Aphrodite's Daughters: Three Modernist Poets of the Harlem Renaissance 9780813570808

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A phrodite’s Daughters

Frontispiece. Josephine Baker, 1929, Paris. Photo by George Hoyningen-Huene. © HorstPhoto, Courtesy Staley/Wise Gallery.

A P H ROD I T E ’ S D AUG H T E R S Three Modernist Poets of the Harlem Renaissance

Maureen Honey

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Honey, Maureen, 1945- author. Title: Aphrodite’s daughters : three modernist poets of the Harlem Renaissance / Maureen Honey. Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015037353| ISBN 9780813570792 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813570785 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780813570808 (e-book (web pdf )) Subjects: LCSH: American poetry—African American authors—History and criticism. | American poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. | Harlem Renaissance. | African American poets—20th century. | Women poets, American—20th century. | African American women—New York (State)—New York—Intellectual life. | Modernism (Literature)—New York (State)—New York. | African-American arts—New York (State)—New York—20th century. | Grimkâe, Angelina Weld, 1880–1958—Criticism and interpretation. | Bennett, Gwendolyn, 1902–1981—Criticism and interpretation. | Cowdery, Mae V. (Mae Virginia), approximately 1909–1953—Criticism and interpretation. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women. | LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African American. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women’s Studies. | SOCIAL SCIENCE /Ethnic Studies / African American Studies. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Women Authors. | HISTORY / United States / 20th Century. Classification: LCC PS310.N4 H66 2016 | DDC 811/.5209928708996073—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037353 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2016 by Maureen Honey All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

For my late parents, Betty and Keith Honey, whose love made all possible

You are like a pale purple flower In the blue spring dusk . . . . . . You are like a yellow star Budding and glowing In an apricot sky . . . . . . You are like the beauty Of a voice . . . . . . Remembered after death . . . . . . You are like thin, white petals Falling And Floating Down Upon the white, stilled hushing Of my soul. —Angelina Weld Grimké

I love you for your brownness, And the rounded darkness of your breast; I love you for the breaking sadness in your voice And shadows where your wayward eyelids rest. —Gwendolyn B. Bennett

No more The feel of your hand On my breast . . . Like the silver path Of the moon On dark heaving ocean. —Mae V. Cowdery

Contents

List of Illustrations x Acknowledgments xiii 1  The Lyric Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery  1 2  Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire  29 3  Harlem’s Phoenix: Gwendolyn B. Bennett  97 4  Shattered Mirror: The Failed Promise of Mae V. Cowdery  155 Epilogue 217 Appendix A: List of Published Poetry 223 Appendix B: Selected List of Unpublished Poetry 226 Notes 227 Bibliography 251 Further Reading 256 Index 261

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Illustr ations

Frontispiece: Studio portrait of Josephine Baker, 1929 Figure 1: Studio portrait of Angelina Weld Grimké, ca. 1907 Figure 2: Class photo, Fairmount Grammar School, Hyde Park, Boston, ca. 1892 Figure 3: Angelina Weld Grimké in her Carleton Academy dorm room, 1895 Figure 4: Photo of Mary “Mamie” Burrill Figure 5: Studio portrait of Angelina Weld Grimké, ca. 1895 Figure 6: Studio portrait of Thérèse “Tessa” Lee Figure 7: Daguerreotype of Sarah Stanley Grimké and baby Angelina, 1880 Figure 8: Studio portrait of Archibald and Angelina Grimké, ca. 1902 Figure 9: Studio portrait of Gwendolyn B. Bennett in the 1920s Figure 10: Gwendolyn Bennett with male friends in the 1920s Figure 11: Gwendolyn Bennett as a child, ca. 1907 Figure 12: Studio portrait of Joshua and Gwendolyn Bennett, ca. 1909 Figure 13: Gwendolyn Bennett at the Savoy Ballroom, 1939 Figure 14: Gwendolyn Bennett and Richard Crosscup, 1973 Figure 15: Mae V. Cowdery as winner of the Krigwa Prize, 1928 Figure 16: Mae V. Cowdery and Louise Pelham, New York City, 1928 Figure 17: Mae V. Cowdery and Marion Turner, Atlantic City, 1933 Figure 18: Mae V. Cowdery with her daughter, mother, and grandmother, 1937 Figure 19: Mae V. Cowdery at a Philadelphia fund-raiser, 1937 Figure 20: Photo of Mae V. Cowdery with notice of her death, 1948

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ii 28 53 53 56 58 61 74 89 96 111 117 121 146 150 154 183 197 201 201 208

Acknowledgments

From the moment I first encountered the vast treasure trove of women’s poetry in New Negro journals and anthologies of the Harlem Renaissance over twenty years ago, three poems lodged in my mind with particular staying power. Angelina Weld Grimké’s “El Beso” took my breath away as the scene moved from twilight calm to a woman’s provocative laughter to her alluring mouth to a moment of mad surrender and finally to sobbing regret before returning to quiet twilight—all in the space of sixteen lines. Gwendolyn B. Bennett made me shiver with her one-stanza portrait of a strangely cool night in midsummer when far-off laughter dissolves into crystal tears in “Nocturne.” Mae V. Cowdery riveted my attention when she opened “Want” with a speaker’s startling desire to take down heaven’s stars and bury her face in them. The directness of their verse erased the many decades that separated it from me; their images were haunting. There was something so palpably real in their lyric poetry that I felt its modernity and relevance to my own era. This study grows out of that early connection and the desire it created to find out when, where, and how this lyricism was born. Of immense help to me as I moved forward in this journey was my editor, Leslie Mitchner, who believed in the project from its very beginnings and whose enthusiasm lifted my flagging spirits as the writing proceeded. Her guidance throughout has made this a far better work. The perceptive comments of Cherene Sherrard-Johnson were also tremendously helpful as I honed the core of my analysis and forged links between my three writers. The book has been made far better by the meticulous copyediting of Kate Babbitt and the fine photograph production of Anne Hegeman. Carrie Hudak provided much-needed support throughout the publication process. Many thanks to the design team for this book’s gorgeous cover. I am indebted to the groundbreaking scholarship on women of the Harlem Renaissance of Gloria Hull, Carolivia Herron, Sandra Y. Govan, Cheryl A. Wall, Lorraine Elena Roses, Thadious Davis, Deborah McDowell, Angela Y. Davis, George Hutchinson, Cary Nelson, Nina Miller, Melissa Girard, Cynthia Davis, Verner D. Mitchell, Hazel Carby, Claudia

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xiv  T  Acknowledgments Tate, Yemisi Jimoh, Carla Kaplan, Mary Helen Washington, Robin Hackett, Joanne Braxton, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Hortense Spillers, among others. Without their trenchant investigations, I would have had very little notion of how to blend literary analysis with biographical history or connect Harlem Renaissance women poets to modernism. Arnold Rampersad, Amritjit Singh, David Levering Lewis, Adam McKible, James Smethurst, Seth Moglen, Mark Sanders, and Houston Baker Jr., among many others, have provided foundational insights into the Harlem Renaissance; without their work, this study would be much diminished. The contributions of Lillian Faderman, Laura Doan, Eric Garber, Karla Jay, A.B. Christa Schwartz and George Chauncey to LGBT history were essential to my understanding of Grimké’s and Cowdery’s erotic poetry, as was the foundational work on black women’s poetry by Barbara Smith, Ann Allen Shockley, June Jordan, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Cheryl Clarke, Nikki Giovanni, Rita Dove, and Maya Angelou. Several people encouraged me during my research and writing with their enthusiasm for my subject, particularly colleagues in the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Of particular help were my talks with Melissa Homestead about recovery work over many lunches and her suggestions of fruitful approaches to my biographical material. Gwendolyn Foster provided key advice and moral shoring-up, especially as I went through the copyediting. I am also immensely grateful for the support of Kwakiutl Dreher, Amelia Montes, Joy Castro, Grace Bauer, Julia and Dominique Cheenne, who all sustained me throughout the many years I worked on this project. Other colleagues in the English Department to whom I am indebted include Ken Price, Stephen Behrendt, Gregory Rutledge, Stephen Buhler, Wheeler Dixon, Kwame Dawes, Chigozie Obioma, Ted Kooser, Guy Reynolds, Jack Vespa, Pete Capuano, Julia Schleck, Laura White, Roland Végsö, Fran Kaye, Tom Lynch, Tom Gannon, Stacey Waite, Shari Stenberg, June Griffin, Steve Ramsay, Rhonda Garelick, and Adrian Wisnicki. All of them encouraged me with their own excellent work and interest in my project. I am most grateful to my chairs, Marco Abel and Susan Belasco, for providing the research assistance, personal support, and faculty leaves I needed to complete this book. Other treasured friends and colleagues who have provided crucial personal support for my work include Venetria Patton, who is my home away from home; Jeannette Jones; Anna Shavers; Helen Moore; George Wolf; Emily Levine, Joyce A. Joyce; Sharon Harris; Myriam Chancy; Alpana Sharma; Linda Pratt; Barbara DiBernard; Julia Ehrhardt; Greg Kuzma; and Hilda Raz. Marly Swick, Judy Slater, Suzy Beemer, Steven Aldrich, Maureen Sullivan,

Acknowledgments  T  xv Joan Nelson, Olivia Petrides, Sharon Monod, and Devon Niebling are essential to my heart and soul. Many thanks to Martha Allen and Jonathan Zeitlin, whose hospitality enabled me to do research at Howard University and whose insightful comments about the Grimké brothers moved my project in dynamic new directions. I also want to thank Eric Mock and Louella Berliner for their hospitality in New York City when I was doing research at the Schomburg Center. They made my stay in the Big Apple wonderfully pleasant. My brilliant niece, Emily Hamilton-Honey, provided me with essential information about nineteenth-century boarding schools at a key moment in my work. A big thank you to my reading friends Ardy Cunningham, Cindy Cerny, and Peggy Olson. This book would not have been possible without the genealogical sleuthing of Reginald Pitts, who combed through the black press and public documents to give me biographical information not available in archives, especially on Mae Cowdery. Our trip to Germantown in pursuit of Cowdery’s childhood home was particularly memorable and illuminating. Without Reg’s meticulous researching of hard-to-obtain news items on Cowdery, I would have had no biographical context for interpreting her work. Cowdery’s granddaughter, Melanie Coles Hamilton, provided me with family history to which I would not otherwise have had access, and her deep admiration for her grandmother’s poetry inspired me to bring it to the attention of other readers. Melanie has inherited the spirit of her grandmother and carries on her artistic legacy. Vincent Jubilee, Laura Harris, and Lorna Wheeler provided invaluable research on Cowdery, as did Douglas Oitzinger, who is researching her family tree. I am most grateful for the financial support of the Research Council and the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which allowed me to conduct research at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and the Philadelphia Public Library. I also thank the College of Arts and Sciences for a grant to help cover permissions costs for the illustrations in this volume and for two faculty development leaves. Staff members at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center gave me excellent help in using the Archibald H. Grimké Papers and the Angelina Weld Grimké Collection, particularly Kenvi Phillips, Ida E. Jones, and Richard Jenkins. I am indebted to Thomas Lisanti and Linden Anderson at the New York Public Library for their help in identifying photographs from the Gwendolyn Bennett Papers at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

xvi  T  Acknowledgments People who gave me much-needed technical and bibliographic support in the English Department are Erin Chambers, our media specialist; Brad Cain, our computer technician; and research assistants Jeannette Schollaert, Mitchell Hobza, Tami Zwick, and Aubrey Streit-Krug. Their intelligent and enthusiastic help made it possible to bring this work to completion. Many thanks are due to the graduate students who took my seminars in Women of the Harlem Renaissance and whose incisive comments greatly enhanced my understanding of the period. Of particular value are those I worked with closely in and out of class and those whose dissertations I directed. I especially want to thank Amber Leichner, Shane Hunter, Jacyln Cruikshank Vogt, Megan Peabody, Tamy Burnett, Mevi Hova, DeMisty Bellinger, Julie Iromuanya, Carrie Walker, Pascha Stevenson, Kristi Carter, Aaron Hillyer, Elizabeth Lorang, and Steven Moore. They have all been an inspiration to me. I am deeply grateful for the insights into women writers of the modernist era by my seminar students as I was copyediting this book: Jessica Aerts, Stephanie Camerone, Stevie Seibert Desjarlais, Amber Hadenfeldt, Katie Schmid Henson, Natalie O’Neal, Emily Rau, Dillon Rockrohr, Cameron Steele, Jenny Schollaert, Brita Thielen, and Visnja Vujin. I want to single out our department’s superb administrative assistant, LeAnn Messing, for her expertise in working through all the bureaucratic steps needed to process my grants. She has been a guiding light. Last but by no means least, I want to extend my deep appreciation for the help of my family in getting to the end of this project. My brothers, Charles and Michael Honey, have been at my side every step of the way. Their interest in the political and artistic dimensions of my poets’ lives greatly encouraged me even as I wrestled with doubts. Moreover, just as I sat down to construct my chapter on Angelina Weld Grimké, our parents suddenly reached the endpoint of their lives, and we were thrust into the chaos of that experience. Without my brothers’ emotional support, and that of their partners, Pat Krueger and Andrea Myers, I would not have been able to resume writing, a task that took on unexpected meaning as I explored Grimké’s many meditations on loss and death. Most of all, I want to thank my partner, Tom Kiefer, who not only saw me through this personal trial but urged me to put the book first and gave me the room and time to complete it. He took precious time away from his own writing to take care of our pets, daily household tasks, and other pressing matters so that I could visit archives and meet writing deadlines. Without him, this book would not have materialized, and I owe him more than I can say. Such intelligent love is rare, and I am profoundly grateful for it.

aphrodite’s daughters

1 The Lyric Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery

I

n the spring of 1927, Angelina Grimké, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Mae Cowdery were beginning what would prove to be a banner year. Spring was a season they frequently celebrated, as did all poets of the Harlem Renaissance, for it symbolized the rebirth of African Americans in the modern age, the New Negro casting off plantation stereotypes. “Toss your gay heads, brown girl trees; / Toss your gay lovely heads,” Grimké joyfully shouts in “At April”; “Night wears a garment / All velvet soft, all violet blue,” Bennett seductively tells us at the start of “Street Lamps in Early Spring”; “I stand on a high green hill / Caught in breathless wonder / By a sudden gold daffodil,” marvels Cowdery in “Spring Poem in Winter.”1 This particular spring was especially auspicious, however, for each of them would publish several poems in multiple venues that year, building upon (or attracting, in Cowdery’s case) the attention of powerful critics and anthologists, such as William Stanley Braithwaite, Charles S. Johnson, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, Alain Locke, and James Weldon Johnson. Grimké published twenty-one poems in 1927, Bennett twelve, and Cowdery eight, all of them across a wide range of highly regarded journals and anthologies.2 In the spring of 1927, at age forty-seven, Grimké had just retired from teaching English at Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., where she lived with her activist father and distinguished uncle in a gorgeous row house on the city’s northwest side. She frequently spent Saturday nights at Georgia Douglas Johnson’s salon on S Street, but tending to her father’s failing health had become the center of her life by 1927. She would lose

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2  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters touch with her writing peers after his death in 1930, falling into silence and seclusion after a 40-year writing career. Bennett, a 24-year-old professor of fine art at Howard University that spring, also attended Johnson’s salons while remaining a fixture on the Harlem arts scene, but she had recently fallen in love with a Howard medical student and would marry him the following spring, moving to Florida at the height of her fame in 1928. When she returned to Harlem in 1930, the Depression had created such hardship that she barely recognized it. She became a community activist while completing her art education and continuing to write poetry, but without the time or venues she needed to publish it, her creative publications ended. Cowdery was a Philadelphia high school senior the spring of 1927, where she lived with her socially prominent parents in Germantown and hobnobbed with Langston Hughes’s bohemian circle while remaining popular with the daughters of lawyers, doctors, and community leaders in the city’s black professional class. She was about to enroll at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute as an art student in the fall, but her true calling was poetry. Her work was already being published in the newly formed Black Opals, whose inaugural issue in Philadelphia that spring contained three of her poems. By December, Cowdery had won the prestigious Krigwa Prize in a poetry contest run by The Crisis, but her journal and anthology appearances would come to an abrupt halt in 1930 despite having placed nineteen poems in prominent New Negro venues by the age of twenty-one; only 350 copies were printed of her self-published 1936 collection, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems, and it was quickly forgotten despite favorable reviews. In short, these three poets were at the center of the Harlem Renaissance in 1927 with shared sensibilities that resulted in deeply personal lyric verse and inspirational uplift poetry, despite their very different circumstances, personalities, and intimate circles. Just a few years later, however, their poetry would disappear for decades, forgotten or dismissed as minor contributions to the Harlem Renaissance. Even though they and other women poets were resurrected in the 1980s, there is still relatively little scholarship on their poetry. In part this is because Grimké never was able to publish a collection and only a few dozen of her poems made it into print; Bennett’s small body of published creative writing came to an end after she married; and Cowdery’s collection did not appear until 1936, when the Harlem Renaissance was all but dead. The result in each case was a limited body of published poetry that, while engaging, has not seemed as central to the arts movement as work by more prolific poets, such as Langston Hughes or Claude McKay. Even more damaging to their poetic legacies, perhaps,

Lyric Poetry of Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery  T  3 is that these three, like other black women poets from the period, have fallen between the cracks of two major critical models in the scholarship. They have been left in the shadows of modernist studies, which tends to focus on white writers, and scholarship on Harlem Renaissance modernism, which favors prose or male poets who transformed outmoded dialect verse into a blend of African American musical rhythms and the vernacular. Although Grimké’s poetry is generally viewed as her best work, it is her play Rachel and her anti-lynching fiction that have received the most critical attention, despite an excellent edition of collected work that includes quite a bit of her poetry.3 Bennett’s poetry, social columns, and two pieces of fiction are starting to receive critical investigation, but she has been highlighted mainly as a key organizer of Harlem artists.4 An edition of her creative work has yet to appear, seriously hampering such scholarship, particularly given the fact that so much of her work remained unpublished. Cowdery’s poetry is now included in several anthologies of the Harlem Renaissance, but the absence of an edition, archive, or even basic information about her life severely inhibits analysis of it. Aphrodite’s Daughters: Three Modernist Poets of the Harlem Renaissance seeks to help fill that critical void by close reading of verse centered on the erotic by three poets whose modernist mark within the New Negro movement has yet to be fully recognized: Angelina Weld Grimké (1880–1958), Gwendolyn B. Bennett (1902–1981) and Mae V. Cowdery (1909–1948). I focus on their love poetry because that is what they emphasized and where they did their best work but also because it is in the lyric genre that they most clearly achieved a modernist voice of lasting value. To help bring into view this crucial aspect of their sensibility, I put the lyric verse into dialogue with each poet’s life through a bio-critical lens that treats the chronologically ordered poetry within a framework of the writer’s unfolding life events. Although I do not claim to be a biographer of their entire lives or an analyst of all their poetry, I here am following the lead of Gloria T. Hull, Cheryl A. Wall, Sandra Y. Govan, and others, whose groundbreaking work underlines the importance of incorporating women’s biographies into investigations of their Harlem Renaissance writing.5 Like them, I believe it is only by framing the literature with the life that we can find the true heart of these writers’ vision and courage. This approach is crucial, I believe, for interpreting lyric poetry, a highly personal genre based on the interiority of its speakers. I also include unpublished poetry by Grimké and Bennett that is generally left out of the scholarship, of which there is over twice as much as

4  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters the published work in Bennett’s case and at least a hundred more pieces in the case of Grimké. Because the subject matter often was intimate and publication outlets were narrow, the unpublished verse is a necessary component of my study. Supported by archival research at the MoorlandSpingarn Research Center at Howard University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library in Harlem, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Aphrodite’s Daughters also brings to light previously unknown facts of these writers’ lives from public records and the black press, particularly for Cowdery, who left no archive and about whom little has been known. This information sheds light on the struggles they faced that are reflected in their lyric poetry while opening a window on what life was like for them as modern black women poets in the age of Jim Crow. I have selected these particular poets in part to represent three pivotal moments in the Harlem Renaissance and key points of the geographic map on which it was anchored. Grimké, writing in Boston and Washington D.C., was part of the first generation of New Negro writers emerging in the century’s first decades who found success in the 1920s; Bennett, residing in D.C. and New York, was one of the young upstarts at the peak of the arts movement in the middle of the decade; and Cowdery, a Philadelphia native, belonged to a third wave of promising young writers inspired by Langston Hughes’s call for a new kind of modern poetry in the late 1920s. Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery are not the only New Negro women poets who focused on the erotic in modern lyric verse while battling racism in protest poems: Georgia Douglas Johnson, Jessie Fauset, Helene Johnson, Anne Spencer, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and many others also celebrated a modern dark female sexuality while advocating for racial justice. Fine biographies, and editions of their work in some cases, are available that can advance explication of their lyric verse, and I intend this study to encourage more such critical readings.6 The three writers I have chosen are not intended to be viewed as exceptional in their thematic, in other words, but rather emblematic of the many New Negro women poets whose lives and work remain open to further investigation. Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery represent three generations of Harlem Renaissance writers whose explorations of interior intimacy and erotic connection define them as New Negro modernists, but each of their individual stories helps construct the diverse palette of women artists’ lives in the early twentieth century. The more such stories get told, I believe, the better will be our understanding of the era in which they lived and the more we will be enriched by their art.

Lyric Poetry of Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery  T  5 Although other writers’ poetry and lives can be put into similar fruitful dialogue with each other, I have focused on these three because they share so many common artistic elements, while also displaying consistent treatment of the female erotic as a source of strength and meaning. All three allude to an Aphrodite figure who rules a dark realm. This goddess functions as a muse for each of them, and her falling into silence, the fading away of her luminous image, foreshadows the end of their writing careers. This thematic link of Aphrodite as muse and their portrayal of the erotic as a source of power and a vital component of the New Negro woman unites them in this study. Furthermore, Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery, like other New Negro poets, were race activists who saw no gap between the lyrical and the racial in their poetic landscapes, yet they drew upon unique personal material for their best poetry. Each had her own path to walk as she grappled with turbulent romantic attachments, high family expectations, devastating disappointments, and hardening lines of segregation in the early twentieth century. All experienced unbearable pain at times, and lyric poetry became a realm of transcendence and stability in the face of that pain. Their courage, resilience, and artistry are what make them such a compelling trio for me, their transformation of life’s highs and lows into art that speaks to us generations later.

