Category: Poem

Categories
1920s African American Poem Song Stars, Moon, Sky

Song for a Banjo Dance

Song for a Banjo Dance

By Langston Hughes
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
Henry Ossawa Tanner. The Banjo Lesson. Oil on canvas, 1893, Hampton University Museum, VA. Public Domain. 
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake your brown feet, chil',
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake 'em swift and wil'—
    Get way back, honey,
    Do that low-down step.
    Get on over, darling,
          Now! Step out
          With your left.
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake 'em, honey chil'.

Sun's going down this evening—
Might never rise no mo'.
The sun's going down this very night—
Might never rise no mo'—
So dance with swift feet, honey,
    (The banjo's sobbing low),[1]
Dance with swift feet, honey—
Might never dance no mo'.

Shake your brown feet, Liza,
Shake 'em, Liza, chil',
Shake your brown feet, Liza,
    (The music's soft and wil').
Shake your brown feet, Liza,
    (The banjo's sobbing low),
The suns's going down this very night—
    Might never rise no mo'.
Hughes, langston. “song for a banjo dance.” THE CRISIS 24, NO. 6 (OCTOBER 1922): 267.

[1] Although today the banjo is mostly associated with bluegrass music, the earliest iterations of this musical instrument “were played exclusively by the enslaved at least two hundred years before whites ever considered laying hands on what was, to the slaveholding culture, a ‘primitive’ instrument.”

Contexts
Original cover from The Crisis‘ number that included “The Yellow Tree.”

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
  • A photo essay by banjo scholar and performer Tony Thomas traces historical relationship between the banjo and African American musical culture.
  • The Creole bania, the oldest existing banjo, came from Suriname, in the Caribbean, and is on permanent display at the Tropenmuseum in the Netherlands.
  • Dena J. Epstein’s 1977 Sinful Tunes and Spirituals traces the history of African American music up to the Civil War. The book was the culmination of Epstein’s twenty-year research. She touches upon drums, banjo, and other instruments.
Contemporary Connections

Paul Ruta. “Black Musicians’ Quest to Return the Banjo to Its African Roots.”

In 2014, Malian n’goni player Cheick Hamala performed together with bluegrass banjoist Sammy Shelor and multi-instrumentalist Danny Knicely at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. The n’goni is the traditional string instrument that evolved into the Banjo in North America. The concert was aptly named “From Africa to Appalachia.”

Categories
1910s African American Poem Seasons

O Autumn, Autumn!

O Autumn, Autumn!

By Mary Effie Lee
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
William Henry Holmes. Autumn Tangle. Watercolor, 1920, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Florence Deakins Becker. Public domain. 
O Autumn, Autumn! O pensive light and wistful sound!
Gold-haunted sky, green-haunted ground!
When, wan, the dead leaves flutter by
Deserted realms of butterfly!
When robins band themselves together
To seek the soul of sun-steeped weather;
And all of summer’s largesse goes
For lands of olive and the rose!
LEE, MARY EFFIE. “O AUTUMN, AUTUMN!” THE CRISIS 16, NO. 6 (OCTOBER 1918): 269.

Contexts

Mary Effie Lee kept contributing to The Crisis as Mary Lee Newsome after her wedding to Rev. H. N. Newsome of Selma, Alabama, in 1920. She was one of the African American poets who wrote primarily for children. The Envious Lobster also contains selections from Gladiola Garden, her one volume of poetry.

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:

  • haunted: Frequented or much visited by spirits, imaginary beings, apparitions, spectres, etc.
  • largesse: The willingness to spend freely; (the virtue of) generosity; liberality, munificence.
  • wan: Lacking light, or lustre; dark-hued, dusky, gloomy, dark. Obsolete. Chiefly poetic.

Categories
1890s Humor Poem Wild animals

The Giraffe

The Giraffe

By Oliver Herford
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Oliver Herford, “The Giraffe.” Original print accompanying the poem.
See the Gi-raffe; he is so tall
There is not room to get him all
U-pon the page. His head is high-er—
The pic-ture proves it—than the Spire.[1]
That’s why the na-tives,[2] when they race
To catch him, call it stee-ple-chase.[3]
His chief de-light it is to set
A good example: shine or wet
He rises ere the break of day,
And starts his break-fast right away.
His food has such a way to go,—
His throat’s so very long,—and so
An early break-fast he must munch
To get it down ere time for lunch.
Herford, Oliver. “The Giraffe.” A Child’s Primer of Natural History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899.

