wise 18” (Baraka), 161 overwriting and, 103
“Wise One, The” (Coltrane), 169 rights and, 98
Wise Why’s Y’s: The Griot’s Song (Djeli Ya) see also Afro-Modernism, epic,
(Baraka), 151–5, 159–63, 173, 175, Modernism
182–5, 188
Blues People and, 71, 114, 167–9 Xerxes, 170
epic and, 164–6, 169–72, 186–7
Europe and, 178–81 Yerby, Frank, 13
Hughes and, 149 Young, Gerald, 107
Suso and, 171–2, 174, 176–7 “Young Prostitute” (Hughes), 12, 113
“TREY” and, 156–8 youth culture, 128
“Wise Why’s Y’s” (Baraka), 181, 186, “Y The Link Will Not Always Be
197n1, 198n5 ‘Missing’ #40” (Baraka), 169
Wolof people, 174 Yugen (journal), 179
women, 34, 189n2 “YYYYYYY (18)” (Baraka), 161
Wood, John, 123
“Woodcuts for Americana” (Tolson), “Zeta” (Tolson), 72, 77
18–19 Zeus, 95
Woodson, Carter G., 100 Zulu Club (Harlem), 67, 73, 80
Woodson, Jon, 44 Zulus, 79

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The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka

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Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

THE AFRO-MODERNIST EPIC

Kathy Lou Schultz

Language and the Renewal of Society in Walt Whitman,

Kathy Lou Schultz

Chapter 1 Modern, Modernist, Afro-Modernist: Melvin B.

We are all, as moderns, travelers through

Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson. (Bob indicates in a conference paper he

of Pennsylvania for professional assistance and good cheer. Thank you to

Schultz, Kathy Lou. Portions of chapters 2 and 4 appeared in a different

influenced by these global contexts, historically, politically, and artistically.

composition linked [Gillespie’s] sonic experiment to an African past, to his

The fact that Afro-Modernism extends throughout the twentieth cen-

womanish girl meets mannish boy

Mullen’s work contains African American speech markers on a verbal play-

Modern, Modernist, Afro-Modernist:

helped to create a new generation of Tolson readers, “Harlem Gallery” and

he reinforces a “whites only” modernism: Tolson, as a black man, can only

Although he was one of the first African Americans to conduct a study of

Long before contemporary literary critics began to reconsider modern-

The magnitude of Poetry ’s importance to modernism has never been

Poetry magazine was an especially important touchstone for Tolson with

A Gallery of Harlem Portraits

self-expression of the Negro to-day a new figure on the national canvas”

such worthless experiments as polyphonic prose, an innovation as absurd

When a man has lost his taste fer you,

If an example of the original Blues-ballad is placed in juxtaposition with

Tolson maintains his interest in “concentrated repetition” as a device for

Her dark brown face

The resemblance to Ezra Pound’s imagistic gesture from “In a Station of

in the Chiaroscuro section, instead mirror those of Spoon River Anthology in

And free-loving women from Nome to Harlem

I plays any game

disdain when [he] excitedly discovered Sandburg’s ‘Chicago’” (Farnsworth

the term “Chicago Renaissance,” as it is usually used, applies more

Other sources such as the Encyclopedia of the Chicago Literary Renaissance

In 1979, Chicago Renaissance artist Eldzier Cortor recalled that among

Notably, among the many influences on Harlem Renaissance writers

1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.

Lawrence Rainey stresses Pound’s influence on this piece, maintaining that

Rendezvous with America

A freebooter of lands and seas,

He stands before the bar of pride,

What whim of flesh, what quirk of soul,

Tolson’s range of reference is beginning to widen in this collection. Phrases

words, often employing words commonly used as nouns as verbs.15 Tolson’s

“A Song for Myself”

Thus the poet is most successful if he continues to draw inspiration from

The great biologist said: “The semen of change

Out of dead-ends of Poverty,

“Rendezvous with America,” Title Poem

Messiahs from the Sodoms and Gomorrahs of the Old World,

Scholars from Oxford and Leyden,

There were the men of iron lips

Into the arteries of the Republic poured

The flotsams of isms,

I see America in Thomas Paine,

Tolson achieves emphasis throughout the section again utilizing ana-

Brumidi, Caruso, and Toscanini. He ends the section with a description

A blind man said,

America can worship gods of brass

And the termites of anti-Semitism busy themselves

The inevitable outcome is war and economic degradation.