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     Ferociouskitty Veteran Poster Username: Ferociouskitty Post Number: 265 Registered: 02-2008 Rating: |
The Harlem Renaissance thread got me to thinking... I have a book in my personal library that once belonged to my ex-husband's grandfather (RIP). "The Book of American Negro Poetry" edited by James Weldon Johnson, first copyrighted by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1922 and 1931, again later by Grace Nail Johnson (his wife?) in the 1950s. The book belonged to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and also to Columbus Middle School, at some point. It didn't circulate often, just a few times in 1971 (the year I was born), once in 1973, once in 1974, and twice in 1978. Old books always make me wonder who read them before, and why. School assignment, or pleasure? After a lengthy preface to the original 1921 edition, in which Johnson analyzes several poems, their authors, and the contexts in which the poems were written, the collection features work by Paul Laurence Dunbar, WEB DuBois, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Claude McKay, and Jessie Redmon Fauset. Those interested in Nella Larsen's "Passing" may be interested in Fauset's "Plum Bun". I found them both eye-opening. http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/fauset_jessie_redmon.html Other poets in the collection include: Charles Bertram Johnson, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Arna Bontemps. Those are the poets whose names and/or work I'm familiar with; there are a host of others featured who I haven't heard of. I find the title interesting as it says a lot about the times: "THE Book of American Negro Poetry". The preface to the revised (1931) edition (which precedes the preface to the original edition) is compelling for the same reason. Johnson writes: "When this book was compiled, only ten years ago, the conception of the Negro as a creator of art was so new, indeed so unformed, that I felt it was necessary to make a rather extended introduction in presenting to the public an anthology of poetry by Negro writers. And so, forty-eight pages were devoted to calling attention to the main contributions which the Negro had already made to our common cultural store, and to setting forth a modest claim for his powers of artistic creation and expression. "Within this brief period the introduction to the original edition of the book has become primarily a matter of historical data. Its statements, claims, and forecasts are today, for the most part, accepted facts. Within the past decade there has grown a general recognition that the Negro is a contributor to American life not only of material but of artistic, cultural, and spiritual values; that in the making and shaping of American civilization he is an active force, a giver as well as a receiver, a creator as well as a creature." He goes on to talk about the use of dialect, minstrel traditions, and "genuine folk stuff." Another treasure I have was given to me right after my freshman year in college. There was an older man who lived on a neighboring street in my hometown in Florida, Professor Somebody, who I'd never met. He'd died, and he left behind a huge collection of books. This was back during the time that teachers were well-respected and folks spoke reverently of him as a "schoolteacher", one of only two in my neighborhood (the other was an incompetent, but that's another story for another day). Well, when his family was going through his things, somebody told somebody who told somebody who knew me, about his books. And they figured that since I went college (which was an anomaly in our parts), I might appreciate the books. I really did. Some were just falling apart, and I couldn't do anything with them. But others were gems. One in particular that I cherished was "Manchild in the Promised Land" by Claude Brown. That was truly one of those "Books That Changed My Life." I wonder...when future generations are going through our dusty collections, what will they deem trash and what they will cherish as treasure? | ||
| Yvettep AALBC .com Platinum Poster Username: Yvettep Post Number: 3021 Registered: 01-2005 Rating: N/A |
Great post, FK. Sounds like the seeds of a lengthier article... | ||
| Ferociouskitty Veteran Poster Username: Ferociouskitty Post Number: 267 Registered: 02-2008 Rating: N/A |
JWJ's prefaces deserve an article in their own right! I found myself thinking about the challenges facing black writers then (trying to convince the world that black folks CAN write) vs. the issues black writers face now, some of which is trivial, esp. in light of what our predecessors faced. | ||
| Steve_s Veteran Poster Username: Steve_s Post Number: 347 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A |
JWJ's prefaces deserve an article in their own right! FK, Unless I'm misunderstanding, I think they already have one in "The Jazz Cadence of American Culture," edited by Robert G. O'Meally. The article is entitled "The Seemingly Eclipsed Window of Form: James Weldon Johnson's Prefaces," by Brent Edwards. Although I have the anthology and have read some of it, I have not read that particular essay. | ||
