Categories
1920s African American Poem War

In Flanders Fields: An Echo

In Flanders Fields: An Echo[1]

By Orlando C. W. Taylor
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
Willard Metcalf. “Poppy Field (Landscape at Giverny).” Oil on canvas, 1886, Collection of J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox. Public domain.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow[2] 
Between the crosses, row on row 
     That mark the graves where black men lie;[3] 
     Their souls, long wafted to the sky, 
Look down upon the earth below.
 
E’en while we mourn their loss, we see 
Their brothers hanged upon a tree 
     By whom they saved. Their pain fraught cry[4] 
     Mounts up to those who stand on high, 
And watch the scarlet flowered sea 
     In Flanders fields. 

In Flanders Fields they shall not sleep!
No! For their murdered kin they keep
     A vigil through the day and night, 
     'Til God Himself shall snatch from sight 
Such scenes as make our heroes weep 
     In Flanders fields. 
TAYLOR, ORLANDO C. W. “IN FLANDERS FIELDS,” IN THE DUNBAR SPEAKER AND ENTERTAINER, ED. ALICE MOORE DUNBAR-NELSON, 144. NAPERVILLE, ILL: J. L. NICHOLS & CO., 1920.

[1] Taylor’s poem references “In Flanders Fields,” a famous memorial poem written by Canadian officer John McCrae during the First World War. McCrae’s original poem helped establish the red poppy as the flower of remembrance.

[2] Flanders Fields, which spans across sections of Belgium and France, was the site of several World War I battlefields.

[3] According to the U.S. Department of Defense, more than 380,000 African-Americans served in the Army during World War I.

[Unidentified African American soldier in uniform with First Army shoulder insignia and campaign hat in front of painted backdrop]. Gelatin silver print, 1918-1919, Library of Congress. Public domain.

[4] During 1882 and 1968, 4,743 people were lynched in the U.S. Of them, 3,446 were African Americans.

Contexts

The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer‘s dedication reads: “To the children of the race which is herein celebrated, this book is dedicated, that they may read and learn about their own people.” In the foreword, Leslie Pinckney Hill, an African American educator, writer, and community leader who graduated from Harvard University in 1903, criticizes the one-sidedness of prevailing reading courses: “In vain may you search their pages—those pages upon which all our reading has been founded—for anything other than a patronizing view of that vast, brooding world of colored folk—yellow, black and brown—which comprises by far the largest portion of the human family.” Hill further writes that Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s book seeks to prove “that the white man has no fine quality, either by heart or mind, which is not shared by his black brother.”

Think of reading this poem out loud. Elocution (or public speaking) was a highly valued and widely taught skill in nineteenth-century America. In her introduction to the Dunbar Speaker, Alice Dunbar-Nelson offers some advice: “Before you begin to learn anything to recite, first read it over and find out if it fires you with enthusiasm. If it does, make it a part of yourself, put yourself in the place of the speaker whose words you are memorizing, get on fire with the thought, the sentiment, the emotion-then throw yourself into it in your endeavor to make others feel as you feel, see as you see, understand what you understand. Lose yourself, free yourself from physical consciousness, forget that those in front of you are a part of an audience, think of them as some persons whom you must make understand what is thrilling you–and you will be a great speaker.”

Resources for Further Study

Categories
1890s African American Book chapter Monologue War

Dessalines

Dessalines

By William Edgar Easton
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
Cornelis Saftleven. A Lion Snarling. Black and red chalk and black and brown washes, 1625-1633, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Public domain.

Ay, I am here—Monsieur Dessalines, the freedman; made so by his own hand and proclamation. If it suit thy quaking spirit better I am thy master’s escaped slave. Take me if thou darest! Hiding place my castle is on the mountains, where dwells no will save mine, and no slave dare breathe the air and refuse to be a man.

Good Dessalines, you say? Good slave! I remember when first I was sent to the master to receive from his lips my first instruction in the art of making self, in all things, subservient to the master’s will. On entrance to his presence, in meek and humble tones I showed my aptitude for the first lesson in slavish servitude. This must have pleased the good man, for next he tried to instill in me that God expected of the slave obedience to the master’s will. From sundry books he had at hand he read to me; and all he read impressed me with the thought that the gods from the beginning had ordained one race to serve, the other to rule. My people were of the race to serve; his people of the race to rule. Desiring to see how far this mockery went I asked to be taught a prayer whereby I could free my soul from guilt of insolence and hatred to the whites. He directed me to say a prayer, which after him I repeated, and called on all the saints and angels of his faith to witness I was an obdurate, worthless sinner. Again did he seek to impress me with the thought I must learn to love my masters. Then threw I the mask aside.[1] I told him I hated the masters and their gods! I told him the African’s gods taught revenge for wrongs, hatred for hatred, and death for death. On this he threatened me with chastisement, torment and the church’s most fruitful curses. He dared to call me a pagan dog! Dost know what then I did? I plucked him by his unholy beard, threw him to the ground and spurned him as I would some snarling, fangless cur.

