Insect Folk

By Effie Lee Newsome

Annotations by Karen Kilcup

Original illustration for “Insect Folk,” 1940. Woodcut print by Loïs Mailou Jones. Public Domain.

I only have to lift a stone
Up from the soft gray ground
To start the gayest insect folk
To bustling all around. 

And often when I peel the bark
From off some brown old tree
A host of small white bugs trots out
Almost immediately.

They seem to have all sorts of plans,
And everywhere to go.
And off they rush, one after one,
Like autos in a row.

Newsome, Effie Lee. “Insect Folk.” Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1940, 4.

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.

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.