Quote of the Day (Langston Hughes, on the ‘Little Sleep Song’ of April Rain)

“The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.”—African-American poet, librettist, translator, and fiction writer Langston Hughes (1901-1967), “April Rain Song,” originally published in 1921, reprinted in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (1994)
 
I had a somewhat different reaction to overnight rain than Langston Hughes did: I awoke to hear its soft patter outside my window this morning, rather than falling asleep to it.
 
But I recalled that I had just heard yesterday about this poem. It’s a lovely set of verses (only five more lines than you see here) and easy to find on the Internet. I urge anyone who’s never encountered it to look it up.

Quote of the Day (Lorraine Hansberry, on Stillness and Thinking)

“Don’t get up. Just sit a while and think. Never be afraid to sit a while and think.”— African-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), A Raisin in the Sun (1959)

Excellent advice, to which I would add just one corollary: Never be afraid to sit a while, think—and write.

Quote of the Day (Richard Wright, on ‘Lack of Self-Realization’)

“Remember that men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread! And they can murder for it, too! Did we not build a nation, did we not wage war and conquer in the name of a dream to realize our personalities and to make those realized personalities secure!”—African-American novelist Richard Wright (1908-1960), Native Son (1940)

Flashback, May 1925: Future Novelist Richard Wright in Clash Over Graduation

Being named valedictorian should have been cause for celebration for 17-year-old Richard Wright in May 1925. Instead, the insistence of his principal at Smith Robertson Junior High School in Jackson, Miss., that the youth put aside his own speech for one prepared by the school administrator triggered a threat to withdraw his diploma.

“Listen, boy, you’re going to speak to both white and colored people that night,” he was told. “What can you think of saying to them? You have no experience.”

But, in an early sign of the future novelist’s determination, Wright refused to yield.

The pressure campaign began a career in which the future African-American novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist found himself in lonely opposition to white racists, religious zealots, union busters, communists, American publishers, and the U.S. State Department for what he regarded as their infringement on his freedom of thought.

What made this situation—recounted in Wright’s searing 1945 bestselling memoir, Black Boy—so painful was that the principal was a fellow African-American. It wouldn’t be the last time that he would be disappointed in members of his own race—nor the last time that he would irritate them with his independence.

Just to survive to this point in his life was a miracle. The grandchild of slaves, he was also the son of an illiterate sharecropper who deserted the family when Richard was five. The following year, Richard could commonly be found drunk, in taverns.

A stroke left his mother virtually crippled and Richard in the case of his grandmother, a strict Seventh-Day Adventist who forbade him reading anything that didn’t accord with the gospels. And, still as a preteen, he accidentally set fire to and destroying her home.

In 1921, Wright had started fifth grade in another school two years behind his age group. Spurred by a hunger for food and learning, he prevailed upon his grandmother to let him take jobs after school, which allowed him to purchase books for classes as well as food. Until he could save enough money for a bicycle, he had to walk several miles a day to and from school.

Everywhere he looked, Wright could find little to savor in a Deep South deformed by Jim Crow legislation, leaving whites cruel or indifferent and blacks despairing of a better life in the face of broken families, illiteracy, poverty, ill health, and underpinning it all, disenfranchisement. He was coming, at a young age, what his fiction would continually address: “What quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity?”

The one refuge he could find in all of this was reading, an activity that fed his dream of writing novels in the North:

“Where had I got this notion of doing something in the future, of going away from home and accomplishing something that would be recognized by others? I had, of course, read my Horatio Alger stories, my pulp stories, and I knew my Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford series from cover to cover, though I had sense enough not to hope to get rich; even to my naive imagination that possibility was too remote. I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.”

A short story published with his name (but without payment) in a Jackson black weekly, the Southern Register, heightened his aspirations even as they increased his frustration with a sociopolitical order that hindered his dreams “that the state had said were wrong, that the schools had said were taboo.”

Seen in this light, the principal’s draft of the valedictory address posed a special dilemma for Wright: “I wanted to graduate, but I did not want to make a public speech that was not my own,” he noted.

In quick succession the principal bullied, baited, wheedled, and tempted the young man he called “a young, hot fool,” all to no avail. Attempts by Wright’s brother Leon and friends met with no better success. At last the principal relented, and Wright delivered the speech he had written—one, he admitted, not as simple and clear as the principal’s, but expressing his thoughts.

The teenager blushed, stammered and looked abashed as he addressed the audience. When the ceremony was over, he ignored the outstretched hands of well-wishers and walked home, confirmed in his thinking that, no matter how long it took—and comparatively, that turned out to be a short time—there was fundamentally nothing keeping him in Jackson.

