A SUITE FOR JAMES
WELDON JOHNSON
SUMMER AND FALL,
2020
There is a wide, wide wonder in it all…
James Weldon Johnson
—But…beautiful, like kissed tears, she said…
But if I could tell you, you’d listen?
Geoff Dyer
*
FROM TUESDAY TO TUESDAY, NOVEMBER, 2020,
AND FROM SUNDAY TO SUNDAY, TOO,
FROM THE WRITINGS OF JAMES WELDON JOHNSON,
BY WAY OF ACKNOWLEDGING HIS WAVING FORWARD WORD
And for poets from
Phyllis Wheatley to Joshua Henry Jones, Jr.,
All included in The
Book of American Negro Poetry,
Edited by James
Weldon Johnson, 1922
Six feet from Woodrow Wilson,
James Weldon Johnson, a portrait study
Looking for awareness, Looking
For traces of Corporal Baltimore,
Social distancing we’d call it, today,
Our pandemic-plague-time veiled.
Along this way, but beautiful.
Lift every voice, and sing—
You and your brother riffing
Anecdotes. Anonymous.
Entering the culture from this
Side to save one’s own skin—
Aframerican hope. This, the laundry
Bag where I keep my notebook
In the Pullman car, my artist-friend’s
Dad with his eye-out on the dream
Train. So many anthologies now,
Thick, burdensome, I count three essential:
Yours from 1922, Bontemps’ American Negro Poetry,
1963—and one come later, in-between,
Michael Harper’s—Michaeltree Songline
Pedigree family-blues poet’s 200 Years—
Vision, struggle, power, beauty & triumph,
With Anthony Walton. Quatrains full
With digression, errantry, broken away,
Pull of Black poets, follow-me-prophetic
Jesus-like. From origins, soul-making.
Walkabout like this. Your anthology first,
But I came of age (coming home from war),
Finding you inside Bontemps’ who opens
His books with you: O Black and Unknown Bards:
How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?—
‘Wide wonder in it all’—alongside
Go Down Death (A Funeral Sermon)—
Death didn’t frighten Sister Caroline—
Bontemps (along with music) would carry,
Direct me, over four decades.
Your inclusion of Paul Lawrence Dunbar,
Jump back, honey, jump back.—poor
Was the loan—go forth, Claude McKay says,
Black of that Black
land where black deeds are done—
Anne Spencer, now on a new American stamp,
…a quivering female thing/gesturing assignations—
And young Fenton Johnson’s Children of the Sun—
Weaving, waiting, reared, embossed—in splendor—
His nouns and verbs living still under your cover.
Mine, a thank you crossing 100 years of living poems.
Hand carried from Johnson, Harper, Bontemps,
Breathing, turning poisoned air to oxygen.
Your book carried us, lifted us, like the hymn
You and your brother J. Rosamond Johnson
Created from anecdote, pressured by time.
*
WHEN I WAS NO
LONGER WHO I WAS
1 September 1961—Moore
Theater—Seattle
RAY CHARLES
I got my driver’s
license the day
I turned 16 on the
9th of August—
But I wasn’t at the
Moore—I found
The Eagles Ballroom
at 7th and Union
The night before—
It was a dance, a
dance hall, and I was all eyes—
Knowing about it
before I knew what it was
The only living boy
from Dakota in the room
Unsure of the
clutch in my father’s Plymouth
Never having been
alone on Seattle’s
Downtown streets
stopped
At a red light
pointed at the moon
I wouldn’t know it
then
Did I see the song
or hear it
What’d I say I
wouldn’t
Know it but I had
found it
—this way—
And found myself in
the song
And the song was a
poem
And you don’t know
me
Poem and song the
same thing
And it would be
enough and deeper
And more true and
coming from proof
In my scrapbooks
precursors
It brings a tear
clutch and double clutch
Careless love you
don’t know the one
And what was so
clear
And laid out before
me would never
Veer this straight swing home
30 November—7 December 2020
*
THE SINGING CARPENTER
—for the
students of A.C. Davis High School
And the children of Pastor Everhart
My voice and yours,
Pastor John Edward Everhart, 79,
Yakima, where he sang to us each year
During Black History Month
Transitioned to the welcoming arms
Of the Lord our God on March 28, 2020.
