Native Wood Notes

I

EVER since that day in the 1860’s when Colonel Higginson wrote for the Atlantic Monthly his history-making article about the Negroes’ plantation shouts, then aptly rechristened ‘spirituals,’ these have had their share of attention. When Joel Chandler Harris, a little later, published the Uncle Remus stories, learned men as well as little children became interested in the Negroes’ wisdom about ‘the time when the critturs could talk.’ The publication of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s first book of poems was an event that stirred philanthropists and a few watchful men of letters. And now the critics generally are awaking to the fact that more than a few Negroes are writing admirable verse and prose. Yet no savant seems to have made a study of Negro composition as a whole either for its own sake or for the light it might throw on other literary origins.

The Southern children who tag at the heels of the Negro servants from nursery to kitchen, from kitchen to cabin and field, can listen all day long to hymns, work songs, and ballads that are the spontaneous expression of an illiterate race, and theirs is an experience that scholars well may envy.

It is an opportunity that will vanish before long. Education is already encroaching upon this spontaneity. There will doubtless come a time when more sophisticated Negroes will despise these crude beginnings; and then it may be as hard to evoke these Negro folk songs as it now is to coax from the old people who remember them the ballads that are fresh with the dew of our Anglo-Saxon morning. But now, with a little diligence, the whole literary history of the American Negro can be retraced. Its utmost span is three centuries. Practically it is a much shorter time. Though the slave trade in America began in the spring of 1619 and nominally ended in 1807, it is well known that Yankee traders ran ‘black ivory’ into Southern ports almost up to the time of the war between the States.

My own mother’s beloved Negro mammy was so brought to this country. She used to sing to her nurselings strange songs in a tongue they did not understand, and when she lay dying she sang a lament of which faint echoes lingered in their memory ever after: ‘Marco way, marco way’ — was it the death wail of the Kroos in Africa?

The Negroes’ songs are still chiefly anonymous or communal; improvisation is part of their daily lives; and there is an alluring parallel between the verse forms they have developed and the English verse forms that have come down to us from ‘the high and far-off times.’

Work songs and river songs probably come early in the tradition of every race. Most of our work songs survive only under the disguise of children’s games, while a chance sailor’s chantey may hold an echo of our river songs; but the Negroes sing theirs still from dawn to dusk. For these they are, in all likelihood, in no way beholden to us. Such songs are heard in Africa, sung by the tribes from which our Negroes came. What does it matter whether the words are Kroo or English or whether the river invoked be the Congo or the Mississippi? A river song that belongs to my valley of Virginia is a work song too. The Negroes sing it as they wind a windlass, bringing a dripping bucket from the well: —

Such invocations cannot long survive in a time when all water is drawn from a faucet. But so far the work songs seem rather to multiply than to diminish. Even factory conditions cannot silence the Negroes’ singing, and the tobacco factories in Lynchburg and Richmond are vocal with these chanteys.

Students of variation in traditional balladry might find the variation in these occupational ditties informing. For example, as ‘ Way down in the cotton held’ leaves the cotton states, the scene of action becomes a tobacco patch or a cornfield and there are suitable alterations in the action. To a Virginian, born in the valley that was ‘ the granary of the Confederacy,’ the best of Negro work songs is the cornheld chantey, ‘Shuck along, John.’ That song, by the way, seems to puzzle Dr. Krehbiel, who speaks of it in his admirable study of Afro-American Folk Songs as ‘Shock along, John.’ Probably Dr. Krehbiel never shucked any corn. Maybe he called it ‘husking’ if he did.

Only a fragment of the street vender’s cries has survived, here and there in England, the competition of the hoardings and of newspaper advertising, and perhaps they were never heard in our New England states; but even today in every Southern town the cries of oysterman, crab-seller, and vegetable vender make marketing a musical and colorful event. A collection of these street cries has been published, as a gayly illustrated book ‘for very little children. Isaac Blanchard issued it under the uninviting title, Jingle Jangle Jumbly Lays, and it is, one fears, out of print. Its naïveté makes it treasure-trove if it can be retrieved.

II

From the plantation shout, ‘Ol’ ark’s a-movin’,’ to the Northumbrian Hymn is a far cry; but the source, the general subject, and the epic treatment make them kin. The Vulgate of Saint Jerome must have been to Cædmon what the King James Bible has been to the plantation Negro, Is it a great matter whether one learn the Book from ‘ol’ Miss’ or from the Abbess Hilda? Fundamentalists may find aid and comfort in the fact that the Caucasian hymn-maker begins with the creation and leads up to the redemption, while the sons of Ham begin with the flood and go to doomsday.

In many a spiritual it appears that the Negro’s preoccupation with doomsday is like that of Cynewulf, and the emotion that animates the ‘Vision of the Cross’ moves in the heart-searching Negro hymn, ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’

In spite of these points of resemblance the gulf between such poets as Cædmon and Cynewulf and the plantation singers is, undeniably, very wide. But there is actual likeness in form and substance between ‘Little David’ and ‘Cursor mundi,’ whose Latin title belies the purpose of its anonymous author of the fourteenth century to write a poem for

Not only is the subject the same, but there is the same metre, the same rhymed couplet, and the same touchand-go treatment of the episodes. Here are four couplets, two from each poem: —

Is it easy to tell which lines are from the Negro hymn and which from ‘Cursor mundi’?

