chapter I

have written of a poet whose birthplace was Bardstown, Kentucky. W. Clarence Jordan, a Negro schoolmaster of Bardstown, now dead, wrote the following lines in answer to the questions, so frequently asked in derision, which stands as its title:

WHAT IS THE NEGRO DOING?

As we pass along life’s highway, Day by day, Thousands daily ask the question, “What, I pray, Tell me what’s the Negro doing? And what course is he pursuing? What achievements is he strewing By the way?”

Many say he’s retrograding Very fast; Others say his glory’s fading,-- Cannot last; That his prospects now are blighted, That his chances have been slighted, This his wrongs cannot be righted. Time has passed.

Friends, lift up your eyes; look higher; Higher still. There’s the vanguard of our army On the hill. You’ve been looking at the rear guard. Lift your eyes, look farther forward; Thousands are still pressing starward-- Ever will.

_IV. Roscoe C. Jamison_

Roscoe C. Jamison was fortunate in leaving behind him a friend at his early death, some three years since, who treasured his fugitive verses sufficiently to gather them together, though but a handful, and send them out to the world in a little pamphlet. Fortunate also was he in another friend able to write his elegy:

Too soon is hushed his silver speech, The music dies upon his lute, The cadence falls beyond our reach; Too soon the Poet’s lips are mute.

[Illustration: ROSCOE C. JAMISON]

So wrote in this elegy, _Lacrimae Aethiopiae_, Charles Bertram Johnson, of this untimely dead singer. Hardly a score of poems are in this pamphlet, yet enough are here to reveal a poet in the making. Jamison was a better poet, even in these imperfect pieces, than many a writer of better verses. Here are the ardent impulses and here are the glowing ideas from which poetry of the higher order springs. The art, however, is undisciplined, grammar, metre, and rhymes are sometimes at fault. However, bold strokes of poetry atone, the effects are the effects of a real poet. Sometimes one finds in the small collection a poem that is all but perfect, a production that might have come from a maturer craftsman. I venture to put him to the test in the following poem:

CASTLES IN THE AIR

I build my castles in the air. How beautiful they seem to me, Standing in all their glory there, Like stars above the sea!

I watch them with admiring eyes, For in them dwells life’s fondest hope: If they be swept from out the skies, In darkness I must grope.

They hold life’s joys, life’s sweetest dreams; They make the weary years seem bright. As one guided by bright starbeams I struggle through the night.

Sometimes from out the skies they fall, And my soul shrieks in its pain; But from the heights I hear Hope’s call, “Arise and build again.”

What though life be with sorrow filled And each day brings its load of care, I’m happy still while I can build My castles in the air!

Who but will say, despite the metrical defects, this is a real poem? Another poem will show his art at a better advantage, while the pathos is of another kind, very touching pathos it is, too:

A SONG

I loved you, Dear. I did not know how much, Until the silence of the Grave lay cold Between us, and your hand I could not touch, And your sweet face, oh! never more behold.

I loved you, Dear. I did not know how true, Until in other eyes I found no light; I know--alas!--my Spirit without you Must drift forever in a starless night!

A different kind of merit, the merit of intense reprobation of cruel arrogancy in the one race and of treacherous cowardice in the other, is exemplified in _The Edict_. Triumphant faith, which is the Negro’s peculiar heritage, asserts itself in such a way, in the final stanza, as to lift the poem to the heights of moral feeling.

THE EDICT

All these must die before the Morning break: They who at God an angry finger shake, Declaring that because He made them White, Their race should rule the world by sacred right. They who deny a common Brotherhood-- Who cry aloud, and think no Blackman good-- The blood-cursed mob always eager to take The rope in hand or light the flaming stake, Jeering the wretch while he in death pain quakes-- All these must die before the Morning breaks.

All these must die before the Morning breaks: The Blackmen, faithless, whose loud laughter wakes Harsh echoes in the most unbiased places. They who choose vice, and scorn the gentle graces-- Who by their manners breed contemptuous hate, Suggesting jim-crow laws from state to state-- They who think on earth they may not find An ideal man nor woman of their kind. But from some other Race that ideal take-- All these must die before the Morning break!

We know, O Lord, that there will come a time, When o’er the World will dawn the Age Sublime, When Truth shall call to all mankind to stand Before Thy throne as Brothers, hand in hand, Be not displeased with him who this song makes-- All these must die before the Morning breaks!

If lyric poetry be self-revealment--and such it is, or it is nothing--we can learn from the following poem how deep a sorrow at some time in his life this poet must have experienced:

HOPELESSNESS

Had you called from the fire, or from the sea, From ’mid the roaring flames, or dark’ning wave, With eagerness I then had come to thee, To perish with thee if I could not save.

But now helpless I sit and watch you die, There is no power can save, the doctors say; I lift my eyes unto the silent sky, And wonder why it is that mortals pray.

The title-poem of the booklet, _Negro Soldiers_, is no doubt Jamison’s masterpiece. It is worthy of the universal admiration it has won from those who know it.

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