Category: African American

Categories
1940s African American Birds Outdoors Poem

Scarlet Trimming

Scarlet Trimming

By Effie Lee Newsome
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Audubon, J. J. “Red-Headed Woodpecker.” Colored Print. In Birds of America (1827-38).
The woodpecker folk are quite fond of bright red—
Poinsettia scarlet for neck or for head.[1]
And whether the costume is brown, black or gray,
They count on red hats or red scarfs to make gay.
The dignified flicker, with linings of gold,[2]
The black and gray downy that weathers the cold,[3]
The jaunty old red-head in jockey outfit—[4]
All choose blurs of scarlet to cheer up a bit.
Newsome, Effie Lee. “Scarlet Trimming.” Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1940, 77.

[1] Poinsettia are flowers native to Mexico that for many symbolize the Christmas holiday. Ordinarily red, they now come in many colors.

[2] The Northern Flicker is a large brown and gray woodpecker with a spotted breast and red hat. Coloration varies across the United States, where they are year-round residents.

[3] The Downy Woodpecker is a small bird that lives year-round in most of the United States. Only males have the characteristic red cap.

[4] Both female and male Red-Headed Woodpeckers have an entirely red head. Their bodies are white, and their wings are bright white and deep black. Now in decline in the U.S., they defend their home territory fiercely.

Contexts

Newsome worked among the many celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anne Spencer, many of them poets. Among her noteworthy contributions to that movement was her writing and editing for W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). As John Claborn points out, Du Bois’s political goals embraced the idea of access to natural spaces, and the magazine featured environmental writing by such notable authors as Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and Hughes. Newsome contributed to and edited “The Little Page” (“Whimsies for the Younger Folk”), where much of her work emphasized nature. This poem, like many others in The Envious Lobster, whimsically enacts a natural history lesson, while it encourages children’s imagination.

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

Anonymous. Reading of Newsome’s poem, “The Bronze Legacy.” The illustrations for Gladiola Garden were done by prominent Black artist Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998).

Johnston, Amber O’Neal. “African American Poetry: Effie Lee Newsome. Heritage Mom blog.

Categories
1940s African American Poem Trees Wind

Wind-Stirred Trees

Wind-Stirred Trees

By Effie Lee Newsome
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Original 1940 woodcut for “Wind-Stirred Trees,”
by Lois Mailou Jones. Public Domain.
A tall, proud poplar’s like the ocean[1]
In tossing sound and wind-swept motion.
There’s nothing more like voice of sea
Than roaring billows of a tree,
And one things of the foam-fringed tide
As poplar leaves wave their white side.
Newsome, Effie Lee. “Wind-Stirred Trees.” Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1940, 123.

[1] Numerous types of poplar trees appear across the United States. As Newsome notes, their leaves quiver in the wind, and many have white undersides. One of the most famous types is the quaking aspen.

Contexts

Newsome worked among the many celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anne Spencer, many of them poets. Among her noteworthy contributions to that movement was her writing and editing for W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). As John Claborn points out, Du Bois’s political goals embraced the idea of access to natural spaces, and the magazine featured environmental writing by such notable authors as Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and Hughes. Newsome contributed to and edited “The Little Page” (“Whimsies for the Younger Folk”), where much of her work emphasized nature. This poem, like many others in The Envious Lobster, whimsically enacts a natural history lesson, while it encourages children’s imagination.

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

Anonymous. Reading of Newsome’s poem, “The Bronze Legacy.” The illustrations for Gladiola Garden were done by prominent Black artist Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998).

Johnston, Amber O’Neal. “African American Poetry: Effie Lee Newsome. Heritage Mom blog.

“Fast-Growing Poplars Provide Solutions for Both Energy and Pollution Problems.” US Forest Service Northern Research Station 19 (Winter 2013).