Aphrodite as Poetic Muse Any woman writer who highlighted erotic experience in the early twentieth century, as these poets did, took a considerable risk, but this risk was especially perilous for African Americans. Because black women were subjected to salacious stereotyping as prostitutes by the dominant culture, New Negro models of conventional femininity became firmly entrenched in black communities as a response. Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery were well aware of these boundaries, reflected by the large body of unpublished verse by the former two, but they celebrated sexual desire as a transporting force anyway. “I should like to creep / Through the long brown grasses / That are your lashes,” Grimké’s speaker boldly confides in “A Mona Lisa” (1927): “I should like to sink down / And down . . . . . . / And down . . . . . ./ And deeply drown.” Bennett features postcoital ecstasy in the unpublished “Comrades”: “Friend, I’ll call you. . . . . . / When the minutes / Pulse more slowly, / And the rich, dark stream / Of your willful love / Has ebbed through / The ravaged quiet / Of my breasts and thighs.” Lust animates Cowdery’s 1936 “Insa-

6  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters tiate”: “If her lips were rubies red, / Her eyes two sapphires blue, / Her fingers ten sticks of white jade, / Coral tipped . . . and her hair of purple hue / Hung down in a silken shawl . . . . / They would not be enough / To fill the coffers of my need.”7 Their verse displayed the female body with a new frankness, setting them apart from their predecessors in the nineteenth century. Grimké focused on women’s lips, perfumed hair, enveloping arms, and alluring eyes. “I let you kiss my mouth / Quite through my curtained eyes / I felt your eyes upon my eyes, my mouth / Compellingly and hungrily you fed,” her speaker recalls in an unpublished verse: “And then I slipped into your arms / Forgot all else but just your lips upon / My mouth.” Bennett draws our attention to her subject’s sexual allure in “To a Dark Girl” (1927): “I love you for your brownness, / And the rounded darkness of your breast; / I love you for the breaking sadness in your voice / And shadows where your wayward eyelids rest. // Something of old forgotten queens / Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk.” Cowdery’s “Longings” (1927) includes her speaker’s desire to feel water against her naked body at dawn: “To plunge— / My brown body / In a golden pool, / And lazily float on the swell / Watching the rising sun.”8 Contemporary scholarship on modernist elements of the Harlem Renaissance is beginning to describe this emphasis on the female body. Stephanie Batiste and Jayna Brown focus on women stage performers and representations of women in film, for example.9 Erin D. Chapman interrogates primitivist and consumerist exploitation of black women’s bodies in popular culture of the 1920s.10 Illuminating further the cultural context for this highlighting of the body, Nina Miller frames modernist American women’s poetry within the emphasis on female sexuality in the Jazz Age: “The national, mass media-driven culture that had evolved in America by the 1920s ushered in a palpable national erotics: a charged and luminous representational field out of which individuals and groups derived new identities and identifications.”11 Aware of the whiteness of women’s sexual representations in the dominant culture in both classical and popular art, however, Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery redefined female sexuality as a dark force of resilience and enlightened change. Worship of a darkened Aphrodite was personally compelling for each of them for different reasons, but this goddess of love also functioned as an inspirational symbol of a new world in which beauty triumphed over prejudice, love over hate, and female equality over patriarchal rule. Grimké heralds the arrival of this dark goddess in part III of the unpublished “A Trilogy”:

Lyric Poetry of Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery  T  7 Behold! She comes, the queen of Night! A queen indeed in shape and size With haunting grace, and haunting eyes. [. . .] She charms to rest by slow degrees The birds, the leaves, the trees, the breeze; And then she sits upon her throne A figure motionless, alone, Her solemn, radiant, vigil keeping Never sleeping, never sleeping—.12 Bennett summons a similar poetic muse in “Fantasy” (1927): I sailed in my dreams to the land of Night Where you were the dusk-eyed Queen, [. . .] Oh, the moon gave a bluish light Through the trees in the land of dreams and night. I stood behind a bush of yellow-green And whistled a song to the dark-haired Queen. . . . 13 Goddesses also animate Cowdery’s darkened landscapes. In three of her four stanzas from the 1936 “Four Poems—After the Japanese,” she presents images of powerful female spirits ruling the universe: Night turned over In her sleep And a star fell Into the sea. Earth was a beautiful Snow woman Until the rain Washed her face one day. [. . .] The moon Is a Madonna Cradling in the crescent curve Of her breast A newborn star.14

8  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Grimké, Bennett and Cowdery here create a goddess who models a new kind of power in the modern age, an Aphrodite figure who compels respect and casts off the fetters of racist patriarchal civilization, symbolized by her dark body’s emergence after nightfall. Although Grimké’s dusk goddess was, unlike the mythic Aphrodite, either clothed in white or invisible in the night sky, she inhabited a realm that released her speakers from false inhibiting roles played out during daytime routines. “I built a shrine one day / Within my inmost heart,” her speaker declares in the unpublished “My Shrine” (1902): I placed it not upon The public-way but in A spot retired and sweet Where I might go alone. [. . .] The idol that I placed Within my modest shrine Was but a maiden small But yet divinely pure, And there I humbly knelt Before those calm, grave eyes, Full oft throughout the night, And oft at moments sweet Purloined throughout the day; [. . .] Sweet idol of my life, One little, saintly, maid, Who keeps my actions pure And makes me see the best In all the sinning world Thro’ her grave, thoughtful eyes;-Ah sweet! Cannot you guess The idol at my shrine?”15 Bennett’s speaker is mesmerized by her night goddess’s vulval “velvet soft” gown in “Street Lamps in Early Spring” (1926): the veil she wears is a seductively moist screen, “As shimmering fine as floating dew. . . ” Contemplating the quiet night sky from a city street, Bennett’s speaker is able to see that the universe is animated by erotic female energy, in

Lyric Poetry of Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery  T  9 dramatic contrast to the fast-paced urban power structures of daylight: “And here and there / In the black of her hair / The subtle hands of Night / Move slowly with their gem-starred light.”16 Cowdery’s speaker in “The Young Voice Cries” (1928) urges her elders “To see the naked loveliness / Of things [. . . ] / . . . A crimson rise / Of earth’s breast against the sky!” If they refuse to heed the voice of youth, her speaker declares: “We must be the roots / Of the tree / And push up alone / Thru earth / Rocky with prejudice / And foul with smirking / Horrors. . . .”17 This goddess of beauty rules quietly in the verse of all three, but she is more powerful than the ignorant world of white male power and civilization’s ugly prejudice. Although in Greek mythology Aphrodite is a white figure associated with sunlight, these writers repositioned her as a creature of twilight, dawn, and night, her erotic force imagined as part of a shadowy world glimpsed when day was done in a landscape of silhouettes, watery visions, and the bright star Venus. In nineteenth-century art, Aphrodite’s white naked body is framed by long tresses of hair or gauzy veils while she is attended by cherubs, swans, and doves on ocean waves. These images of whiteness are racially transmuted, darkened, when Grimké sets her poems at twilight with speakers raptly gazing at a distant star, Bennett creates what Miller calls a Nightwoman who serenely drifts through space, and Cowdery portrays naked lovers at dusk or bathed in moonlight.18 The goddess of love is darkened, veiled, set loose at night to awaken forbidden states of ecstasy and release. Birds herald the arrival of this goddess of the dark with song and flowers adorn her earthly path in their poetry, just as they do in legends of Aphrodite, but she emerges in the shadowy mist of nightfall rather than the bright sunshine of Greek mythology. Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery painted imagistic portraits of trees pointing upward—phallic emblems of endurance and fecundity—and perfumed white flowers or orgasmic bright stars—allusions to racial integration and sexual transport set at twilight, dusk, or evening. They portray a female sexual energy that can be safely unleashed in darkness and wedded to a racial liminality impossible to experience in a daytime ruled by segregation. Nature provided an alternative to urban space symbolic of the ruling order’s white male civilization and power. Countering that power in this pastoral space was the woman artist’s pure voice nurtured by nature’s dark female essence. All three of these poets framed the body’s desire as a pathway to spiritual power, truth, and beauty for the modern female artist, a guiding force of creativity. Grimké created a religion of longing in her verse, pop-

10  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters ulated by bewitching goddesses who float just beyond reach and vanish into an eternal landscape of bruising loss. The Sapphic deity who rules in this ethereal world nonetheless inspires Grimké’s speakers to express forbidden same-sex desire in poetic song. Bennett painted luminous portraits of nighttime female sexuality too glorious for most to see, and she explored the truths that could be found in both the pleasure and pain of heterosexual erotic experience. Cowdery set in motion dark heaving oceans of lust, volcanic eruptions of fire that evaporate in an instant but are as riveting as a comet in her bisexual erotic portraits. Grimké created a religion of same-sex desire in which the speaker is purified by worship of the beloved, who resides in a sphere her speakers can never reach. In Grimké’s unpublished “Thou Art So Far, So Far,” the speaker kneels in humble adoration of a woman who fills her with speechless awe: “Thou art to me a lone, white, star / That I may gaze on from afar, / But I may never, never, press / My lips on thine in mute caress, / E’en touch the hem of thy pure dress[.]” Bennett follows a decidedly secular and heterosexual path, in contrast, but intimacy is equally hallowed ground. In the unpublished “Communion,” the speaker presents her lover with a splendid table of wine and delicious treats as testament to their rapturous connection, framing the gesture with Christian symbolism: “Break bread with me, I pray you my beloved, / For food and drink to those who love / More sweet communion are than any holy grail, / More consecrated are than any sacred cup.” Cowdery’s speaker celebrates “the naked loveliness of things” as a way to combat prejudice, “ugly mists of dogmas and fear,” in “The Young Voice Cries”: “The young voice cries / For the pagan loveliness / Of a moon / For the brazen beauty / Of a jazz song . . . / The young voice / Is hushed / In silent prayer / At beauty’s shrine . . .”19 Whether looking for beauty in male or female lovers, Cowdery’s bisexual exploration of her speakers’ sexuality affirms the modern artist’s freedom to follow her muse wherever it leads. In this centering of the body as a sacred road to beauty and the authentic self within, these three poets participated in a core tenet of modernism: artistic release of an inner voice unfettered by society’s imprisoning restraints through experiencing the moment in all its sensual splendor and pursuing a beautiful truth from within. The New American Poetry pioneered by Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, William Stanley Braithwaite, Harriet Monroe, and others in the century’s second decade sought to highlight this subjectivity so as to better communicate with the soul and free it from the constraints of Victorian duty and civilization. According to its tenets, the

Lyric Poetry of Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery  T  11 true artist accessed the self within, which provided a path outward to the world of poetry that expressed direct emotion without judgment, fear, or censure.20 Aphrodite was a key symbol of this idea, for in Greek mythology not only was she a goddess of erotic power and love, she was also a ruler of subjectivity, feeling, the body’s call to succumb to the moment.21 Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery were no less committed than were white modernists to celebrating subjective states, but they also linked the truth within to the defeat of racist patriarchy without. The Aphrodite figure all three constructed as lyric muse early in their careers fades away in their late verse. Grimké’s verses of regret in the 1920s feature a speaker who fruitlessly gazes at the waning light of a night sky whose bright stars and glowing moon fail to inspire the worship they once did. The goddess before whom she once knelt in reverent awe is so far away she can only see a pair of accusing eyes glaring down at her. Indeed, they turn out to be her own eyes of miserable numbness and regret: “Before me the same blue-black cedar rising jaggedly to a point; / Over it, the same slow unlidding of twin stars, / Two eyes unfathomable, soul-searing, / Watching, watching—watching me,” the hollowed-out speaker declares in “The Eyes of My Regret” (1927). “The same two eyes that draw me forth, against my will dusk after dusk; / The same two eyes that keep me sitting late into the night, chin on knees, / Keep me there lonely, rigid, tearless, numbly miserable — / The eyes of my Regret.”22 Bennett’s speaker in the unpublished “To an Aloof Lady” (ca. 1930s) begs her moribund muse to break out of her cold stillness in this excerpt: You are too far away as you stand smiling there, Too much like honeyed ether is the shining of your hair. Were you to speak, your voice would slip With measured slowness through a film of years. [. . .] Come, rend the veil that dims your loveliness, And break the calm that makes your breathing still. 23 The still-youthful Mae Cowdery, who was only in her twenties during the Depression, also struggled with hanging on to her goddess of beauty in her last journal poem, “I Sit and Wait for Beauty” (1935): Long have I yearned and sought for beauty And now it seems a futile race

12  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters To strive to look upon the marvel Of so fair a face. She is not here with the trees That bend to wind in endless grace, Nor has she come from a blue sea In the frothing lace That breaks upon the shore in white ecstasy. She did not come on the piercing call Of wild birds in flight, Nor in young love did I find her— Nor in the wordless wonder of the night, Or with yon’ star that holds my breath Upon a silver spear. Thus I know her to be more than all These things . . . Than life or death— And even tho’ I become a God With all magic secrets at my command She will ever hide her face And elude my grasping hand.24 The fading away of a goddess who inspired their speakers to search for beauty, listen to the voice within, and sing signals the disappearance of these three writers and the lyrical vision to which she had given birth.

Sexuality, Race, and Pastoral Verse in the Harlem Renaissance Although the three poets of this study lived in urban centers of the East, they gravitated toward pastoral settings for their lyric and sexual poems, which, ironically, led to their becoming stereotyped as genteel sentimentalists trapped in conventional poetic genres that were irrelevant to innovative modernism. Grimké locates her speaker’s naked body in a field, for instance, in “Grass Fingers” (1927): “Touch me, touch me, / Little cool grass fingers, / Elusive, delicate grass fingers, / With your shy brushings, / Touch my face— / My naked arms— / My thighs— / My feet.” Bennett creates an English countryside to frame her song of love in “Song” (1926): “Oh, my sweet, / I shall paint you a picture / And call it Spring. . . . / Cool

Lyric Poetry of Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery  T  13 greens and sheep / Upon a smoke-blue hill, / And now and then / A puff of snow-white cloud.” Cowdery focuses on a garden oasis that provides relief from the noisy city in which her speaker lives in these first two stanzas of “Interlude” (1936): I like this quiet place Of lawns and trees well kept And bright geometric gardens Where droning bees hover and lift On pollen-burdened wings . . . Where even sunlight is genteel And birds are shy and swiftly scarlet. I love this quiet place Of sane and placid beauty, But soon I shall return To be torn anew At the bold thrust of skyscrapers Against a murky sky And the strident song Of cars and people rushing by.25 Though all three were drawn to and loved New York, they, like most women poets of the Harlem Renaissance, tended to locate their lyric verse outside city settings.26 Female bodies in their poetry are framed by nature; intimate caresses are veiled in pastoral allusions. It is through references to the natural world, rather than the urban scene of cabarets on which male poets focused, that they explored female sexuality. Harlem, of course, was a primary site of sexual activity in the 1920s, its clubs a mecca for bohemians and artists looking for release from convention, uninhibited dancing, or illicit trysts. Novelists could get major book contracts for stories set in Harlem, and playwrights could get financial backing for Broadway productions. The black women artists who contributed to Harlem’s jazz scene, however, were mainly stage and cabaret performers such as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Josephine Baker, and Ethel Waters. The most innovative of Harlem Renaissance poets, such as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, celebrated this female performer, drew sympathetic portraits of her sexual persona, and poetically rendered the allure of cabaret life. This was problematic space for the female literary artist, however, as we know

14  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters from the work of Nella Larsen and other writers who depicted the great divide between New Negro women dedicated to racial uplift and modern black women seeking sexual autonomy or adventure.27 K. T. Ewing describes this gulf: “Historians of black womanhood in the early twentieth century emphasize two models of black women’s sexual expression as a means of resisting racist stereotypes. . . . The dominant voice belonged to middle-class clubwomen who espoused values almost identical to those of mainstream white society. . . . Both the visibility and popularity of blues women were problematic for [New Negro] clubwomen who were concerned with presenting a morally and sexually pure image of African American womanhood.”28 Investigations into women’s verse of the Harlem Renaissance frame the artistic choices that produced this nature-centered lyricism with New Negro–era politics. Miller asserts that because black modernism of the street was largely a male domain and the New Negro ethos sought to elevate black womanhood, women poets were walled off from racial subjects by gender boundaries: “Lyric poetry offered the possibility of an escape from the imperative to ‘exalt Negro womanhood.’ In its classic definition as the expression of a moment rescued from time and suffused with one individual’s private feeling, lyric poetry radically opposed the performative drive intrinsic to [the New Negro] narrative. . . . This essential aesthetic was the acknowledged domain of a largely masculine avant-garde elite who staked out the street and the urban, working-class life they found there as the site of their resistance to the racial establishment and the bourgeois values it promoted.”29 Miller posits that confronted with the unacceptable choice of being either black or female in New Negro poetry, women elected the lyric mode as a space where they could be both: “‘Love’ finally becomes something about voice and eros—finding, directing and keeping them despite the cultural conspiracy to render one silent, asexual, or animalistic.”30 Ajuan Maria Mance reiterates the dilemma women poets of the Harlem Renaissance faced when a racial identification as black was conflated with a New Negro figure who was male. She believes that a surface nonracial sensibility in their poetry was the result of this conflict: The centrality of the Black male experience of racism to the Harlem Renaissance aesthetic of racial uplift left little room for considering some of the specific effects of prejudice on the lives of African Amer-

Lyric Poetry of Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery  T  15 ican women, but it did leave open the possibility of treating other nonracialized aspects of women’s lives. Thus, the female subjects who appear in Black women’s poetry of the Harlem Renaissance period are deracinated figures, whose interests, language, and physical characteristics (when described) are carefully selected to avoid any imagery, syntax, subject matter, or setting that might suggest the Blackness or ‘Coloredness’ of the speaking subject.31 Erin D. Chapman agrees with Mance and others who point to a male-centered, even patriarchal, emphasis in New Negro ideology of the 1920s, a motherhood ideal for women that undermined both their sexual freedom and self-determination: “In the scholarship of [E. Franklin] Frazier and [Charles S.] Johnson and in the pages of Opportunity, the race motherhood ideals of womanly self-sacrifice and deference to male authority, a man-centered perspective on the effects of racial oppression, and advocacy of the establishment of black patriarchy as a primary goal of racial advancement are repeated over and over again.”32 Chapman points to a small group of women prose writers—Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Marita Bonner, and Elise Johnson McDougald—who challenged these patriarchal ideals by depicting intimate and sexual modernity for black women as self-defining: “They were bold enough to reveal their private, emotional, and sexual selves in order to explore the intimate effects of combined racial and sexual oppression.”33 Women poets also challenged the race motherhood imperative for New Negro women by exploring interior states of ecstasy, despair, desire and anger. To define oneself in this way was a form of resistance to selfless propriety. Although Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery identified with the New Negro movement while participating in the New American Poetry, their lyric poetry, along with that of other women poets, has been largely assessed as sentimental and nonracial, filtered through a critical race lens that underrecognizes its modernist or subversive qualities. Sentimentalism is a stereotype that has been applied to both white women modernist poets and those of the Harlem Renaissance, and Melissa Girard correctly maintains that African Americans have suffered from their gendered affiliation with white peers: “With the possible exceptions of H.D., Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein—and, indeed, even this list is debatable— modernist women poets continue to face charges of sentimentality and, hence, conventionality even today. African American women poets, too,

16  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters including Angelina Weld Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Anne Spencer, routinely confront these aesthetic accusations.”34 Girard insists that the accessible poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, and others brought lyric experimentation to their exploration of the personal and that the label of sentimental modernism applied to them fails to capture their radical departure from the nineteenth century.35 Girard reminds us that women’s lyrical forays into imagism, vers libre, the erotic, and expression of mood were at the heart of American modernism and that only a concerted effort by conservative male critics to enshrine socalled high modernists, such as T. S. Eliot, pushed them off stage: “When the New Critics professionalized literary criticism, they simultaneously deprofessionalized a rich critical and aesthetic discourse produced by women poets in the modernist era.”36 Keith D. Leonard extends Girard’s assertion that women’s lyric poetry of the 1920s was a central feature of American modernism in his review of African American women poets from the colonial era through the late twentieth century. Leonard concludes that earlier writers like Phillis Wheatley and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper fought racist stereotypes by drawing sentimental portraits of black womanhood in familiar feminine roles. He asserts that New Negro poets, in contrast, used lyric verse to break out of this conventional representation by dramatizing internal conflict and paving the way for later modernists such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker: “This turn inward was one of the most important empowering gestures and one of the most significant artistic innovations of mid-twentieth-century African American women’s poetry.”37 In addition to these charges of sentimentalism, women poets of the Harlem Renaissance also have suffered from scholarship that has tended to cordon off lyric verse from race-centered poetry, an impulse that arises from the fact that African American poetry is largely defined as modernist based on its use of the vernacular, jazz rhythms, or the blues. The scholarly distinction between protest poems of racial uplift and lyric verse has hampered subsequent appreciation of these poets, who have been stereotyped as genteel sentimentalists trapped in Eurocentric white models. This is a racial lens through which the most striking innovations are identified as a blend of modern musical form, black folk culture, and the vernacular in poetry. Jane Kuenz characterizes this assessment of New Negro verse as “a narrative of aesthetic development that moved away from conventional lyrics . . . toward authentically realized folk forms,” a narrative, she asserts, that had profound effects on critical assessments of women poets: “An

