Angelina Weld Grimke Essay, Research Paper
The Introduction to The
Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimk?
by Carolivia Herron
The Angelina Weld Grimk? Collection at the Moorland-Spingarn
Research Center of Howard University includes a note in Grimk?’s hand that lists the
titles of a projected collection of poetry. The list begins with the poem "An
Epitaph," which depicts the futility and despair of the narrator who longs first for
joy, then for love, and is answered with. pain and death. The poem is presented in three
stanzas, the last of which unites the themes of death, lost love, repudiation of life, and
despair. The typescript of the poem has many changes of pronoun–from I to she and
from me to her–suggesting that Grimk? debated between the closeness of the
perspective and the participation of the narrator with the subject of the poem. The last
stanza reads:
And now I lie quite straight, and still and plain;
Above my heart the brazen poppies flare,
But I know naught of love, or joy, or pain;–
Nor
care, nor care.
Somewhat illegible, the list of poems moves through titles suggesting happiness and
familial comfort ("Lullaby") and ends with "To Joseph Lee," an
obituary poem that was published by the Boston Evening Transcript (11 Nov. 1908)
and that commemorates an African-American caterer and civil rights advocate in Boston.
Grimk?’s projected volume thus moves from inner death to outer death, from the
metaphorical death and repudiation of the love of one who loves too much to the literal
death of a publicly mourned figure in a communal occasion of grief. The first poem
not only records the failure of love for the narrator, but also masks the fact that the
love Grimk? preferred to receive, the love she missed, was probably that of a woman in a
lesbian relationship. Critics such as Gloria Hull in Color, Sex, and Poetry, and
Barbara Christian in Black Feminist Criticism, have discussed the hidden lesbian
life of Angelina Weld Grimk? as it affects her poetry. A large percentage of the Grimk?
poetic canon is indeed a record of her attempt to love and be loved by another woman. Many
of these poems, such as "Another Heart Is Broken," "Naughty Nan," and
"Caprichosa," are here published for the first time.
"To Joseph Lee," however, is an example of a small percentage of Grimk?’s
poetry that was written for occasions of celebration or commemoration. Among these are
"To My Father Upon His Fifty-Fifth Birthday," "Two Pilgrims Hand in
Hand," and "To the Dunbar High School." In addition, Grimk? wrote and
published several poems, such as "Tenebris" and "Beware Lest He
Awakes," that portray the African-American experience of racial pride, as well as
reaction against and revenge for lynching and other racist acts within the United States.
Although it is an extremely powerful theme when presented in her poetry, the subject of
lynching is minor in terms of the number of poetic references to it. We may say that the
three major themes in Grimk?’s poetry are lost love, commemoration of famous people, and
African-American racial concerns, but we must acknowledge that racial concerns constitute
less than five percent of her total output of poetry.
Most of the poems speak of love, death, and grief through narrative personae that are
not explicitly identified with the interests of African Americans and that are often quite
frankly white and male. "My Shrine," for example, is narrated by a standard
nineteenth-century (male) persona who expresses his idealized love for a woman on a
pedestal.
In contrast, the entire corpus of Grimk?’s fiction, nonfiction, and drama focus almost
exclusively on lynching and racial injustice. These works take on African-American
cultural grief rather than personal grief as their thematic focus, and they express great
outrage over the lynching of African Americans in the South, over the failure of Northern
whites to band together and demand an end to the crimes, and over racial injustice in
general. In one story, "Jettisoned," Grimk? also investigates the repercussions
of passing for white in the African-American community.
Lynching is a particularly affecting theme in Grimk?’s play Rachel (1920). The
play depicts the effects of lynching on the desire to live and the attraction toward
genocide for members of the African-American community, The theme of lynching extends to
her fiction as well, appearing in such stories as "The Closing Door,"
"Goldie," and "Blackness."
Angelina Weld Grimk? was named for her white great aunt, Angelina Grimk? Weld, As a
young woman, Weld, along with her sister, Sarah Grimk?, left South Carolina in the early
nineteenth century to avoid participating directly in the ownership of slaves. The two
sisters settled in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, and became well-known abolitionists and
advocates of women’s rights. Angelina Grimk? eventually married the abolitionist Theodore
Weld. Several years after the Civil War, the two sisters discovered and acknowledged their
mulatto nephews, Archibald and Francis, and accepted them into their home. The young men
were two of the three sons born to Angelina and Sarah’s brother, Henry Grimk?, and his
slave, Nancy Weston. Francis married Charlotte Forten. Archibald married a white woman,
Sarah Stanley, and their only child was Angelina Weld Grimk?.