What lay beyond Jackson? Wright didn’t know, but he was determined to find out. That fall he dropped out of Lanier High School and left Jackson, never to live there again. He took jobs in Memphis and Chicago before joining a group of Communist intellectuals in the latter city (an affiliation he would break in short order, angered by their crushing of member dissent).

By the late 1930s, Wright was gaining critical attention, but it was Native Son (1940) that finally announced him as a force in American letters. Five years later, Black Boy reached number one on the bestseller list.

Increasingly frustrated with American limits on his personal freedom, Wright emigrated to France, where he died in 1960. More than six decades after his death, the voice of protest in his mature work rings with all the clarity and urgency he was not yet able to master as an uncertain but ultimately brave teen facing an authority figure.

Quote of the Day (Frederick Douglass, on When Political Parties Are Strong)

“[P]olitical parties, like individual men, are only strong while they are consistent and honest, and… treachery and deception are only the sand on which political fools vainly endeavor to build.”— American abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on How to be Really Despicable)

“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”— African-American novelist-essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), Giovanni’s Room (1956)

The reputations of all too many prominent writers nosedive after their deaths. But time has only succeeded in lifting James Baldwin—born 100 years ago today in Harlem—even higher.

Whatever advances he may have seen in the status of African-Americans in the United States during his lifetime, he received all too many reminders that they remained excluded in so many ways from the full promise of the American Dream.

Thirty-seven years after his death from stomach cancer, he likely would feel just as angry that he still needed to explain his positions to those who lacked his tragic sense of history.

He might feel blank bewilderment over the backlash against Black Lives Matter, then turn out an essay summoning the fire and passion he had brought to his former role as a teen preacher, filled with what Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel called a prophet’s “profound maladjustment to the spirit of society, with its conventional lies, with its concessions to man's weakness.”

The abuse heaped upon Barack Obama during his two Presidential campaigns and terms, one believes, would hardly surprise him. He would certainly have choice things to say about how, after questioning the circumstances of Obama’s birth, Donald Trump invokes the same frantic tropes on personal identity concerning Kamala Harris.

But I believe Baldwin would have been especially scathing on African-American Trump supporters such as Ben Carson, Tim Scott, and Candace Owens. It is one thing to witness a three-time Presidential nominee who has been nothing if not “contemptuous of other people’s pain.” But what does it mean to excuse and collaborate with such a politician?

(Nicholas Boggs’ August 2022 blog post about Baldwin from the New York Public Library’s Website contains a great quote from the novelist’s 1976 children’s book, Little Man, Little Man, with a mother giving advice to her young son that seems more relevant than ever in our age of disinformation: “Don’t believe everything you read. You got to think about what you read. But read everything, son, everything you can get your hands on. It all come in handy one day.”)

Quote of the Day (Ralph Ellison, on the Truth)

“Few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world. Poor Galileo, poor John Jasper; they persecuted one and laughed at the other, but both were witnesses for the truth they professed. Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.”—American novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison (1913-1994), Juneteenth (1999)

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on Trusting Life)

“Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.”—African-American novelist-essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), “White Man’s Guilt,” Ebony, August 1965, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985 (1985)

Quote of the Day (Chester Himes, on ‘An Indomitable Quality Within the Human Spirit’)

“There is an indomitable quality within the human spirit that cannot be destroyed; a face deep within the human personality that is impregnable to all assaults.”—African-American crime novelist Chester Himes (1909-1984), “The Dilemma of the Negro Novelist in the United States” (1948), reprinted in Beyond the Angry Black, edited by John A. Williams (1966)

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on ‘An Invented Past’)

“To accept one's past—one's history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” — African-American novelist-essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), The Fire Next Time (1963)

Quote of the Day (Paul Laurence Dunbar, on African-American Valor in the Civil War)

“Yes, the Blacks enjoy their freedom,
And they won it dearly, too;
For the life blood of their thousands
Did the southern fields bedew.
In the darkness of their bondage,
In the depths of slavery’s night,
Their muskets flashed the dawning,
And they fought their way to light.
 
“They were comrades then and brothers,
Are they more or less to–day?
They were good to stop a bullet
And to front the fearful fray.
They were citizens and soldiers,
When rebellion raised its head;
And the traits that made them worthy,—
Ah! those virtues are not dead.”—African-American poet-novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), “The Colored Soldiers,” in Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896)
 
I wanted to include some verses by Paul Laurence Dunbar, born 150 years ago today in Dayton, Ohio. Even before reading the above lines, I had been interested in the contribution of African-American soldiers in the Civil War.
 
