Writing Black Modernism Two Poems by Alice Dunbar-Nelson

We are pleased to republish two poems by Alice Dunbar-Nelson that have rarely attracted scholarly comment. Both reveal her responsiveness to the literary and political currents of her time and to African Americans’ literary and cultural history. Although often anthologized as a poet, Dunbar-Nelson only wrote a small number of poems in comparison to her considerable output in other genres. Her recollection of writing “Harlem John Henry Views the Airmada” was that “words leapt at me from somewhere,” a description indicating that poems could come easily when she was inspired (Give Us 434). But apparently this was rarely the case. Writing to an editor who had requested a poem, she explained that she could not comply: “Mr. Dunbar tells me that I average one poem in six months, and that there will be none due for several weeks to come” (qtd. in Hull 54). Her poems often seem to spring from deeply personal experiences or states of mind. Dunbar-Nelson speculated that her friend and fellow poet Georgia Douglas Johnson had been inspired by a love affair to write poems that Dunbar-Nelson regarded highly, just as several of the poems she herself published had come from her “Dream Book,” a private poetic record of her secret affairs (Give Us 88).¹ Unfortunately, this book has never been found. The poems reprinted here also owe their existence to specific circumstances that triggered their composition.

In a handwritten note at the top of her poem-in-manuscript, “I Am an American,” Dunbar-Nelson explains that her composition is a “[c]ompletion of ‘I am an American’ by Elias Lieberman in [the] Lewis & Roland 8th Reader”—she adds a final verse to a poem included in this standard teaching text. She may have originally written the additional verse for her students to recite to affirm the African American’s equal claim to being an “American,” a pedagogical use she advocated for the poem. The Christmas stamp on the manuscript indicates that this verse was composed before March 1928, although it could have been written anytime between 1920 and 1928. Dunbar-Nelson published the verse on 22 March 1928 in her column “Little Excursions Week by Week,” which was syndicated by the Associated Negro Press.² She was provoked to publish it by “Americans All,” an editorial in Collier’s that appeared on 17 March 1928 and purported to answer the question “Who is your true American?” Emphasizing the ethnic diversity of the United States, Collier’s invoked the Puritans at Plymouth Rock, the Dutch, the Spaniards, the French, the Swedes, the Italians, the Germans, the Irish, and the Slavs—everyone except black Americans. Even Collier’s editor’s reference to the Ku Klux Klan’s “ill-will toward all not of old Protestant stock” (58) erases the black presence in America by suggesting that the Klan’s ire is at base religious, not racial. Lieberman’s popular and, at the time, widely taught two-stanza poem similarly makes no mention of African Americans. It contrasts two types of Americans: one whose ancestors fought in the American Revolution, and one who, like Lieberman himself, descends from Russian Jews who died in massacres under the czar. Both speakers in his poem proudly proclaim “I Am an American,” although his ending suggests the future belongs to the children of immigrants.³ Sharply critical of Lieberman’s exclusion of Native and African Americans from the American “melting pot,” Dunbar-Nelson voices the increasing exasperation of African Americans at being forced to segregate themselves by a racial label, while newcomers from distant shores were readily accepted as simply Americans. Her poem underscores not only the long history of blacks in America but also her faith in her country’s—and her people’s—future. Her themes of patriotism and racial pride speak to a literary lineage going back to Frederick Douglass’s writings in The Orator and the 1905 speech in which Pauline Hopkins declares “I am a daughter of the Revolution,” even if white America refuses to acknowledge its “black daughters” (Hopkins 537). Dunbar-Nelson’s poem also resonates with contemporary works like Langston Hughes’s “I, Too.”⁴ Her poem, like his, sounds a postwar note of confident racial pride characteristic of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s: “I am proud of my past. I hold faith in my future. / I am a Negro. I am an American” (lines 12–13).⁵

