SOURCE: "The Search for a Language, 1746-1923," in Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation, Louisiana State University Press, 1974, pp. 1-36.

[In the following excerpt, Jackson and Rubin recount Johnson 's influential creation of a true black voice in American poetry.]

When James Weldon Johnson, putting together his first book of verse in 1917, entitled the final section "Croons and Jingles," he was making an ironic comment not only upon his own early work but upon the situation of the American poet who was black. For by croons and jingles, Johnson was referring to the modes of poetry in which the black poet was expected to write. He could produce sentimental songs like Johnson's own "Sence You Went Away":

Seems lak to me dat ev'ything is wrong,
Seems lak to me dat day's jes twice es long,
Seems lak to me de bird's forgot his song,
Sence you went away.

Or he could write quaintly comic lyrics like Paul Laurence Dunbar's lines in "When De Co'n Pone's Hot":

He could, in other words, write what in the case of the black writer was indeed a loaded term: local color literature.…

As Dunbar's friend James Weldon Johnson reported, "Often he said to me: 'I've got to write dialect poetry; it's the only way I can get them to listen to me.'" In so saying, Dunbar spoke for all his fellow black writers. Anyone who would seek to understand the poetry and prose of black Americans must keep in mind one central truth: that almost every line they wrote, until comparatively recently, was written to be read by an audience not of other blacks, but of white people.…

What was … to be achieved, … was the discovery of a language whereby the black poet could render the particular subtleties and urgencies of black American life. James Weldon Johnson, who was almost two years older than Dunbar, … composed his earlier poetry very much in the two modes that Dunbar used: dialect and literary English. Like Dunbar, Johnson felt the inadequacy of stereotyped dialect very keenly, but he also recognized, without yet knowing what to do about it, the limitations of the ornate literary language of genteel poetry as well. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson was, unlike Dunbar, a highly educated and widely read man. After teaching high school and qualifying for the Florida bar, he collaborated with his brother Rosamond, a talented musician, in writing popular songs and musical comedy lyrics. Johnson's words to such songs as "Under the Bamboo Tree," "Oh, Didn't He Ramble," and "The Congo Love Song" are still popular.

Dissatisfied with his poetry, Johnson knew that something was lacking, not only in his poems but in Dunbar's and those of all other black poets as well. (Apparently Johnson did not see the potentialities in the several free verse poems that W. E. B. DuBois was publishing at this time.) Johnson became intrigued with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: "I was engulfed and submerged by the book, and set floundering again," he recollected many years later in his brilliant autobiography, Along This Way. When Dunbar came to visit Johnson in Jacksonville, he showed him poems he had written after the manner of Whitman. Dunbar "read them through and, looking at me with a queer smile, said, Ί don't like them, and I don't see what you are driving at.'" Taken aback, Johnson got out his copy of Leaves of Grass and read him some of the poems he most admired: "There was, at least," he wrote, "some personal consolation in the fact that his verdict was the same on Whitman himself."

Apparently Johnson acquiesced in Dunbar's verdict, for as late as 1917, when he published his own first book of verse, Fifty Years and Other Poems, he included in it no work that seems especially akin to the poetry of Walt Whitman. That volume did contain his memorable "O Black and Unknown Bards," however, in which, writing in the formal literary English of the day, he achieved an almost classic precision and simplicity of utterance. There was also skillful dialect poetry. But Johnson was still dissatisfied. As he wrote in his introduction to The Book of American Negro Poetry, "Negro dialect poetry had its origin in the minstrel traditions, and a persisting pattern was set. When the individual writer attempted to get away from that pattern, the fixed conventions allowed him only to slip over into a slough of sentimentality. These conventions were not broken for the simple reason that the individual writers wrote chiefly to entertain an outside audience, and in concord with its stereotyped ideas about the Negro."

What was needed was what Johnson discovered while in Kansas City in 1918, when he was engaged in field work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. On a Sunday evening, after having already given four talks to Negro church groups, he heard a famed black evangelist give a sermon:

He was a dark brown man, handsome in his gigantic proportions. I think the presence of a 'distinguished visitor' on the platform disconcerted him a bit, for he started in to preach a formal sermon from a formal text. He was flat. The audience sat apathetic and dozing. He must have realized that he was neither impressing the 'distinguished visitor' nor giving the congregation what it expected; for, suddenly and without any warning for the transition, he slammed the Bible shut, stepped out from behind the pulpit, and began intoning the rambling Negro sermon that begins with the creation of the world, touches various high spots in the trials and tribulations of the Hebrew children, and ends with the Judgment Day. There was an instantaneous change in the preacher and in the congregation. He was free, at ease, and the complete master of himself and his hearers. The congregation responded to him as a willow to the winds. He strode the pulpit up and down, and brought into play the full gamut of a voice that excited my envy. He intoned, he moaned, he pleaded—he blared, he crashed, he thundered. A woman sprang to her feet, uttered a piercing scream, threw her handbag to the pulpit, striking the preacher full in the chest, whirled round several times, and fainted. The congregation reached a state of ecstasy. I was fascinated by this exhibition; moreover, something primordial in me was stirred. Before the preacher finished, I took a slip of paper from my pocket and somewhat surreptitiously jotted down some ideas for my … poem.