Lyric Poetry of Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery  T  17 emergent literary culture . . . broadly characterized their work, as it has [Countee] Cullen’s, as bourgeois, racially empty, and feminine.”38 Helene Johnson is one of the very few women poets to use a modern urban vernacular and to set many of her poems on the streets of Harlem. As Cynthia Davis and Verner D. Mitchell describe Johnson’s modernist sensibility: “In creating female personae as urban wanderers, [Johnson] resists the politics of respectability and asserts the contribution of African American women to modernism.”39 Johnson’s flaneurs and saucy slang were in tune with her male peers’ celebration of the street, but she was almost unique in her ability poetically to enter the male domain of modern Harlem. It is noteworthy that Johnson also wrote lyric poetry in line with that of her sister poets and that it too has remained understudied.40 Revisionist Harlem Renaissance scholarship, in contrast, locates lyric poets within both the New Negro movement and modernism’s free verse movement, which I do here as well. Whether expressed in new poetic formats such as imagism or in traditional forms such as the sonnet, lyric verse is now being reassessed as original or even radically new. This is a frame I apply to these three poets, whose New Negro sensibilities were intertwined with their lyricism.41 As Mark A. Sanders says, “A discussion of the New Negro Renaissance and its relation to American modernism begins not with our received New Critical sense of the era, but with a look at . . . a heterodox modernism in which New Negroes participated fully.”42 Black poets and white engaged in what Andrew Thacker calls “a turn away from the ‘fireside poetry’ tradition of American verse” in favor of “a more introspective, individualist mode of expression,” in which conventional formats were replaced by modern verse focused on interior space, moods, and immersion in the moment.43 Jennifer Wilks similarly extends our view of modernism by connecting women’s poetry on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating how varied the forms writers used were.44

Modern Black Women Poets in the Age of Jim Crow The tendency to frame New Negro women’s poetry by later politics of race or to look at it through a purely lyrical lens belies the dynamic connection Grimké, Bennett, Cowdery, and their peers made between personal or sexual freedom and challenges to racism in their art. Community awareness and personal expression were not separate spheres in their verse: to be a New Negro woman poet in their minds was to be sexually frank while also protesting lynching, poverty, and segregation. All three experienced

18  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters the racism of Jim Crow at a time when American artists were casting off the shackles of Victorian propriety and celebrating freedom of the creative voice to explore sexuality and intimacy. Identifying simultaneously with the New Negro, New Woman, and New American Poetry movements, each challenged racism with her art by bringing to the surface her inner emotional life, seeing the two as complementary. Their poetic portraits of the New Negro woman were a fresh combination of racial and sexual liberation; they proclaimed their right to be modern women artists unfettered by race prejudice, patriarchal rule, or Victorian repression of their sexuality. They broke free of stereotypes by asserting a deeply personal individual voice and collapsed the divide between middle-class female roles, imagined as white in the dominant culture, and models that portrayed black Americans fighting racism as predominantly male members of the New Negro movement. We have long known that Grimké and Bennett, along with Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Fauset, and Georgia Douglas Johnson, were race activists who published prose protesting racism while also composing anti-racist verse that celebrated African American heritage. This aspect of their creative work, however, has not been sutured to their lyric poetry. Although Grimké was a celebrated poet during the Harlem Renaissance, she has been highlighted for her work on anti-lynching campaigns and is best known for her propaganda play Rachel, which was designed to forge an interracial coalition of women against racism. Bennett, a star poet in the 1920s, has been largely celebrated as a leading activist and editor in the 1930s; she headed the Harlem Community Arts Center and the George Washington Carver School for Democracy before suffering persecution from congressional witch-hunts in the 1940s.45 Prize-winning poet Cowdery also engaged in Philadelphia racial uplift programs, helped her social worker mother improve the lives of black women and children, and saw her art as a way to end segregation. This activism is reflected in the racial uplift poetry of all three. Grimké’s “Tenebris” (1927) features a tree that casts the shadow of “A hand huge and black, / With fingers long and black. / All through the dark, / Against the white man’s house,” and in Bennett’s “Song” (1925), a speaker whose “song of waters / [s]haken from firm, brown limbs, / [ . . .] sing[s] the heart of a race.”46 Cowdery also created race-centered poetry, such as her prize-winning “Lamps” (1927), in which the speaker declares, “You and I are lamps— Ebony lamps. / Our flame glows red and rages high within,” and “A Prayer” (1928), an anti-lynching piece.47 As I describe in greater detail in the following chapters, this uplift po-

Lyric Poetry of Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery  T  19 etry emerged from the racism all three writers experienced and witnessed as black women in the early twentieth century. These experiences frame the lyric verse within a context of racism and shaped the foundations of the artists’ lives, art, and creative careers. Grimké benefited from elite white schools of the late nineteenth century thanks to abolitionists Theodore and Angelina Grimké Weld, who financed the Ivy League educations of Archibald and Francis Grimké and left a trust fund for Angelina, but she was often the only black student in her school. The mixed-race child of a white mother and a father who was born into slavery, Angelina was raised by her white maternal family for the first seven years of her life and then transferred to the custody of her father because her mother felt she needed to be with unprejudiced people. Racism played a major role in the dissolution of her parents’ marriage. Grimké suffered significant isolation throughout her childhood and adolescence because of the race divide. Furthermore, once she graduated from the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, she moved to rigidly segregated Washington, D.C., where she taught in black high schools from 1902 to 1926, a dramatic contrast to the relatively liberal Boston of her youth. The ending of her close friendships with white girls in the boarding schools she attended brought home in an intimate way the impact of racism even among the highly educated elite class Grimké inhabited, as did the rejection of her mother, whom she never saw again after she was given over to her father at age seven. Finally, the activism of Grimké’s father in the NAACP and her uncle’s leadership of the city’s Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church reinforced Grimké’s passionate commitment to ending racism, while the Grimké brothers’ brutal subjugation as slaves in Charleston was well known to her and a searing reminder of the country’s racist foundation. Bennett also attended predominantly white institutions, such as the Brooklyn Girls’ High School, where she was the first black student in the school’s literary club, and Columbia University, where racism was so prevalent she dropped out. In childhood, Bennett lived with her mother at a Washington, D.C., private school for white girls while enrolled in the city’s segregated public system, a jarring juxtaposition of race and class that distanced her from potential friends and left a permanent scar. As an adult, Bennett recorded instances of racism in her first diary when she lived in Paris and in memoirs of her thwarted efforts to find employment in New York—she was constantly short of money—and of southern racism. At one point, she passed for Javanese to get a job in a New York batik factory and at another watched in terror as hooded Klansmen parked in

20  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters front of her house in Eustis, Florida.48 Extremely close to her father, Bennett blamed a racist world for destroying him when at the age of fortysix he threw himself under the wheels of a New York subway car after working his way up from the cotton fields of Texas to a Brooklyn law office. She recorded the disastrous effects of the Great Depression on black professionals in Harlem and wrote radical unpublished poetry describing breadlines, prostitution, and the unappreciated hard labor of black men in constructing industrial America. Bennett devoted her life to building interracial political organizations that challenged racism and paid dearly for that activism when she was persecuted by right-wing ideologues during the 1940s. Cowdery grew up in Philadelphia at a time when the city was undergoing severe racial restrictions because of the Great Migration. African Americans who came to the city during World War I were often barred from new industrial jobs and frequently found themselves in conflict with an influx of white migrants seeking employment in factories and in the city’s restaurants and hotels. Although her parents were among the first African Americans to buy a home in Germantown and she attended the prestigious white-dominated Philadelphia High School for Girls, Cowdery’s social life was limited to segregated facilities run by the YWCA and societies formed by the black professional class. None of the city’s art schools admitted black students beyond a token few, and Cowdery’s artistic ambitions were seriously undermined by Philadelphia’s conservative racist environment. Both of her parents worked their entire lives to maintain a modest middle-class existence in the city’s rigidly segregated labor market that provided very few avenues for educated African Americans. Though she tried mightily to forge a modern identity as a woman artist who combined marriage and motherhood with white-collar employment, the insular world of Philadelphia’s black professional class, limited as it was by segregation, brought a premature end to Cowdery’s writing and perhaps to her life. Even though they were highly educated and came from relatively privileged families, Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery encountered racism on a regular basis, and to become artists they had to overcome challenging limitations on them as black women. Their protest poetry reflects and resists those gender and race barriers. Yet they were attracted to the lyric in a racist era that denied them personhood, as Miller notes: “Seeming to escape time and the social contract, suffused with the emotion of a single consciousness, . . . a variety of lyric modes . . . tend[ed] toward the pro-

Lyric Poetry of Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery  T  21 duction of a speaker whose psyche was underwritten by a primordial experience of self-worth . . . the project of an unassailable and free-standing feminine self.”49 In the American context of new political opportunities for women with passage of the suffrage amendment in 1920, liberating cultural changes, and a booming postwar economy, segregation was an appalling refutation of modernity for the black woman artist of the Roaring Twenties and the New Poetry’s emphasis on lyrical transport offered her ground on which to stand. As Miller says: “Images and the spaces they create provide[d] black women writers with alternative values and meanings in a world whose given terms render black women’s existence precarious.”50 I would add to Miller’s perceptive reading of the lyric’s magnetic appeal for Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery that this verse reflects the titanic struggle all three waged to believe in themselves as artists and to form lasting intimate relationships. Grimké was haunted by female lovers who slipped away and she swore off marriage after an emotional affair with a man ended badly; she was never able to establish a lasting intimate bond with the many girls and women who inspired her verse. Bennett endured two troubled relationships before finding a compatible soulmate in middle age. Cowdery experienced two failed marriages and several other transient intimate encounters that ultimately seemed to overshadow her love of life. Poetry sustained these women through sometimes searing psychic pain while giving them an identity as modern artists leading the race forward through art. Their courageous individual stories are embedded in the lyric poetry that is notable for its honest representation of their deepest desires, doubts, fears, and hard-won wisdom. To see how courageously they expressed inner truth in their art, how resilient they were in the face of failure, how openly they shared the deepest wellsprings of feeling is to appreciate their strength, talent, and creative vision.

The Lives and Verse of Three New Negro Modernists In the following chapters, which can be read in any order but proceed chronologically according to the writers’ birth dates, I focus on each poet’s creative years and flesh out the artistic and personal circumstances that framed her lyric verse. My intention is not to foreclose alternative readings of the poetry but rather to widen the lens we have applied to the verse published in anthologies of the Harlem Renaissance that is left to speak for itself, unattached to its biographical context. I also include unpublished poems often left out of those anthologies that are inaccessible to people

22  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters who have not been able to look at historical archives or the complete body of work. Finally, I provide information from the black press and public records to fill in some of the blanks that have emerged in the biographical work done on these women, especially for Cowdery, whose biography has been largely a blank slate. “Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire” begins with “A Mood” (1902), an unpublished poem in Grimké’s poetry notebook of the 1890s, and the draft of a letter in which she expresses her love of night and the forbidden. These establish a framework for her earliest love poetry addressed to women at the turn of the century, which she later refined into imagistic poems published in the 1920s. Dating these verses through Grimké’s early poetry notebook, handwriting, school notebook paper, and correspondence, I relate them to events and people in her life at the time she was writing them. I also trace a thematic arc of what I call Sapphic desire in which speakers worship a female deity, a muse who inspires but whose unattainability ultimately produces annihilating regret and despair that is best expressed in modernist poetic form. Because the poetry has not been read along the time frame of Grimké’s actual production, this creative arc has not been visible. I also describe her evolution from traditionalist to modernist as she explored same-sex desire, originally in rhymed verse, and then shifted to innovative lyricism that put her on the cutting edge of modernist poetry in the early twentieth century. Scholarship on Grimké typically frames her poems within the politics of the New Negro movement or the Harlem Renaissance instead of using the lens of the New Woman or free verse movements of the early twentieth century. In contrast, I view Grimké’s art through the lens of modernism inflected by the New Negro movement, of which her father was a major architect, and link the work to pivotal moments in her life. I describe the fluid sexual identity of Grimké’s era, which scholars have characterized as Sapphic modernism, a cultural framework that helps account for her brief attraction to a man while she created a body of poetry in which speakers yearn for a female beloved. Unlike previous scholarship on Grimké, which is largely silent about her first seven years, I also describe at length her early childhood, which she spent exclusively with her white mother, Sarah Stanley, and with the Stanley family in Michigan after her parents separated. I see this crucial period as a possible source of Grimké’s portrayals of death in her poetry from girlhood to middle age. The absence of her father in these early childhood years, combined with the permanent rupture from her mother at age

Lyric Poetry of Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery  T  23 seven, set up an insecurity about intimacy that Grimké addressed throughout her writing career. Separation from her father, followed by separation from her mother, then from both parents while she was immersed in a culture of romantic friendship at boarding schools became a foundation for Grimké’s depiction of ephemeral same-sex love. Her verse portrays an ethereal goddess from the viewpoint of an adoring acolyte whose thirst for intimacy could be quenched only by transitory moments of lyric ecstasy. I attribute Grimké’s poetry of despair not to an authoritarian father who forbade lesbian love but to upheavals in her youth that created deep insecurity and to the loss of a context for romantic female friendships once she graduated from the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics in 1902. The poetry reflects this frustrated isolation in images of drowning, burial, regret, and longing for a dead beloved. Ending the chapter with Grimké’s flight to New York City after her father’s death in 1930, I situate the final poems of self-immolation in the late 1920s as a sign of her waning artistic muse, her increasing despair about the possibility of forming a lasting bond, and the imminent devastating loss of her father. “Harlem’s Phoenix: Gwendolyn B. Bennett” also begins with an unpublished poem, “Train Monotony” (1928), which runs counter to the joyful poetry that brought Bennett so much fame as one of Harlem’s brightest lights. It describes the speaker’s life as a barren canvas stretched between moments of joy and sadness as she stares out the window of a train. Written at the peak of her career, I address the poem’s puzzlingly depressed tone given the success Bennett was enjoying at the time, both professionally and romantically. A central participant in the New Negro arts movement from the moment she became an undergraduate at Columbia University in 1921, Bennett garnered so much attention that she was asked to compose a poem for the legendary Civic Club dinner launching the Harlem Renaissance in 1924. She went on to become literary editor and columnist for Opportunity, a member of the editorial board of Fire!!, and a professor of fine arts at Howard University in the mid-1920s. She also was one of the very few black women to make it to Paris, the mecca for artists, modernists and bohemians, where she studied art and became acquainted with Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Matisse, and other modernists. There she honed her skills at batik and painting while frequenting nightclubs in Montparnasse and cafés on the Left Bank. Bennett was the epitome of a young New Negro woman artist, and her ebullient personality, editorial work, cover illustrations for The Crisis and Opportunity, and positive poetry of uplift put her at the heart of Harlem’s

24  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters art community. Her marriage to a Howard University medical student in 1928 was framed by the black press as that of an ideal New Negro couple. The dejected tone of “Train Monotony” stands in contrast to all this success, but the chapter links it to negative imagery in other verse that coexisted with Bennett’s joyful poems and points to private pain that she omitted from her public persona. To get at the source of that pain, I rely on Bennett’s unpublished prose that describes her parents’ divorce, the traumatic loss of her father, and the failure of her marriage. I also link these pieces and Bennett’s second diary, which chronicles her turbulent affair with a young Harlem artist, to the poetry, particularly the unpublished verse, much of which is remarkably erotic. Written mainly in the 1930s, this unpublished body of work amplifies the twenty-two published poems, creating a more substantial picture of Bennett’s exploration of the erotic as a foundation for herself as a New Negro woman artist. Bennett’s private reflections, unpublished poetry, and small body of published work reveal an artist transcending in the 1930s setbacks that threatened to silence and defeat her, in contrast to Grimké, whose retreat into silence after 1930 lasted nearly three decades. These include the abrupt separation of Bennett from her mother as a child, the financial failures of her father and his well-publicized violent death in a New York subway station, the loss of all of her artwork in a fire, the painful end of her first marriage, the highs and lows of a turbulent love affair, and the torpedoing of her career as a community organizer in the 1940s. I focus on the way Bennett rebounded from all of these losses, writing poetry throughout, and left us a legacy of resilience in her art. She created a body of lyrical poetry reflective of this resilience as well as of her intelligence, talent, compassion, and love of life. Her biographer, Sandra Y. Govan, has said Bennett was a true Renaissance woman—activist, journalist, poet, visual artist, teacher, organizer—but she was also Harlem’s phoenix, rising out of the dust numerous times with the help of poetry that transformed anguish into art. “Shattered Mirror: The Failed Promise of Mae V. Cowdery” pieces together the life and art of a poet who left nothing to posterity—no letters, photographs, diaries, or drafts of poems. All we have are sixty-two intriguing verses published in the late 1920s and in the 1936 self-published collection We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems, by which time the Harlem Renaissance was visible only in the rear-view mirror. The absence of biographical information on Cowdery has severely hampered investigation of her poetic forays into same-sex intimate encounters, celebration of the female body, and embrace of a New Negro woman who is overtly sexual.

Lyric Poetry of Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery  T  25 Although she will always be shrouded in mystery to a certain extent, the information I provide on Cowdery gleaned from the black press, public records, and letters she wrote to Langston Hughes at the outset of her career brings her to life in ways that allow her modern poetic voice to be more clearly heard. She stands as a symbol of all the black women poets who failed to leave archives and whose lives need to be reassembled in other ways. Mentored by Hughes, Cowdery burst on the arts scene when she was still a high school student in Philadelphia. Her androgynous picture appeared in the January 1928 issue of The Crisis for winning the Krigwa Prize (see Figure 15), and she went on to be published in several more issues of The Crisis as well as in Opportunity, Black Opals, The Carolina Magazine, Harlem, and Ebony and Topaz. William Stanley Braithwaite was so impressed by her work that he included her poems in his influential Anthology of Magazine Verse and Year Book of American Poetry, and he wrote the foreword to her collection. The chapter begins when Cowdery was a high school senior living with her parents when she had a close friendship with Hughes, who was at the time a student at Lincoln University just north of Philadelphia. Her letters to him provide a window into this young poet’s personality, lifestyle, and attitudes toward sexuality that shine through in her erotically frank poetry. Cowdery’s father was a caterer-turned-postal worker at the city’s 30th Street main station, and her mother was a social worker who helped black families survive the turbulence of a racist labor market in which few middle-class jobs were available for African Americans in the highly segregated city. The chapter describes Cowdery’s maternal and paternal ancestors, who were highly respected leaders of Philadelphia’s African American community, and the conflict between these professional class roots and her bohemian sensibilities. When Cowdery graduated from high school and moved to New York in 1927, she was torn between the life of a bohemian artist in the Harlem arts crowd and her hometown’s conservative milieu. She continued to write poetry while she studied art at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, but she also played the role of Philadelphia debutante and socialite along with her childhood friends in her frequent visits home. Cowdery’s 1932 marriage to a New Jersey journalist when she was only twenty-three, followed by the birth of their child in Philadelphia, to which she had returned by then, strengthened her ties to the city, as did her second marriage in 1936 to a medical student at nearby Lincoln University. The excellent poems Cowdery produced during the early 1930s while conforming to Philadel-

26  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters phia’s finishing-school culture appeared in a 1936 collection of which she was justifiably proud, given how few black women succeeded in publishing volumes of poetry. Although she was a married socialite and young mother when it came out, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems shows that Cowdery continued to write about erotic encounters, lost lovers, the ephemeral nature of passion, and her identity as a New Negro poet fighting to move the race forward in radical new ways. While she seemed to thrive at this important stage of her writing career, Cowdery never published again. Using notices about her in the black press from the 1920s through the 1940s, I describe Cowdery’s gradual immersion in the role of Philadelphia civic matron for which she had been groomed. By 1945, she, her daughter, and her second husband had settled into an apartment above his office in a mixed commercial-residential neighborhood of West Philadelphia. If Cowdery wrote poems during the last twelve years of her life, as it seems likely that she did, they were lost when she committed suicide in that apartment in 1948 at the age of thirty-nine. Mae Cowdery’s willingness to be vulnerable in published verse that openly portrayed lustful encounters with women and men, boldly looked at death, and called for youthful revolt from prejudice of all sorts left us a remarkable portrait of the Harlem Renaissance at its end. As a privileged member of the Philadelphia elite, she was perhaps in some ways a victim of her relative affluence, given the conservative nature of her social class. The painful beauty of Cowdery’s poetry reminds us that to be an African American woman artist in the early twentieth century was a steep uphill climb and not everyone made it over the mountain. Her tragic end provides an object lesson in the dangers of stereotyping her as a member of the privileged elite with nothing to offer a larger black community. If Angelina Grimké survived the multiple blows of her youth through innovative writing that allowed her to retire with some pride and Gwendolyn Bennett matured into a fulfilled artist and activist despite her many disappointments, Mae Cowdery symbolizes the many other New Negro artists who vanished into a vortex of postwar conservative forces that buried their dedication to overcoming mindless prejudice and convention. I began this project to understand better the woman behind the poet, and I have ended it feeling as if I have gotten to know each of these remarkable artists quite well. I realize that readers may interpret the art and life of these complicated women differently and that they will form unique relationships with each poet. Indeed, sparking a variety of responses to the material is one of my goals. To facilitate this vibrant connection between

Lyric Poetry of Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery  T  27 reader and poet, the chapters are designed as acts in a play whose central connecting point is a lyrical sensibility that records each woman’s journey from childhood to maturity. In order to bring the poetry to its living, breathing source, I provide a biographical context for opening up the poetry as a living artifact of the life, a mirror in which we see the poet from our own particular vantage point as we consider the path she traveled.