| Ferociouskitty Veteran Poster Username: Ferociouskitty Post Number: 269 Registered: 02-2008 Rating: N/A |
Thanks for the title, Steve. As they say, there's nothing new under the sun. We are always essentially re-writing the same old stories. ;-) | ||
| Cynique "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Cynique Post Number: 12372 Registered: 01-2004 Rating: N/A |
Very interesting post, FK. This situation may have been what motivated Langston Hughes to remark that creativity abounded among gifted black artists long before the white patrons of the Harlem Renaissance era called attention to it. | ||
| Steve_s Veteran Poster Username: Steve_s Post Number: 348 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A |
FK, thanks, "The Seemingly Eclipsed Window of Form: James Weldon Johnson's Preludes" is a 21-page academic article on a very specific area of the intersection of: orality and textuality; of music on the page and in the air, etc. It's not an easy piece for someone like me to read or understand, but I'll keep pluggin away at it. Before I forget, could I just record my thoughts and observations on what I've recently read and listened to?, because I think it's related to the same general subject of the Brent Edwards article: black writers' sophisticated use of music in literary texts. If anyone's not interested, please read no further. 1) In "Just Above My Head," gospel singer Arthur Montana makes two trips down south during the civil rights movement which seem to parallel Baldwin's own trips. At the end of the novel, Arthur is recalling how Jimmy, his piano accompanist, banged out the opening bars of "Just a Closer Walk with Thee," causing Arthur to catch his breath and then nearly crack up. It's followed by some lyrics and then Arthur's remarks that at the time, he had no idea how "sacariligeous" it was, which is followed by his musings on the meaning of "sacrilege." I think it may be sacriligeous because it's a confession of love in a church that may look with disapproval at this kind of relationship, and secondly, although unstated, is the tradition of coded spirituals during slavery (Steal Away to Jesus) and then 100 years later (Any Day Now, see Peter Guralnick's biography of Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers). And finally, I think it's also an illusion to "the love of sacrilege" from "A Season in Hell" by Arthur Rimbaud (see The Silence of Thelonious Monk by John Edgar Wideman, and Stanley Crouch's theories about Charlie Parker and outlaw culture. All that stuff's a little over my head.) 2) "Flamenco Sketches" from Kind of Blue has no "text" as far as melody, because it's all impromptu. The soloists improvise on a series of modes or scales related to five chords, the duration of which are up to the soloist. While Trane plays almost exactly the same form as the preceding soloist Miles had, Cannonball takes a few more liberties, stretching out certain sections. Cannonball, unlike the other soloists on this tune, interpolates some melodic fragments from "external" sources (popular songs) the lyrics of which have an ironic meaning in the context of the song they're being quoted in (Flamenco Sketches). Ralph Ellison, in his essay "Golden Age, Times Past," called these "signifying riffs." So, when Cannonball quotes two bars of a 1939 Tin Pan Alley song called "Brazil," he's in effect saying "Return I will, to old Brazil," and when he quotes two bars of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine," he's saying "and promising never" (the full line is "And there we are, swearing to love forever, And promising never, never to part.") Cannonball must be signifying on the general concept "Latin America," because Flamenco is Andalusian, Brazil is Portuguese, and the Beguine, I believe, is a dance form of the French Caribbean (Guadaloupe and Martiniqu). Anyway, I do have a lot more thoughts on how Baldwin uses music, but I'll spare you  Thanks for reading. | ||
| Cynique "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Cynique Post Number: 12382 Registered: 01-2004 Rating: |
A very good dissertation on the subject of riffing writers who sample the essence of popular songs in their prose, Steve! BTW, FK, Claude Brown's "Man Child in the Promised Land" is one of my all-time favorites, too. | ||
| Ferociouskitty Veteran Poster Username: Ferociouskitty Post Number: 282 Registered: 02-2008 Rating: N/A |
Cynique: Brown's other novel, "Children of Ham" (also set in Harlem) wasn't as good, imo, but it did include a disturbingly unforgettable scene. Manchild, Daddy was a Number Runner, and James Baldwin's book made me fall in love with this mysterious place called Harlem. Boy, was I disappointed when I finally arrived there in 1989, and stepped off the Metro North train at 125th station. | ||
| Ferociouskitty Veteran Poster Username: Ferociouskitty Post Number: 283 Registered: 02-2008 Rating: N/A |