We’d take our classes to the auditorium
Where he was backed by angels—
The Aeolian Choir and he’d talk to us,
Tell us his story, tell us
How it was—he finished
High school in the army—
Chaplain’s assistant, 20 —
Served in Vietnam—we
Never talked about it—and
How it is, too—he’d be preaching
To us, really, Texas born,
Married in North Carolina,
And then, my God! How
He did it, he’d be right there
In between talk and song
Maybe the change in mid-word,
Harmonies—by the time he hit
Liberty it was there,
High as the listening skies,
The Aeolians would kick in,
Beckoning with their arms,
More than two decades
We did this, there was a piano
Too, where would it come from,
And drums, Full of
the faith,
Full of the hope, and we
Wouldn’t get every word
But carried by students next to us
Even in the balcony, where the air
Was thin, everybody singing—
Thy hand true, true to our native land—
He came from Mt. Hope,
He came from Pilgrim’s Rest,
He came to us all of us
Young and young again
In the public city school
Where his children
Would hear their father sing
20 November 2020
*
—BUT BEFORE THEN,
a poor town boy
from the country of wheat fields
closer to Canada
than the United States of America
his parents left the wheat fields
and the grain elevator
staying close to railroad tracks
to the West Coast and city life
the time of Elvis Presley
he’s carrying newspapers
a 14-year old paper boy
on his bicycle—it’s as simple
as this—he hears
the music of Ray Charles
Before they left the country
He listened to baseball game
With his mother
In the farm kitchen
From baseball cards
He knew Mickey Mantle
And Willie Mays
He knew what was happening
From these cards
He knew Elston Howard
*
THE NFL FOOTBALL GAME
LINKING TULSA TO RAY CHARLES
AND THE CONVERSATIONS WITH GIL CHANDLER
CONFIRMING THE TIME
Gil and I out back
On patio chairs with coffee
Both with books, Baldwin
Biography in my hands
And Tulsa massacre in his—
One of us, must’ve been Gilbert,
Brings up Ray Charles—
Tulsa with 10,000 homeless
Hundreds killed in Greenwood District
Memorial Day, 1921, how
Talk turned to Seattle Labor Day
Black Wall Street don’t have a clue—
Gil talking about Eagles Ballroom,
Ray Charles, Eagles Ball Room, Seattle,
Around in the alley a door
Two stairs, my cousin and I
Would stand around the door
Push on door trip that lock
One go one way one go the other
We eat lunch under the big Maple
Autumn Blaze, I ask Gil to say Grace
He gives his Daddy’s prayer
The divine love has
met
And always will
meet
For every human
need
Which we are truly
grateful for, Amen
Gil says he said it every day,
His father, Ben Chandler
Back and forth all morning
The Negro Alamo and Ray Charles
Somehow remembering he says,
Seattle, 1959—No, no, I say,
Couldn’t have been
I was only 14 then and I was there too
Just 16 by days, a kind of terror
In memory’s timeline
Look it up
Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers
Are in Portland for an exhibition game
And I came up to see Ray Charles
There it is I find it months later
August 25, 1962, Browns win 34-27
I am in that Ballroom Gil
We’re in there together,
That sound coming from that voice
The Raylettes I knew something new
In me forever that night
You were there and we wouldn’t meet
For nearly forty years
You taking me into the ancestors
In Old Yakima when I come back
From Detroit I’m 16 by days
You’re 22
Jim
22 July—8 December 2020
*
Where the bright gleam of our bright star is cast—
This, that day of collapsing distance
With President Wilson—Fighting
Southern oligarchy, for national citizenship
With deep distrust of Wilson in 1916.
1917 comes to East St. Louis and Houston.
Speaking to Wilson against shooting
And lynching, after writing about the baby
Baptized in gasoline, who has a word
For you, elected NAACP Secretary
Standing to speak? 13 new NAACP
Branches, 1917 horrors destroying
What can be remembered in time.