Figure 1. Portrait of Angelina Weld Grimké ca. 1907. Signed, “Love, Nana / Wash. D.C.” Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

2 Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire I love—a love for the forbidden—clearly the dangerous living ever attracts me. Angelina Weld Grimké

W

ell before her success as a well-regarded poet and playwright of the Harlem Renaissance, on February 8, 1902, Angelina Grimké (February 27, 1880–June 10, 1958) sat down to record her thirty-second poem in the poetry notebook she had kept since age eleven. She was about to turn twenty-two on February 27 and was living in Boston with her longtime friend, Tessa Lee, while both of them studied to be physical education teachers. It was while living in the Lee household that Grimké composed the bulk of her love poetry, much of it recording the torment of desire for inaccessible lovers. On this particular day, she penned an atypically light-hearted verse, “A Mood,” which describes night as a time for letting one’s hair down and unleashing the joy within: “For in me a spirit of daring delight / Compels me to wander this rollicking night / This rushing night, this gushing night.” Many of the images she uses are replete with erotic connotations as her speaker savors “the coquettish glee” of a “rollicking breeze” and a “whimsical road” with “heart-stirring heights.” She delights in her solitary perambulations that have no aim or destination, “Where I, either walking or skipping may go / May laugh with the winds, or may sigh with them low.” Unseen, she passes beyond the demands of society or reminders of pain: “houses dark and hushed in sleep,” “grave-yards where the willows weep,” “rivers silent, black and grim,” “mocking, teasing, little hills.” Celebrating her release from normal daytime routine, she comes alive, confined by neither duty nor guilt:

29

30  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters And up or down to left or right The same compelling, wild delight! Within the breast No thoughts of rest; No thoughts of care; Beyond the snare Of Reason’s eyes And wise replies And On! On! On! into the night!1 Although “A Mood” is not one of Grimké’s modernist poems, it expresses the exuberance that lay within this brooding poet even as she tried to repress what she called her selfish sinful ways and to survive her exhausting bouts with shame, regret, and fleeting intimate contact. In it, we see her attraction to nature as a mimetic backdrop for the adventurous spirit within; she is the poet of eros who longs to be held in its infinite caressing embrace and yearns for invisibility in the darkness most people fear. As is the case in this poem, Grimké’s speakers are alone or with a tantalizing woman or the memory of a woman, while grass, trees, flowers, birds, sky, and water converge in a luminous symphony of sensual enclosure. Twilight, or dusk, as she called it, is a particularly favorite frame for the speaker’s meditations on love, heartache, hope, and loss, and as in “A Mood,” the night provides magical starlight that illuminates her innermost desires. Despite the fact that Grimké lived in Boston; Washington, D.C.; and New York, her poetic sensibility flourished away from the bustling city, in verdant pastures with birdsong and flowers close by. Her residences were capacious, even lavish for African American homes of the day, but in her imaginative musings, she preferred the outdoors where she could be free of restraint, conversation, and irksome household distractions—outside where she could be herself. Living at 528 Columbus in Boston, where “A Mood” was composed, should have felt to the young Angelina like heaven. Joseph Lee, a former slave and Archibald Grimké’s closest friend, had struck it rich with his invention of a bread-kneading machine in 1894 that allowed him to buy into the fashionable South End of the city where he purchased a newly built home in 1899.2 His wife Christiana and daughters Genevieve, Tessa, and Narka took care of the housework along with an Irish servant while the only son, Howard, pursued a degree at Harvard.3 Lee himself was a master chef and ran a catering business out of his house as well as bustling inns. Yet “A Mood” is set in the chilly night air—com-

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  31 posed on a February evening in Boston—and the speaker happily roams an imaginary countryside where she trudges up hills and down ravines, traverses rivers, leaps over brooks, all in “wild delight.” Grimké elaborated on her attraction to night in a letter she wrote to an unidentified confidante around the time “A Mood” was written: “I love— a love for the forbidden—clearly the dangerous living ever attracts me. It has a fascination for me. I find an exhilaration in the very audacity of being like the moth. [. . .] I love to flutter and dart around the flame [. . .] and fly safely and prettily away. Yes, it is into the night to be sure. No, the idea of going out into the night is not the least unpleasant. The night in many respects is far more beautiful than the day.”4 Her celebration of risk, of the forbidden, the unconscious, and dangerous love in these comments serves as a preface to the poetry she says will accompany the letter, “the verses I promised to let you read.” In describing those now-lost poems, Grimké offers us a glimpse into her wellspring of poetic inspiration—the unnamed lovers who compel worship and remorse throughout her writing life: “These verses were born out of great but temporary happiness & great & lasting regret. If I had never known certain people it would have been impossible to have written them. And never mind how far apart the lives of these people and mine shall diverge[,] for diverge more and more they will[,] and never mind all the changes that come into their lives[;] still[,] don’t you think that the memory of these verses may make a pleasant little thread of remembrance in the years to come? I hope so. When you have read all of the life out of this little note, cremate its dead body, won’t you? Thank you. Sincerely your friend, ‘The Little Sister.’” It seems likely this letter was written to Tessa Lee, who was the closest thing Grimké had to a sister, but with characteristic obfuscation, she failed to date the letter or name the intended recipient. Despite their centrality to her art, the “certain people” who inspired the poetry, whose lives are “far apart,” are left out of this and other autobiographical material Grimké saved. In part this reluctance to expose her carefully encircled private life explains why Grimké’s poetic exploration of eros and thanatos, her portraits of sexual arousal and meditations on death, have not been sufficiently explicated despite her 1987 resurrection by Gloria Hull decades after she was forgotten.5 We are still excavating the life of this very early modernist, the essential outlines of which Hull provided, but many of the details remain hazy, such as the specifics of her childhood, her multiple attachments to women, and a timeline for her poetry. Our understanding of Angelina Grimké the poet is made richer, how-

32  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters ever, by recuperating Nana—the girl, the teenager, the daughter, the niece, the friend, the lover, the evolving writer. To whom was she close? How did she spend her days? What were her relatives and friends like? What or who might have inspired her poetry and when was it written? When we fill in some of the blanks in her biography while plugging the poetry into the life, Grimké’s work takes on fresh meaning and resonance. She left us a good deal in the way of letters, reflections, creative writing, and photographs—more than most African American women of her time—as did her father and uncle, the extraordinary Archibald and Francis Grimké.6 Putting even a fraction of this rich material in conversation with the lyric poetry makes it come alive in unexpected ways. A major challenge to explication of Grimké’s work is that most of her love poems are unpublished. Many are undated, unpolished, and handwritten. She published only a few dozen poems, but she left well over 100 that never saw the light of day. We must, however, incorporate this unpublished verse into our critical readings to appreciate the power and depth of her erotic vision. As Cary Nelson says, “[Grimké’s unpublished poems] record a private—and finally successful—effort to find vital, original figures for female sexuality . . . [and] a dramatic, obsessional, erotic voice [that] achieves controlled but powerful realization.”7 Adding to Nelson’s assessment, Melissa Prunty Kemp asserts that her erotic poetry (re)sutures Grimké to American modernism, a movement that unfolded in the second decade of the twentieth century when Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound collaborated in introducing imagism, blank verse, polyphonic writing, and other free verse techniques to the United States.8 Grimké is often typecast as a genteel sentimentalist or deracialized nature poet, and it is not widely known that she was on the cutting edge of American modernism when she began writing experimental verse, well before Lowell and Pound began hammering out principles of the New American Poetry shortly before World War I.9 Between 1891 and 1902, she neatly recorded forty-four dated and polished poems in her poetry notebook. By 1912, the year Harriet Monroe’s modernist journal Poetry was established, Grimké had produced sixty dated poems, but dozens more undated verses appear to have been written during this period, judging from the handwriting and the notebook paper on which the poems appear, and many of these are cast in new unrhymed formats that explore the female erotic. After 1912 she seems to have turned her attention to prose and her signature drama Rachel until the 1920s, when she returned to poetry as an accomplished imagist.10 Hull, who was the first to discuss the large body of unpublished love

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  33 poetry, correctly points out that only here do we find the feminine pronouns, names, and images that are missing from the published verse. Hull also articulates the inhibitions that make it difficult for us to contextualize these poems: “Because of psychic and artistic constraints, the ‘lines she did not dare’ went almost as unwritten as they were unspoken. Being a black lesbian poet in America at the beginning of the twentieth century meant that one wrote (or half wrote)—in isolation—a lot that she did not show and could not publish. It meant that when one did write to be printed, she did so in shackles—chained between the real experience and the conventions that would not give her voice.”11 We must overcome these homophobic restraints by tackling the unpublished work despite the challenges they pose and flesh out as best we can the invisible attachments on which it is based. Grimké was a pioneer—she was arguably the first African American woman to publish lesbian-themed poetry—and to appreciate her achievement, we need to unpack the artistic challenges she faced. Although some scholars have maintained that Grimké relied on male speakers even though she rarely used masculine signifiers, for example, Hull insists that we resist heteronormative framing of her love poetry, asserting that the lyric “I” Grimké adopts is female, reflective of the poet’s real attraction to women: “In these poems, Grimké was probably not simply assuming the mask of a traditional male persona, but writing from her own true feelings and experiences.”12 In the 1991 Oxford edition of Grimké’s work in which many of these poems appear, Carolivia Herron also affirms the lesbian impulse behind the bulk of her love poetry: “A large percentage of the Grimké poetic canon is . . . a record of her attempt to love and be loved by another woman.”13 Strengthening a reading of her speakers as female is the fact that Grimké often uses the pronouns “I” or “my,” reinforcing a connection between the poet’s gender and that of her speakers. Arguably, we can envision her speakers as female in the absence of other markers instead of imposing a heterosexual frame, even as we recognize the indeterminacy of the speaker’s gender in such poetry. I agree with Hull that we do not need to prove that Grimké acted in particular ways on the erotic attraction to women her poetry articulates in order to recognize that it was a real force in her life and art: “For the sensitive researcher, there is often a gap between what one knows and what can be ‘proved,’ especially to those readers who demand a kind of evidence about the individual and the meaning of her work that could not be produced for heterosexual subjects.”14

34  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Acknowledging that the largest body of Grimké’s love poetry is addressed to women does not mean that none of it was directed to men. The heartbreak recorded in her 1903 diary, for example, was over a man, and a handful of verses clearly speak to that relationship.15 This heterosexual infatuation, which was deeply threatening to her father because this suitor was the first man in whom his daughter had shown an interest, nonetheless coexisted with a growing body of poetry lamenting the loss of female lovers. Grimké’s hope to marry this man appears not to have supplanted same-sex desire in her poetic landscape. Furthermore, though the failed romantic flirtation that prompted her vow never to marry was with a man in her Boston social circle, Grimké describes it in her diary as nonphysical, in contrast to the love poetry’s focus on intimate contact with women’s bodies: “I have no presents, nothing to remember you by, not even a kiss, and, dear, if only once you had taken me in your arms and kissed me (how my heart leaps at the thought), I should have been happy forever more. But there is nothing to link you to me, nothing.”16 Finally, it appears that Grimké rather thoroughly put this brief love affair behind her. Although she expressed suicidal thoughts in her 1903 diary over this singer’s failure to write when he left Boston shortly after spending a magical July 4th with her, Angelina writes her father only a year later that she has gotten over him: “I am very happy. [. . .]I suppose you want to know about Hinton [Jones]? He called the 4th of July and left town the same day for the summer. I am all right.”17 She wrote in her second 1909 diary of hearing from a friend that Hinton Jones was in London pursuing a singing career and sent “best regards” to her, but she records that she felt nothing: “Funny, but I have not the slightest thrill when I think of this or I did not when she told me. A funny, funny old world! And I thought once that I had rather be dead etc.”18 Other than this serious emotional affair, a close reading of the letters in her archive, which I describe later in this chapter, indicates that all of Grimké’s close relationships outside the primary bond with her father were with women, and the verse reflects that orientation.19 Scholars who identify Sapphic modernism as a sensibility underlying literature by women of the early twentieth century provide a useful lens for understanding Grimké’s affective orientation because the term connotes a more fluid sexual identity than our contemporary categories of lesbian, gay, and heterosexual identities allow. As Laura Doan and Jane Garrity assert, “Such discrete categorizations and boundaries were far more fluid than has previously been acknowledged . . . and we should be wary about assigning [lesbian or

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  35 bisexual modernist writers] to fixed categories.”20 Doan advises us to “resist the anchoring of modern identity categories to sexual subjects of the past”: “Too often, sexual identity is invoked as originating in a ‘historical past,’ even though, in attaching our own labels to past sexual lives—however stubbornly ill fitting or marked by silences—we shape those lives to look like our own.”21 Dagny Boebel uses the lens of Sapphic modernism to discuss bisexual and lesbian writers of this period while seeing in their art a specifically modern celebration of female sexuality: “Sapphic modernists . . . dar[ed] to give expression to the suppressed and denigrated soft, moist female body. Through their experiments with form and syntax, they created space for female meanings.”22 Another way Sapphic modernism offers us a useful perspective is that it refers to Grimké’s generation of New Women, who challenged traditional gender roles through art and unconventional lives with a particular emphasis on love between women as a counterweight to male dominance. Sappho’s domain of female acolytes on the isle of Lesbos symbolizes this independence from patriarchal institutions.23 Grimké’s life follows the trajectory of just such a New Woman in that she never married, worked in the public arena to end racism, published innovative poetry along with anti-lynching fiction and a ground-breaking play, and enjoyed a long teaching career. The many love poems she addressed to women reflect deep attachments to female classmates, teachers and friends. To view her verse as Sapphic thus locates the poet in a firmament of early twentieth-century women writers who followed similar paths, albeit with the race privilege Grimké lacked, such as Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, and Hilda Doolittle.24 By refusing to code her speakers as male while constructing female objects of desire, in other words, Grimké participates in the historical moment of Sapphic modernity through expressing same-sex longing without claiming a sexual identity as we know it today. Seeing Angelina Grimké as a poet of Sapphic modernism allows us to view more accurately not only her life but also the imaginative space she occupied and to notice the fluidity of her verse conveyed in the very images she employs—twilight, water, ethereal realms of the spirit. The many verses Grimké set at dusk, for instance, participate in what Anna Clark calls “twilight moments” in gay and lesbian writers’ texts in the era before modern sexual identities. Clark maintains that such moments furnished people with a way to understand same-sex sexual behavior or feelings: “These people’s desires did not create a fixed identity; they indulged in these forbidden moments and then returned to their ordinary lives, just as

36  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters twilight fades into darkest night, and night is succeeded by the dawn. Just as one can see only vague shapes in the dim light of dusk, twilight words conveyed sexual desires and practices that were only half-understood.”25 Similarly, Lillian Faderman describes early twentieth-century lesbian relationships as “’twilight love,’ the love that dares not speak its name.”26 Grimké’s frequent use of twilight shapes similar liminal spaces of forbidden or transgressive intimate desire as her speakers ruminate on love for a distant female beloved. Twilight also alludes to racial liminality in Grimké’s corpus, and this connection would not have been missed by her African American audience. The daughter of a white mother and black father who himself was of mixed-race heritage, Grimké felt keenly the hardening lines of racial segregation that characterized the era of Jim Crow, when she fought against lynching and supported her father’s political work in the NAACP. That so many of Grimké’s poems are set at dusk and feature dark silhouettes of trees pointing upward, bright stars that gaze at the speaker in reproach, or white flowers that gleam in moonlight suggests her ruminations on love are inseparable from her awareness of the color line and its imposition of race hatred. Twilight is a moment when the line is blurred, softened, allowing darkness and light to coexist as the speaker contemplates an alltoo-transitory moment of peace, often tinged with regret. Twilight also darkens the speaker’s vision as a range of colors disappears with the setting sun to focus her attention on black and white silhouettes, stark images of a world in which black and white define sharp boundaries. Grimké’s twilight and nature verses have been miscategorized as aracial and asexual in part because their foundational roots in the unpublished poetry have not been traced. Juxtaposing her life experiences with the chronologically ordered private and public lyric verse, however, charts her turbulent journey from romantic adolescent to mature recluse in poetic constructions of religious dedication to an alluring goddess of the night. Through her speakers’ worship of this darkened Aphrodite, Grimké transformed guilt, shame, longing, and regret into purifying art. She created a female beloved worshipped as an unreachable muse who inspires transcendent moments of intense longing and imaginative power for her speakers but who eventually disappears, leaving in her wake a bereaved acolyte filled with anguished regret. Grimké creates a Sapphic temple of desire worthy of a goddess to whom the speaker voices words she dare not speak to a real woman. Here she feels cleansed of sinful thoughts and purified.

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  37 By the late 1920s, however, this goddess has vanished, and speakers lament her absence while being consumed by remorse. These last poems foreshadow Grimké’s sinking into silence for the last third of her life, centered as they are on images of drowning and self-immolation as the speaker is inextricably tied to longing for a Sapphic sphere she can never reach except through death. If we look at the entire spectrum of Grimké’s lyric verse through the lens of this creative arc, we more clearly see her evolution from traditional forms to imagism and other aspects of the free verse movement as she grappled with same-sex desire while inhibited by expressions of her sexuality as a New Negro exemplar of feminine respectability. Because she started writing poetry in the late nineteenth century and was eager to support the New Negro movement of which her father was a central architect, Grimké initially wrote in the style of the traditional verse that was taught in the elite boarding schools she attended that were intended to showcase African American entry into the highest realms of art. However, as she matured, we can see the young poet gravitating toward a modernist aesthetic as the erotic subjects to which she was drawn propelled her toward the New American Poetry, verse that privileged personal direct expression of feeling and mood, immersion in the moment, and exploration of sexuality as a site of self-realization.27

Early Unpublished Lyric Poetry to Women The earliest love poems Grimké recorded in her poetry notebook at the turn of the century are often sonnets or rely on ABAB rhyme schemes in iambic pentameter, yet even these are infused with sexual energy and the images that anchor Grimké’s modernist corpus. They are surprisingly explicit, especially considering that so much of it was produced when Victorian mores of sexual prohibition were firmly in place. That Grimké did not marry is unusual given the expectations for women of her social class, but her production of so much lesbian-themed and erotic poetry is even more remarkable in an age that frowned on sexual expression of any kind from a “respectable” woman. Even when corsets were abandoned by flappers of the Jazz Age, middle-class women and schoolteachers such as Grimké, especially those in the New Negro Movement, were regulated by a more conservative set of conventions.28 Perhaps one could go dancing at

38  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters night—to a formal ball and in good company—but a young woman was not supposed to have feelings of such intense desire that she dreamed, as Grimké’s speakers did, of drowning in another’s eyes or being smothered by soft caresses or surrendering to a woman’s seductive touch. What is perhaps most striking about the unpublished rhymed verse in her poetry notebook is the freedom with which Grimké portrays intimate feelings of longing for a woman within conservative poetic formats that distract us from their erotic subject. “Caprichosa” (1901), for instance, celebrates attraction to a teasing flirt in the singsong cadence of a nursery rhyme, yet the eyelashes, lips, and locks of the “lady coyly shy” lead the speaker to imagine a kiss so sweet and wet that she wants to drown in its nectar: Little lady coyly shy With deep shadows in each eye Cast by lashes soft and long, Tender lips just bowed for song, And I oft have dreamed the bliss Of the nectar in one kiss. [. . .] And her feet So discreet Only dare to coyly flirt From beneath her filmy skirt. Soft her curls and dusky deep Holding all the shades for sleep, And in drinking their perfume I sink down mid lotus-bloom, Cruel, dainty, little lady.29 Another playful rhyme from 1902, “Naughty Nan,” can possibly be read as a self-description since Nana was Grimké’s nickname. It similarly focuses on seductive lips while the speaker disarmingly uses discourse one might use with a child: Naughty Nan If you can [. . .] Tell me why you have such lips Tempting me to stolen sips

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  39 Tender, drooping, luring, sad, Laughing, mocking, madly glad, Tell me naughty Nan?30 The personae of both poems are comfortable with teasing forays of seductive approach and retreat, but the childlike cadence distracts us from the forbidden sexuality they celebrate. Likewise, the speaker in the undated poem “Babette” boldly declares: I love Babette. You ask me why? Do winds know why the violet Is dear to them? Then why should I? I love Babette. Last night when in the fields we met She paused and shyly bade me tie Her britches-string. Was it a net? I only know as she slipped by She raised me eyes I can’t forget;—31 The provocative image of two women meeting in a field at night with one inviting the other to (un)tie her underwear is elided by the speaker’s simply marveling at Babette’s flirtation through a pretty bit of rhyme. In “You,” also undated, Grimké moves closer to portraying intimate contact as she mines this childlike frame. The speaker’s hungry gaze lingers on a woman’s throat, skin, fingers, chin—everything that makes her irresistible—and we see the speaker appropriating an appraising visual stance normally assumed by men: I love your throat, so fragrant, fair, The little pulses beating there; Your eye-brows’ shy and questioning air; I love your shadowed hair. I love your flame-touched ivory skin; Your little fingers frail and thin; Your dimple creeping out and in; I love your pointed chin.

