not, in this instance, adept in the use of black diction, but the content of the poem
reveals her attitude toward the limited possibilities available to black adults in the
United States:
Ain’t you quit dis laffin’ yet?
Don’ you know de sun’s done set?
Wan’ me kiss dis li’l han’?
Well, well, laf de w’ile you can,
You won’ laf w’en you’se a man,
Dere! Dere! Sleep! Sleep!
Grimk?’s fiction is more stark in portraying the horror, the accents, and the future
of black children. An infant is smothered in "The Closing Door," and in
"Goldie" and "Blackness,’" an unborn child is cut from the womb of a
lynched woman, revealing the full horror of African-American life in the United States.
Grimk? wrote a few poems presenting her overall world view and background philosophy.
Among these are "Life [(1)]" and "The Puppet-Player." In "Life
[(1)]," for example, human beings are out of control of the destiny of their lives
and overwhelmed by the "Ocean, boundless, infinite" of life:
Thou ne’er hast known nor dead nor living
One single braggart man as master, . . .
And some are lost on rocks relentless;
And some are drowned mid storms tremendous, . . .
The waters close again impenetrably:–
Each one must make his way alone—
And
this is Life!
"The Puppet-Player" is even more pessimistic and ascribes conscious and evil
intention to the power that controls the world:
Sometimes it seems as though some puppet-player
A clench?d claw cupping a craggy chin,
Sits just beyond the border of our seeing,
Twitching the strings with slow, sardonic grin.
Other poems directly examine the value of life for the narrator. "Epitaph on a
Living Woman" describes the annihilation of emotion and joy for the speaker:
"There were tiny flames in her eyes,/ Her mouth was a flame,/ And her
flesh……………………….. / Now she is ashes." "Life [(2)]" is
Grimk?’s only acknowledgment in verse that the narrator’s life, in spite of its grim
sadness, has at least been more dynamic than other people’s:
What though I die mid racking pain,
And heart seared through and through by grief,
I still rejoice for I, at least, have lived.
By contrast, a rare poetic encounter with hope and joy is found in "A Mood":
Up mocking, teasing, little, hill;
Past dancing, glancing, little, rills,
And up or down to left or right
The same compelling, wild, delight!
"The Visitor" is Grimke’s only poem in which the narrator repudiates rather
than longs for death:
I beg you come not near!
See! Though I am so proud
I’ll fall upon my knees,
And beg, and pray, of you
To spare this little soul!
Some of Grimk?’s poems use such forms as the sonnet, the triolet, and the roundel.
Sonnets are particularly solemn forms for Grimk?, who uses them to commemorate the life
of the philanthropist Mary Porter Tileston Hemenway in "Two Sonnets to Mrs.
Hemenway," and to represent stern authoritarian sentiments about God in "As We
Have Sowed":
I
As we have sowed so shall we also reap;
And it were sweet indeed if blossoms fair
Grow from the seeds to scent the sunlit air,
But oh! How sad if weeds that hide and creep
Grow in their stead to prick and sting our feet.
Too soon we’ll meet the Master on our path,
And in His deep sad eyes we’ll feel the wrath
Of justice or the thrill of praises sweet.
I do but pray within this humble breast,
That little flowers may blossom on my way,
But yet so pure they change the night to day,
I beg that one more fair than all the rest
So please the Master that with glad surprise
He proudly plucks it, smiling in my eyes.
II
As we have sowed so shall we also reap:–
How sweet if by our path the blossoms fair
Grow from the seeds to scent the sunlit air;
But Oh! How sad if weeds that hide and creep
Grow in their stead to prick and sting our feet.
We know not when the Master passing by
May pause, nor when from out his deep sad eye
May leap the flame of wrath or praises sweet
The sweetest flowers are those not proudly drest,
But little ones that brighten all the way,
They are so pure and white. For me I pray
That one white flower more pure than all the rest
May burst in blossom ‘neath the Master’s eyes,
That only He may know the sacrifice.
In the first of these sonnets, the Master plucks the narrator’s most beautiful flower,
and in the second the narrator’s one white flower bursts into bloom as an expression of
her sacrifice. The stern taskmaster in the poem is surely an extension of Grimk?’s own
father, who often chastised her verbally for her inadequacies and demanded that she
fulfill all the restraining public roles that were expected of an educated middle-class
African-American woman of her time.