Categories
1920s African American Family Poem

Motherhood

Motherhood

By Georgia Douglas Johnson
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
Henry Ossawa Tanner. Portrait of the Artist’s Mother. Oil on canvas, 1897, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Public Domain. 
Don’t knock on my door, little child,[1] 
I cannot let you in;
You know not what a world this is, 
Of cruelty and sin.
Wait in the still eternity
Until I come to you.
The world is cruel, cruel, child, 
I cannot let you through.

Don't knock at my heart, little one, 
I cannot bear the pain
Of turning deaf ears to your call, 
Time and time again.
You do not know the monster men 
Inhabiting the earth.
Be still, be still, my precious child, 
I cannot give you birth.
JOHNSON, GEORGIA DOUGLASS. “MOTHERHOOD.” THE CRISIS 24, NO. 6 (OCTOBER 1922): 265.

[1] Also in 1922, Georgia Douglas Johnson, one of the key figures of the Harlem Renaissance, published Bronze: A Book of Verse, which included the poem “Motherhood” under a different title: “Black Woman.” This significant change illuminates the racial component of Johnson’s concerns.

Contexts

In the same number of The Crisis that included Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poem, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that “birth control is science and sense applied to the bringing of children into the world.” Writing about the responsibilities associated with large families, specifically in African American communities, he added that “parents owe their children, first of all, health and strength. Few women can bear more than two or three children and retain strength for the other interests of life. And there are other interests for women as for men and only reactionary barbarians deny this.”

Starting in 1912, the October issues of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, were dedicated to children. A typical edition of these children’s numbers would contain a special editorial piece and two or three literary works specifically for children, while still including the serious pieces about contemporary issues with a focus on race that The Crisis was known for. These October numbers were sprinkled with children’s photographs sent in by the readers.

In his first editorial for the Children’s number in 1912, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that “there is a sense in which all numbers and all words of a magazine of ideas myst point to the child—to that vast immortality and wide sweep and infinite possibility which the child represents.”

The success of The Crisis’ children’s number led to the standalone The Brownies’ Book, a monthly magazine for African American children that circulated from January 1920 to December 1921 under the editorship of Du Bois, Augustus Granville Dill, and Jessie Fauset.

Resources for Further Study
  • The Comstock Act of 1873 made it illegal to mail “obscene, lewd or lascivious,” “immoral,” or “indecent” materials, a category that included texts or instruments associated with contraception and abortion. The act’s birth control provisions were overturned in 1936, thanks to the work of activist Margaret Sanger (1879-1966).
  • The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, passed by Congress in June, 1919, granted American women the right to vote and, consequently, paved the way for women’s reproductive and economic progress. However, voting restrictions in the Jim Crow South kept African American women (and men) unable to exercise their voting rights.
  • Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poem foregrounds the speaker’s choice and heartbreaking logic, but it is important to recognize that the United States has a long history of forced sterilization, experimentation and reproductive coercion aimed at poor women and women of color.
  • Georgia Douglas Johnson: Rereading the Harlem Renaissance.
Contemporary Connections

In her book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, Robin Bernstein illustrates how the American idea of childhood innocence became racialized and excluded black children.

Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, edited by Annie Finch, is an anthology of poems concerned with reproductive rights that includes works from African American writers, among them Georgia Douglas Johnson’s “Motherhood.”

SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Collective, is a national organization that wants to “build an effective network of individuals and organizations to improve institutional policies and systems that impact the reproductive lives of marginalized communities.”

Categories
1910s African American Autobiography Essay Family Farm life Sketch

How I Grew My Corn

How I Grew My Corn

By Helen Stevenson
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
Charles E. Burchfield. Sunlight on Corn. Watercolor on paper, 1916, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo State College, NY. Public domain.

In the year 1914 all the children schools of Cumberland county, N. J., were given the privilege to enter a contest. The girls were to sew, patch or bake and the boys to grow corn or sweet potatoes.[1] As I liked to work out of doors I entered the corn contest. The rules were that the boys should do all the work themselves; the girls were to do all except the plowing. We were to have one-tenth of an acre and find our own seed.

