Color by Countee Cullen

Source of book: I own this

This is my second official choice for Black History Month this year.

Here is the list of Black History Month selections since I started this blog, and also some related books:

2011:    50 Years and Other Poems by James Weldon Johnson

2012:    Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

2013:    The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois

2014:     Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

2015:     Kindred by Octavia Butler

2016:    Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

2017:    Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South

    And

    Black Boy (American Hunger) by Richard Wright

2018:    Poems 1921-1930 by Langston Hughes

2019:     Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

2020: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

       

Other notable books by African American or African authors:

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Poems by Phillis Wheatley

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

I Greet The Dawn (Poems) by Paul Laurence Dunbar

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh by Daina Ramey Berry

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

The Fire This Time edited by Jesmyn Ward

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

The Honor Code by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe 

White Rage by Carol Anderson

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Brian Mealer

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

Books on Black History by other authors:

Red Tails, Black Wings by John B. Holway

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark Noll

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Ragtime (the Musical)

The Slaves’ War by Andrew Ward

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing Vol.1 by M. T. Anderson

Devil In The Grove by Gilbert King

Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith

***

I have a particular love for the Harlem Renaissance. The flowering of art, music, literature, and culture in 1920s New York was a magical time that left us with so many immortal masterworks. 

It was not a coincidence that the 1920s also saw the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, the rise of white nativism, and vicious anti-immigrant sentiment. For every advance of people of color, there is a vicious whitelash. 

Picture from the cover of my book.

Countee Cullen tends to be the forgotten poet of the Harlem Renaissance, mostly because he was eclipsed by Langston Hughes in popularity. One factor in this was public taste, which switched from older formal poetry to a free verse modernism. Hughes was the new, while Cullen represented the old. It is a shame, in my opinion, because Cullen was a skilled and evocative poet, and his mastery of an older art form should not be held against him. 

Color was Cullen’s first collection, published in 1925. It is divided into four sections. The first, also entitled “Color,” contains poems with racial themes and characters. The second is a collection of epitaphs. Third is a handful of poems about love, while the fourth is a miscellany. In addition, a longer poetic introduction, “To You Who Read My Book,” expresses the author’s desire that his words survive the ravages of time. 

After the introduction, the collection opens with what has to be Cullen’s best known poem, a sonnet that asks a question that haunted Cullen throughout his life.

Yet Do I Marvel

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,

And did He stoop to quibble could tell why

The little buried mole continues blind,

Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,

Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus

Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare

If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus

To struggle up a never-ending stair.

Inscrutable His ways are, and immune

To catechism by a mind too strewn

With petty cares to slightly understand

What awful brain compels His awful hand.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:

To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

The form is interesting, neither strictly Petrarchan nor English. The first two quatrains are rhymed like an English sonnet, but they clearly form the first half of the poem - there is no third quatrain. The final six lines very much fit the pattern of the Petrarchan sonnet. 

I love how Cullen saves the central idea of the poem to the very last line. We are teased with three examples: the blind mole who never sees the light, Tantalus who can never grasp the food he craves, and Sisyphus who must endlessly engage in futile labor. And then the twist of the knife: the black poet who must sing. Fortunately, Cullen was a bit wide of the mark: his words, and those of other African American poets, would prove to be anything but futile and pointless. Indeed, despite prejudice and the violence of the KKK, over the next century, the world would literally be singing the songs and the poems of black poets and musicians. 

Many of the poems in the first section directly address the intersection of race and class in society, and the casual disdain which African Americans experience. Cullen uses his art to insist on the full humanity of those looked on with contempt. I found this one particularly interesting. 

Black Magdalens

These have no Christ to spit and stoop

To write upon the sand,

Inviting him that has not sinned

To raise the first rude hand.

And if He came they could not buy

Rich ointment for His feet;

The body's sale scarce yields enough

To let the body eat.

The chaste clean ladies pass them by

And draw their skirts aside,

But Magdalens have a ready laugh;

They wrap their wounds in pride.

