Helene Johnson’s Barbaric Songs Choked

Helene Johnson, born in 1906, was among the younger poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Today, Helene Johnson suffers from relative neglect, which impoverishes our understanding of both the Harlem Renaissance and the possibilities of the sonnet form. Though her free verse poems are more often anthologized, her sonnets offer complex, sometimes deliberately ambiguous portrayals of Black women’s interiority. In particular, two of her sonnets, “A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America” (1928) and “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” (1927), have a shared contrast between sonnet and “song” that reveals one way that Johnson exploits the nuance of the form to simultaneously embody and critique the American sonnet tradition. This paper asks: what does the sonnet form contribute to the understanding of Black figures in America who are not (yet) American, and how does the form embody and also create this vision of America in contrast to an African or otherwise exoticized home? The poems use different rhyme schemes and depict different types of Black characters in America, raising different questions about assimilation, among other things. That said, the shared theme of song within the sonnet structure provides a way of imagining the creation of a place in America (or perhaps America making a type of figure out of the poetic object).

The sonnet invites contrasts and tensions, in fact emphasizing them formally, and Johnson uses that effect to distance speaker from observation and form from what the poem represents; the form is aware of its history and its work in creating poetic meaning. In “A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America,” a 1928 sonnet first published in Harlem, the contrast between speaker and subject of the poem (here in the object position) is put in religious terms, with America represented by a missionary who has brought a “young native” to this continent. In “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem,” a 1927 sonnet that appeared in both Caroling Dusk and Ebony and Topaz, the contrast between America and the man’s “home” (Africa or perhaps the Caribbean) is visual and aural, in how the man looks and sounds walking down the street. These poetic subjects, which appear in the object rather than the subject position of the poem, are not allowed to speak in the sonnet form, which, here, is an American form, representing the tenets of a culture they do not yet fit into. Both poems mention the “songs” of the characters. Their songs differentiate them from the people they are around, but the poetic form does not give voice to those songs.

Though the sonnet is a “little song” in its meaning, it is now more associated with its constructedness, its lack of spontaneity, whereas a “song-like” poem tends to connote a feeling of spontaneity or unconstructedness. Of course, sonnet writers and readers know that the “constraint” of the form need not be “limiting,” but the association of the form with control, with tradition, and with labor marks it as distinct from a poem or song that seeks to appear spontaneous (or many lyric poems that critics historically dismissed as song-like, thereby also dismissing the skill required to write them, as was the case for many female poets historically). Thus “song,” in these poems and more broadly, connotes something closer to “natural” (or even primitive, revealed by the adjective “barbaric” in “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem”) in that it may be unlearned or from a folk tradition, and something not yet worked into a particular shape like the sonnet has been. This distance between the song and the sonnet features prominently in both of these poems, emphasizing a distance between the speaker/observer and the observed, immigrant character whose songs are mentioned but not represented on the page.

The physical presence of the Black body combines with a deep, emotional ambivalence about Christianity in “A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America” (1928), which imagines one woman’s experience of the mythologized journey to “salvation” in America. The poem ends:

And as the moon grew large and whiteAbove the roof, afraid that she would scream...