The second selection we present here, “Harlem John Henry Views the Airmada,” also reflects the thinking of the “New Negro Renaissance.” This movement brought a renewed attention to African American history. As Dunbar-Nelson wrote in “The Negro Looks at an Outworn Tradition,” “The Negro has begun to study his own history. . . . He knows what gifts he has brought to America. He is racially conscious as never before” (291–92). Her shared researches into the African American past with her friend Carter G. Woodson, the renowned African American historian, provided the immediate impetus for the poem. Late in May and early in June 1931 she had been in Washington doing research in the Library of Congress and working closely with Woodson. She described one of their work sessions in her diary: “he gave me three, nearly four hours, while we sat, I taking notes, he haranguing, collecting books and getting the new book planned out” (Give Us 431).⁶ On Wednesday, 10 June, it was after twelve o’clock when she “got to Woodson’s dusty place” (Give Us 434) at 1538 Ninth Street, Northwest, his home and the longtime headquarters of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.⁷ Sometime around 3 p.m. inspiration struck, and in about two hours, surrounded by books and papers in Woodson’s office, she penned her longest, perhaps most ambitious poem, an effort that left her utterly drained. Apparently, she revised the poem very little after that afternoon and about a week later sent it to the Atlantic Monthly and other prominent white publications. Just as speedily, however, she received rejection after rejection, at least seven in all (Give Us 457). Finally, on 2 November 1931 she sent the poem to The Crisis, and her diary records that on Christmas Day she got a sneak peek of the January 1932 issue, with the whole poetry page given to her composition (Give Us 465).⁸

The blank-verse poem mines the African American vernacular tradition by threading through the text snatches of Negro spirituals. In her June 1926 “Une Femme Dit” column, Dunbar-Nelson acknowledged that some African Americans “refuse to see the beauty of the spirituals, and would suppress them for their connotation of slavery and oppression” (164); ironically, she pointed out that whites—both “our friends and enemies”—had no compunctions about profiting “hugely in money and fame by that which we cast off” (165).⁹ Likening the spirituals to “precious gems,” she concludes that it would foolish not to appreciate their beauty “because we disliked to remember how the grandfather of the owner of the mine obtained the property” (166). Although she chooses to weave the spirituals into the poem, the question of how she intends these “gems” and their beauty to be read is not easy to answer. They form part of the crux of the poem, and the work’s creative tension depends upon how one reads them in the context of the history the poem summons. Are they meant primarily to affirm the collective voice of black Americans and their shared striving and sorrow? Or do they provide an ironic commentary on the long history of exploitation of African Americans? Could they themselves signal an irony within an irony, pointing to the double-voiced discourse of the slave, with one meaning for a white audience and another for a black one? Do the spirituals themselves speak contradictory truths? However we understand the poem, Dunbar-Nelson’s skillful incorporation of the spirituals here builds upon the foundation of African American vernacular music, which she considered the best music in the world and what “makes us great artists in other lines” (167).

The poem also calls upon the vernacular through its protagonist, the figure of “Harlem John Henry.” He is the latest iteration of the black folk hero, the legendary “steel-driving man” who died defeating a machine in a hammering contest to build a railroad. Dunbar-Nelson’s racially self-aware John Henry begins his meditation on the black man’s part in America and its wars at the tomb of Ulysses S. Grant near 122nd Street in Manhattan, just below Harlem, which proclaims “Let Us Have Peace.” Yet overhead he sees a huge “airmada” of US warplanes, a reference to America’s modern war machine and to African Americans’ exclusion from the air force in World War I. Characteristic of modernist poems, “Harlem John Henry Views the Airmada” is a densely allusive montage of quotations and images that trace, among other things, African Americans’ sacrifices in the nation’s wars, from Crispus Attucks, the first casualty of the American Revolution, to the killing “No-Man’s land” of War World I’s battlefields. “Harlem John Henry asks” if “that”—a vague demonstrative pronoun pointing to all the past suffering previously alluded to in the poem—was “in vain,” and further, “Must beauty die once more, / Slain o’er and o’er in stupid senseless rage?” (lines 130, 131–32). The fate of the original John Henry was to die laboring to build the United States; however, in choosing a modern, racially conscious John Henry based in Harlem, Dunbar-Nelson implicitly questions whether the contemporary generation of black Americans should follow its heritage of patriotic bloodshed for a nation that has “marched erect to wealth on [their] lowly backs” (51).¹⁰ The poem’s prominence in The Crisis speaks to the question’s urgency for many African Americans.

The original manuscripts for both poems are in the Alice Dunbar-Nelson Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library. For more on “I Am an American,” see Jacqueline Emery’s essay in this issue.