Corporal Charles Baltimore of the 24th Infantry
Going to check on Alonso Edwards,
Black soldier who was pistol-whipped
And arrested, after coming to the rescue
Of a Black woman pulled into the street
In her nightgown while her five children watch.
Leader of 10,000 people Silent March--
Newspapers show and tell of the lynching
And Private Frank Johnson breaking into gospel,
Lord, I’m coming home, 12 other soldiers joined
In song. In East St. Louis, white mobs massacre
Blacks protesting black workers from the South
Taking industrial jobs from them. 27 murders found,
Houses, bodies, neighborhood burned—this is the news
On the 4th of July, 1917. Jim Crow Justice.
*
We come as a delegation from the New York Branch
Of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
Johnson says to President Wilson, standing, And now,
Mr. President, we
would not let this opportunity pass…
100 YEARS OF A SOUL-MAKING
CHAIN
For B.G,
exhortation, & the critical moment
Three anthologies
Linking each other threaded
Dark duende matter
Sounding soul singing
Johnson-Harper-Bontemps
Dry paper ink breath
1917
Soldiers in East St. Louis
Six feet chain-distanced
A murmuration
Confuse predators, stay
warm
Dry streams declaring
The Book of
American Negro Poetry
Come to us in a mean time—1922—
1922—Thanking you at Thanksgiving,
Mr. Johnson, 100 years later. You’ve been
Working with NAACP and Congress
For three years on the Anti-Lynching Bill,
The Dyer bill, finally passed by House
In 1922—Senators will filibuster,
But the poems, still in print—
I’m reading now A
Song of Thanks,
By Edward Smyth Jones,
For the pumpkin
sweet and the yellow yam
For the corn and
beans and the sugared ham—
Jones lives too in the Index of Authors, telling
How he walked 100s of miles from the South
To Harvard, arrested for vagrancy. His poem,
Harvard Square gets him out of jail. So it is,
With poems, Mr. Johnson, this book in my hands.
The anti-lynching bill will be looked at again.
It, too, well, another poem, George Marion McClellon’s
Feet of Judas, reminds, Christ washed Judas’ feet.
Some things you don’t know about your work:
Library of America, 2004, your work, 1000 pages,
Paper like silk, bound on boards, wrapped in cloth,
Richly maroon, and boxed, matching sewn ribbon
For marking pages. But beautiful. If I underline?
If I write in margins, I deface a treasure. You write
On page 615 when Jack Johnson defeats Jeffries.
NOT UNTIL I’M 75 YEARS OLD DO I READ
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF AN EX-COLORED MAN
IN A SINGLE AFTERNOON, TELLING MY WIFE AT DINNER,
Karen, I’ve known about this book since high school,
But never read it. Listen. I take notes from first sentence,
...in writing the
following pages I am divulging
The great secret of my life. The second paragraph
Reveals the regret in the book’s last paragraph.
Of course I read it next. Beginning again, his mother’s
Arms hold him, he becomes a solitary. He turns in
The wrong notebook in school…a book that cleared
The whole mystery…and who is this father? She’ll…
Someday…—and while I’m reading,
My brother calls, He’s just seen
This movie, a message of hope,
David Byrnes’ American Utopia,
Every song better than the last,
If you need hope, especially
The last one, a protest,
Say her name
Say his name
Spike Lee directs
We’re burning down the house
Byrnes says and this
This is a connection
To the other side.
It’s a young singer,
Janelle Monáe
Hell you, Talmbaud,
Her chant, chanting
Names of Black Americans
Killed by police and vigilantes,
From 2015—anthemic—your tocaya
In our time—Wondaland arts, Afro
Futurist, asking listeners to record
Personal versions—Say her name—
Tagline on truth—voices cracking
The popping sounds
of technology and pistol
He added,
‘of course, you could go any place in the city,
they wouldn’t know you from white.’
Our author Learning language rolling cigars
Learning to speak by speaking.