Johnson saw now that he had been looking in the wrong place for his idiom. The place to find the diction and pattern of imagery and idiom for a poetry that could embody the experience of black Americans was not in the convention of dialect poetry, for that was not black experience, but a caricature of it written to fulfill the expectations of a white audience. Neither was the literary English of the poetry of idealism a suitable vehicle; its demands, expectations, and vocabulary were alien to the racial idiom. The model must instead be the folk tradition of black America itself, with its own cadences and metaphors. As he declared a few years afterward in his introduction to The Book of American Negro Poetry: "What the colored poet in the United States needs to do is something like what Synge did for the Irish; he needs to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without, such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation. He needs a form that is freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor; a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos, too, of the Negro, but which will also be capable of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations, and allow of the widest range of subjects and the widest scope of treatment."

The poem that Johnson produced as the result of what he discovered that evening in Kansas City was "The Creation," published in The Freeman for December 1, 1920, and later the basis for his book of seven black sermons, God's Trombones (1927). The first three stanzas authoritatively set the mood and tone:

And God stepped out on space
And he looked around and said:
I'm lonely—
I'll make me a world.

As far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything.
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.

Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said: That's good!

In place of the singsong rhymings and the contrived semiliteracy of cotton-field dialect, here was the flowing, pulsating rise and fall of living speech, making its own emphases and intensifications naturally, in terms of the meaning, not as prescribed by an artificial, pre-established pattern of singsong metrics and rhyme. Here indeed was the influence of Walt Whitman, not woodenly imitated but used creatively and freely. Instead of abstract rhetorical platitudes couched in ornate literary English, there was colloquial speech—"I'll make me a world." Colloquial in the true sense, however, because drawn from the actual language of men and women, not the self-conscious cutenesses of dialect. Nor was there any self-imposed limitation on emotion: "Blacker than a hundred midnights / Down in a cypress swamp" was language and metaphor that was at once expansive and natural. The diction, the cadence, the range of feeling permitted a freedom of metaphor and a flexibility of language and imagery that allowed him to express his meaning in a voice that could move from formal intensity to colloquial informality and then back again, without confusion or incongruity:

And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till he shaped it in his own image …

To realize the potentialities and possibilities of the new form that Johnson discovered with "The Creation," one need only compare such a stanza with lines from several of the poems in Fifty Years and Other Poems. Here are the opening lines of "Prayer at Sunrise":

O mighty, powerful, dark-dispelling sun,
Now thou art risen, and thy day begun.
How shrink the shrouding mists before thy face.
As up thou spring'st to thy diurnal race!

The contrived stiffness of diction of this poem, with its ornate literary idiom, its forced imagery and sententious attitudinizing, seems artificial and lifeless by comparison with the far greater force and natural intensity of "The Creation." Contrast "Now thou art risen, and thy day begun" with "Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky"; not only is the metaphor of God lighting the sun as if it were a lantern far more striking than anything in the other line, but the desired sense of power and vastness comes across far more convincingly.

Now compare the lines from "The Creation" to these lines of an early dialect poem by Johnson entitled "A Plantation Bacchanal":

W'en ole Mister Sun gits tiah'd a-hangin'
High up in de sky;
W'en der ain't no thunder and light'nin' a-bangin'
An'de crops done all laid by …

The need to make the idea picturesque and quaint by referring to "ole Mister Sun" who "gets tiah'd" robs it of almost all potentiality for dramatic intensity and wonder. The fact that the speaker must express himself in folksy images designed to exhibit his unlettered, primitive status thoroughly dissipates any chance for serious commentary. The best that can be managed with such a speaker is homely philosophizing. By contrast, the language of "The Creation" can permit simple and authentic colloquial diction—"the most far corner of the night," "Like a mammy bending over her baby"—while also allowing for great intensity—"Who flung the stars," "Toiling over a lump of clay."

With "The Creation," Johnson had indeed achieved a momentous breakthrough in the search of the black American poet for his proper language. Here at last was a way to deal with the unique particularities of black experience, while at the same time achieving the dignity and intensity of imaginative literary utterance. In his own way, Johnson had pointed the way toward a discovery for the black poet fully as useful as that which the Chicago poets and, more importantly, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were making for American poetry in general: he had found the idiom for writing important poetry about the circumstances of twentieth-century American life.

Though Johnson went on, in the middle and late 1920s, to add six more sermons to "The Creation" and complete the book he entitled God's Trombones, it cannot be said that he himself chose to follow up and develop the implications of what he had been first to discover. Johnson was never a full-time poet; he wrote verse only intermittently, and by far the greater part of his energies was devoted to his work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Feeling as he clearly did that his formidable intellect and irrepressible energies could best be utilized in leading the legal and moral fight to ameliorate conditions under which the vast majority of black Americans were forced to live as second-class citizens in a nation in which Jim Crow laws still went almost unchallenged, Johnson had little time for the writing of verse. Save for the six-part poem he entitled "St. Peter Relates an Incident," and a few other shorter poems, he produced no additional poetry. It would be left to other and younger men and women to create the poetry of twentieth-century black America. But it was Johnson, more than any other man, who opened the path, and the achievement that followed was in an important sense possible because of what he first demonstrated. The leading poets who came afterward—Toomer, Hughes, Toison, Hayden, Brooks, Le-Roi Jones—can truly be said to have followed along James Weldon Johnson's way.