God have mercy on me? Thou, too, art a doler out of superstitious cant—an humble worshipper of thy master’s household gods. I have none, I know none, and owe allegiance only to my kind. A race enslaved ’tis true, but not all of us are only fit to be in spirit as thy master hath made thee. Teach the slave if he disobey he receives the lash. ‘Tis is reason, for thy corporal frame is captive; but to command the mind to worship at an altar where the sacrifice of liberty and manhood occur each day is as tyrannical as useless. Minds are not made captive with slavery chains, nor are men’s souls made for barter and trade.

What has made me master here? What will make ye masters here? Look upon us! I am as black as the shadows of night, with muscles of iron and a will that was never enslaved! What has he that I have not save the arrogance of the accursed Caucasian blood? What have these Franks that we are their household chattels–that we are their beasts? They suffer from the heat more than we, their sight is less keen, the evening dews hasten them to their graves and the noonday’s sun finds them under cover. The very fibres[2] of their frames are weak and puny, and, as the gods allotted labor for the part of man, they must depend on us to carry out the law. What fetich[3] have they that sustains their power to rule and ours to serve? We are ten to one their number now in Haiti—perhaps an hundred it may be. Then is it the strong who rules, or is it the natural sequence of our own inward weakness? Have ye mothers, sisters or laughing babes that ye can call your own?

Were ye always slaves and your sires, too? And must it follow that ye must always be?

Listen! When but a stripling in my native land I was wont to hunt the great king of the jungles whose roar is like the distant thunder, and whose bite is death. One day, with five companions, armed with spears and shields, I penetrated a dense undergrowth and suddenly confronted a lioness and her mate. On seeing us they gave forth terrific roars in defiance of our arms and numbers. All unprepared for the meeting, my companions were affrighted and would have fled had I not called on them to halt—as flight meant a fearful death—and to charge upon the foe. We charged upon them, and though they were wounded, they were not disabled, and only made more fierce and desperate. Then there ensued such a battle! The spears were torn from our hand. Three of my companions with their entrails protruding from their tortured abdomens were still in death upon the ground. The brutes’ terrific roar and fearful carnage drove terror to our hearts, and routed, we ran ingloriously from the scene. What would I teach thee from this tale? The same lesson I have learned: That wavering is cowardly and desperation makes men brave; that the arms of the oppressors, however great in number, cannot prevail with the desperation of the lion at bay. The masters are wavering like the tall palmetto in the storm’s angry blast. Let us but be brave and the shackles now upon your limbs will be turned to anklets of gold and precious stones taken from the bodies of these Frankish dogs. If you will be brutes be lions!

Louis Rigaud. Jean Jacques Dessalines. Oil Painting, 1878, Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
EASTON, WILLIAM EDGAR. “DESSALINES,” IN THE DUNBAR SPEAKER AND ENTERTAINER, ED. ALICE MOORE DUNBAR-NELSON, 100-02. NAPERVILLE, ILL: J. L. NICHOLS & CO., 1920.

[1] Paul Laurence Dunbar’s famous poem “We Wear the Mask” was first published in 1896, three years after Dessalines.

[2] Fibre: Alternate spelling of fiber.

[3] Fetich: Archaic spelling of fetish.

Contexts

The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer‘s dedication reads: “To the children of the race which is herein celebrated, this book is dedicated, that they may read and learn about their own people.” In the foreword, Leslie Pinckney Hill, an African American educator, writer, and community leader who graduated from Harvard University in 1903, criticizes the one-sidedness of prevailing reading courses: “In vain may you search their pages—those pages upon which all our reading has been founded—for anything other than a patronizing view of that vast, brooding world of colored folk—yellow, black and brown—which comprises by far the largest portion of the human family.” Hill further writes that Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s book seeks to prove “that the white man has no fine quality, either by heart or mind, which is not shared by his black brother.”

Jean-Jacques Dessalines was a leader of the 1804 Haitian Revolution. The text included in The Dunbar Speaker is a modified excerpt from Easton’s 1893 historical drama Dessalines. Without other characters’ interventions (as they appear in the original play) this adaptation becomes a monologue.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

affrighted: Frightened, terrified.

freedmen: A man who was a slave but has now been given his freedom; an emancipated (male) slave.

Resources for Further Study
  • In “Jean-Jacques Dessalines: Demon, Demigod, and Everything in Between,” Lindsay J. Twa analyzes contradictory representations of Dessalines’ controversial legacy. She notes that twentieth-century African American writers reached for this Haitian historical figure as part of their rhetorical efforts to instill racial pride and represent black heroic accomplishment.
  • Easton himself, in the preface to Dessalines, admits that he favors romance over history in his fictionalization of Dessalines’ story, and asks readers to given him credit for “seeking . . . to teach the truth, that ‘minds are not made captive by slavery’s chains, not were men’s souls made for barter and trade.’”

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