Interesting as is the parallel between Saxon and Negro poetry, the differences are no less so. From the beginning, we Caucasians seem to have embroidered our thought with words. Negroes embellish theirs with music. The refrain is usually the predominating element. As to words, they make free use of rhyme and assonance, but they can do perfectly well without either, for theirs is literally ‘the way of the makers.’ The distinctive element in their folk poetry is onomatopæia. It takes the place here that alliteration held in earliest English versification. It is heard in ‘Ol’ ark she reel, ok ark she rock.’ It startles the listener in the music of ‘Death goin’ to lay his cold, icy hand on you.’ It rolls in ‘Hear that lumberin’ thunder,’ and it goes haltingly along ‘A mighty rocky road whar I’m mos’ done travelin’.’

Amid all the praise that has been heaped upon the spirituals one looks in vain for adequate recognition of the range and beauty of their metre. It seems to cover the whole scale of natural emotion and varies from the arresting shout, ‘O mo’ner!’ to the majestic rhythm of such a line as

Some of the Negro dance songs are made on the spur of the moment, — the wings of the dance, — and others are echoed year after year, generation after generation, and are sung from Chesapeake Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.

Perhaps one has surprised narrative balladry at the source in such an episode as Dan Tucker’s mishaps when

In the Southern states, ‘Dan Tucker’ is danced wherever dancing feet are found, and there are those who contend it originated in Europe. Be that as it may, the quatrain just quoted is pure Afro-American-Plantation-Negro.

The field hands in the South have a form of improvisation that is like the chantes fables of Old France. Wherever they gather for cotton-picking, hay harvest, hemp-breaking, or like gregarious enterprise, they are apt at the dinner hour to call on one ol their number ‘ to give out the news.’ The recital is nearly always concerned with local happenings and it is impossible to cite an example that would give a just notion of it. One hopes that before the Negroes learn, like the rest of us, to depend too much upon print or radio to ‘give out the news’ some appreciative scholar may hear that rolling blank verse, that polyphonic prose.

Nearly all illiterate Negroes improvise with complete readiness. I recall a half-witted Negro house boy who was the delight of my childhood because I never heard him speak prose. For example, he would gravely report on a rainy morning: —

What little girl could fail to think that such rhymed conversation was more entertaining than other people’s prosaic speech?

III

It is a long time since we others have voiced our grief in coronachs above our dead; the Negro’s unimpeded flow of song is still heard best at funerals. Everybody who has read Porgy will recall how Porgy and his friends sang for the ‘saucer-burying’ and at the grave; and there is still another kind of dirge even more closely akin to the ancient coronach. One of these I heard when as a child I was taken to the funeral of an old Negro servant, a man loved and respected by two races. Of prayer and Bible reading I recall nothing. There was no sermon. Instead the Negro preacher lifted his splendid voice and sang a couplet in praise of his dead friend. From a corner of the little church a woman’s voice took up the story. There was no chorus this time. One by one his friends wove for their dead comrade a chaplet of song. Probably no one present could have repeated a line of it afterward, but to a little listening child it seemed a better tribute than the flowers at a ‘white’ funeral.

Many of the Negro ballads have more kinship with dirges than with the dance. Has that clue been followed in any ballad-hunting? The Negro ballads that I know differ, indeed, from such coronachs as I have spoken of in that they are by no means beautiful. Instead, they bring the Congo disconcertingly close. But their theme is often death, and the music to which they are sung is slow and like a dirge.

Probably every Negro in America can sing the ballad of Buggah Burns, whose tragic history begins, —

Long before Spoon River Anthology was written, Negro balladists luxuriated in dreadful realistic detail that told how

It is only fair to record that music solemn as the ‘Dead March’ from ‘Saul’ redeems the naked savagery of the words.

‘Frankie’ is another ballad of death, though in this case the protagonist was not victim but avenger. Students of ballad variation might find much to interest them in it. The opening line varies with the standard of the singer. Sometimes it is

Frankie was a lady, everybody knows.

Again, a sterner judge will declare that

In the far South her weapon was a cane knife; in Virginia she was represented as using a corn knife; in Georgia she has been known to handle a razor; but in Kentucky

But always the long line ends with the wailing refrain, heavy with all sorrow of a dark, primitive race, —

He was her man, but he done her wrong.

A very queer recurrence of an ancient form is in a cumulative song called ‘Pretty Pear Tree.’ The Negroes sing it on summer nights and the music ripples on, piling phrase on phrase, till it tells of the very ‘song on the beak of the bird in the egg in the nest in the pretty pear tree, down in yond’ beautiful field.’ It is strangely like the traditional carol whose refrain is

Again, there is a Spanish folk song beginning

which is so like the Negro shout,

that one might almost be a translation of the other.

Conscientious students might, of course, fall to hunting for evidences of Spanish influence on African tradition or African on Spanish, but probably the chance likeness only proves the essential kinship, under like conditions of poverty and simplicity, of ‘all God’s children.’

People who have heard Roland Hayes sing some of the Negro songs in lighter vein must have been struck with their likeness to the flytings, or floutings, of the childhood of literature in Europe and in the British Isles. ‘Poor old Piedy’ is such a flyting, and there is one in dialogue form that stirs the hair on the heads of Southern children, white and black. That one begins innocently, to all appearance: —

and the answer, equally innocuous, is ‘Aigs.’ But with question and answer the flyting runs on till that supper of eggs resuits fatally, and the listening children hear the crickets chirp above the corpse.

Not all the dialogues are grotesque. The form is sometimes used in meditation that is like the Hebrew psalms.

One of these begins, —

It goes on and on till the listener feels utterly diminished — less than the grass, less than the dust. Suddenly the song restores his spirit with a trium phant shout:—

Work songs, river songs, dances, and hymns, chantes fables and flylings, coronachs and ballads — through the centuries these have emerged in our literary tradition, and some we have lost and some we have retained. The Negroes in America, neither helped nor hampered by instruction, made use of all these forms before they learned to read. It seems to show that life, not learning, is the mother of the arts.