Where vocabulary comes from.
One day his mother called him home.
This is your father. He promises a gift.
It’s a piano and you’ll never see him again.
But now you can talk to your mother,
And like Baldwin, you’ll get to Paris.
You’ll sit in a theatre watching Faust
Looking at a woman, imagining.
She’s young, beautiful, with her parents,
You’re there by accident looking
At her father, seeing, now, he’s yours’,
Too, this man you’ve seen once in your life.
Nothing is acknowledged.--
Another friend calls
Reading Yeats—
Turn to The Tower,
Last section, beginning,
Now I shall make my
soul…
Yeats is an old man
My friend tightens down the poem
Like he did with Williams’
Red Wheelbarrow
Deleting ‘so much depends’
Now only this
Now I shall make my
soul
However you make it
Repeating again, however
I would tell Karen
The story of the reading of this book
Reading it as James Weldon Johnson’s
Autobiography, misreading, because
I’d not known—published anonymously,
I’d not read enough—and I’d wake her
That night in bed, saying, I had it wrong,
The I in the story, it wasn’t Johnson,
It’s a book of fiction. Published that way.
And I got pulled in. Oh, man. This book.
Johnson knows the slave songs. It shows
In every piece of his work—James Weldon Johnson.
*
PLAY IT FORWARD, PLAY IT BACK,
FURTHERANCE—THIS LETTER,
DEAR MR. JAMES WELDON JOHNSON,
% OF WRITINGS,
LIBRARY OF AMERICA
Your editorials from The New York Age:
Do You Read Negro
Papers?
President Wilson’s
“New Freedom” and the Negro,
Calibre Statesmen,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
And the Clansman,
The Passing of Jack Johnson,
A Trap, “The Poor
White Musician”,
Stranger Than
Fiction, Saluting the Flag,
Responsibilities
and Opportunities
Of the Colored
Ministry, Under the Dome of the Capitol,
The Silent Parade,
An Army with Banners,
Experienced Men
Wanted, “Why Should a Negro Fight?”,
“Negro” With a Big
“N”, Protesting Women and the War,
The Japanese
Question in California,
The “Jim Crow” Car
in Congress,
A Real Poet—Mr. Johnson, I’m stopping
Here—but beautiful--…there
are, of course,…
Great poets that
blaze out brightest…
These four great
religious leaders…
All great ethical
poets…Buddha,
Confucius, Christ
and Mohammed…
Peaks of …genius of
the races
That produced
them…limited to
Oriental races. America
And the 2020 elections. I’m here,
Now. Me, thanking you for NAACP,
America has been saved by Black voters again.
A President whose name, We cannot say,
Has been ousted. Van Jones, Black voice,
It’s easier to be a parent this morning,
Kamala Harris, Howard University,
Dressed in a 2-piece pant suit,
Cream-colored blouse, our Vice-President—
Lift every voice and sing.
We’re singing, Mr. Johnson,
Just after Thanksgiving, we’re singing
In the midst of a new plague,
Singing through a poisonous time.
Walter Mosley, mystery writer, Black,
Receiving the national award for
We, the people, who
are darker than blue,
I write you from Yakima, Washington,
Authenticated by Black writers, reading Cervantes,
almost done, this last redeeming note:
unnamed President protesting Detroit votes
that threw him out, files lawsuit.
NAACP Legal Defense Fund files
Federal lawsuit on behalf of Michigan
Voters, accusing him of violating
Voting Rights Act. Sherrilyn Ifill,
President and Director, Counsel of NAACP
Legal Defense Fund—cousin of Gwen Ifill,
(now with you), living on the page
And a new Commemorative Stamp,
The one on this letter, hand-cancelled,
Connects directly to you through one
Thurgood Marshall. I’m writing
From bed, after waking Karen,
My wife, to tell her about this lawsuit.
It’s Come Sunday here, Sunday Morning,
It’s dark, but the morning, and your words,
POST SCRIPT—BUT BEAUTIFUL
Access and other sources: Gilbert Chandler, Geoff Dyer,
29 November 2020
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