They fare full ill since Christ forsook

The cross to mount a throne,

And Virtue still is stooping down

To cast the first hard stone.

Cullen touches a raw nerve here. There is a long history here in the United States of attributing hyper-sexuality to African Americans, as a defensive mechanism against acknowledgement of the equally long history of white men raping black women. It continues today, with a never-ending parade of culture war asshats claiming that if black people would simply stop fucking so much, they would be equal. Sigh. “Virtue” still is picking up the stones.

Later in the collection is a longer poem about Judas Iscariot, which takes a look at the story from a different perspective: what if Judas was truly doing what he believed Christ asked him to do? Wasn’t he too an instrument of the Ineffable Divine Plan? 

Another poem with a religious theme is this one, which draws on the tradition that Simon of Cyrene was black. (Cyrene was in North Africa, which had a large Jewish population. It is at least possible that Simon was a dark-skinned convert to Judaism, hence the tradition.) 

Simon the Cyrenian Speaks

He never spoke a word to me,

And yet He called my name;

He never gave a sign to me,

And yet I knew and came.

At first I said, "I will not bear

His cross upon my back;

He only seeks to place it there

Because my skin is black."

But He was dying for a dream,

And He was very meek,

And in His eyes there shone a gleam

Men journey far to seek.

It was Himself my pity bought;

I did for Christ alone

What all of Rome could not have wrought

With bruise of lash or stone.

This next one was written after reading Batouala, a novel by French Guyanese author René Maran. It is another sonnet (which may be why I like it), but on the theme of love. 

The Dance of Love

All night we danced upon our windy hill,

Your dress a cloud of tangled midnight hair,

And love was much too much for me to wear

My leaves; the killer roared above his kill,

But you danced on, and when some star would spill

Its red and white upon you whirling there,

I sensed a hidden beauty in the air;

Though you danced on, my heart and I stood still. 

But suddenly a bit of morning crept

Along your trembling sides of ebony;

I saw the tears your tired limbs had wept,

And how your breasts heaved high, how languidly

Your dark arms moved; I drew you close to me;

We flung ourselves upon our hill and slept. 

Most of the poems are short, but there are a couple of longer ones, most notably “The Shroud of Color,” a musing conversation with god over the problem of being black in a time of prejudice. Filled with biblical allusions, striking metaphors, and beautiful language, it is worth a read. 

The epitaphs are fun. (I confess to enjoying epitaphs, particularly by skilled poets. For example, Edgar Lee Masters and John Donne.) Here are my favorites:

For a Cynic

Birth is a crime

All men commit;

Life gives them time

To atone for it;

Death ends the rhyme

As the price for it.

For a Lady I Know

She even thinks that up in heaven

Her class lies late and snores,

While poor black cherubs rise at seven

To do celestial chores.

For a Virgin

For forty years I shunned the lust

Inherent in my clay;

Death only was so amorous

I let him have his way.

For an Unsuccessful Sinner

I boasted my sins were sure to sink me

Out of all sound and sight of glory;

And the most I’ve won for all my pains

Is a century of purgatory.

For Myself

What’s in this grave is worth your tear;

There’s more than the eye can see;

Folly and Pride and Love lie here

Buried alive with me.

I love the rapier wit in these. I’ll end with this one, with its unusual tercet form.

The Wise

Dead men are the wisest, for they know

How far the roots of flowers go,

How long a seed must rot to grow.

Dead men alone bear frost and rain

On throbless heart and heatless brain,

And feel no stir of joy or pain.

Dead men alone are satiate;

They sleep and dream and have no weight,

To curb their rest, of love or hate.

Strange, men should flee their company,

Or think me strange who long to be

Wrapped in their cool immunity. 

My exploration of Countee Cullen before this was limited to the few works I found in anthologies. I was therefore thrilled when I found a hardback collected poems at a library sale. I am looking forward to reading the rest in the future.