Countee Cullen

From the Dark Tower: “Younger Negro Artists” in 1926

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s February and in America it’s Black History Month.*   In the past few years of this Project I’ve picked a publication that has entered into public domain status to examine.**  This February I’m going to feature work from a singular 1926 publication, the first issue of what was to be a literary quarterly called Fire!!  The cover advertised it would be “Devoted to younger Negro Artists.”

FIre!! cover

Want to read this issue of Fire!!  in part or all? Here’s a link to a high-resolution scan of it.

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It’s worth stopping and noticing that “younger” again. It’s easy to fall into a trap when considering a time so long ago to many who will be reading this in 2023 — but its contributors and instigators were in their younger 20s though some had been writing and publishing since they were teenagers. They may seem old to you by strange definition, but they were certainly young to themselves and their contemporaries.

I find that remarkable. While a range of Black American artists were coming to the fore in the last decade called “The Twenties,” I can’t think it was in any way a time friendly to them. Even artistic Modernism, which sought new sources of inspiration and often delighted in mocking old prejudices, was a mixed bag. Racism and ethnic stereotyping remained present in Modernism. Perhaps sociologists could tell us if it was greater or lesser in the world of art than in society at large then, but I’m certain it was no small factor. And yet here were these young writers who at this point thought it was time for them to unleash a record of their experiences.

It’s not so wild a theory to say that they were so audacious because they didn’t know any better. I’m not going to knock that — for this white elderly composer and amateur sorta-scholar to think I have anything to bring to their efforts is not how the smart money would bet either. And you? You’re reading a blog with poetry and a variety of non-commercial music. So clearly, we all don’t know any better.

In the previous year’s Black History Month series here we’ve noted that some forms of new expression that would be featured in Fire!!  were not without opposition even from the existing Black Intelligentsia. Jazz and Blues musics were considered problematic. Literary examinations of the sequalae of poverty rather than stories of uplift were controversial. Even if the 1920s were the decade that free verse became more widespread, some of these young poets looked more to Shelley and Keats than Carl Sandburg or Langston Hughes.

From the Dark Tower

Here’s Cullen’s sonnet as it appeared handsomely set in Fire!! It’s also the first poem in the poetry section of this issue, a section titled “Flame From the Dark Tower.”

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Our lead-off poet is one such example. Countee Cullen was not a Modernist poet. Unlike other metrical/rhyming poets like Frost, and sometimes Yeats or Millay, he’s not even Modernist in outlook. While he’s 23 years old when this was published, he writes as if he was looking back to his  last decade to be called the 20s, which would be the 1820s. None the less, “From the Dark Tower”  is an impassioned account of the harms of white supremacy — and it is very well written within that style. If the premiere Afro-American poet Phyllis Wheatley was out to prove that she could write 18th century poetry as well as any white poet, Cullen demonstrates that he could do the same for the 19th century. Sure, there’s the matter that he was writing in the 20th century, and we are reading him in the 21st, but that’s likely a lesser sin now when there’s no fresh battle to be joined over free verse, Jazz rhythms, or Blues speech. It’s not unlikely that we read other older poems written in this poem’s style, and Cullen is in 2023 one of those old poets.

And then there’s this — this huge thing. I was trying to quickly get down an acceptable take of my simple acoustic guitar version of my song-setting of Cullen’s poem from Fire!!  yesterday. Across my country, at the same time, in a city famed for its American music, so significantly Afro-American music, there was a funeral for yet another Black person killed by our official representatives in a manner that seems clearly to be an affront to civilization. Should we, musicians who’ve inherited that tradition, merely “beguile…with mellow flute?” To sing Cullen’s line, couched in careful rhyme and meter: “We were not made eternally to weep” — can I wish that situation would seem old-fashioned, out of date, a curiosity of the obsolete?

To hear that performance you can use a player gadget that should appear below. No player? This highlighted link is an alternative.

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*Not to cast shade on this worthy endeavor, but Black History Month has been in my observation largely an Afro-American  History month. There’s nothing inherently wrong with concentrating on that subject. I’ll just acknowledge that in the past century or so there’s been a counter-colonialist reassessment of African continental history — and while it has not risen to the level that this American has been aware of it (beyond some UK and other former English-speaking Commonwealth country reading) there may be worthwhile study and information coming forth on the wider African story.

**Because reusing, adapting, even performing, work not in the public domain is a legal gray area, this project shies away from using more modern work. Luckily as this nearing 7-year-long project has continued, more and more “Harlem Renaissance” work has entered PD status. Specific thanks is due to the Yale University Library for making Fire!!  available digitally.

In Memory of Colonel Charles Young

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

A new month, and I hope to have some new pieces here with a focus on February and Black History Month. It’s also a new year, and there are now some new books and works available in the public domain that I can freely adapt for use here.