When I first asked my father for a piece of ground he said, “I can not spare it.” But at last he consented to give me a plot next to the woods, if I could get one-tenth of an acre from it.

One night after school I went down and measured off my ground. On the nineteenth of May I took my old friend, Harry (the horse), whom I had worked in the field before, and went down to my farm, as I called it. There I worked until I had an even seed bed, after which I marked it out and fertilized it. On the next day I planted my corn putting three grains in a hill and covering it with a hoe.

I paid it daily visits and when it was about two inches high I replanted it and hoed the hills which were up. From then on I hoed and cultivated my crop and kept it free from grass until it grew too large to be attended. As it was a dry season that year, the stalks next to the woods did not grow to their full height.

I also had visitors to come and see my corn. This gave me more courage to go on as all the other girls and boys in Fairfield township had given it up. Mother and father had also tried to discourage me, but I kept on.

I did not cut it down until November. I then measured my highest stalks which were from fifteen to sixteen feet. On the day before the contest I stayed home to get my corn ready. Mother and father coaxed me not to take it away, but I did.

After selecting ten of my largest and best ears of corn, I put them in a basket and went to Bridgeton with one of my neighbors, as father would not take them. After arriving in town I carried my corn up to the Court House.

The next day I went to school and in the afternoon my teacher received a telephone message which said I had won a prize. I was very happy indeed; mother and father were surprised.

On Saturday went to the Bridgeton Library annex where things were being exhibited and saw my corn with a prize tag on it which made me feel very proud. I then went to the Commercial League room where the prizes were distributed. I received my prize and went home very happy and full of courage to try again.

The amount I cleared for my corn was $12.00–$5.00 for my fodder, $4.00 for my seed and $3.00 for my prize.

I am going to try again this year and I think all boys and girls who have the privilege of learning to farm should do so–for there is nothing better than life on a farm.

STEVENSON, HELEN. “HOW I GREW MY CORN.” THE CRISIS 8, NO. 6 (OCTOBER 1914): 273-74.
Cover of the State of New Jersey’s Department of Public Instruction’s Leaflet No. 3: Corn Growing (1914).

[1] In February, 1914 the Department of Public Instruction from Trenton, N.J. published an elementary agriculture manual on corn growing. This document’s foreword references “the widespread interested aroused at the present time by the organization of ‘Corn Clubs’ [that] makes a study of corn one of the best ways of introducing agriculture in the elementary grades of the public schools of the State.” The section “Suggestions for Girls’ Participation in the Study of Agriculture” speaks directly to Helen Stevenson’s experience: “The girls may do exactly the same work as the boys . . . Not a few girls will prefer this plan and some of our girls have grown corn quite as successfully as boys.”

Contexts

Starting in 1912, the October issues of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, were dedicated to children. A typical edition of these children’s numbers would contain a special editorial piece and two or three literary works specifically for children, while still including the serious pieces about contemporary issues with a focus on race that The Crisis was known for. These October numbers were sprinkled with children’s photographs sent in by the readers.

In his first editorial for the Children’s number in 1912, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that “there is a sense in which all numbers and all words of a magazine of ideas myst point to the child—to that vast immortality and wide sweep and infinite possibility which the child represents.”

The success of The Crisis’ children’s number led to the standalone The Brownies’ Book, a monthly magazine for African American children that circulated from January 1920 to December 1921 under the editorship of Du Bois, Augustus Granville Dill, and Jessie Fauset.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

fodder: Food for cattle, horses, or other animals.

Resources for Further Study
  • After the Civil War (1861-1865) and the subsequent abolition of slavery, former slaves were notoriously promised “forty acres and a mule” as a compensation for their unpaid work during slavery. Ultimately, this attempted redistribution failed and by the end of the Reconstruction period (1865-1877) lands were returned to their previous white owners.
  • A timeline of interactions between black farmers and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) from 1920 to 2021.  
  • Oxford Bibliographies‘ page on African American agriculture and agricultural labor.
  • TED-Ed short animation on the history of corn. Indigenous peoples from southern Mexico domesticated corn about 10,000 years ago. Today, this crop accounts for more than one tenth of our global crop production!
Contemporary Connections

Data on female producers from the 2017 Census of Agriculture.