40  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters I love the way you move, you rise; Your fluttering gestures, just-caught cries; I am not sane, I am not wise, God! How I love your eyes!32 These unpublished rhymed poems give way to experimental free verse Grimké sketched on individual pieces of paper outside of the poetry notebook that appear to date from her college years through the decade that followed judging from the handwriting and type of paper on which they’re written. These rough pieces directly represent physical contact as speakers become ever more impetuous and assertive. Here Grimké vividly describes seductive glances, alluring lips, glowing skin, and perfumed hair in moments of ecstatic surrender. She abandons rhyme for a passionate vernacular addressed directly to the beloved. In a stanza from the untitled “[Love me to-day],” for instance, the speaker implores her lover to abandon all restraint and make love to her the entire day before moving away: Love me to-day Hold me, hold me, within your arms from whitening dawn To blazing noon—to evening purple. Kiss me, kiss Me, kiss me yes a million times. Remember dear It will be long, God’s love, how long when you are gone. Tell me you love me though you mean it not. Then go.33 Another untitled verse describes the speaker’s helpless surrender to a sudden ardent kiss in one unrhymed stanza with lines calling our attention to the two lovers’ alluring mouths, half-closed eyes, and burning lips: I let you kiss my mouth. Quite through my curtained eyes I felt your eyes upon my eyes, my mouth[.] Compellingly and hungrily you fed[.] Against my will the curtains lifted from my eyes. One breathless space our souls clung each to each, And then I slipped into your arms[,] Forgot all else but just your lips upon My mouth.34

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  41 Again, in “Give Me Your Eyes,” the speaker begs for “one last look” as she opens the door to an exhilarating moment of free fall: “Give me your eyes. / I do not ask to touch / The hands of you, the mouth of you, / Soft and sweet and fragrant though they be. / No, lift your eyes to mine; / Give me but one last look / Before I step forth forever / Even though within that moment’s crashing space, / I shall know all of life and death and heaven and hell.”35 In these verses, the speaker is mesmerized by a moment so intense it threatens to engulf her, as in the following excerpt from a threestanza untitled elegy for a woman who has died. In the first two stanzas, the speaker recalls the sweet touch of her dead friend’s fingertips caressing her lips upon awakening in her arms: I shall remember eons hence her eyes[.] Green green they are, seawater pools ’neath grayful skies With one large dark island lying [in] their midst And tiny flecks for footholds, So that when passing by and being tangled sure Within her long and silky reedy lashes, tripping May not drown when falling Into those dear pools. I shall remember eons hence her eyes. I shall remember eons hence her hands White and slender, veined with blue Pink tipped and rosy pink [. . .] That lay so oft responsive in my savage hand Waking to love and soothing back to sleep. I shall remember ever the feel of each Sweet cool finger-tip against my lips; I shall remember eons hence her lips.36 The bliss of these rhymed and modern pieces leads to the speaker’s selfabasement and worship of a divine being in other poems that frame desire for a woman as purifying transcendence, elevating eros to a celestial sphere. The poetry notebook’s “My Shrine” (1902), written in blank verse but in the stiff archaic rhetoric Grimké would later abandon, articulates the religious foundation she constructs for an Aphrodite figure enshrined in a Sapphic temple of desire:

42  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters I built a shrine one day Within my inmost heart, And draped it not with words And thoughts of gaudy weave But with white words of truth. To catch the shallow crowd, I placed it not upon The public-way but in A spot retired and sweet Where I might go alone. [. . .] The idol that I placed Within my modest shrine Was but a maiden small But yet divinely pure, And there I humbly knelt Before those calm, grave, eyes, Full oft throughout the night, And oft at moments sweet Purloined throughout the day; And all the loving words I never dared to speak Gushed thro’ my silent lips An unsealed fountain, strong. Grimké’s phallic imagery of “loving words I never dared to speak” “gushing” in a liquid stream from the speaker’s mouth, “an unsealed fountain, strong,” in the first stanza of “My Shrine” constructs a prayer of Sapphic desire purified by the poet’s song in the final stanza: Sweet idol of my life, One little, saintly, maid, Who keeps my actions pure And makes me see the best In all the sinning world Thro’ her grave, thoughtful, eyes; Ah sweet! Cannot you guess The idol at my shrine? 37

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  43 Although she uncharacteristically uses a male speaker, Grimké here creates a shrine of words, a sacred private vow to honor a love that is so pure and deep it cannot be shared with anyone or expressed anywhere but in the realm of art.38 As in “My Shrine,” her speakers in the love poetry transcend the troubled strife of quotidian duty, aching loneliness, and a feeling of not being worthy of the love of the adored. They transform emotional turmoil and desire into the highest form of art: poetic transport. Elevating the beloved into a goddess, Grimké blurs the line between romantic yearning and a poet’s dedication to her art, conflating desire for a feminine beloved with spiritual cleansing. Worship of a female deity is central to the lyric verse; a dedication to Venus, Aphrodite’s signature planet, and a muse for the speaker who gazes rapturously from afar. In the unpublished “My Star,” for instance, the speaker obsessively enacts a ritual at the end of day in which she contemplates Venus as a lodestar that inspires a core self that can only surface at twilight: There is a star I love, Oh! very much; I see it when the dusk And day-time touch. [. . .] Each dusk I sit with it A little while; I do not have to make believe, Or have to smile. But just be what I am, Until I know, ’Tis time to kiss my hand To it—and go.39 Similarly, the poetry notebook’s “Thou Art So Far, So Far” (1901) places the adored in a firmament beyond reach of an earthbound admirer tethered to her flawed inadequate self: Thou art to me a lone, white, star That I may gaze on from afar, But I may never, never, press My lips on thine in mute caress, E’en touch the hem of thy pure dress,—

44  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Thou art so far, so far. [. . .] A sinner I may only stand, An outcast on thy borderland; And kneeling humbly worship thee, And kneeling humbly pray for thee, And kneeling humbly long for thee,

Thou art so far, so far.40

Even when the love goddess appears close by, tantalizingly within reach, she remains in a world apart. In an untitled poem dated 1902 and scribbled roughly on a sheet of ruled paper, the beloved’s footsteps leave no trace on the path she follows: “My sweetheart walks down laughing ways / Mid dancing glancing sun-kissed days / And she is all in white. // Ethereal she looks and seems / A vision dropped from silvered dreams / A vision of the night. / So light her foot, so soft her tread / The green-eyed grasses cannot read / The place her feet have gone.”41 The beloved is hauntingly beautiful and remote, “a vision of the night” without boundaries or rules, a nymph who joyfully navigates sylvan pastures and streams, as in the following quatrain: When you walk, I can think only of a white dryad Slipping out of a brown tree . . . . . . And skipping . . . . . . . 42 The speaker is fated to gaze upon a superior being who is free to dance, float, or reside seamlessly in nature while the adorer is rooted to one place, one moment, patiently waiting for glimpses of perfection from a heavenly body. She longs for this bewitching otherworldly creature’s touch and seductive glance, revisiting moments of ecstatic contact.

Imagistic Verse Presenting same-sex desire as a realm of spiritual transcendence, Grimké increasingly ventured into the uncharted waters of free verse and imagism along with the first wave of modernist poets when she began to publish. Expressing more subtly the abandon of “[I let you kiss my mouth],” “El Beso” (1909), published in the Boston Transcript, is notable for its bold use

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  45 of dashes, unrhymed staccato delivery, and exclusive reliance on imagery to convey the speaker’s thoughts: Twilight—and you, Quiet—the stars; Snare of the shine of your teeth, Your provocative laughter, The gloom of your hair; Lure of you, eye and lip; Yearning, yearning, Languor, surrender; Your mouth, And madness, madness, Tremulous, breathless, flaming, The space of a sigh; Then awaking—remembrance, Pain, regret—your sobbing; And again quiet—the stars, Twilight—and you.43 Although somewhat rough at times, “El Beso” is surprisingly fresh and sensual, and its typography of unrhymed jagged lines outlining an upper lip mirrors the breathtaking kiss it describes. It reflects the themes, concerns, and aesthetics of the New American Poetry—imagism, line breaks and ellipses, immersion in the moment—and we can see Grimké constructing an identity as a modern writer who is exploring the deepest recesses of her psyche in explicit images of erotic surrender. When she refined her verse for publication in the 1920s, Grimké compressed her erotic themes into images of nature that echoed the speaker’s transport. In one of her best-known pieces, “A Mona Lisa,” published in 1927, the speaker falls into the imaginary pool of Grimké’s earlier unpublished sketch,“[I shall remember eons hence her eyes],” only here she drowns and gives herself up to whatever is waiting. I should like to creep Through the long brown grasses That are your lashes; I should like to poise On the very brink

46  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Of the leaf-brown pools That are your shadowed eyes; I should like to cleave Without sound, Their glimmering waters, Their unrippled waters, I should like to sink down And down And down . . . . . . And deeply drown. . . . . . The besotted speaker yearns to erase all boundaries between herself and the beloved, to join her in a deathly embrace that will transcend time and space, defying gravity and earthbound isolation. The compelling gaze of her flesh-and-blood Mona Lisa—alluring and mysterious as the Da Vinci portrait to which she is compared—becomes an invitation to plunge into a pool so inviting that one never wants to surface. Like the mythic Undine who lures fishermen to their death, Grimké’s goddess is revealed as an irresistible siren in the second stanza: Would I be more than a bubble breaking? Or an ever-widening circle Ceasing at the marge? Would my white bones Be the only white bones Wavering back and forth, back and forth In their depths?44 Melissa Girard describes “A Mona Lisa” as the imagining of “an erotic meeting that transforms the iconic object of Western art into a desiring female body” and asserts that “the poem ends in orgasm, the ellipses of a desire so intense that it rearticulates the bounds of the self.”45 “A Mona Lisa” portrays desire in images of drowning as the beloved’s eyes become Edenic pools of depthless passion. Windows to the soul, these eyes seem to have come from nature’s pure bounty and infinite largesse, inviting the speaker to repose forever, disembodied, in their reflection. As is true of other later poetry written in the 1920s, Grimké finds an aesthetic in “A Mona Lisa” that matches the intense subjective state of her persona. Her voice is less artificial and

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  47 mannered, her format supple and imaginative. She experiments with line breaks and triadic lines while foregoing the nineteenth-century conventions to which she had once been attracted. In another poem of the 1920s, the unpublished “Evanescence,” liminal natural spaces are again the setting for a similar union of souls, brought together by physical beauty that fades into wordless communion, an endless moment of bliss: You are like a pale purple flower In the blue spring dusk . . . . . . You are like a yellow star Budding and glowing In an apricot sky . . . . . . You are like the beauty Of a voice . . . . . . Remembered after death . . . . . . You are like thin, white petals Falling And Floating Down Upon the white, stilled hushing Of my soul.46 Calmed by the delicate beauty of her beloved’s ethereal grace, the speaker succumbs to a peaceful serenity that heals all strife. Protest, doubt, trepidation, and trivial distraction are erased by the heavenly merger of two souls perfectly aligned. Equally rhapsodic is another unpublished verse from the 1920s, “Brown Girl,” which beautifully describes the speaker’s beloved entering into silent communion with her after a golden day of joy. In the hot gold sunlight, Brown girl, brown girl, You smile;

48  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters And in your great eyes, Very gold, very bright, Shaking so lazily, I see little bells, (Oh! small they are) . . . . . . . . . . I hear the bells. But at fawn dusk Brown girl, brown girl, I see no smile, I hear no bells. Your great eyes Are quiet pools; They have been drinking, drinking, All the day, The hot gold of sunlight. Your eyes spill sunlight Over the dusk. Close your eyes, I hear nothing but the beating of my heart.47 The quiet appreciation of this speaker for the luminous gaiety in her brown lover’s dancing eyes as night falls is recorded in a verse whose typography mirrors the sunlight spilling out of those now-calm pools. This lover’s eyes are so ardently focused on the speaker that she wants to forever remember the moment by listening only to her answering heartbeat: “Close your eyes, / I hear nothing but the beating of my heart.”

Verses of Regret In sharp contrast to these initial twilight verses that worship a goddess of the night or revel in contemplation of the beloved, the melancholy of Grimké’s later dusk poems is foreshadowed by her 1912 quatrain “The Want of You,” later published in 1923. A hint of gold where the moon will be; Through the flocking clouds just a star or two; Leaf sounds, soft and wet and hushed, And oh! the crying want of you.48

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  49 “The Want of You” begins as an idyllic pastoral image, but the serene mood is disrupted by the speaker’s heart-rending cry for an absent beloved, and Grimké’s religious dusk images begin to evolve into portraits of regret. In several unpublished verses, devotion to a lost love that can never return is expressed in nightly rituals at twilight wherein the speaker gives herself over unto bottomless depths of misery. In the unpublished “Regret,” for instance, Grimké pulls together images that became central to her modernist corpus, and we see the awful fading of her creative muse: Stars through my window’s poor pane; The shriveling husk Of a yellowing moon on the wane;— And the dusk. Star paths descending to earth Through the tear drops wet; And the dusk pain again,—the rebirth Of regret.49 Here the glowing apricot sky of “Evanescence” is overtaken by “the shriveling husk of a yellowing moon,” and the bright star of “Thou Art So Far, So Far” and “My Star” descends to earth through “tear drops wet.” Revised as “Dusk” and published in 1924, this moment of regret is captured in a haunting quatrain in which the speaker is immobilized by a foreboding night sky. The image is presented without comment and is left to represent a subjective state imagined by the reader, but Grimké’s unpublished twilight iterations sensitize us to the speaker’s sense of a dying vision, an inner emptiness mirrored on the night sky: Twin stars through my purpling pane, The shriveling husk Of a yellowing moon on the wane,— And the dusk.50 One of her most famous poems, “A Winter Twilight,” published in 1923, imagistically condenses the speaker’s worship of Venus in “My Star” and the beloved’s weightless steps in “[My sweetheart walks down laughing ways]” into a chilling still-life octave. Though warmed by its depiction of “a whisper, a sigh, a breath,” the poem’s subdued tone and allusions to

50  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters death, cold, and silence contrast markedly with the exuberant rapture of earlier twilight ruminations: A silence slipping around like death, Yet chased by a whisper, a sigh, a breath; One group of trees, lean, naked and cold, Inking their crests ’gainst a sky green-gold; One path that knows where the corn flowers were; Lonely, apart, unyielding, one fir; And over it softly leaning down, One star that I loved ere the fields went brown.51 The unpublished “At the Autumn Dusk” is more explicit about the speaker’s diminishing hope, her waning inner light. It takes the speaker from her bedroom and places her outside, but unlike “A Mood,” the atmosphere is funereal, and the graves once passed in carefree perambulation are emblazoned hauntingly in the firmament: I watched the dusk come, Watched the autumn dusk come. And the pale sun sagged down and down listlessly, Caught in a mesh of wanly opaled mists, Fell into a flat sad sea. And a bat slipped by silent and dark, Returned, flicked my cheek with furtive wing, Sped on and came no more. And in the west one star was not, Then was, A sallow star, a somber star. And through the mists between the star and sea, The face of one long dead looked out at me And the eyes called . . . . . . . O, eyes that call and call, Life is not sweet, life is not sweet At the dusk, At the autumn dusk.52 The star that is “a friend to me I understand” in “My Star” is in this piece “sallow,” “somber,” “the face of one long dead.” The eyes that sparkled

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  51 like inviting pools in “A Mona Lisa” or “Brown Girl” are here light years away and often they look down at the speaker with a piercing glare of accusation. “The Eyes of My Regret,” published in 1927, is one such portrait of self-recrimination. It contrasts starkly with Grimké’s youthful verses of astrological worship when day is done: Always at dusk, the same tearless experience, The same dragging of feet up the same well-worn path To the same well-worn rock; The same crimson or gold dropping away of the sun, The same tints—rose, saffron, violet, lavender, grey, Meeting, mingling, mixing mistily; Before me the same blue-black cedar rising jaggedly to a point; Over it, the same slow unlidding of twin stars, Two eyes unfathomable, soul-searing, Watching, watching—watching me; The same two eyes that draw me forth, against my will dusk after dusk; The same two eyes that keep me sitting late into the night, chin on knees, Keep me there lonely, rigid, tearless, numbly miserable— The eyes of my Regret.53 The transfixing gaze of “A Mona Lisa” is transposed to the speaker’s projected landscape of guilt that is indelibly imprinted on the blackened sky and holds her captive far into the night as she contemplates a crushing sense of failure and wasted opportunities. The cedar “rising jaggedly to a point” becomes a bony finger of accusation, directing the speaker’s gaze toward stars that once made her heart sing but now keep a deathly grip on her imagination in “unfathomable, soul-searing” reproach. With the spectral gaze of a lost love upon them, the speakers in Grimké’s twilight verses of regret ruminate on what might have been, reluctant to let go yet powerless to move forward.

Relationships with Women The sources of these lyric portraits have been obscured by Grimké’s silence on her love life, but the poetry paints such vibrant pictures of passionate love for women we sense that a real yet untold story is buried there. We

52  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters have no way of knowing, of course, the exact nature of Grimké’s actual attractions, but her archive makes clear that she was indeed attracted to women as a teenager and a young adult. Echoing a consensus among many scholars, Julie Butler Armstrong interprets her silence about these relationships as reflective of minimal to no intimate contact: “Diaries and letters show that her attraction to women rarely, if ever, found outlet beyond her poetry, yet that attraction is clearly and consistently present throughout her verse.”54 Keeping in mind the prohibitions against sexual experience of any sort for women at the turn of the nineteenth century, however, such erasure in her private papers does not necessarily indicate absence of physical or verbal expression, and in any case, intimate contact exists along a broad continuum of behavior.55 As with heterosexuals, we have no way of knowing what a woman-loving writer’s intimate physical encounters were actually like, but we should not automatically assume she had none. What we can look at is the writing, and women clearly inspire the lion’s share of Grimké’s love poetry. It undoubtedly reflects a wide range of same-sex affection and experience, from dreamed of to wished-for to remembered. Although we cannot say for sure that specific people were in Grimké’s mind when she wrote her poetry or that she acted in particular ways toward them, there is evidence in her archive that she turned consistently to girls and women, both white and black, for companionship. In a class photograph taken when she was a student at the Fairmount Grammar School in Hyde Park sometime in the early 1890s, for instance, we see a pensive Angelina, one of only two African American students in the picture, holding hands with the white girl sitting next to her (see Figure 2). Similarly, in a photo taken in her Carleton Academy single dorm room at Northfield, Minnesota, dated Christmas 1895, she is reading a book seated next to an unidentified white girl who appears to be sewing (see Figure 3).56 These are innocent schoolgirl photos, but they display an easy friendship with white girls and reflect her gravitation to girlfriends at school. Moreover, without overdetermining the sexual nature of her adolescent friendships, we can describe a network of female friends who corresponded with Grimké using flirtatious romantic rhetoric, alluding to intimate kisses, passionate hugs, intertwining of fingers—in short, to a closeness mirrored in the young poet’s verses. This intimate discourse grew out of what Lillian Faderman calls a culture of “romantic friendship” between women in elite educational settings in the late nineteenth century, particularly in boarding schools. Grimké’s attraction to women

Figure 2. Class photo at Fairmount Grammar School, Hyde Park, Massachusetts, ca. 1892. Angelina Grimké is in the front row, third from right. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives, Howard University, Washington, D.C..

Figure 3. Angelina Grimké with an unknown classmate in her dorm room at Carleton Academy, Northfield, Minnesota, 1895. In Grimké’s handwriting on the back: “To my darling papa with lots of love & Christmas greetings. Carleton College, Christmas ’95.” Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

54  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters would have been able to flourish in such an atmosphere. We know from Faderman, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and others that a culture of “passionate friendship” characterized Victorian relationships for young women. Within this subculture, love could be expressed in flowery language, and romantic same-sex crushes were viewed as normal. Because respectable women were thought of as being averse to sexuality—defined as heterosexuality—their displays of affection could be dismissed as schoolgirl high spirits and rehearsals for heterosexual courtship and marriage. Young women of Grimké’s social class were expected to develop such close and playful friendships with members of their own sex. These were not seen as incompatible with eventual marriage or family or as a sign of lesbianism, a term that did not come into usage until well into the twentieth century.57 The only same-sex romantic friendship discussed in the scholarship on Grimké is the one she established with Mary “Mamie” Burrill, as Gloria Hull has described, but its depth and duration have not been adequately outlined.58 Burrill’s family were members of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., where Angelina’s uncle, Francis Grimké, was pastor and while she was living with him and his wife, Charlotte Forten Grimké, before Nana was sent to Carleton Academy in Northfield, Minnesota. Her aunt Charlotte took an active role in the church by inviting young women such as Mamie Burrill to their home at 1526 L Street for weekly cultural gatherings. The Grimké home was very close to the Burrill residence, which was located on 1716 Seventeenth Street in the northwest section of the city and was on the same block as the home of Charlotte’s closest friend, Anna Julia Cooper, at 1706 Seventeenth.59 In addition, Burrill and Grimké both attended the African American M Street School from late 1894 through early 1895, after which Angelina was sent very far away to Carleton Academy. In February of 1896, Mamie wrote her absent friend an ardent letter that Hull discovered but from which she quoted only a few lines. It is worth a more extensive look, for the letter’s effusive romantic language and inclusion of a poem about a dead woman lover provide a context for Grimké’s poetic depiction of Sapphic intimacy and longing for women who are in the grave: “While sitting in school I think quite often of you,” Burrill wrote. “Have you forgotten how I used to come and meet you at noon, when you attended that dear old building in which you and I have spent so many pleasant days[?] . . . Could I just

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  55 come to meet thee once more, in the old sweet way, just coming at your calling, and like an angel bending o’er you breathe into your ear ‘I love you.’” Apologizing for “having acted so mean towards you [during that visit],” she goes on to quote “a very pretty verse” she had come across: Farewell!—and never think of me In lighted hall or lady’s bower; Farewell!—and never think of me In spring sunshine or summer hours. But when you see a lonely grave Just where a broken heart might lie With not one mourner by its sod Then and then only—Think of me! After urging her friend to “take me back to my home in your heart,” Mamie adds the postscript: “Angie, do you love me as you used to? Answer soon.”60 It is clear from this letter that Grimké and Burrill had a close relationship that, at least in the beginning, was a romantic friendship that lasted beyond their 1895 separation. During Grimké’s two-year stay at Carleton from 1895 to 1897, they had chances to visit during school breaks in Washington D.C.; Burrill alluded to one of them in her 1896 letter. Other evidence of continuing closeness is provided in an 1898 letter to the eighteen-year-old Nana by her father who chides his daughter for ignoring her friend on another visit and indicates that he was not threatened by the relationship: “You must not neglect Mamie Burrill, for she was devotion itself to you while home. Please write to her soon, for it would be very bad manners not to express to her your appreciation of all her attention.”61 A photograph of Burrill as a pretty young woman at the turn of the century that their mutual friend Lula Allen sent to Angelina during her college years in Boston is in the Archibald Grimké archive; it is one of the few photos there of people outside the family (see Figure 4).62 The 1902 poem “[My sweetheart walks down laughing ways],” which identifies the beloved as “Mary” in its last line at a time when both Mamie and Angelina were living in Boston as college students, and “Brown Girl,” which describes the laughing eyes of a dark-skinned woman, may refer to Burrill, although we don’t know exactly what their relationship was at the time these poems were composed. After she graduated from high school,