I found today’s piece “In Memory of Colonel Charles Young”  while reading one of those newly PD books, Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro, An Interpretation published in 1925. This book was something of the premier book-length publication of what became known as The Harlem Renaissance. Unlike James Weldon Johnson’s anthology of just three years prior, The Book of American Negro Poetry, Locke’s book was a collection containing only the work of living writers, and with a particular focus on younger Afro-Americans who were just then coming to the fore. And so it is that after an introductory essay on “Negro Youth Speaks*”  by Locke that I began to read his selection of youth of his day with the first poet in the alphabetical section: Countee Cullen.

illustration of Countee Cullen by Winold Reiss from The New Negro

Locke’s The New Negro is a beautiful book too, with striking woodcuts and illustrations of the authors.

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Let me once more demonstrate the gaps in my scholarly education. I knew Cullen’s name and little else about him. The various short literary assessments I’ve since read to get some quick handle on him concentrate on his eventual estrangement from the development of Afro-American literature and poetic Modernism in general because his verse used 19th century Romantic poets as its models, and as his career progressed there was a feeling that his youthful promise didn’t sufficiently develop. After the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance passed by, Cullen in the 1940s was teaching middle school. One of the young teenagers he taught? A kid named James Baldwin.

So, what stood out as I came upon “In Memory of Colonel Charles Young”  in Locke’s anthology? Well, there’s a mystery there for one thing. The poem read alone on the page seems to evoke something, but I suspect few readers will grasp what it means. Here’s a link to the text of Cullen’s poem. For me, and probably for you, that mystery starts right-off with the title. You may well ask: who the hell is Colonel Charles Young? Why would this young Afro-American be writing a poem about him? I need to tell you a story.

It starts in 1865. The American Civil War is raging. An enslaved Black man in Kentucky, Gabriel Young, escapes to Ohio leaving his wife and one-year-old son in order to join the Union army. After the end of the war, Gabriel uses his veterans’ pension to buy some land and a house for his young family. That toddler grows up to be a very sharp student, graduating first in his class in his high school. Perhaps thinking of the way his father had used military service to advance himself, that young man, Charles Young, decides to enter the U. S. Army military academy at West Point in 1884.

To say the least this was not an established path for an Afro-American in 1884. Indeed, Charles Young was only the second Afro-American to attend, and the first had entered only the year before and would become Young’s roommate at the school. The Academy had a well-established culture of hazing and a peer-discipline system based on fellow students issuing demerits on their own initiative. These pioneering Black students where therefore subject to every racist and discriminatory action the white student body could generate, and it was all so-easily cloakable as “tradition.”

Young persevered through all that, graduated, and was given his commission as a second lieutenant. He began his career in the still segregated U. S. Army in Nebraska and Utah with an Afro-American cavalry regiment. In 1894 he was assigned to Wilberforce College back in Ohio where he established the military services department at that historically Black college. He left there to serve during the Spanish American War of 1898, commanding a Black regiment in that conflict. After that war his military career took him to various assignments, including a time as the Superintendent of Sequoia National Park, various overseas assignments with Military Intelligence working at American embassies, and even a gun battle during the Pancho Villa expedition into Mexico in 1916. By this point he had risen to become the Colonel Charles Young of Cullen’s poem’s title.

And this brought upon the most remarkable event of his career as the United States entered WWI the following year. As the U.S. mobilized rapidly to enter the war, a veteran officer with war and foreign experience like Young should have been a prime resource. A white officer with a similar resume would have been rapidly promoted to general and put in charge of one of the regiments of the newly created expeditionary force. But this situation pointed out a problem with a segregated Army: there was no way to do that without making an Afro-American the out-ranking commander of some white soldiers. If there’s one thing white supremacists can’t account for it’s that, just maybe, there might be some Black folks with every demonstrated reason to out-rank them. Drives them nuts.

The Army decided to “solve” this problem by pulling Young from active duty, declaring him unfit for the war due to high blood pressure. Young attempted to refute that claim by riding on horseback from Wilberforce college in Ohio to Washington D. C., but less than a week after he arrived, the Armistice was signed to end WWI.

Charles Young at Fort Des Moines

Colonel Charles Young at Fort Des Moines in Iowa, which was a leading training center for Black troops during WWI.

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Young was returned to active duty however, and he died in 1921 while serving overseas with Military Intelligence in Nigeria. He was buried with military honors at Arlington cemetery, and thus we have the grave that Cullen would use as the scene for his poem.

So now that you know this as you read the text of this poem, or hear Cullen’s references to Young’s career in my performance, you should have a sense of its full import, one that should inform you as we celebrate Black History Month. Charles Young gave his full measure of service to America even if America gave him back something less than that. This is an example of what history is about. You may feel anger, puzzlement, gratitude, regret, or admiration at Young’s life. It might be most appropriate to feel all of those things. One task for poets and singers, from Homer to Countee Cullen, and onto you or me, is to be the trees with tongues to tell that Cullen ends his poem with.

The player gadget to hear my performance of Countee Cullen’s “In Memory of Colonel Charles Young”  is below. If you don’t see a player to click on, you can also click on this highlighted hyperlink to play the performance.

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*There’s nothing untoward about that categorization. Odd as it seems to think of these men and women who I think of as of my grandparents’ generation as ‘youth,”  Countee Cullen was just 22 in 1925, the exact same age as our recent Inaugural poet Amanda Gorman is today.