“Living off the land: the new sisterhood of Black female homesteaders.”

Categories
1940s African American Humor Insects Outdoors Poem

In the Grass

In the Grass

By Effie Lee Newsome
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Original 1940 woodcut for “In the Grass,”
by Lois Mailou Jones. Public Domain.
Sometimes I lie in meadow grass,
And watch all kinds of insect pass
In brown and red and gray.
Some very busy ants speed by
With white crumb bundles stacked up high,
All hastening one way.

Each hurries with his heavy load 
Up what I call the Cricket Road,
It looks so cool and dark.
There’s pleasant millet growing there,[1]
And wisps of fox-grass everywhere[2]
That I use as a cane

To push along some lazy bug,
That lags without a load to lug
Along the insect land.
And bugs keep coming on and on—
New bands before the old have gone.
Sometimes one comes alone. 

A grasshopper quick, proud and lean
Leaps to the millet, tall and green,
And takes it for this throne. 
Sometimes a beetle blunders past
Or stops awhile, then starts out, fast,
As though he’d heard a call.

Sometimes a soft green worm drags by,
Then winds beneath a millet sky,
And can’t be seen at all.
Each worm and bug moves on its way.
Some tap the grass, as though in play.
But I like best the ants’ long strong
Returning from their marketing.
Newsome, Effie Lee. “In the Grass.” Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1940, 9-10.

[1] Millet is an ancient type of grass often grown for its grain. Newsome imagines herself down in the grass with the insects, so the millet seems like a forest.

[2] Foxtail grasses, considered a weed, can reach as much as three feet tall. The seeds are dangerous for livestock to eat.

Contexts

Newsome worked among the many celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anne Spencer, many of them poets. Among her noteworthy contributions to that movement was her writing and editing for W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). As John Claborn points out, Du Bois’s political goals embraced the idea of access to natural spaces, and the magazine featured environmental writing by such notable authors as Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and Hughes. Newsome contributed to and edited “The Little Page” (“Whimsies for the Younger Folk”), where much of her work emphasized nature. This poem, like many others in The Envious Lobster, whimsically enacts a natural history lesson, while it encourages children’s imagination.

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

Anonymous. Reading of Newsome’s poem, “The Bronze Legacy.” The illustrations for Gladiola Garden were done by prominent Black artist Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998).

Johnston, Amber O’Neal. “African American Poetry: Effie Lee Newsome. Heritage Mom blog.

Categories
1940s African American Flowers Poem

Indian Pipe

Indian Pipe

By Effie Lee Newsome
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Original 1940 woodcut for “Indian Pipe,”
by Lois Mailou Jones. Public Domain.
The Indian pipe folk stand around[1]
With white pajamas on,
And look so lazy in the gloom,
I almost hear them yawn.
Newsome, Effie Lee. “Indian Pipe.” Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1940, 105.
Cover of Emily Dickinson’s Poems, 1890. Public Domain.

[1] Often known as the “ghost plant,” the Indian pipe is nearly transparent. It emerges, sometimes suddenly, from forest floors in early summer to early autumn. Emily Dickinson admired the plant; see Dubrow’s blog below.

Contexts

Newsome worked among the many celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anne Spencer, many of them poets. Among her noteworthy contributions to that movement was her writing and editing for W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). As John Claborn points out, Du Bois’s political goals embraced the idea of access to natural spaces, and the magazine featured environmental writing by such notable authors as Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and Hughes. Newsome contributed to and edited “The Little Page” (“Whimsies for the Younger Folk”), where much of her work emphasized nature. This poem, like many others in The Envious Lobster, focuses on nature’s power to spark children’s imagination. It may respond to one of two Emily Dickinson poems, “White as an Indian Pipe” or “’Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe.”

