Cross-Writing, Music, and Racial Identity: Bessie Woodson Yancey’s Echoes From the Hills

As an African American woman who sought a public literary voice in the United States between the world wars, amid decades of fierce racial segregation, Bessie Woodson Yancey implicitly crossed cultural borders every time she wrote, a complexity embodied in her 1939 collection of poetry, Echoes from the Hills. At times self-consciously "literary," at others interweaving oral traditions, both black and Appalachian, through dialect and song, Yancey's poetry constitutes an especially significant revision of what Frances Smith Foster labels as the "masked," "two-toned," or "double-voiced" characteristics of African American literature, metaphors derived from the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar and W. E. B. DuBois (24). Yancey's uniquely historicized renderings of song and voice attest both to the multiply ethnic heritage and to the implicit reach of her art. Despite her variously two-toned diction, as well as thanks to it, Yancey's poetic range as it reverberates its rich ethnic dimensions ultimately subverts a reading that would strictly identify this poetry's imagined audience as confined by race or by age. Yet it bears referential markers that can be read to denote such limits. Most strikingly, Yancey's collective Echoes from the Hills conflate yet confound many distinctions between adult and child as intended readers or auditors for these works. When cast within their variously generative musical settings, which themselves cross racial and cultural traditions from popular to elite, Yancey's poems further attest to the complex issues that underlie her vivid work's likely reception. Particularly through deft code-switching throughout this collection, Yancey offers poems that the cultural critics of Alain Locke's New Negro Movement might classify through style and content either as distinctly "art" or "folk," using the words of music historian Maude Cuney-Hare. Such distinctions influenced not only black writers in the first half of the twentieth century, but their counterparts in visual art and music: could their ambitions of high art merge with "the genuine folk stuff" (J. W. Johnson, Book 6)? By infusing elements of song as inspiration, as content, and as form for her poems, Yancey extends her poetic audience not only beyond the literary, but even beyond the strictly literate, reiterating the orality of this art even as inscribing it visually on the page. As such, her poetry signifies a self-determining moment in the history and reception of African American writing, conjoining aspects of expression that cross-refer to both adults and children in Appalachia and beyond. Modulating her community's many voices, Yancey's work in turn gives voice to that vibrant community at large, a community if at that time only partially recognized, if seen at all, by a wider artistic world. Writing of masking as a literal as well as a strategic presence in African American texts and songs, Henry Louis Gates evokes its synesthetic dimension, a genetic fusion that Yancey's work also suggests: The mask is a common motif in Afro-American poetry--common yet carefully veiled in the main. Of course, with slavery and the evolution of the slave songs into spirituals, the mask was utilized in a political context--indeed, as a matter of personal safety--to say one thing, all the while meaning another, usually under the guise of religious expression. (175) While not mainly religious in content, Yancey's poems frequently summon traditional Christian references and maxims. More significantly, though, this collection exerts a deeper moral urgency. Seeking to uplift and to instruct her race, Yancey also writes to instruct her audience, regardless of color, about her race and its place in a larger America; claiming individual identity can ultimately work to define a truly democratic community. For Yancey, that community's strength lay also in constructing its own ethnicity: to claim its intersecting traditions, a community must raise its multiple voices to the dominant literary culture previously disinclined to hear them, an ambition that song forms, available to adults and to children, could enable her poetry to advance. …