Angelina was born on February 27, 1880, in Boston and lived most of her life with her
father to whom she was extremely attached emotionally. Soon after Angelina’s birth, her
mother left the Grimk? household. Information concerning Sarah Stanley Grimk? is scant,
but it appears that she was confined in some manner for mental aberration or physical
incapacity. In a letter written to Angelina when she was seven years old, Sarah speaks of
wanting to return to visit her daughter, of hearing her cry out "Mamma" in her
dreams. "I dream about you very often. The other night–I thought–I saw you out in a
large cornfield. . . . Do you ever dream of Mamma?–Some time I shall be able to come to
you in my Shadow Body and really see you. How would you like that? And some
time we will be together again."
In spite of (or because of) Angelina’s great affection for her father, he seems to have
been the source of some restriction and oppression in her own sexual self-consciousness as
a lesbian. It is clear that she decided to forgo the expression of her lesbian desires in
order to please her father, and in her poem written to commemorate his fifty-fifth
birthday she describes what she would have been without him in terms of a great horror and
scandal avoided. Love letters to named and unnamed women appear in Grimk?’s papers as
early as her fourteenth year, and an exchange of letters with Mamie Burrill in 1896, when
Grimk? was sixteen years old, makes definite reference to a prior love affair. Burrill
writes to Grimk?, "Angie, do you love me as you used to?" Grimk?’s draft
letter of response answers:
My own darling Mamie, If you will allow me to be so familiar to call you such. I hope
my darling you will not be offended if your ardent lover calls you such familiar names. .
. . Oh Mamie if you only knew how my heart beats when I think of you and it yearns and
pants to gaze, if only for one second upon your lovely face. If there were any trouble in
this wide and wicked world from which I might shield you how gladly would I do it if it
were even so great a thing as to lay down my life for you. I know you are too young now to
become my wife, but I hope, darling, that in a few years you will come to me and be my
love, my wife! How my brain whirls how my pulse leaps with joy and madness when I think of
these two words, "my wife."
Grimk? was educated at Fairmont Grammar School in Hyde Park (1887-1894), Carleton
Academy in Northfield, Minnesota (1895), Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, and
Girls’ Latin School in Boston, and in 1902 she took a degree in physical education at the
Boston Normal School of Gymnastics (now Wellesley College). That same year she began her
teaching career as a gym teacher at Armstrong Manual Training School in Washington, D.C.,
but in 1907, after much tension with the principal of Armstrong, she transferred to the
more academic M Street High School (later Dunbar High School) where she taught English.
Grimk? was always more academic than vocational in her interest, and there is some
question as to why she took a degree in physical education in the first place. Perhaps as
a closeted lesbian she found physical education attractive because it provided sublimated
contact with women.
Grimk? retired from teaching and moved to New York City in 1926 where she died on June
10, 1958. Most of her works were written between 1900 and 1920. The drama Rachel is
her only published book prior to this volume, but she published some of her poetry,
fiction, and nonfiction (reviews and biographical sketches) in many prominent journals,
particularly Opportunity, and in newspapers and many anthologies.
The present volume includes approximately one-third of the poetry, one-half of the
short stories, and a small sampling of the nonfiction found in Grimk?’s papers at the
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. A republication of Rachel is also included.
Almost all of the nonfiction is still in holograph, as are perhaps another two hundred
poems, the incomplete play Mara (which also centers on lynching), and many
unfinished short stories.
When focusing on death, women as objects of desire, lost love, motherhood, and
children, the emotive import of Grimk?’s poems is overwhelmingly that of despair. In the
poem "The Garden Seat," for example, the narrator recalls a love tryst with a
woman who has died:
And then I stole up all noiseless and unseen,
And kissed those eyes so dreamy and so sad–I
Ah God! if I might once again see all
Thy soul leap in their depths as then
So hungry with long waiting and so true,
I clasp thee close within my yearning arms
I kiss thine eyes, thy lips, thy silky hair,
I felt thy soft arms twining round my neck,
Thy bashful, maiden, kisses on my cheek
My whole heart leaping ‘neath such wondrous joy–
And then the vision faded and was gone
And I was in my lonely, darkened, room,
The old-time longing surging in my breast,
The old-time agony within my soul
As fresh, as new, as when I kissed thy lips
So cold, with frenzy begging thee to speak,
Believing not that thou wert lying dead.
Grimk?’s poem "Death" examines death abstractly as a philosophy of an
afterlife and is more hopeful than her poems that describe the death of loved ones.
When the lights blur out for thee and me,
And the black comes in with a sweep,
I wonder–will it mean life again,
Or sleep?