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

Anonymous. Reading of Newsome’s poem, “The Bronze Legacy.” The illustrations for Gladiola Garden were done by prominent Black artist Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998).

Johnston, Amber O’Neal. “African American Poetry: Effie Lee Newsome. Heritage Mom blog.

Painting of Indian pipe by Mabel Loomis Todd given to
Emily Dickinson, date unknown. Courtesy Amherst College.
Categories
1940s African American Outdoors Poem Stars, Moon, Sky

I Like to Hear the Wind

I Like to Hear the Wind

By Effie Lee Newsome
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Original 1940 woodcut for “I Like the Wind,”
by Lois Mailou Jones. Public Domain.
I like to hear the wind at night
Running along with all its might,
Over the roof and over my head,
Way up above my cozy bed.

I like to hear the wind by day,
Calling out in such a jolly way,
Making my hat go sailing out,
Slapping my coat and hair about.
Newsome, Effie Lee. “I Like to Hear the Wind.” Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1940, 160.

Contexts

Newsome worked among the many celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anne Spencer, many of them poets. Among her noteworthy contributions to that movement was her writing and editing for W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). As John Claborn points out, Du Bois’s political goals embraced the idea of access to natural spaces, and the magazine featured environmental writing by such notable authors as Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and Hughes. Newsome contributed to and edited “The Little Page” (“Whimsies for the Younger Folk”), where much of her work emphasized nature. This poem, like many others in The Envious Lobster, focuses on nature’s power to spark children’s imagination.

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

Anonymous. Reading of Newsome’s poem, “The Bronze Legacy.” The illustrations for Gladiola Garden were done by prominent Black artist Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998).

Johnston, Amber O’Neal. “African American Poetry: Effie Lee Newsome. Heritage Mom blog.

Categories
1940s African American Poem Stars, Moon, Sky Wild animals

Sky Pictures

Sky Pictures

By Effie Lee Newsome
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Original 1940 woodcut for “Sky Pictures,”
by Lois Mailou Jones. Public Domain.
Sometimes a great white mountain
Or snowy polar bear
Or lazy little flocks of sheep
Move on in the blue air.

The mountains tear themselves like floss,[1]
The bears all melt away,
The little sheep will drift apart
As though they’d finished play.

And then new sheep and mountains come, 
New polar bears appear,
And roll and tumble on again
Up in the skies, blue-clear.

The polar bears would like to get 
Where polar bears belong.
The mountains try so hard to stand
In one place, firm and strong.

The little sheep all want to stop
And pasture in the sky.
But never can these things be done,
Although they try and try.
Newsome, Effie Lee. “Sky Pictures.” Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1940, 143.

[1] Today many readers might think of dental floss, but here floss refers to a soft thread of silk or cotton used for embroidery.

Contexts

Newsome worked among the many celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anne Spencer, many of them poets. Among her noteworthy contributions to that movement was her writing and editing for W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). As John Claborn points out, Du Bois’s political goals embraced the idea of access to natural spaces, and the magazine featured environmental writing by such notable authors as Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and Hughes. Newsome contributed to and edited “The Little Page” (“Whimsies for the Younger Folk”), where much of her work emphasized nature. This poem, like many others in The Envious Lobster, focuses on nature’s power to spark children’s imagination.

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

Anonymous. Reading of Newsome’s poem, “The Bronze Legacy.” The illustrations for Gladiola Garden were done by prominent Black artist Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998).

Johnston, Amber O’Neal. “African American Poetry: Effie Lee Newsome. Heritage Mom blog.

Categories
1940s African American Poem Seasons Trees

Quilting Bee

Quilting Bee

By Effie Lee Newsome
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Modern pieced fabric quilt. Courtesy QuiltWoman.com.
Sometimes I play that in the spring
The woods get scalloped scraps of green,
And set the trees to gay quilting,[1]
Making a merry, gorgeous scene,
A sight I like to look up to—
The sky helps piece the quilt with blue.