But I think Dunbar—one of the first African-Americans to earn a living from writing—invested his poem “The Colored Soldiers” with even greater depth of feeling because his father Joshua, a Kentucky slave who escaped to Canada before the war, returned to serve with the 55^th Massachusetts Regiment.
 
After Joshua separated from his wife Matilda, Paul was raised by his mother, who encouraged him to pursue writing. From an early age, he displayed his talent, editing while in high school a short-lived paper The Dayton Tattler (printed, incidentally, by his classmate, future aviation pioneer Orville Wright).
 
In certain ways, Dunbar’s career resembles that of Stephen Crane. Both produced an enormous both of prose and poetry, drank heavily and died far too soon of tuberculosis. Both also dealt at one point or another with war and racism.
 
The title of Maya Angelou’s famous memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, derives from a Dunbar poem, “Sympathy.”
 
Five years ago, filmmaker Frederick Lewis created a feature-length documentary on Dunbar’s life, Behind the Mask, taken from the title of one of the writer’s poems.

Quote of the Day (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, on a Slave Mother)

“She is a mother pale with fear,
   Her boy clings to her side,
And in her kirtle vainly tries
   His trembling form to hide.
  
“He is not hers, although she bore
   For him a mother's pains;
He is not hers, although her blood
   Is coursing through his veins!
  
“He is not hers, for cruel hands
   May rudely tear apart
The only wreath of household love
   That binds her breaking heart.”—African-American poet, abolitionist and temperance and women's suffrage activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), “The Slave Mother,” originally published in her Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), anthologized in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume Two: Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals, edited by John Hollander (1993)
 
I am glad to see historians’ growing attention to Reconstruction and the far longer Jim Crow era of reaction to the political and economic gains of African-Americans. It’s important to realize how easily such advances can be reversed.
 
But with the federal holiday of Juneteenth occurring today, I think it’s also important to remember that emancipation—and the horrifying Civil War that made it possible—also ended practices that would never be repeated. One of these was the breakup of slave families by their owners, a dread evoked in the above verses.
 
I had never heard of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper before I began looking for a quote in observation of Juneteenth—she never came up in my college courses on American literature nor American history in the 19^th century—but I think her life and career are worth recalling.
 
Particularly in the antebellum era, this child of free blacks bore witness, through her writing and lectures, to the horrors of slavery—and implicitly refuted whites who perpetuated the myth of innate African-American intellectual inferiority.
 
For a deeper consideration of what Harper meant—for her time and ours—I recommend Eric Gardner’s 2015 post on OUPblog, Ohio University Press’s Website offering “Academic Insights for the Thinking World.”
 
The image accompanying this post, Kentucky painter Thomas Satterwhite Noble's The Modern Medea (1867), was inspired by Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who, after being recaptured in the North through the Fugitive Slave Act, killed her own daughter rather than allow her to be returned to slavery.
 
Garner’s case—an example of the plight faced by African-American women under slavery depicted by Harper—also gave rise, a century later, to Nobel Literature laureate Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), as well as her libretto for the opera Margaret Garner (2005).

Quote of the Day (Lorraine Hansberry, on ‘The Worship of Despair’)

“I am one who considers the worship of Despair a pointless and, I must add, a rather boring pursuit."—African-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), letter of Apr. 4, 1960, to Jaroslav Chuchvalec of Czechoslovakia, included in To be Young, Gifted, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, edited by Robert Nemiroff (1970)

Quote of the Day (Lorraine Hansberry, on ‘The Thing That Makes You Exceptional’)

“Eventually it comes to you: the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.” —African-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (1969)

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on When Americans Must ‘Work Out Our Salvation’ on Civil Rights)

“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.”—African-American novelist and essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on White Police Amid ‘The Revolution Now Occurring in the World’)

“The white policeman, standing on a Harlem street corner, finds himself at the very center of the revolution now occurring in the world. He is not prepared for it -- naturally, nobody is -- and, what is possibly much more to the point, he is exposed, as few white people are, to the anguish of the black people around him. Even if he is gifted with the merest mustard grain of imagination, something must seep in. He cannot avoid observing that some of the children, in spite of their color, remind him of children he has known and loved, perhaps even of his own children. He knows that he certainly does not want his children living this way. He can retreat from his uneasiness in only one direction: into a callousness which very shortly becomes second nature. He becomes more callous, the population becomes more hostile, the situation grows more tense, and the police force is increased. One day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up. Before the dust has settled or the blood congealed, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened. What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men.”—African-American novelist and essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” originally published in Esquire, July 1960, reprinted in Nobody Knows My Name (1960)

Psychologically wounded himself by ongoing racism, James Baldwin described the situation facing America 60 years ago in words that themselves continue to stab with a shock of recognition. It certainly describes the cycle of mutual fear and unrest, the “match in the powder keg,” the blow-up, and the demands ‘to know what happened” that we are now seeing. 

