AFTER A THOUSAND TEARS

A Book of Verse
by

Georgia Douglass Johnson

Preface by

GEDRIG DOVER

"ONE LIFE FULL CERTIFIED"

It is said, with just enough exaggeration to point
the truth, that the Negroes are behind everything
creative in the United States. They have not only
made the outstanding folk culture of lonised America,
but have a remarkable gift for absorbing and trans-
forming which goes beyond imitation to the making of
novelties that are more than merely clever. This
characteristic gave life to the artistic upsurge
known as the New Negro Movement. Its vitality, expertly
distilled by Alain Locke in The New Negro and
V. F. Calverton in his Anthology of American Negro
Literature, is as urban as the blues and as notable as
any achievement during the effulgence of the 'twenties.

Georgia Douglas Johnson's poems have been published
in the anthologies of this "renaissance", her three books
appeared in the decade that marked its beginning and end,
and her home has always been a centre for the writers
and artists who gave it colour and shape. She is defi-
nitely of it; but equally definitely not in it. Her
first volume, *The Heart of a Woman* (1918), echoes Sara
Teasdale and shows a fine sensibility, but contains no
hint of the ferment which, a little later, inspired
Claude McKay's moving sonnets of protest, his evocative
explorations of the Harlem scene, and his exquisite
lyrics of nostalgia.

Claude McKay's *Harlem Shadows* heralded the paganism which was to grow into the glorification of the Golden Brown and the portrayal of the sordid realities of city life. These extensions of poetic function required freedom from the restraints of conventional poetising, and found it in the work of Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay and other figures of the American "poetry revival". There was no lack of new forms for expressing new values.

*Bronze* (1922), Mrs. Johnson's second book, reflects these departures from the vision of the comfortable villa in the manner indicated by its title. The subject is still the heart of a woman, but now it is the heart of a colored woman aware of her social problem and the potentiality of the hybrid. Unfortunately her last book, *An Autumn Love Cycle* (1928), fails to concentrate her awareness. Instead of enlarging the new vitality, it reverts to the personal notes of her first, with the aching maturity of a sensitive woman in her forties. In it the poet is again overcome by herself.

Soon after the *Cycle*, the Depression swept away the Golden Brown and everything else that was supposedly golden in the days of mad prosperity. It should, by all means, have swept Mrs. Johnson away too, but she survived by turning her attention to other things, including fiction. The war revived her into fighting identification with the Negro struggle to share the democracy that demanded Negro lives and labour. She gave herself unstintingly and, at the same time, poured out a stream of effective poems and martial songs. Today, in her fifties, she remains as vital as she was thirty years ago.

It is an exceptional record. All the more exceptional when we view the sad procession of middle class poets silenced by their inability to find some dynamic in a transitional society. Mrs. Johnson has been saved, I think, from this fate by the circumstance of being a Negro. It has prevented class limitations from enclosing, and finally stifling, her. It rouses a passionate belief, grounded in suffering, in ultimate justice and the coming brotherhood of man. It gives that extra something, supported by keen poetic sense, apparent in her great sincerity an appealing simplicity.

These are qualities that assure admiration, even from those who have gone beyond idealization to the real means, the critical disciplines and endeavour, by which ideals are realized. They are evident in the sifting of her collected work presented here for the first time. It is lit by the glow of a rich, mellow personality, near enough to less generously endowed folk to be typical of cultivated thought in a large part of the coloured world.

Indeed her affinities with people and poetry we know are as integral to the interest of her poems as the quietly sharp difference. We expect chords of conventional familiarity among the offerings in "The Heart of a Woman", and we find them - yet their essential quality is hedonistic. They do not chant the hymns of undying devotion, but frankly sing the pleasures of loving today and sorrowing, if needs by, tomorrow. Again, in "Ambergris to Gall", The unusual regrets of the passing years do not fuse, as they normally do, into uniform greyness, but suggest a personal adjustment based on the continued joy of being alive.

These two sections represent the chief preoccupations of ordinary feminine po-sy. Mrs. Johnson escapes their fatal attractions through additional areas of awareness

created by identification with Negro life. She has
faced and resolved the psychological and social
complications of being a near-white in the coloured
scene, while retaining enough traces of "tragic
octaroon" feeling to stress the merit of her conquest.
She has felt this situation so intimately, and
approached it with such courage, persistence and
intuition understanding, that she is still the first
and most prolific poet of the half-caste, though
Langston Hughes and the Eurasian, George Walker,
have also probed the subject.

And it is from this distinction, not
exhaustively indicated in "Nor This, Nor That", that
her community with the African American people and her
conspicuous urge to internationalism proceeds. There
is a lesson here for those who would understand the
social role of the mixed breed, as well as for the
millions of mixed breeds themselves who are caught
up by vast changes in the balance of power and ideas--
a lesson of basic importance. That is why I am especially proud of the opportunity to pay this tribute to
my friend Georgia Douglas Johnson.

1461 S St N W

Washington D C

August 5 47

Dear Bruce

I have just put my fourth book into an envelope and taking the second thought felt that it would be wisest to ask you WHERE to send it or if I should send it to you to take.

Two copies of the same book have gone to publishers. one to London one to India. Want you to read this introduction. It is by a very eminent author in England.

I've already delayed too long in getting this out to a publishers as I got ir recopies first for safety's sake.

Please write me at once air mail and tell me what to do. ONLY WAIT ...

After eight oclock you can call me North 1305 and reverse charges. In this way I can mail it sooner.

It is already perfectly arranged for printing. All the printer has to do is to go right ahead. Even the flap is set up in place.

It is in four parts and includes things from each of my books as well as ending on the TO: ERANCE and BROTHERHOOD idea which makes it apt and fitting for the TIMES.

Talk to some one of your literary friends ans to me what to do at once please. I always know I can depend upon you. Tell me of your own plans I feel you are doing great things. Now call me as you have not given me your phone number-- give it to me now... Always the same

G D J