Meant to say: 125th Street Station | ||
| Thumper Veteran Poster Username: Thumper Post Number: 519 Registered: 01-2004 Rating: N/A |
Hello All Ferociouskitty: I love your post. I can now see one difference between the Renaissance in Johnson's intro that you provided, proving that we are artistic, at a time when white folks believed otherwise. The difference with today is that we are not trying to prove that we can be artistic, or we should not be trying to prove it anyway. Your story reminds me of one of my own. I was away at camp one summer, one of those hot assted Indiana summer too. I came home, hot and sweating to a hot house, loud fans blowing hot air and NO AIR CONDITIONING! I walked through the door and made a b line for my upstairs bedroom, anxious to make my own personal fan house. You all know those homemade fan houses/tents, where you get a sheet and put it over the front of the fan, with the back of the sheet being sucked on to the back of the fan to keep the in place, and then you get shoes and/or books and place each of them on top of the edge of the sheet so that the sheet is now in the from of an igloo, and you crawl inside with a shoe to put on the opening you created when you came into the fan house. *looking around* Now, I know good and damn well I aint the only one to do that. *LOL* Well, anyway, after I dropped my suitcase in my room and came back downstairs, where it was cooler than the oven I call my room. I plopped down, cursing the heat and my father said, your Uncle was cleaning a house and the lady was throwing away a big of box of books. Your uncle asked her if he could have the box because he had a nephew that read a lot (I was a real egghead back in the day). He pointed to a big ol box in the living room. *LOL* Talk about Christmas in July!! I had a real Christmas in July thanks to my Uncle Ted! There must have been about 50 paperback books in the box and I read every single one of them, biographies, true crime books, etc. It stayed hot until October, but as long as I had books and a fan house, I was cool. Manchild In The Promise Land - CLASSIC! I totally agree. I read it about 8 years ago, here on the site. But, it would have changed my life if I had read it when I was a teenager. Steve_S: What's up with you? *big smile* Damn you are deep! I had not thought of music and literature being connected in the way you describe. I see exactly what you're saying. I have seen a connection with music and literature, but my view is weird and not intelligent at all. There have read writing styles that "sound" melodic to me. But, then that's me. I know I'm weird because I can't read without music playing. And then to make it worse, it has to be music that "fits" the book or story that I'm reading. I just finished Fledgling and played Carmen McRae and Betty Carter while reading it. I'm reading another one, Skull Cage Key, and I'm playing Leontyne Price singing Puccini's arias. Yeah, I know, I don't try to understand it, I just go with it. *smile* | ||
| Ferociouskitty Veteran Poster Username: Ferociouskitty Post Number: 285 Registered: 02-2008 Rating: N/A |
Thumper: If I may ask, where did you grow up? I grew up in Florida...no air-conditioning until we got a couple of window units when I was 13. I'm hot just thinking about it now. Why...WHY...did I never think of your ingenious fan house/tent??? We just put the fan in the window and tried not to move around so much. Or talk. Or breathe too heavily. My Aunt Sandra was like your Uncle Ted (except we called her Pokey; you know black folks: her siblings said she looked like Porky Pig, and Porky became Pokey). She worked at a local publishing/printing company, and she would bring home boxes of books with the covers ripped off so that they could not be sold. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you are a precocious pre-adolescent like I was), the books tended to be of the "Sensuous Nurse" variety. That was a big part of my sex education. My godmother was another source of naughty books. At her house when I was 8, I hid in the bathroom most of one summer reading "The Happy Hooker" and "Portnoy's Complaint." I got caught reading the "The Happy Hooker", and my family NEVER let me live that down. They were a little upset at first, because they knew I could actually read the words, but then somebody found the humor in it, and it became the stuff of family lore. | ||
| Steve_s Veteran Poster Username: Steve_s Post Number: 350 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A |
One explanation of the meaning behind Rimbaud's "love of sacrilege" is contained in the Stanley Crouch essay "Blues to be Constitutional," from his book "The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race," reprinted in the O'Meally anthology "The Jazz Cadence of American Culture." Whether or not it's what Baldwin intended, it might have some meaning in that context. You can read some of it here: http://books.google.com/books?id=_5GJRHq4w2gC&pg=PA155&lpg=PA155&dq=rimbaud+love +of+sacrilege&source=web&ots=ScA7syCdWk&sig=2XQJlyQwnXCzj2NBd-3m8ZANUAw&hl=en&sa =X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result Thumper. I've never been able to read while music is playing, I don't know why. | ||