True, so much has changed in American life—and including the relative prospects of African-Americans—in the years since in terms of voting rights and equality of opportunity. But the sense of police as an occupying force in African-American communities remains visceral, as seen this past week in the swelling unrest in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minnesota.

“Occupying force” may take on a whole new level of meaning with President Trump’s recent threats that, if local officials didn’t “dominate the streets,” the federal government would step in. It all has the whiff of martial law.

Quote of the Day (Claude McKay, on Easter)

“Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly

My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,

Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily

Soft-scented in the air for yards around;

Alone, without a hint of guardian leaf!

Just like a fragile bell of silver rime,

It burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief

In the young pregnant year at Eastertime;

And many thought it was a sacred sign,

And some called it the resurrection flower;

And I, a pagan, worshipped at its shrine,

Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.”—African-American poet Claude McKay (1890-1948), “The Easter Flower,” in Harlem Shadows (1921)

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on Those Who Think ‘History Flatters Them’)

“People who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.”—African-American novelist-essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), “White Man’s Guilt,” Ebony, August 1965, collected in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985 (1985)

One of the great pleasures of listening to Regina King graciously accepting her Best Supporting Actress Oscar early in the week was her immediate acknowledgement of the man who originated If Beale Street Could Talk, the property that won her the award: author James Baldwin.

Given my lack of time and tight writing schedule in recent years, I have read Baldwin’s nonfiction—The Fire Next Time and his essays—rather than If Beale Street Could Talk or his other novels. I hope to remedy this, at some point.

In the meantime, Baldwin’s urgent, eloquent polemics on racism remain, unfortunately, all too relevant these days. A teen preacher who gave up his ministry, Baldwin remained a secular prophet to the end of his days, warning that the condition that Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal called “An American Dilemma” would imperil the nation’s future as surely as it had poisoned its past.

This past week, further underscoring Baldwin’s continuing significance, we witnessed multiple revelations in Congressional testimony by a convicted fixer about the former boss who once couldn’t get enough of his schemes, a politician who thinks that “history flatters” him. 

Yet none of these has dismayed me as much as the “Make America Great Again” hats worn by friends or “liked” in their Facebook posts. 

I try to get my mind around the idea that so many people I have known all my life support the kleptocrat who popularized that phrase, a monster of privilege and power who has been unable to convincingly rebut the story that he referred to nations led by African-descended heads of state as “shithole countries,” or that African-Americans would be “too stupid” to vote for him.

In 1965, Baldwin complained when the moderately liberal Robert Kennedy made the prescient prediction that in 40 years an African-American might become President: “From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barber shop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he is already on his way to the Presidency. We were here for 400 years and now he tells us that maybe in 40 years, if you are good, we may let you become President.”

For all his continual rage about the state of race relations he displayed at points like this, by the 1980s Baldwin lamented, watching the ascent of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency, that he had underestimated “the reality, the depth, and the persistence of the delusion of white supremacy in this country.” 

I think he would laugh bitterly at the notion that the nation’s first African-American President would spark a reaction based on the most preposterous political urban legend propagated in my lifetime: the “birther” movement favored by only one GOP primary candidate in 2016—the successful one!—and teasingly embraced by a North Carolina Congressman who is now offended by any suggestion that he might be racist.

For those who want to “Make America Great Again,” I have two questions:

1)What stopped it from being great?

2)When did it stop being great?

The answers to those two questions will not only shed much light on how history is currently understood—or, really, misunderstood—by a large part of the electorate, but what hope might exist, if any, of bringing America to become the nation for which Baldwin so desperately yearned.

In a way, it is not surprising that the current occupant of the Oval Office believes that “history flatters” him; how can he believe otherwise when he understands neither himself nor history? What is surprising—to me, anyway—is how many people still believe him, even as evidence of his mismanagement and criminal ways grows daily. 

One of Baldwin’s novels is Another Country. But the same title can do double-duty to describe a new realm created by our current President. 

I know that bigotry and violence dotted America’s past, but I never thought till now that a wider, safer space could be created for the intersecting forces of racial division, class resentment and unreason. 

But, far better than anyone thought at the time, Baldwin anticipated much of the current mass psychology that has led America to its present uncertain state:

“The history of white people has led them to a fearful baffling place where they have begun to lose touch with reality – to lose touch, that is, with themselves—and where they certainly are not truly happy, for they know they are not truly safe. They do not know how this came about; they do not dare examine how this came about.”