"A Triolet," on the other hand, with its repeated line "Molly raised shy
eyes to me," is an expression of joy in lesbian affection:
Molly raised shy eyes to me,
On an April day;
Close we stood beneath a tree,
Molly raised shy eyes to me,
Shining sweet and wistfully,
Wet and yet quite gay;
Molly raised shy eyes to me,
On an April day.
The rounded "Vigil" inhabits the intersection between hope and despair. The
narrator repeatedly insists that her departed loved one will return—"You will
come back"—but these words are surrounded by such a strong hint of impending
hopelessness—"But if it will be bright or black"—that the act of hope
appears to be merely the subterfuge of holding back despair:
You will comeback, sometime, somehow;
But if it will be bright or black
I cannot tell; I only know
You
will come back.
Does not the spring with fragrant pack
Return unto the orchard bough?
Do not the birds retrace their track?
All things return. Some day the glow
Of quick’ning dreams will pierce your lack;
And when you know I wait as now
You
will come back.
For the most part, Grimk? uses the poetic rhythms and styles characteristics of
Anglo-American poetry as a whole. The African-American distinctiveness of her work is most
visible in content and plot rather than in style. In those works dealing directly with the
problem of being black in the United States, she attempts to tear down the master’s
house by using the master’s tools. That is, she calls on the moral conscience of
white Americans to correct and improve their relationship with their black fellow
citizens. This mode of expression is particularly evident in her play Rachel. In
fact, in an essay about the play, Grimk? declared that Rachel had been written to
educate whites and to correct their attitudes about lynching and its effects on African
Americans.
Variously called The Pervert, The Daughter, and Blessed Are the Barren
before receiving the title Rachel, the play is about a young African-American woman
who prefers to forego both marriage and motherhood so as not to provide whites with more
black people to destroy through lynching and other racial atrocities. Indeed, the play may
be said to encourage a for of self-genocide of African-American people. Although Grimk?
attempts to justify this attitude in terms of the cruelties that African Americans are
forced to endure in the United States, it is probable that in this plot she is using a
psychic energy that repudiates heterosexuality on a personal level to accentuate her
passion for annihilating that marital and familial expectations in African-American
culture. Her denial of the possibility and hopefulness of heterosexual union appears more
explicitly in "The Laughing Hand," a short story that does not have
African-American characters. In this story, a young woman is forced to break her
engagement to her fianc? because he has contracted cancer and has suffered a disfiguring
and silencing operation in which his tongue is cut out. This castration of language is
more that an expression of the impossibility of heterosexual union; it may also comment on
Grimk?’s closeted sexuality. Unendurable marriage is also the subject of the short
story "The Drudge," whose white characters are of a lower economic class than
those in "The Laughing Hand." Here a beaten, oppressed wife manages to get some
control over her husband by refusing to accommodate herself to his adultery.
Grimk? is essentially appalled at her incapacity to have a lover in this world. And
she is appalled at the restricted world that the United States allows for its
African-American citizens. Her inner astonishment at her failure to find sexual and
romantic companionship, and her outer astonishment at finding herself in a world that
denigrates her value because she is a black woman, combine to give terrifying but
effective power to stories like "The Closing Door," "Goldie,"
"Blackness," and "Black Is, As Black Does," all of which, like Rachel,
take lynching as their theme. Two of the stories, "The Closing Door," and
"Goldie," were published in the Birth Control Review to encourage black
women not to have children.
Although Grimk?’s consciousness of African-American culture is restricted primarily to
plot, one large exception to this rule appears in "Jettisoned," a story written
almost entirely in African-American English. It is probably not accidental that this short
story, which adopts African-American style more overtly than do her other works, is the
only one with an optimistic ending, though to get to that point her characters go through
hell with problems of poverty, threatened suicide, and the pain of having relatives who
pass for white.