[1] Their steeples made churches the tallest buildings in most U.S. towns and many cities.

[2] Giraffes are native to the grasslands and open woodlands of Africa. See Contexts and Resources below for more detail.

[3] A steeplechase is a horse race across country with jumps and other obstacles, but Herford imagines the giraffe as a steeple.

Contexts

The late nineteenth century began the period known as The New Imperialism, in which Western European nations took control, and used the resources, of nearly the whole continent. This poem’s speaker distinguishes his European perspective by using the word “native.”

When Herford published his book, natural history was an obsessive subject for children’s writers. Popular magazines like St. Nicholas led the way, creating study groups like the St. Nicholas League and advocacy for bird protection through its Bird Defenders. Exotic animals seemed to particularly fascinate American children. Contributors to St. Nick included prominent scientists like William T. Hornaday, who became the director of the New York Zoological Park (commonly known as the Bronx Zoo), and who founded the National Zoo in Washington, DC; famous naturalist John Burroughs; and Ernest Thompson Seton, founder of the Boy Scouts of America.

Herford’s poems, as well as their accompanying images, presented more fanciful accounts of animals but sometimes offered small natural history lessons. In this case, Herford underscores the time it takes giraffes to swallow and digest food and water. All the poems in this book hyphenate some words, presumably to instruct children—and their parents—how to read.

Resources for Further Study
  • “Giraffe, Giraffa camelopardalis.” San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
  • “Giraffe Fact Sheet.” PBS Nature. July 15, 2020.
  • Kilcup, Karen L. Stronger, Truer, Bolder: American Children’s Writing, Nature, and the Environment. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. See chapter 4, esp. 271-74, for information about the St. Nicolas contributors mentioned above.
Contemporary Connections

The American Wildlife Foundation and The Nature Conservancy outline current challenges to giraffe habitat and proposes some solutions.

The National Geographic Society’s video “Giraffes 101” includes some surprising facts about the animal.

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
1890s Life and Death Poem Seasons Trees

Among the Leaves

Among the Leaves

By Ethelwyn Wetherald
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Hans Andersen Brendekilde, Wooded Path in Autumn. Oil painting, c. 1902. Public Domain.
The near sky, the under sky,
    The low sky that I love!
I lie where fallen leaves lie,
    With a leafy sky above;	
And draw the colored leaves nigh,
And push the withered leaves by,
And feel the woodland heart upon me
	brooding like a dove.

The bright sky, the shifting sky,
    The sky that Autumn weaves!
I see where scarlet leaves fly
    The sky the wind bereaves;
I see the ling’ring leaves die,
I hear the dying leaves sigh,
And breathe the woodland breath made
	sweet of all her withered leaves.
Wetherald, Ethelwyn. “Among the Leaves.” Youth’s Companion (October 17, 1895): 490.

Contexts

Based in Boston, the long-lived Youth’s Companion was at one time among America’s most popular children’s magazines. Famous writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, and Booker T. Washington all published in its well-thumbed pages. Among its avid readers was a young Robert Frost. It helped popularize The Pledge of Allegiance, publishing it in its September 8, 1892 issue.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary

nigh: near

bereaves: to rob; to deprive of anything valued; to leave destitute, orphaned, or widowed [here, by implication, to sadden]

Resources for Further Study
  • “Category: Youth’s Companion.” Wikimedia Commons. This page has some illustrations from the magazine.
  • Chris [last name unknown]. “The Youth’s Companion.” This blog has numerous issues, with pictures. The most recent blog pages feature the 1920s.
  • Pflieger, Pat. “Youth’s Companion (1827-1929).” Nineteenth-Century American Children and What They Read.
  • “The Youth’s Companion.” The Online Books Page. University of Pennsylvania. You can read other selections from the magazine here through HathiTrust (the interface is not particularly user-friendly).
Contemporary Connections

Readers today still value what original readers often called “The Companion.” See Vintage American Ways (a site with some errors, including the magazine’s dates).

“A History of The Youth’s Companion and Pledge of Allegiance with collectors’ notes” on the Collecting Old Magazines site highlights how the issues that contain Emily Dickinson’s poetry and The Pledge of Allegiance are valuable. (this site also has errors, and it misleadingly presents the magazine as “boring.”)

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.

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