56  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters

Figure 4. Undated photo of Mary “Mamie” Burrill. Courtesy of the MoorlandSpingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Mamie moved to Boston with her family in 1901. While Angelina was finishing her undergraduate education at the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, Burrill was pursuing a degree at the Emerson College of Oratory, from which she graduated in 1904. By 1907, she had become director of the Washington, D.C., Conservatory of Music. That year, Angelina left the Armstrong Manual Training Institute, where she had been teaching since 1902, to take a position in the English Department at the M Street School, and Burrill joined her there in 1911. In the English Department at what had now become Dunbar High School, they both taught literature and drama until Grimké retired in 1926. Both moved to New York City, Grimké in the early 1930s and Burrill in 1944, the year she retired, two years before her death.63 Although it appears that Mary Burrill and Grimké had a strong attraction to each other as teenagers and college students, Hull quotes a 1911 note from Burrill, the year Grimké fractured her spine in a railway accident, that indicates they had grown more distant by that point: “If I can serve you at all, for the sake of the days that are a long way behind us both, I trust you will let me do so.”64 It is possible that Grimké’s infatu-

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  57 ation with a man in 1903 drastically altered the terms of their friendship, but they lived, studied, and worked in the same cities; they taught at the same school; they were both playwrights; and they published together in the same issue of the Birth Control Review.65 They even retired to the same place. Although Grimké would never have a life partner, Burrill formed a lasting relationship with another African American woman, Lucy Diggs Slowe, the first dean of women at Howard University. She lived with her at 1256 Kearney Street NE from 1922 until Slowe’s death in 1937.66 Whatever their friendship was, we know it was close, and perhaps one of the sources of regret that haunted Grimké after she left school. Mary Burrill is not the only woman with whom Grimké formed a meaningful friendship. In line with a culture of same-sex romantic friendship but taking it to an unusual level of passionate expression, the teenage Angelina wrote one of the few documents that openly declared her desire for a female, a draft of a letter that scholars have been interested in for over two decades. However, this scholarship misidentifies Mary Burrill as the addressee. I revisit it here to connect Grimké’s poetic fixation on women in part to her contact with white girls and teachers in nineteenth-century boarding schools, cross-race relationships that have not been accounted for but that shed light on the poetry’s allusions to white women’s bodies and the many twilight settings with black and white images. On the back of physics lecture notes taken at Carleton Academy dated October 27, 1896, the sixteen-year-old roughed out a love letter that begins: “My own darling Mamie, I hope my darling you will not be offended if your ardent lover calls you such familiar names. [. . .] Oh Mamie if you only knew how my heart beats when I think of you and it yearns and pants to gaze, if only for one second, upon your lovely face. [ . . .] I know you are too young now to become my wife, but I hope, darling, that in a few years you will come to me and be my love, my wife! How my brain whirls, how my pulse leaps with joy and madness when I think of these two words, ‘my wife.’” Underneath the closing “Your passionate lover,” Grimké inscribes their two names in the way of smitten adolescent lovers from time immemorial: “Mamie . . . Angelina.”67 Scholars have assumed that the Carleton letter was addressed to Mamie Burrill, but Brett Beemyn asserts that Grimké was addressing a white Carleton classmate, Mamie E. Karn.68 Beemyn tells us Karn later earned a degree in music, married a Minnesota lawyer, and gave birth to a child in 1916.69 Grimké wrote Mamie Karn’s name, along with a Northfield, Minnesota, address, underneath the body of her letter, seeming to corroborate this interpretation.

58  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters

Figure 5. Portrait of Angelina Grimké, ca. 1895. Stamped: 1217–1219 Penna. Ave. D.C. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Another white classmate at Carleton who surfaces in the Grimké archive is Alice Stacy. A photograph of Stacy, taken in a Northfield, Minnesota studio dated May 19, 1896, is inscribed with Grimké’s initials on the back and is the only photograph of a classmate Grimké saved from Carleton besides her Christmas dorm-room tableau. The following undated poem written in Grimké’s youthful script may have been inspired by Stacy, as it is addressed to “Alice” in a setting that could easily be a boardingschool hallway looking out onto a courtyard: ’Twas twilight time when Alice came Unto her self again And black was all the hall Save for one open pane. And as within a maze she lay And watched the stars catch flame Beyond the open square slow-stepped Remembrance backward came. Moonlight, starlight, light of dew On the lilies lies;

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  59 Moonlight, starlight, light of dew In my lady’s eyes. Shadows velvet black and soft Where the poplars rise; Shadows velvet black and soft In my lady’s eyes.70 We can connect at least one unpublished verse in the singsong cadence of her earliest poetry, “Rosabel,” to another woman in Grimké’s life, a white teacher who taught at Cushing Academy, which Grimké attended after she left Carleton. It features a speaker who sends nature’s emissaries—birds, the wind, and roses—to whisper words of love into her beloved’s ear since she dare not deliver them herself: Leaves, that whisper, whisper ever, Listen, listen, pray; Birds, that twitter, twitter softly, Do not say me nay; Winds, that breathe about, upon her, (Since I do not dare) Whisper, twitter, breathe unto her That I find her fair. Rose whose soul unfolds white petaled Touch her soul rose-white; Rose whose thoughts unfold gold petaled Blossom in her sight; Rose whose heart unfolds red petaled Quick her slow heart’s stir; Tell her white, gold, red my love is; And for her—for her.71 This poem, dated October 25 but with no year, appears to have been inspired by Angelina’s music teacher at Cushing, Rosabelle Temple. Grimké attended the academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts from 1897 to 1898, and Temple, who taught there from 1891 to 1938, is said to have been a gifted teacher who inspired her pupils to love music. Archibald Grimké mentioned Temple as a favorite of Angelina’s in a letter to his daughter shortly after he received her October 1897 letter from Ashburn-

60  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters ham while he was in Santo Domingo: “I am glad that you are so much in love with your music teacher.”72 In a history of the school, Temple is described as having “a vibrant personality” and her Friday morning classes are referred to as “a delight.” Her contralto voice is characterized as “rich, deep, soul-stirring,” and her concerts as “a stirring experience for both participants and audience.” Educated at Wellesley and in the European theaters of Oxford and Munich, the evidently unmarried Temple lived in Boston, commuting to Ashburnham a couple of days a week, according to this account.73 A white classmate at Cushing, Marie Vose, emerges in the correspondence as another important white woman in Grimké’s boarding-school life. Vose’s 1898 letter, sent to “my dearest Nana” after Angelina left Cushing Academy with Tessa Lee to attend Boston Girls’ Latin School, indicates that the two were close at that time: “Nana darling, do you remember the Mozart Symphony Club last year? When you and I went down to the 7:29 train to see them off and got left? Well they were here last week and were fine. I thought of you at the time and I do wish you could have been here. [. . .] Now, Nana darling, do write very soon to me for I long to hear from you. Think of me real often as I do of you and never forget that je vous adore. Your very loving friend, Marie Vose.”74 Vose, a member of the women’s basketball team at Cushing, was the descendant of one of the academy’s founders, James E. Vose, and Archibald inquired about her family connection when Angelina mentioned her new friend in an 1898 letter to her father: “Who by-the-bye is your friend, Mary Vose? Is she related [. . .] to the Voses of Hyde Park and Milton?”75 Letters in the archive from Grimké’s closest friend, Tessa Lee, underline how normal it was for young women in Grimké’s circle to address each other in the language of courtship we see in Burrill’s and Vose’s correspondence. They are also evidence of a core friendship with an African American woman upon whom Nana relied as she adjusted to her father’s absence while he served as consul to the Dominican Republic from 1894 to 1898, her mother’s death in 1898, and her frequent moves as a student. Thérèse (Tessa) Lee, born August 25, 1881, was eighteen months younger than Angelina and was the third child of Joseph Lee (see Figure 6). Archibald Grimké had formed a tight bond with Joseph Lee in Charleston, South Carolina, where both were born into slavery in August 1849. Angelina lived with the Lees off and on since 1894, and she continued to live with them during the summer from 1902 until at least 1908, the year Joseph Lee died. When Grimké entered Cushing Academy in the fall of 1897, she was

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  61 accompanied by Tessa Lee, who was a classmate with her there until the spring of 1898, when both left to enroll for a short time at the Girls’ Latin School in Boston. From 1898 to 1902 and then in the summers thereafter, they lived together in the Lee home at 528 Columbus Avenue while both were studying physical education at separate institutions, Angelina at the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics on 9 Appleton Street just a few blocks away and Tessa at Dudley Allen Sargent’s school in Cambridge.76 The two graduated in the spring of 1902 and successfully applied the same year for teaching jobs in Washington, D.C., Angelina at the Armstrong Manual Training Institute and Tessa at the M Street School (later Dunbar High School). There they worked as physical education teachers in separate black high schools until 1907, when Angelina began teaching English at the M Street School, where Tessa was coaching girls’ basketball. Angelina and Archibald routinely spent summer and fall breaks in Boston with the Lee family, judging from their correspondence addresses. Tessa and Angelina attended two of the same schools; vacationed together in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, the Berkshires, and elsewhere; lived together in

Figure 6. Undated portrait of Thérèse “Tessa” Lee. Stamped: J. Paul Brown, 617 Market St., Wilmington, Delaware. Grimké lived with the Lee family at 528 Columbus Avenue in Boston when she attended the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics from 1898 to 1902. Tessa Lee was Grimké’s closest friend. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

62  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Boston; and taught in Washington, D.C. They are mentioned frequently in letters from members of both families. There is no evidence they were lovers or that Tessa Lee had any romantic interest in women. Although Lee did not retire from teaching until 1949, she married in 1914 at age thirty-two, bore one child in 1916, married a second time in 1932 after a divorce, and moved to New York City to live with her daughter in the early 1950s shortly before she died in 1952.77 Despite her heterosexual dating pattern, Lee’s surviving letters to Angelina reveal a warm intimacy that is always playful, even flirtatious; affectionate; and full of allusions to delicious secrets. This friendship perhaps afforded the teenage Grimké an environment in which she could let go of her reserve, laugh, and have a good time. Tessa’s letters to Grimké reflect her outgoing personality, one that could draw Nana out of her adolescent brooding while at the same time encourage her artistic development. They clowned around, got in trouble for their fun-loving escapades at Cushing Academy, and generally flouted Victorian conventions. With her brio and insouciance, Tessa Lee seems to have brought out the carefree side of the young poet. Lee’s youthful letters to Angelina reflect the culture of romantic friendship Faderman and others have described, but most likely the friendship operated within a framework of platonic sisterly affection. On December 27, 1894, thirteen-year-old Tessa wrote from her home in Auburndale, Massachusetts to the fourteen-year-old Grimké, who had just moved to Washington, D.C., to live with her aunt and uncle: “My dear, dearer, dearest, most dearest, and sweetest Nana, Behold me prostrate before you in sack cloth and ashes biting the dust in remorse, shame and contrition. [. . .] I have been very busy getting ready for Christmas and with my school work. [. . .] I received your pretty card which helped to give me twenty-three presents [. . .] but I think most of yours because it came from you.” She alluded to pictures Angelina had drawn of the characters in Lee’s budding novel and urged, “Write soon & write a longer letter than I.”78 Six months later, in June 1895, she wrote a letter to Angelina, who was now at Carleton, while Tessa was sitting in her classroom. She wrote about how thrilled she was that Nana would be spending the summer with her and how she couldn’t wait to meet her at the train station in Boston: “The river is just fine now, it is lovely, and wishing it could hold a boat containing Nana & Tessa.”79 In the fall of 1901, Tessa, by then age twenty, wrote from 528 Columbus to a vacationing Angelina in Fitchburg, saying how sorely missed she was: “I have missed you more than you know, especially this morning since you

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  63 did not come in my chamber and have one of your gay times (doesn’t that sound sporty?) with me. At present I am using your pen and it seems I can feel your little fingers just above mine writing with me. Can you guess the feeling?” After recounting the news of family and girlfriends, including “the Misses Burrill,” she signed off with the phrase, “Be faithful for lo I am with thee alway[s], Tessa.”80 Though Tessa at this time was dating Roscoe Bruce, to whom she referred disparagingly as two-timing her by dating Carrie Burrill (whom he married in 1903) her rhetoric is unselfconsciously intimate, affectionate, and flirtatious. As late as 1911, Tessa’s letters were effusively loving and playful. In her August 4 letter of that year, she expressed support for Grimké’s recovery from a railway accident the previous July, in which Angelina had fractured her spine. It took several months of being laid up in a cast for Nana to recover while living with her father, Uncle Francis, and Aunt Charlotte at 1415 Corcoran Street, a row house in Washington D.C.81 Lee began her letter with the salutation “My very dear Nana” and complained that Archibald was keeping her in the dark about his daughter’s condition, “to keep you just where he knows where you’re at.” She referred to herself as Angelina’s “partner in distress,” sent hopes that she would heal quickly, and promised to visit: “Honey, I am surely sorry to know you are so bad off but I am sure you will be O.K. in a little while. [. . .] I shall be there soon and all will be well. With all my love, Tessa.”82 In the correspondence from Tessa Lee, who was a lifelong friend like a sister, we see references to a playful physical intimacy rooted in girlhood, a platonic emotional bond sometimes described in romantic terms, and a friendship that transcended love affairs gone awry for both women. The primacy of this friendship was forged out of the fact that both were daughters of ex-slaves from Charleston, who were also members of Boston’s African American prosperous class at the turn of the century. They were familiar with what it felt like to be the only black student in white institutions.83 Both conformed to the model of the highly educated New Negro Woman who fashioned a career that demonstrated a commitment to race activism. It was a friendship at ease with affectionate kisses, hugs, flirtation, expressions of love, and familial bonding. That Grimké had a crush on her music teacher and enjoyed freely affectionate friendships of a diverse sort with Tessa Lee, Mamie Burrill, Mamie Karn, Marie Vose, and perhaps others while writing the bulk of her love poetry is understandable, given her immersion in a culture of Victorian female bonding. We see in these racially diverse

64  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters relationships a wide range of intimacy, from platonic to romantic, from lived to imagined, but consistently the young Angelina chooses girls and women as her closest confidantes.

Sources of Despair and Regret: Resignation to a Life Apart Despite these sustaining friendships, Grimké’s Sapphic verses become infused with a deepening sense of despair once she graduated from the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics in 1902, and we glimpse in them possible sources of the regret so central to her lyric poetry. In some poems, the speaker has lost her love to a male rival and is condemned to regret her failure to act; in others, the beloved dies before words of love can be spoken. In the following unpublished poem, the speaker rues her hesitation to claim a lover who is now committed to a man: Hands of her white hands of her Frail, appealing, delicate God I love them how I love them[;] Why then should I have come too late? Eyes of her dear eyes of her Big and pure and sweet and deep Crying to me crying ever Why must I do naught but weep? Lips of her sweet shy lips of her Scarlet pouting all demure Yearning to me yearning ever Ah God why are they not mine? His are her dear hands and eyes His are her sweet lips so red His they are and his forever Ah God why am I not dead?84 In the following excerpt from another unpublished piece, the speaker talks to a man who is despondent over being rejected, hinting they have had their hearts broken by the same woman: So you strolled along the terrace, Saw the summer moonlight pour

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  65 All its radiance on the waters As they rippled on the shore, Till at length you gathered courage, When you saw that none was nigh— Did you draw her close and tell her That you loved her? So did I. Well, I needn’t ask you further, And I’m sure I wish you joy. Think I’ll wander down and see you When you’re married—eh, my boy? When the honeymoon is over And you’re settled down we’ll try— What? The deuce you say! Rejected— You rejected? So was I.85 Speakers also suffer anguish from lovers lost to the grave, and these poems point to the frequency of death in Angelina’s life as black communities coped with tuberculosis, malaria, smallpox, flu, and other diseases while barred from white hospitals. Even affluent white families were sometimes decimated by illnesses beyond the reach of medicine. In an unpublished poem written on an envelope from her lawyer postmarked Washington, D.C., May 2, 1912, Grimké’s speaker is a desolate acolyte whose muse is about to be buried. Filled with shame and regret, she cannot imagine smiling again beyond the smile through which her tears fall upon the face of the dear departed, whom she hopes will be awakened by their cleansing warmth and her ardent kisses: Keep this lily that I fold In your hushèd hand; Though they tell me that you sleep, You will understand. Keep this tear upon your cheek; And this tear its mate; They will tell you of the tears That I weep too late. Keep this smile I give to you, Born mid shame and pain; Keep it for I never shall Smile on earth again.

66  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Keep these kisses on your eyes; Hoard their memory, So when I shall kiss them then, They will ope for me.86 These poems of lost love are infused by the speaker’s expressions of frustration at being unable to achieve a lasting intimacy that is both safe and nurturing. The tenderness with which Grimké’s speakers approach those they love fails to stave off annihilating rupture; the ecstatic surrender to intimate touch leaves a bruised imprint on the heart. One of her most beautiful poems, “My Lilies at Dusk,” which was submitted to in 1927 but not published by The Carolina Magazine, captures the mature poet’s characteristic meshing of loving caress, desire, and lethal intimate contact: My lilies, listless, dim, There where the shadows are; My lilies, still and slim, Each a blurred white star. ———— In the sun, Softly to each I moved; Lightly lipped and loved Every one. ———— I did not know a touch Could hurt so much; I did not dream a breath Meant death. ———— My lilies, listless, dim, There where the shadows are; My lilies, still and slim, Each a blurred white star.87 In the four quatrains of this verse, the lines of the identical first and last stanzas are aligned with the left margin and use an ABAB rhyme scheme. The second and third stanzas feature misaligned divided statements constructed in jagged steps, one with a CDDC rhyme scheme

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  67 and the other with an EEFF scheme. Such rhyming and line placement emphasize the disintegrating forces lying hidden within the surface harmony of the initial floral image, the mortal blow delivered by innocent kisses, and then a recast perspective on the opening image in the final stanza. The poem moves from contemplation of beckoning lilies through the speaker’s movement forward to bestow gentle caresses, then shocked awareness of her touch’s destructive result, followed by movement backward as the bruised lilies are engulfed by evening shadows. The speaker traces a linear path in the poem, but we see at the end that she has actually traveled in a circle because the lilies are already “listless, dim” and “blurred” in the first stanza; they are already in shadows. She has begun her contemplation having already kissed the flowers softly in the sun and now stands apart, regretting what her touch has done. A metaphor of intimate contact resulting in death emerges as the poem’s central message, cast within an impressionist still-life portrait of deceptive beauty and peace. Grimké not only obsessively returns to moments of longing, regret, and sadness in her poetry, her speakers also commune directly with the dead through transcendental mergers with the natural world. The line between thanatos and eros is blurred; there is more than a hint of erotic attraction to death as a form of intimate union and the consummation of love for an alluringly distant beloved. In the following middle excerpts from her poetry notebook’s “The Garden Seat,” dated January 6, 1902, for example, the speaker has a powerful vision of a resurrected beloved woman with whom she used to sit gazing at flowers: I clasped thee close within my yearning arms, I kissed thine eyes, thy lips, thy silky hair, And felt thy soft arms twining round my neck Thy bashful, maiden, kisses on my cheek, My whole heart leaping ’neath such wondrous joy-When the vision suddenly fades, the speaker is once again bereft, as she has been since the moment of her beloved’s death, when she placed on her dead face a last desperate kiss: The old-time longing surging in my breast, The old-time agony within my soul

68  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters As fresh, as new, as when I kissed thy lips So cold, with frenzy begging thee to speak, Believing not that thou wert lying dead.88 Similarly, in the following excerpts from the three-stanza poem, “Where Phyllis Sleeps,” published in the Boston Transcript, July 31, 1901 and entered in the poetry notebook on August 19, 1900, the speaker walks at dusk toward a woman’s grave: The World, upon the dreamy breast of Sleep, her head is bending, While I, a soul alone, my melancholy way am wending To where the patient willow weeps Upon the grave where Phyllis sleeps. On her way to the graveyard, she encounters “sobbing leaves” and “startled birds awakened by the weeping,” until at last she falls upon the burial plot: Dear one, I lie upon thy grave, my tears like rain are falling, My breaking heart, my yearning soul, in vain thy name are calling. Poor little tired head, whose sunny curls I used to treasure! Poor little tired feet, that learned all but too soon to measure The distance to the door! And still those tender eyes so pleading Can never see that all the pathways of my life are leading To where the patient willow weeps Upon the grave where now she sleeps.89 Grimké’s preoccupation with dead beloveds reached its apex in the late 1920s in verses in which death not only steals away those who are dearly loved, it also moves ever closer to the speaker herself. When she was only in her forties and had nearly half her life before her, Grimké’s poetry became increasingly centered on images of suffocation, burial, drowning, and silence. It is at this time that she wrote poems in which the speaker is dead or nearly dead even as her body remains vibrantly sentient. “Grass Fingers,” published in 1927, places the speaker in a Whitmanesque field of grass, with her face down, begging the blades to caress her naked body: Touch me, touch me, Little cool grass fingers,

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  69 Elusive, delicate grass fingers. With your shy brushings, Touch my face— My naked arms— My thighs— My feet. Is there nothing that is kind? You need not fear me: Soon I shall be too far beneath you For you to reach me, even, With your tiny, timorous toes.90 In the unpublished “An Epitaph,” the speaker is a corpse: I plead for joy from star-wake until sun[;] Then whitely tense I waited—not in vain. One came, slow came, with eyes enmisted, dun; And left me,—pain. I plead for love, the love men know but keep So ill. I waited, waited with bound breath. One came with eyes repellant, chill, and deep, And dealt me death. And now I lie quite straight, and still and plain; Above my heart the brazen poppies flare, But I know naught of love, or joy, or pain,— Nor care, nor care.91 In the quatrain “Epitaph on a Living Woman,” published in 1927, the electric eroticism displayed in earlier poems ignites a funeral pyre that consumes the speaker’s still-living body: There were tiny flames in her eyes, Her mouth was a flame, And her flesh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Now she is ashes.92

70  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters In “Under the Days,” another piece published in 1927, the speaker is buried alive by the simple passage of time in typography shaped like the metaphorical tree from which leaves fall and smother her: The days fall upon me; One by one, they fall, Like leaves . . . . . . . . . . They are black, They are grey, They are white; They are shot through with gold and fire. They fall, They fall Ceaselessly. They cover me, They crush, They smother. Who will ever find me Under the days?93 These were among her last published poems, and they heralded Grimké’s disappearance from public view in 1930. She was at the prime of her career, and in 1927 alone she published poems in Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk and in Ebony and Topaz, Opportunity, The Carolina Magazine, and the anthology Black and White. Yet after 1930, she published only reprinted poems in period anthologies.