Grimk?’s most radical works on African-American culture, including the short stories
on lynching and the poems "Trees," "Surrender," "The Black
Finger," "Tenebris," and "Beware Lest He Awakes," all lean toward
a refusal to accept the given conditions of being black in the United States. But probably
because of publication restrictions, these works often stop just short of demanding
unapologetic revenge for acts against African-American people.
The poem "Beware Lest He Awakes," for example, has three versions, and
Grimk?’s changes, when compared with the published text, reveal that she may have been
coerced into making revisions in order for the poem to be published. The original
statement of the poem, that African Americans would eventually wake up and take revenge
for the actions against them, was changed from the definite statement, "Beware when
he awakes" to the more suppositional, "Beware lest he awakes." Thus the
final version leads us to believe that the African-American people may or may not wake up
and take revenge. Further, the line "Beware lest he awakes," which in the
earlier versions ("Beware when he awakes") ends the two stanzas and thereby
gains greater importance than any other portion of the poem, is–in the published
version–buried in the middle of the first verse. Though it still ends the poem, the
line’s message has nevertheless been diffused.
Similarly, the short story "Goldie," which is a revised version of
"Blackness," ends with the statement that the African-American man who takes
revenge for lynching is himself lynched as well: "And Victor Forrest died, as the
other two had died, upon another tree." "Blackness," however, implies that
the vindicator escapes safely: "I have reason, to believe, he escaped. But I have
never heard from him or seen him since." Although this unnamed vindicator must leave
his position in the North to escape the retribution of Southerners who come after him, we
are given to understand that, with the money he has saved and with support from friends,
he is able to live a life in another country or community and is not hunted to the death.
Evidently, the revised story, "Goldie," was more palatable to, and therefore
deemed more publishable by, the Birth Control Review whose subscribers were more
likely to accept fiction that encouraged African Americans not to have children in order
to avoid having them lynched. The same subscribers, who were primarily white, would
probably not have been willing to read about African Americans successfully taking revenge
for lynching. In addition, Grimk? leaves the successful revenge taker unnamed, perhaps to
imply that he is still at large, still among us, and therefore his name must be protected.
Finally, Angelina Weld Grimk? places herself within the tradition of African-American
writers who are interested in identifying what is distinctive about African-American
literary works. In her "Remarks on Literature," she describes the coming black
literary genius in these words:
In preparation of the coming of this black genius I believe there must be among us a
stronger and a growing feeling of race consciousness, race solidarity, race pride. It
means a training of the youth of to-day and of to-morrow in the recognition of the
sanctity of all these things. Then perhaps, some day, somewhere black youth, will come
forth, see us clearly, intelligently, sympathetically, and will write about us and then
come into his own.
Grimk? herself is a participant in this coming genius, which is the forerunner of
contemporary and emerging African-American artistic excellence. The oppressive stance of
having to assume a white male narrative persona in her poetry in order to accommodate the
"freedom" to describe sexual interest and encounters with other women gave
Grimk? profound information about the strategies of being closeted through concerns of
race, gender, and sexual preference. The two major themes of her writings, the desire for
romantic and sexual companionship and the desire for social and political equity for
African Americans, give her work the import, if not the discrete form, of the blues–that
musical and poetic cultural form which is the repository for African-American heroic
anguish over love, lost love, and political disenfranchisement. The blues, whether in form
or content or both, may indeed be characterized as the African-American epic song, and
Grimk? sings that song as an artist creating through the triple cultural blows of being
black, female, and lesbian.
Much of her work has been rigorously ignored. Most of the poems were too lesbian and
too sentimental for audiences during and after the Harlem Renaissance. Her fiction, on the
other hand, was too stark in its unflinching descriptions of the violence of lynching.
Indeed, the directness of her scenes of violence were unknown in African-American
fictional literature prior to the work of Richard Wright. Further, her short stories with
their promulgation of racial self-genocide have been too politically and emotionally
threatening for African Americans and others to receive and accept. As Toni Morrison
writes in the conclusion to Beloved, a more recent tale of infanticide, "This
is not a story to pass on." Thus it is a painful gift to participate in the
self-investigation this work has required of me; it is an honor finally to assist in
passing on this story that was not to be passed on.
From Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimk?. Ed. Carolivia Herron. Copyright ?
1991 by Oxford University Press.