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

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.
Dobrow, Julie. “The Ethereal Indian Pipe.” After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America’s Greatest Poet.”
“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.