Childhood Dislocation and the Poetry of Despair Critics have been at a loss as to the source of Grimké’s searing verses of regret and death, beyond attributing their despairing tone to the inhibiting force of her father on her love life. But I see a more complicated root of the poet’s melancholy both from without and within. Certainly repression of her sexuality and failure to find an intimate relationship played a large part, perhaps even the primary part, in creating Grimké’s poetry of despair, although her father was far from the only factor in that repression. Of equal if not greater import in my mind was her transition from student to teacher, the worsening Jim Crow restrictions of the

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  71 century’s first decades, and some unresolved issues of abandonment from her childhood. Leaving the separate sphere of female boarding schools in 1902 clearly meant a painful adjustment to heterosexual norms for the young teacher as her friends began to marry and have children. Her one foray into those norms in 1903 was so bitterly disillusioning that she swore off marriage and motherhood forever. She was also propelled into a segregated school system in the nation’s capital after spending most of her youth in white institutions and the relatively liberal atmosphere of late-nineteenth-century affluent Boston neighborhoods. After she relocated to a middle-class black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where her uncle presided over a black church, Grimké’s well-developed race politics were driven home by diminishing opportunities for the interracial friendships of her youth. A hardening color line, coupled with the fact that many of her friends settled into married life, possibly made the kind of intimacy Grimké was drawn to in her poetry look ever more unlikely. In addition, her consistent and early preoccupation with death suggests that other deeply rooted anxieties informed Grimké’s sense of solitude and hopelessness. While meditating on mortality may be understandable in middle age when a writer is aware of sand running through the hourglass, Grimké’s poetic imagination was occupied by doom and gloom, despair, regret, and death even when she was a child. Her very first dated poem, “The Violets Narritive” [sic], written on February 15, 1891, just before her eleventh birthday, traces the last day of a little girl who goes out into the night when “all was silence from beneath / All was silence from on high.” In the poem, which is set “a hundred years ago” on “a sweet and placid evening,” we first encounter the girl when we hear her sighing, “O dear! O dear! O my! O my! / What can I do! O my! O my!” and vowing to plant some seeds before she dies. The resulting flowers “made her a bed / And she was going to lie down / But she fell dead.”94 A month later on March 18, 1891, she composed “Beautiful Death, or In an Old and Broken Garret” and “Three Angels,” which features a dying swan.95 “Rest,” penned in February 1893, just before her thirteenth birthday, features another dead little girl: In a garret dark and gloomy Where the sun ne’er shows his face Where the winds with sighs and moaning Creeps through every crack and space

72  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Where a child lay dying fair. All alone she lay unheeded With the sunny golden hair And a smile it lighted up Her face so wan and fair. In the last stanza, the child is transported upward by “a radiant angel” and laid “in the arms of Jesus.”96 The month before twelve-year-old Nana penned that poem, in January 1893, she wrote “Dreamy Night,” which ends with the speaker’s death: Sometime when the sun has set And I have ceased to moan Then Death he will surround me And claim me for his own.97 Grimké’s first published poem, “The Grave in the Corner,” which she wrote at the age of thirteen, is about a little girl who visits her parents’ graves on Memorial Day. In the ninth stanza, she wails to the Civil War veterans laying flowers on the plots of deceased comrades that she wants to join her departed loved ones: And sometimes, in the evening, When the red sun is in the west, I wish I could be with them E’en in the land of the blest.98 For a young girl to meditate on death in such a lyrical, even romantic, way suggests deep wells of grief and loss soothed by the imagined embrace of lost dear ones in an unseen celestial sphere free of pain. Grimké displayed a preternatural affinity for the grave, then, from a very young age, while as a young adult she lamented the ephemeral nature of an intimate embrace, which was already vanishing at the moment of its birth. Framing these verses with the dislocations in Grimké’s childhood helps us see just how rocky the path of her young adulthood was when schoolgirl crushes and rebellion against authority figures threatened to overturn the relationships on which she depended for survival. These are areas of her life that have not been linked to the poetry, but we can detect

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  73 a foundation there for the intertwining of eros and thanatos at its core and the unusual closeness with her father that seems to have fueled her drive to write it. It is well known that Grimké was separated from her father early on when her parents’ marriage dissolved and she was just a baby and that later she was separated from her mother when Archibald took over permanent custody of his daughter in 1887. A third rupture occurred when Archie’s immersion in Boston politics after the Civil War landed him in the Dominican Republic as a diplomat from 1894 to 1898, just as Angelina was entering adolescence. The most profound of these breaks occurred in the wake of her parents’ estrangement, and while scholars have identified the loss of her mother as a primary source of Grimké’s unhappiness, she also faced a stark racial divide as a mixed-race child raised by her mother’s white family. Moreover, the protracted battle her father waged to keep his marriage together is not widely known, yet Nana saw the devastating impact on him of her mother’s rejection. That Grimké’s parents were deeply in love when Sarah Stanley began dating the handsome, brilliant Archibald Grimké when he was a lawyer fresh out of Harvard Law School and she a 27-year-old graduate of Boston University makes even more poignant the rapidity of the marriage’s disintegration. Letters Sarah wrote to Archibald while visiting her family in Michigan both before and after they married in April 1879 are intensely passionate, suggesting they had an egalitarian relationship that could withstand Sarah’s need to travel, write, and teach. In March 1879, she wrote, “My dear, sweet, sweetest Harry,” a nickname only she used that was drawn from Archibald’s middle name Henry, his late white father’s (and owner’s) name. A month after their marriage, when she may have already been pregnant with Angelina, she wrote a May 29 letter that begins, “Love! Lord! my—Husband!”99 As Grimké family biographer Mark Perry describes this honeymoon period, “[Archibald] and Sarah had set up house near his offices in downtown Boston, and he had walked to work every day and hurried home every night, anxious to show that he was a devoted husband. He attended to Sarah’s every need. . . . Sarah Stanley’s love for her new husband was seemingly boundless: ‘I no longer have a separate being,’ she wrote to him during one of his trips away from Boston. ‘My soul has gone and only a dull machine moves about these rooms on the streets and Commons of Boston, all is unmeaning haze until my prince return and revivify with his breath and magic touch.’”100 Just after Angelina’s birth in February 1880, a Boston studio daguerreotype from

74  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters that year—the only known extant photograph of Sarah Stanley—pictures the young mother with a beatific smile looking down at the adorable baby cradled gently in her lap, suggesting that motherhood was a joy to this independent thinker who insisted on the freedom to have her own life, become a writer, and not be a housewife (see Figure 7).101 When she took Angelina with her in the spring of 1882 for one of the several visits she made to her family in Michigan, however, Stanley quickly came to question the relationship. Carolyn Amonitti Stubbs attributes the rupture to Sarah’s jealousy of and suspicion about her husband’s frequent absences from home.102 Perry believes Stanley was overwhelmed by the stress of being married to a black man, despite her family’s felicitous adjustment to her mixed-race marriage. Archibald expressed in letters to Stanley’s father that he thought Sarah’s poor health was to blame, a point with which M. C. Stanley agreed as he tried to comfort his anguished son-in-law and coach him on how to win back her love.103 As Perry asserts, losing Sarah was traumatic for Archibald, and Angelina was well aware

Figure 7. Daguerreotype of Sarah Stanley and Angelina Weld Grimké, 1880. On back: J.J. Hawes Photo, 19 Tremont Row, Boston. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  75 of that impact: “[Grimké] pleaded with his wife to come back to him, but she did not answer his letter [begging her to come back]. Archibald Grimké would never remarry, and for as long as Sarah remained a part of his life, he would hope for her return. . . . Angelina would later write that her mother’s decision to leave Boston . . . was ‘a terrible blow’ that had a profound effect on Archie’s life, touching everything from his personal relationships with his family to his political beliefs. It took him many years to recover, she said.”104 The devastating effect on Archibald of Sarah’s abandonment and his inability to fashion another intimate relationship perhaps became for Angelina a model of failed lasting romance and a foundational template of unrequited love. From a child’s perspective, her father’s lifelong bachelorhood may have seemed to be the price he paid for loving a woman so deeply that he could never recover the will to love again. In addition, his marriage had been preceded by two other relationships—also with white women—and the good-looking charismatic Archie appears to have given up on marriage and love altogether.105 Although Grimké’s poetry reflects failed relationships in her own life, the examples of her father’s romantic disappointments and her mother’s inability to form a stable intimate bond after she left her husband undoubtedly lurked at the back of her mind when as a young adult she contemplated the likelihood of ever establishing a permanent tie with anyone. Little is known about Grimké’s earliest years, the foundation of her deepest perceptions and feelings, but from looking at the correspondence between Sarah Stanley, Stanley’s father, and Archibald Grimké, we can see that Angelina’s childhood was spent exclusively with her white maternal family in Michigan from at least the age of two, and this experience may have contributed to her later insecurity. Angelina’s maternal tie has been misunderstood as a brief relationship, but it was her primary bond from birth to the age of seven and a half, when she was sent to her father in Boston. Stanley, who was never separated from her daughter until 1887, took her baby girl with her when she left Archie to visit her parents in Detroit, where her father was a minister in nearby Midland, and resisted visits from her husband, fearing he would take Angelina from her.106 The Stanley family helped their daughter raise Nana in Michigan, taking her with them on visits to Mackinac Island in the Upper Peninsula while Archie unsuccessfully pleaded with his estranged wife to come back to Hyde Park with their little girl. Sarah appears to have briefly rejoined her husband, perhaps with Nana, after Archibald rented a flat she asked him to secure for them in the

76  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters fall of 1882, but by the spring of 1883, she had returned to her Michigan family and told them “there was trouble.”107 In the fall of 1884, she wrote to Francis, “I do not intend to ever return to live with Archie,” and she demanded full custody of Nana.108 As late as January 6, 1886, Archie begged Sarah to honor their marriage vow, “until death should us part,” but she held firm, finally asking him for a divorce (for which neither of them ever did file) in a letter of May 11, 1888, saying that she intended to resume using her maiden name and to leave the United States so she can lecture on astrology, mysticism, and the body’s connection to psychic health.109 Despite her determination to keep Angelina, it appears that Sarah Stanley reversed her decision to have sole custody with abrupt finality, informing Archie that she would be sending Nana to him “immediately by express” and that she was motivated by a twin desire to pursue her lecturing career and spare her child the trauma of being raised among whites. In a letter from Stanley to Archie dated April 25, 1887, she alluded to race when announcing her intention to send Angelina to him that very day: “[Nana] needs that love and sympathy of one of her own race which I am sure her father still has for her, but which it is impossible for others to give. . . . She is now getting old enough to see and feel the thoughts of others, which the difference in race and color naturally engender regarding her.”110 Evidently her mother put little Nana on a train to Boston all by herself, as her former teacher, Frances Morehead, referred to this solitary journey when she thanked Nana for visiting her California home in a letter dated June 26, 1887: “I think you were a brave girl to take such a long trip alone. Did no one have the care of you all the way from Kansas to Boston?”111 The seventeen letters to Angelina from Sarah Stanley and her parents spanning the period May 9–December 31, 1887, and the correspondence they had with Archibald from 1882 to 1887 reflect a long and intimate relationship with her as a child and strong maternal family ties. It is possible that Nana even attended school in Michigan, for Sarah alluded to a former teacher in her first letter: “I hope that you are already going to school every day, and that you will have a teacher whom you will like as well as you did Miss Morehead [now living in California].”112 In the next she asks, “Do you still go to school? And do you like Miss Perry [at the Fairmount Grammar School] as well as Miss Morehead?”113 This foundational bond, however, was almost completely severed by Angelina’s removal to Hyde Park. Sarah’s letters to her daughter indicate that the separation was so

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  77 painful that she poignantly attempted to forge a spiritual bond with her child that would transcend the physical distance: “I dream about you very often. The other night I thought I saw you out in a large cornfield. I called to you and you looked up and laughed as heartily as could be, and then you began to run up and down the rows of corn as fast as you could make your feet go. [. . .] Do you ever dream of Mamma?—Some time I shall be able to come to you in my Shadow Body and really see you. How would you like that?—And some time we will be together again.”114 Sarah wrote her daughter ten letters from the moment Nana left in May until just after Christmas of 1887. She sent her little girl soap, books, and a necklace she asked her to wear “all the time, day and night.” She strongly urged her to visit Sarah’s sister, Emma Tolles, in Hartford, Connecticut. She addressed her as “My dear little girl” and signed off as “Your loving Mamma.” She reminded Nana of her final words as she put her on a train to Boston, “the promise I made my little girl that day on the cars just as I left you when you were going to Boston,” and described vivid dreams about her: “One Saturday night I woke up hearing you call ‘Mamma, Mamma’ just as plain as could be. I expect you woke up suddenly and forgot where you were.— Do you remember?“115 These efforts to maintain a loving relationship with her daughter clearly meant something to the seven-year-old Nana, for she kept these letters the rest of her life and they repeatedly express the idea that separated loved ones could fashion an enduring bond in a spiritual realm. Of these crucial early years, Grimké says virtually nothing. In her 1925 biographical sketch of her father, she provides numerous highlights of her father’s early history and of his mother but says nothing of her own mother or mother’s family, glossing over the years 1880 through 1887. These foundational early years with the white side of her family are completely excised when she recounts her earliest memories: “In 1882, [my father] had moved from Boston and gone to live in Hyde Park [the flat Sarah Stanley asked Archibald to rent]. [. . .] It is here that my own memories of my father begin. ‘Tanglewood’ was the name of the modest two-story grey house owned by a couple, in their way as lovable as any I have known. Their name was Leverett. They lived downstairs and we, up.”116 Given how consistently Grimké returned to the subject of motherhood in her plays and short stories, scholars have concluded that her mother’s absence had a profound impact, however, and that the rupture was painfully deep. Patricia Young expresses the prevailing view that Grimké never forgave

78  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters her mother for abandoning her and created loving mother figures in her prose to compensate: “Grimké’s fiction not only reflects the legacy of race consciousness that her distinguished forebears passed down to her; it also reflects her resentment of her mother, which was occasioned by Sarah’s rejection of her.”117 The bitterness she felt toward her mother is certainly evident in her diaries and letters, but there is another side to Grimké’s feelings about her mother that surface in some of the juvenile and young adult poetry. Poems in Angelina’s girlish cursive, for example, point to a special closeness between mother and child. One reads, What can I give My happy dark-haired mother[?] Once I gave her a white flower The first of the spring, Her eyes were shining as she kissed me. Now I give her a song Her eyes are puzzled As she looks at me. She does not kiss me now. Another alludes to the speaker’s homesickness: The sun is shining, I see a robin All the earth is fair And I am longing for my dear home Now that spring is there. I cannot picture God high up in heaven I close my eyes and try to see Him there, And darkness clouds them so I cannot see. I open my eyes and see Him in a flower The snow falling white from the sky To be crushed under our feet, A baby’s face, my mother’s lips And happy children’s eyes That is where I see my God.118 Exacerbating what had to be the sudden and bewildering leave-taking from a mother Angelina evidently loved so dearly and the loving Stanley

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  79 extended family is the fact that Sarah poisoned herself in 1898 at the age of forty-eight, an event that seems to have caused the eighteen-year-old Nana to reflect poignantly on her, at least initially. Having suffered for decades from heart disease produced by scarlet fever at the age of four, Stanley rationally chose to euthanize herself in California.119 The long time frame from Stanley’s death on August 25 to the October 1 date of Emma Tolles’s letter informing her niece of the death suggests hesitation, perhaps out of awkwardness or confusion about how to present the information. “My dear Angelina,” she writes, “I am very sorry to be the bearer of sad news [. . .] of your dear mother’s passing on to higher planes. She was hoping to see you once more and was trying so hard to make a little home to which you could come and visit. She never ceased to love you and dearly as ever and it was a great trial to her to have you go away from her, how great God alone knows, but it was the only thing to do.” Tolles makes only vague reference to the cause of death: “She had every thing done that could be done. She wrote me just as long as she could make a mark but finally grew so weak she could not hold a pencil. [. . .] Your mother, dear Angelina, was one of the most wonderful souls that ever came to this planet. When you are old enough to understand I will tell you about her wonderful career. This world has been a scorching fire through which she has passed and now she has gone to a reward that few of us can conceive of.”120 The painful circumstances of Stanley’s suicide are described in letters from M. C. Stanley to Archibald, however, and they provide additional context for Grimké’s verses of pathos set at dusk and her many poems featuring oceans and ships. On November 16, 1898, Stanley’s father wrote that, having collapsed from heart failure in New Zealand, Sarah miraculously made it back to Detroit, where she lived with her parents for a year and a half before traveling to San Diego “to die of poison” surrounded by friends.121 Two months later, in a letter dated February 18, 1899, he informed Archibald that Sarah was cremated and her ashes thrown into San Diego Bay by these friends from a boat at dusk: “By her request, her friends at the setting of the sun, gathered on the shore and a few went out in a boat carrying the urn that contained her ashes and scattered them over the limpid waves. Lo, there is not now a vestige of our dearly beloved one remaining.”122 At the end of this letter, Stanley told Archie that Sarah’s last letter to him from New Zealand mentioned how sorely she missed her daughter even though she hadn’t seen her for eleven years: “In that letter she said, ‘O, if I only had Nana with me, how much happier I should be.’”

80  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters A poem in Angelina’s poetry notebook dated July 18, 1899, five months after the date on which her grandfather wrote his account of Sarah’s scattered ashes in his letter to Archie, suggests that her father shared these letters with Nana and that Sarah’s death was deeply painful. “Longing,” a piece that later was published in the Boston Transcript in April 1901, poignantly recreates the scene in San Diego Bay her grandfather described and is the first time she employs images associated with Aphrodite. As a white dove, against the deep blue sky, Skims swiftly far away on restless wings, As a blithe barque shakes off the clinging spray, And to the gallant breeze her ensign flings, So longs my soul to fly away to thee. As lights the panting dove in some far land, And at the sunset hour sleeps on her nest, And as the barque tossed by the blustering gale, At last in port lies on the Ocean’s breast, So longs my soul to rest alway[s] with thee.123 The poem’s female imagery of a white “panting” dove flying “far away on restless wings” who comes to rest “in some far land” and “at the sunset hour sleeps on her nest” describes Sarah Stanley’s irrepressible urge to travel to California and New Zealand despite her poor health and a diseased heart that made it hard for her to breathe. It also alludes to her final resting place “at the sunset hour.” It describes a barque “tossed by the blustering gale” coming to port at last “on the ocean’s breast,” a clear reference to her mother’s long journey back to Detroit from New Zealand and the final journey by boat in California in the urn that held her ashes at sunset. “So longs my soul to fly away to thee,” the speaker proclaims, “So longs my soul to rest alway[s] with thee.” In addition to the separation from her mother in 1887 and Sarah’s premature death in 1898, the departure of Angelina’s father for the Dominican Republic for four years from late 1894 to 1898 created a third dislocation that has not been adequately recognized as a force in Grimké’s artistic themes. The only scholar to address the impact of his departure is Brian Russell Roberts, whose chapter on Grimké’s Rachel in Artistic Ambassadors draws a connection between the absent presence of the lynched fa-

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  81 ther in the play and Angelina’s distress over separation from Archibald in 1894: “Archibald’s four-year consulship in Santo Domingo usually receives a cursory nod in narratives of Angelina’s life, with his diplomatic work framed as merely incidental to his daughter’s literary production . . . [but] Archibald’s four-year consulship constitutes a repressed yet pivotal and defining foreign presence within Rachel’s domestic project.”124 Pointing out that the play’s action revolves around the date of October 16, when Act I takes place, and leaps ahead to the same date four years later, Roberts notes that the shattering of the Loving family on this date when Mrs. Loving first tells her children of their father’s lynching mirrors the playwright’s own life splintering when Archibald took Angelina to his brother’s home on October 14, 1894, and did not return until four years later.125 Roberts also reminds us that Archibald wanted to remain in Santo Domingo for several years beyond the four he spent but that he was suddenly removed from his post by political shifts in the nation’s capital and that Angelina recorded great unhappiness over separation from her father in her 1925 biographical sketch of Archibald Grimké.126 I would add to Roberts’s perceptive spotlighting of this paternal hiatus that it was at this moment that Angelina began to articulate her attraction to women, the moment when her home shifted to white boarding schools, the Lee household in Boston, and her aunt and uncle’s home in Washington D.C. and she faced open-ended separations from both parents. The multiple residences she experienced from the mid to late 1890s were far removed from either parent’s protection and control, so she had abundant opportunities to live out those attractions, both in life and in her art, and their intensity may have been amplified by the teenager’s loss of stability in Hyde Park with her father and the long estrangement from her mother. Perry notes Grimké’s turbulent rebellious personality at this time and the stress she experienced after her father went to Santo Domingo, relating that Charlotte Forten Grimké wrote to Archibald shortly after he left the country that Nana was arguing with her guardians and was “unruly.” Although Archibald admonished Angelina to buckle down in school and respect her elders, in the end Charlotte told him that her presence in their household had become “unbearable.” Perry cites a letter from Archibald expressing deep disappointment in his difficult and willful daughter: “I had hoped against hope that you would [. . .] prove your self in every respect worthy to live in such a city as Washington [and] that you would try to be a comfort & joy in the home of your uncle & aunt. I know

82  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters now that you have been neither, my dear child.”127 Indeed, a set of studio portraits taken of Angelina at this time, dressed in native Dominican garb her father had sent, shows her to be a rather sullen, defiant subject for the photographer (one of these images appears on the cover of the paperback version of this book).128 In April 1895, fifteen-year-old Grimké was transferred from the M Street School, an African American high school in the center of the nation’s capital, to Carleton Academy, where she participated in the college preparatory program. The school was located in the small town of Northfield, Minnesota.129 After being separated from her father, moved out of Hyde Park, and then taken out of her new school in Washington D.C. soon after that, the teenage Angelina’s long trek to Carleton must have seemed like going to the end of the earth. In addition, Angelina clashed so severely with Joseph Lee’s wife, Christiana, while her father was gone that she temporarily moved out of the Lee household to live with a family friend in Roxbury Point.130 Although her aunt and uncle continued to be her legal guardians until Archie returned to the U.S. in June 1898, Angelina appears to have lived with them only sporadically during this period. She lived in Northfield, then in Ashburnham, Massachusetts where she attended Cushing Academy, finally settling in Boston with the Lees, and making only periodic visits to Washington D.C. during school breaks. Perhaps the most autobiographical portrait of these difficult years occurs in Grimké’s story “The Closing Door,” published in the Birth Control Review in 1919. The 25-year-old narrator begins the story by telling us that at age fifteen (the age when Angelina was transferred from her father’s care to that of her aunt and uncle), she was “diffident and old far beyond my years from much knocking about from pillar to post.” In the opening flashback, we see this teenager’s mother as a maid who returns to work for a previous employer when her husband dies and is unable to keep her daughter with her: “I was passed along from one of her relatives to another. When one tired of me, on I went to the next. [. . .] Have you ever, I wonder, known a happy person? I mean a really happy one? He is as rare as a white blackbird in this somber-faced world of ours.” Raised by the only two happy people she says she has ever known—Agnes, a woman distantly related on her father’s side, and her husband Jim—the narrator, Lucy, describes the chilling descent of this African American couple from being madly in love to insanity and death after a lynch mob brutally tortures

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  83 Agnes’s brother in Mississippi. Agnes never recovers, and when her child is born, she rejects the baby, ultimately smothering him and dying shortly thereafter of a fatal illness. The story is made even more poignant by the fact that Agnes was the only person Lucy had ever really loved: “It was the mother heart of Agnes that had yearned over me, had pity upon me, loved me and brought me to live in the only home I have ever known. [. . .] I love her still.”131 The image of a happy person being as rare as “a white blackbird” in “The Closing Door” points to Grimké’s mixed-race ancestry and is a telling image of color that starkly defined the narrator’s orphaned state. It is well known that Grimké composed prose pieces such as “The Closing Door” as polemical tracts to arouse indignation over the suffering inflicted on black mothers and children by racism, and her central character in Rachel vows never to have children in a society that refused to honor their humanity. At the same time, we can see in such portraits the absent presence of a mother and a father in her own life that left her feeling vulnerable and alone as she entered her teenage years.

