In the Market
By Effie Lee Newsome
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
When vegetables go to the market in town They wear the most wonderful frills on their frocks— Broccoli and lettuce and gay Brussels sprouts And plump country turnips in bright purple socks. The cabbage comes wrapped in a satiny shawl, The carrots in tight orange skirts, Tomatoes all grinning like red country girls, And parsley so fancy in little green curls, Cucumbers with warts on each long, smileless face That seems quite displeased with the town, And beets very shabby with dull sweaters on, Limp skirts with red streaks up and down.
Newsome, Effie Lee. “In the Market.” Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1940, 61.
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.
Resources for Further Study
- Claborn, John. “The Crisis, the Politics of Nature, and the Harlem Renaissance: Effie Lee Newsome’s Eco-poetics.” Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 1895-1941. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
- “Effie Lee Newsome, 1885-1978.” Poets.org. This site provides access to seven of Newsome’s poems.
- Newsome, Effie Lee. Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Courtesy of the New York Public Library, this site provides access to the entire text.
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.