Such philosophical investigations of death removed from expressions of lost love are
rare, however. In "Where Phillis Sleeps" Grimk? writes, "Dear one, I lie
upon thy grave, my tears like rain are falling," and in "One Little Year,"
she writes, "Quite hopeless, now, my lips refuse to pray–/ For thou art dead."
The poem "Thou Art So Far, So Far" is one of many that depict lost love due not
to death but to the unapproachable nature of the beloved:
Thou art to me a lone, white, star,
That I may gaze on from afar;
But I may never, never, press
My lips on thine in mute caress, . . .
The poem "My Shrine" is Grimk?’s prime example of poems that depict women as
ideal objects of desire:
The idol that I placed
Within this modest shrine
Was but a maiden small,
But yet divinely pure,
And there I humbly knelt
Before those calm, grey, eyes, . . .
In this poem Grimk? takes the persona of a male,"Behold the one he loves!,"
presumably to divert attention from the lesbian implications of the poem.
"Caprichosa" emphasizes a sexual rather than an ideal interest in a woman, and
the narrator does not take on a male persona:
Little lady coyly shy
With deep shadows in each eye
Cast by lashes soft and long,
Tender lips just bowed for song,
And I oft have dreamed the bliss
Of the nectar in one kiss. . . .
Grimk?’s most significant statement about motherhood is unconsciously embedded within
her poem "To My Father Upon His Fifty-Fifth Birthday." While the poem purports
to praise her father’s help and strength, it actually focuses on diminutive images of him
as an infant incapable of sustaining himself:
. . . This day on which a new-made mother watched
You lying in her arms, your little head against
Her breast; and as you lay there, tiny wriggling mass, . . .
The description of her father as a "tiny wriggling mass" surely is not
calculated to glorify his strength and has uncomfortable phallic implications as well. She
goes on to describe her grandmother’s new experience of motherhood in nursing her father.
And the exclamation point is given not to a celebration of the child (her father), but to
a glorification of the mother (her grandmother): "Ah, gift of Motherhood!" The
poem then elaborates on the virtues of women and mothering. It is here that Grimk? refers
to what her life would have been like without her father (and presumably without having to
restrict her lesbian inclinations):
. . . What were I, father dear, without thy help?
I turn my eyes away before the figure and
Rejoice; and yet your loving hands have moulded me; . . .
Through her father’s assistance, Grimk? repudiates her own self-molding and takes her
dependent imprint from him. Finally, after depicting the care he has given her through her
life, Grimk? gives her father her highest compliment, "You have been a gentle mother
to your child." That is, the best she can say about her father is that he is almost a
mother.
This poem gives the impression that Grimk? and her father had no major disagreements
in their lives, but that is belied by the opening passage in Grimk?’s first diary,
started in July 1903 to record a lost love involvement with an unnamed person. "My
father and I have been having a hard time tonight over you, dear. I guess he is right and
I shall try to give you up." Earlier in this entry, she writes, "I suppose I was
a fool and oh how I wish that I had a mother!" Grimk?’s inability to portray her
father as an adult male in her poem celebrating his fatherhood reveals her ambivalent
feelings toward this man whose approval she could not live without but whose moralistic
dicta appear to have greatly restricted her own sexual expression.
The theme of children is almost as significant as the theme of mothers in Grimk?’s
poetry and is usually linked, as in "The Black Child," with portrayals of the
ways in which African Americans suffer oppression at the hands of whites. "The Black
Child" uses the image of a black baby playing in sunlight and then in shadow as an
affecting extended metaphor of black life and external oppression. The poem opens:
I saw a little black child
Sitting in a gold circle of sunlight;
And in his little black hand,
He had a little black stick,
And he was beating, beating,
With his little black stick,
The sunlight all about him,
And laughing, laughing.
By elaborating on this scene through the passage of the day, and by refusing to explain
or interpret it, Grimk? increases the poignancy for the reader who alternately sees the
poem as a metaphor of black life or as a realistic image of a black child playing. The
image is so well formed, and the impulse to delight in it so strong, that the reader
almost hopes the poem is simple realistic truth to enjoy and appreciate without
confronting the psychic and sociological shadow that alters and subverts the lives of
black children.
And he sat in the gold circle of sunlight
Kicking with his little feet,
And wriggling his little toes,
And beating, beating
The sunlight all about him, . . . .
The shadow eases upon the black child slowly until at the end of the poem he is beating
not the light but the shadows. In another poem about a black child, "Lullaby
[(2)]," Grimk? includes her only attempt to write black diction in verse. She is