Three Young Men Sitting in a Bar in Harlem
Due to my unfamiliarity with our blog system, I am attaching my second blog post, a poem, as a PDF so that I don’t lose its formatting.
I found myself very conflicted when reading our poems and academic material for this week; I am taking English 535 (African American Literature) and we just read The House Behind the Cedars by Charles Chesnutt, an author whose vanished work was actually alluded to in our reading. The time that book was published and when our poets were writing is less than 30 years. Racial conflict in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is an impossible topic to avoid, but when the sheer weight of oppression arises again and again across multiple texts…it’s overwhelming for me, and I’m a white lower-middle class male living in the twenty-first century. The House Behind the Cedars is the tale of a brother and a sister passing for white in South Carolina, and the tragic nature of their struggle that, in Chesnutt’s own words, required a tremendous amount of “courage.” Courage, to want to be something other than what society imposed, implacably and forcibly, by law, upon them to be (in this case, black, even though they could technically be qualified as “octaroons,” and then not even look dark-skinned). It is a brilliantly written book, but I grimaced often at how patently unfair African Americans were treated for hundreds of years (and made some uneasy connections to race relations today).
I bring up this digression because my overwhelming feeling after reading Cullen’s work was that it was so sad that he felt that he had to use traditional white literary form to achieve some modicum of success; the New Negro movement was so young and the African American people so stilted in terms of culture from the impossible oppression of slavery and then the de facto slavery that came afterwards, that there was nothing for Cullen to go back to.
Hughes “made it new,” as Pound might say. He used jazz, the blues, new structures; I must admit that I read Angela’s blog post before writing this, and saw that my thoughts were echoed in her words, that it was unfair of Hughes to decry what Cullen was doing with white literary forms.
Sterling A. Brown’s use of the blues in “Southern Road” is breathtaking. It’s so soulful, so sad, no ray of hope, but within it a determination. I have always been a sucker for the blues, especially the dance between the virtuosic guitar solos and the heavy lyrics.
It should be no surprise then that I included elements of all three in my creative response (see-poem) “Three Young Men Sitting in a Bar in Harlem.” The blues of Sterling A. Brown cry out about a people that have no firm cultural heritage or homeland in a nation where African Americans are essentially a new people. Countee Cullen offers a defense of himself, in rhyming quatrains (I almost never rhyme in my poems anymore). And Langston Hughes, whom I think, although he is extremely critical of many types of people for not following the same path he treks along, is the most hopeful sounding of the three and so ends the poem (with a hint of a nagging question) on a defiant note, punctuated with the ending crescendo of a blues song.
Some questions to consider: What do these poets have to offer us today; are they a cultural relic, a collection of excellent literature, a message from the past, a portrait of a specific time and place? Why is their work so different from the Modernists of the same time period, and how is it similar? If these poets were so dissimilar in their approach to poetry, why are they “schooled” together?
Bruce, I really appreciated you forthcoming and thoughtful response to our readings from this week, and the way you added to that wealth of the black experience we’ve imbibed with Chestnut. You’re poem, too, I read as a kind of echo of Hughes. The italicized refrain read like an ongoing layman’s lament, in contrast to the cultural and more sophisticated language of stanzas in the right column. I suppose that the three men in the bar are the three voices that emerge from this poem. The two contrasting voices of the first four stanzas create the third when they are melded together in a way. The wrestling with what black art is becomes apparent in the fourth stanza, in which the speaker sees black art, perhaps on the stage, and wants to embrace that same unique quality on the page. The ending was a great melding of these two voices, in which the struggle for identity, explored in lines like “Lost souls looking for the promised land / Lost souls in nothin but a name,” is embraced in a bluesy voice.
I enjoyed your poem and thought the elements reflected the Harlem poets well. My favorite few lines are “Her notes draw the blood from my face / I did not want to be come white / I wanted to transcend race.” The image and the directly stated desire is relatable. Race has always existed at the peripherals of my life, but for millions of Americans, it remains at the forefront. I think your work not only respects the characteristics of Harlem writers, but it touches on racial tensions that still exist. The stanzas remind me of the Janus-face, speaking to each other and facing opposite directions, there’s tension here within the poem that reflects the tensions of the speakers. The bold and unconventional “Ohhhhhh Lord, yeahhh-heee-yeah-yeah!” speaks to the same tones of “Fire!!” magazine and what the Harlem poets were trying to accomplish.