Then there’s a change when autumn’s back,
The green scraps turn to gold and red.
The dark twigs stitch them still with black,
But there’re more blue scraps overhead,
And soon the whole quilt’s all blue-gray—
The brighter scraps get blown away.

And now I play each empty tree
Is left there from the quilting bee.
They can’t get home—so bent and old
Out there with bare hands in the cold
To wait for spring and gay green scraps
To fill their old lean hands and laps.
Newsome, Effie Lee. “Quilting Bee.” Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1940, 125.

[1] A quilting bee is a traditional community activity where a group of people gather to sew together squares (or other pieces) of fabric to form a quilt. The bee would also help sew together the top (pieced) section, a filling (such as a sheet of cotton batting), and a backing fabric. Newsome imagines the sky and trees as pieces in a quilt that her poem stitches together. Unlike a cloth quilt, nature’s “quilt” changes as the seasons change.

Contexts

Newsome worked among the many celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anne Spencer, many of them poets. Among her noteworthy contributions to that movement was her writing and editing for W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). As John Claborn points out, Du Bois’s political goals embraced the idea of access to natural spaces, and the magazine featured environmental writing by such notable authors as Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and Hughes. Newsome contributed to and edited “The Little Page” (“Whimsies for the Younger Folk”), where much of her work emphasized nature. This poem, like many others in The Envious Lobster, uses the community activity of quilting to teach a natural history lesson.

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

Anonymous. Reading of Newsome’s poem, “The Bronze Legacy.” The illustrations for Gladiola Garden were done by prominent Black artist Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998).

Johnston, Amber O’Neal. “African American Poetry: Effie Lee Newsome. Heritage Mom blog.

One of the best-known quilting groups today is the community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama.

Contemporary fabric quilt. Artist Unknown.
Categories
1940s African American Birds Poem

Chimney Swift Runaway

Chimney Swift Runaway

By Effie Lee Newsome
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Print of chimney swift (top) and barn swallow, 19th century. Public Domain.
He looked like a closed umbrella[1]
Some fairy elf had swung
With the little end turned upward—
That was the way he hung,
Clasping my curtains with all his might,
Quivering like ferns in his funny fright.

He’d dropped from his chimney nursery,
And tried to fly through
My tin kitchen flue.[2]
I heard his wings lash,
And, quick as a flash,
I pulled off the tin
And let him fly in.

The new scenes made him quite uncertain,
That’s why he held fast to the curtain
Till I’d unhooked his claws with care
And turned him free to take the air.
Newsome, Effie Lee. “Chimney Swift Runaway.” Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1940, 80.

[1] Chimney swifts are small birds that nest on vertical surfaces like chimneys and flues. Federally protected, they are famous fliers and often chatter when they are aloft. They travel thousands of miles from their winter homes in Peru to breed in North America during the summer.

[2] A flue takes stove exhaust from the house.

Contexts

Newsome worked among the many celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anne Spencer, many of them poets. Among her noteworthy contributions to that movement was her writing and editing for W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). As John Claborn points out, Du Bois’s political goals embraced the idea of access to natural spaces, and the magazine featured environmental writing by such notable authors as Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and Hughes. Newsome contributed to and edited “The Little Page” (“Whimsies for the Younger Folk”), where much of her work emphasized nature. This poem, like many others in The Envious Lobster, whimsically enacts a natural history lesson and speaks to animal welfare.

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

Anonymous. Reading of Newsome’s poem, “The Bronze Legacy.” The illustrations for Gladiola Garden were done by prominent Black artist Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998).

Johnston, Amber O’Neal. “African American Poetry: Effie Lee Newsome. Heritage Mom blog.

Photo of Chimney swifts hanging on chimney. Public Domain.
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