| Carey Veteran Poster Username: Carey Post Number: 868 Registered: 05-2004 Rating: N/A |
Thump & Kitty You two have to stop with these stories. They ALWAYS make me think of one of my own. My treasures were in the attic. When we moved from the project, we had a house with a basement and an attic. So whenever a family member had "stuff" with no where to put it, they would put it in our attic. Talkin' hot, I used to sneak up there in my underwear. I couldn't open any windows because mom might see them from outside while she was hanging clothes on the line. See, there were some secrets up in that attic and kids were not allowed up there. But of course that made it all the more exciting. Of course there were books but my eyes were fixed on all the records, old records. I would read a little of this and a little of that and sneak out records. I couldn't ask any questions about my bounty but I always wanted to ask about the WHITE people in the FAMILY albums...yikes...discovery! I found out in later years...yikes...discovery! Thump, I smell money. Yep, The igloo for fools club house. Yep, we could market that baby as a convertible club house, spin the bottle, let you cousin stay over night ..house. Carey | ||
| Thumper Veteran Poster Username: Thumper Post Number: 521 Registered: 01-2004 Rating: N/A |
Hello All, Yawl know what, I can not believe that we (my cousins and I) were the only ones to come up with the fan and the sheet thang. Now, Carey, how can I market the thing with a name like "igloo for fools club house", when it actuality it's the dirt poor man's version of air conditioning. *smile* FK: I was born, rasied and still live in Indiana. The summers here are ugly, second only to hell. Not only do we have to deal with the heat, but the humidity that goes with it! There are days when the temperature is in the low 80's but the humidity is so high, we all run for the air conditioner. The summer I really started reading, which was a year before I got the box of books, the first book I read on my own was my mother's...Bloodline by Sidney Sheldon. My mother read all the soft porn, and some not so soft, romance novels. In the summer of my first reading, I read two Sidney Sheldon books, one Judith Krantz, two Harold Robbins, and Jackie Collins...and To Kill A Mockingbird. I soon after discovered Agatha Christie and it was on then. | ||
| Thumper Veteran Poster Username: Thumper Post Number: 522 Registered: 01-2004 Rating: N/A |
Hello All, FK: I forgot to mention my opinion of Jessie Fauset's novels. I read There Will Be Confusion, The Chinaberry Tree and Plum Bun. I hate to say it but, if you read one Fauset book, you read them all. It's been said that Fauset's books were more aligned to what the black upper crust was looking for when speaking of black literature. Fauset's novels only deal with that limited group and not in a very imaginative or truthful light. So, I do not lump Larsen's novels with Fauset's just for that reason. | ||
| Ferociouskitty Veteran Poster Username: Ferociouskitty Post Number: 294 Registered: 02-2008 Rating: |
Thumper: Hmmm...now you've got me wanting to read Fauset's other books. Thanks! Isn't it funny how so many of us (it seems) cut our reading teeth on trashy novels and yet went on to appreciate a diverse selection of reading material? | ||
| Thumper Veteran Poster Username: Thumper Post Number: 533 Registered: 01-2004 Rating: |
Hello All, FK: It is. The notion was my shining hope that at least a few readers of the U go girl or current street lit would at least give some of the other genre of books a try. Many have, but not a great number in that the publihsers would notice. My case was sort of special too in that when I got done with my mother's books, it just so happen that my Uncle Jr. was staying with my grandmother at the time. My grandmother lived next door to us. One day when I was dying for something to read, I got into my uncle's books and STOLE his copy of Langston Hughes' The Big Sea! *smile* I still have it, some 30+ years later. And then I stole his (my) Henry Dumas book from him because he and Eugene Redmond (the book's editor) was real good friends. Now to show you how stupid I was, the thought that my uncle would know that I stole from him did not cross my mind, mainly because my uncle would not hesitant in getting into our (my cousins and I) grip if the situation called for it. My uncle knew I had them and we would talk about what I read. I asked him why he had all of those books and he told me that in order to be a good WRITER, you had to be a good READER! So there it is. | ||
| Ferociouskitty Veteran Poster Username: Ferociouskitty Post Number: 305 Registered: 02-2008 Rating: N/A |
I asked him why he had all of those books and he told me that in order to be a good WRITER, you had to be a good READER! So there it is. And there it is. Thumper, you are blessed to have the family you have. |