Sources of Strength, Continuity, and Resilience Although she dealt with a good deal of uncertainty and instability, Grimké drew on a deep reservoir of resilience and familial strength as a student, a young teacher, and finally an adult writer. Substitute mothers appeared in her young life—an unidentified correspondent from Hyde Park she knew as “Mama Day”; her father’s white landlady, Marie Leverette; Joseph Lee’s wife Christiana; and, most importantly, her Aunt Lottie, Charlotte Forten Grimké. The glowing portraits Grimké drew of her paternal grandmother and aunt after their deaths suggest how important they were to her in spite of the fact that she lived with Nancy Weston just a few months and with Charlotte only intermittently. They also suggest how powerful the hold on Grimké’s imagination was of women who have passed on to another plane of existence, the lingering ties to those who mentored and loved her. Fully thirty years after Weston’s death we see in Grimké’s 1925 profile of Archibald the vivid impression her paternal grandmother made on Angelina as a teenager when both parents left her. She began the essay with an adulatory description of her paternal grandmother.132 In addition, the courageous loving mother Grimké created for her signature drama, Rachel, is clearly

84  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters drawn from Weston, who similarly bore three children in the South whom she raised by herself when their white father died in 1852. In the play, the mother’s lynched husband edited a black newspaper, just as Weston’s oldest son Archie did when he founded Boston’s The Hub. Like Weston, Rachel’s mother is a seamstress and tries to protect her children from the racism that limits their horizons. That Grimké enshrined a black mother in Rachel who was so much like Nancy Weston reflects a strong identification with the paternal, black side of her heritage, even though she lost that maternal figure when she was still little more than a child. (Weston died in 1895.) Angelina’s Aunt Lottie, married to her father’s brother Francis, was an even greater influence. Although they conflicted when Charlotte became Angelina’s guardian in 1894, the correspondence between them reflects a warm and loving relationship, and when Charlotte died in 1914 after decades of battling tuberculosis, Angelina wrote two of her most beautiful poems. “To Keep the Memory of Charlotte Forten Grimké” (1915), which was published in both The Crisis and Opportunity and in Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923), is deservedly one of Grimké’s most admired verses. In its first and last stanzas, the poem presents a woman whose love of the natural world is forever imprinted on the speaker’s mind and whose gentle devotion to the eternal verities of nature lend her a kind of immortality. The poem subtly evokes similarities between niece and aunt that while she was alive at times caused them to clash but created a lasting bond: Still are there wonders of the dark and day; The muted shrilling of shy things at night, So small beneath the stars and moon; The peace, dream-frail, but perfect while the light Lies softly on the leaves at noon. These are, and these will be Until Eternity; But she who loved them well has gone away. [. . .] Where has she gone? And who is there to say? But this we know: her gentle spirit moves And is where beauty never wanes; Perchance by other streams, ’mid other groves; Far, far indeed it is from those she loves;

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  85 And to us here, ah! she remains A lovely memory Until Eternity, She came, she loved, and then she went away.133 The unpublished “Butterflies,” written in blank verse, is another tribute to Nana’s Aunt Charlotte, who spent her last days in Washington, D.C., at 1415 Corcoran NW, the elegant row house Angelina shared with her aunt and uncle and her father from 1904 to 1930. That residence has been demolished, but its likeness is preserved in the neighboring units, 1417 and 1409, and in the historically preserved block on which it was located. We see some of its features in the piece.134 The three-story red brick units with white trim are lined with windows on the north and south sides; these are featured in “Butterflies” as the speaker walks outside in the sunshine and looks up at the second-floor bedroom where the corpse of a woman who has just died is lying: Two windows has the little room, One to the north, the other to the south; Open, both, for the sun and the air She needed so. But now . . . . . . . . . . . . . The long fifth stanza describes the dying woman’s final days as she sat in her favorite chair: Her dark head heavy, Her dark head weary. Nothing but weariness left: Weariness of hand and foot and knee and back; Weariness of wide, unquiet eyes glimpsing things unseen, Weariness of wide, unquiet eyes forgetting you. Remembering you, forgetting you again; Weariness of the journey from the weary ring finger To the wearier middle finger, Of her mother’s wedding ring; The silence of weariness; The slow withdrawal of her who sat in that unresponsive body, The young soul whiteness of her unloosening its shell, And slipping out—and slipping out—and slipping out. . . . . . .

86  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters The poem moves from white butterflies fluttering in the sunshine to the woman’s white chair and white chest of drawers to the corpse’s white sheet as the speaker dwells on these last painful memories. She finally calls our attention to the “young soul whiteness” leaving the lifeless body by focusing on the butterflies as a representation of the deceased’s beautiful departing spirit in the poem’s final lines: Butterflies, white butterflies, in the sunshine, Have you seen them? Really seen them? Lovely things!135 Interracial images of whiteness and darkness in the elegy create a silhouette of the dying woman’s dark head framed by white furniture, a shroud, white butterflies that symbolize the purity of a soul freed from the ravaged dark body’s surrender to a lifetime of struggle. The similarities between her Aunt Lottie and Angelina are legion: they were both introverted, drawn to literature and music, poets, teachers, independent self-supporting women, race activists, writers, and lovers of nature. Indeed, it is likely that Grimké was both inspired and slightly intimidated by her illustrious aunt. Charlotte Forten was an activist, writer, and published poet of the nineteenth century. Her four-volume diary, which she kept between 1854 and 1864, and a fifth, which she kept from 1885 to 1892, are some of the most important writings of an African American woman from that period.136 She was published in William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and in the Atlantic Monthly and other prestigious venues. She was the cultivated daughter of a well-to-do Philadelphia family yet supported herself as a teacher and then as a clerk at the U.S. Treasury Department before marrying Francis Grimké, fourteen years her junior, in 1878 at age forty-one. Charlotte and Angelina Grimké were also bound by their love of two brothers who were inextricably tied by the nightmare of slavery as boys, the rigors of an Ivy League education in the north as young men, and prominence in the New Negro movement as mature adults. Francis became pastor of one of the most influential African American churches in the country, while Archibald became head of the NAACP branch in Washington, D.C., and traveled throughout the East lecturing on civil rights issues. To be related to such men was no easy matter, and the two women felt keenly their role as New Negro educators leading the race forward. They also suffered devastating personal losses that were mirror

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  87 images of each other—Angelina was a motherless child and Charlotte a childless mother. Charlotte’s daughter Theodora, born shortly after her niece in 1880, died as an infant. If Francis and Charlotte were blessed with the lasting marital relationship that escaped Archibald, they were denied the daughter who remained central to Archie’s life. Reflecting her father’s race activism, Grimké wrote stirring inspirational poems, such as “Beware Lest He Awakes” (1902), “The Black Finger” (1923), and “Tenebris” (1927), along with anti-lynching prose. She built on a firm foundation of social justice writing in her family, especially that of her namesake, Angelina Grimké Weld.137 At the same time, her parents’ fractured interracial marriage with the ensuing disjunctive childhood and adolescence seems to have created a need to work out some private pain as well, and lyric poetry provided a way to do that. Laine A. Scott describes these twin pillars of Grimké’s writing career well: “[Her] heritage put enormous pressure on Grimké to carry on her family’s tradition of embracing social causes. Timid and obedient as a child, she turned to writing as a release for her preoccupations: her need for a mother’s attention, her diligence in living up to her father’s expectations, and her inability to establish a lasting romantic partnership.”138

The Final Years of Silence The most devastating blow Grimké suffered was arguably the death of her father. This loss brought an end to her writing and suggests not only how profoundly attached she was to him but also how integral he had become to her Sapphic poetic vision. Scholars have posited that Grimké wrote in large part out of a desire to please her father. Certainly he helped fuel her drive to publish. There are equally compelling sources of Angelina’s dependence on him for emotional support, however, as she ran up against the limits of her earliest romantic attachments. If her muse was Aphrodite, the emotional ground on which Grimké stood became the life she shared with her father, who took pride in her publishing career and stepped into the role of agent, chief fan, and primary reader. As early as 1899, he advised her about how to send a story to the Boston Transcript, expressing his great interest in it while consoling her for the rejection of another.139 By 1901, he proudly addressed a letter “My dear little poetess.” That same year, Tessa Lee described how Archibald was distracted away from a delicious breakfast at 528 Columbus by a manuscript of hers that arrived in the morning mail:

88  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters “Your father rec’d your manuscript this morn [. . .] and left his hearty meal upon his plate to cool until he had perused the many pages of the finely written epistle. [. . .] Many a time while reading your scrip[t] [. . .] he sighed many times & cast a sheepish glance at his untasted breakfast temptingly displayed before his eager eyes & mouth, but he never flinched but kept reading on to the end.”140 In a 1905 letter to his daughter, Archibald expressed his whole-hearted support for her poetry in particular: “Your verses, my dear, are real poetry. They have [. . .] ‘the authentic fire.’ I like them much. I see no diminution of your ability to make real poetry. All you have to do is hold on in the course in which you are now sailing with such favoring winds and you will be sure to arrive at your destination. Do not let the reception or rejection of your verses by the magazines discourage you in the least.”141 Grimké wrote about the importance of Archibald’s love and support, the integral role he played in her desire to write in her diaries. The first diary, which Angelina wrote in Boston from July 18 to September 10, 1903, not only chronicles her anguished days as she waited for a letter that never came from the first male suitor for whom she had ever felt desire, it also chronicles her agonizing over how empty her future looked: “I am very very tired of living. There is nothing to look forward to, only a year of school with a vacation at the end. [. . .] There is writing, but the great emptiness of many years before [me] with nothing to look forward to at the end. When people talk about what they are going to do in the future all I think to myself is[,] ‘What does it all amount to?’ At the end there is only the grave. There is no cure for this everlasting heartache. It never lets up. [. . .] I have given up my girlhood. I can never be a girl again. That is gone, and I am an old woman at heart.”142 On the verge of suicide over this romantic disappointment, Angelina found the will to go on only by intertwining love for her father with devotion to writing. As she wrote in the July 21 entry of this diary: “I have two reasons only for living, my dear dear father and my writing. They must fill my life absolutely. I can never expect to love again. This shall be the beginning, the real beginning of my effort to crush it out forever. [. . .] It almost hurts me to see that my love for you [the man who has disappointed her] is nearly as great as that for my father. It hurts me to feel also that he has ever had a rival for I do, I do love him so much.”143 At the end of the diary, she makes a vow to never forget her duty to live for the talent bestowed on her or her father’s love: “Before you do this thing remem-

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  89

Figure 8. Portrait of Archibald and Angelina Grimké, ca. 1902. Stamped: The Donaldson Studio, 927 F St. NW, Washington, D.C. Grimké lived with her father and uncle in Washington, D.C. from1902 to 1930. Courtesy of the MoorlandSpingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

ber that somewhere there lives a just God before whom sometime you will have to stand in judgment. Remember that you have a father who lives for you alone, who would give his life blood for you. [. . .] Remember that God gave you talent. [. . .] Remember these things before you undertake to break this pledge: I swear before God that from this day forth, I shall be all that I would be.”144 Having come through this 1903 crisis, Grimké thereafter appeared to consign desire for intimacy to the realm of the poet, the twilight imaginings of a solitary dreamer unable to translate vision into a lived relationship and to base her will to live on the twin pillars of writing and her father’s love. In her final diary, which consists of a single entry written on New Year’s Eve 1911, Grimké reiterated her father’s centrality to her life as she faced the new year and struggled to overcome self-doubt. The fatherdaughter bond Grimké described in this entry goes far beyond the patri-

90  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters archal constraints others have attributed to Archibald’s hold on her. We see instead how effectively he was able to bring out the best in his sensitive only child by providing her with what she felt to be the purest kind of love, respect, and trust: “My faith in myself is not profound. On this the last day of the year 1911, I am brought face to face with myself. I cannot say I am proud. My hands are not clean. [. . .] There are so many, many things I could have left undone, so many struggles with myself where I have been not exactly victorious, [. . .] the shadows black of many other disagreeable and disgusting things.” Alluding mysteriously to “that horrible searing unfounded scandal” and to the “remorse and regret” that had become “rightful guests,” she concluded this “prayer for the coming year” with a powerful description of her relationship to Archibald, which she characterized as “when some people are as one”: “This I know now and I have always known it and felt it, I have no desire absolutely for life without him. There is no father like him and no friend so kind, so patient, so helpful. My happiness and my suffering and his are indissolubly bound up together. [. . .] My greatest and most beautiful blessing now and always is my father. Make me worthy of him. I know that I shall never fail him as I know he will never fail me.”145 In part Angelina’s devotion to the man she called “Papa” and to whom she wrote nearly every day when they were apart (as he did to her), stems from the fact that he stepped into the shoes of her absent mother, a role she highlighted in the 1904 poem she wrote to commemorate Archibald’s fifty-fifth birthday.146 In her bleakest childhood and adolescent moments, Nana could count on her father to be there for her as she coped with losing her maternal family and adjusted to being one of the very few dark students in her Hyde Park grammar school, then bouncing from there to Washington, D.C., then to Northfield, Ashburnham, and Boston. In all of those places she was again surrounded by white classmates with neither parent physically present to comfort her. Archibald’s letters from Santo Domingo, which he began writing immediately after he arrived there in November 1894, surely helped bolster his daughter as she coped with her singular status in white institutions without the benefit of a parental safe harbor. He addressed her as “My little darling,” “My dear, dear Nana,” “Dear Child,” and effusively signed off, “with ever & ever so much love from your loving Papa” in letters that arrived like clockwork, almost on a daily basis. The remarkable 35-year correspondence between Angelina and Archibald Grimké charts a filial closeness that transcended

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  91 marital estrangement, the premature death of Sarah Stanley, prolonged separations, financial and emotional distress, intense political infighting between Archibald Grimké and Booker T. Washington, and Angelina’s unexpected blossoming into a writer. They forged a relationship through long letters while Archie lectured for the NAACP and his daughter completed her schooling or vacationed in New England with friends. They lived together at 1415 Corcoran Street in Washington, D.C., and 528 Columbus in Boston but led quite independent lives as Angelina enjoyed an unusual amount of freedom to travel, write, and visit whomever she liked. Though both were charismatic, attractive people, they remained single, seemingly bound by the immense respect each had for the other’s intelligence, courage, and talent along with the romantic heartache both of them suffered. There is another way Archibald Grimké assumed center stage in his daughter’s life: his remarkable journey from slavery to Harvard Law School and full-time activism as a co-founder, with W. E. B. Du Bois, of the NAACP. In her highly edited biographical sketch of 1925, Angelina alluded to the fact that her father had overcome poverty, hardship, suffering as a child and a teenager in Charleston before he left the South as a sixteen-year-old, but she chose not to include details of the life-threatening racism that formed the core of his passionate fight against segregation. In Perry’s biography of the Grimké family, however, we see that Archibald and Francis barely escaped the tentacles of slavery. Their father and owner, Henry Grimké, inherited a large cotton plantation just outside Charleston, and his sister, Angelina Grimké Weld, remembered Henry’s cruelty to the slaves as a child: “[She] often witnessed Henry beating his slaves. A racist and white supremacist, he had a wicked temper. . . . He was meanspirited and sharp-tongued.”147 Though Perry believes that Henry loved his slave-mistress, Nancy Weston, who bore him three sons, when he died in 1852 his will bequeathed the boys to Henry’s white son Montague, whose mother had died in 1843, and Montague proved to be a hard-core violent racist. According to Perry, “[He was] quick-tempered, narrow-minded, and sometimes violent.”148 Though Nancy and her boys were initially provided a house in Charleston after Henry’s death, where she supported her children through sewing and laundering, Montague insisted that the children come to his home as slaves of his new wife in 1857. Frank and Archie rebelled and ran away, but were caught and severely punished, according to Perry’s account:

92  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters [Frank] was whipped mercilessly several times by Montague and his

wife . . . and apprenticed to a local workman known for his brutality and for most of the next year . . . the child was regularly beaten and starved by his new master. The morning of General Beauregard’s shelling of Fort Sumter found him half-clothed and half-starved, attempting to protect himself from that day’s beating. With Frank out of the way . . . Montague focused on Archie, whom he viewed as a surly, callow, ungracious, and insulting servant. At one point he sent the boy to the Charleston workhouse for thirty lashes.149 In her notes for a longer biographical sketch of her father, Angelina described this incident: “Montague beat my father [and his cries were so loud he arranged for police to take him to the guardhouse, where they] tied him, put his head in a cap. They bared his back and lashed him unmercifully.”150 After Frank was sent to the new master, Archie ran away at age twelve in 1862, according to Perry, and hid in the black community of Charleston, emerging only at night dressed as a girl. Frank survived being sold to a Confederate lieutenant in 1864 and nearly died of starvation. Both boys finally joined the Union army when it overtook Charleston in 1865. After leaving their home city soon after the war ended to attend Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the brothers never set foot in South Carolina again. The harrowing story of the Grimké brothers frames Angelina’s dedication to her father, whose fortitude and refusal to be broken by slavery in the Old South or segregation in the North undoubtedly became a model for her of courageous defiance. We see his struggle to survive in Charleston reflected in Rachel when the play’s signature character describes traumatic racist attacks on her at age twelve, the same age Archibald was when he ran away from Montague.151 Perhaps feeling lost at times as a shy schoolgirl trying to bridge white and black ancestry, Angelina had in her father a bracing figure of political conviction, race pride, oratorical prowess, and unconditional love. Under his protective wing, she was free to explore her innermost thoughts and feelings in poetry while contributing with him to the fight against racism as a playwright, fiction writer, and author of poems centered on race. Although he may have inhibited her from forming a lasting intimate relationship, other factors, such as the patriarchal norms of her era, her Uncle Frank’s puritanical religious tenets, the formidable barrier of segregation, and her own complicated

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  93 psyche, undoubtedly did so too.152 Above all, Archibald Grimké furnished the only stability Nana had ever known after she was separated from her mother’s family. We can surmise that as long as she had his extraordinary character to balance her self-reproach, his love to take the sting out of personal rejection and disappointment in the world of publishing, she could find the will to go on. His capacious embrace of her New Negro sensibility allowed her to fuse the activism he stood for with creative writing that helped fuel the Harlem Renaissance while lighting the corridors of her deepest desires and fears. Shortly after Angelina abruptly left 1415 Corcoran just a month after her father’s passing in February 1930, two days before her fiftieth birthday, Anna Julia Cooper begged her to not lose heart in the wake of Archibald’s death, “an aching void [. . .] which no words of mine can help and no sympathy or tenderness can console.” She alluded to the trials Grimké had been through, “the life that was hard to endure, much that brought out more bitter than sweet.” Urging her to resist succumbing to despair, Cooper implored: “Get a fresh grip on yourself. Put away the thoughts that embitter and becloud and depress. Seek cheerful companions and find engrossing occupation. Take up your pen. Use your talent. Get out in the open. [. . .] Bring in the sunshine. You miss your father because you must have someone to love, someone to do for. Love your uncle, do for him. [. . .] Travel, study, write. Be happy.”153 In 1932, a Henry B. Jones similarly begged Angelina to start writing again: “At once, rush to your desk and write the poetry you can and must do. [. . .] Had I encountered you last Saturday night after I had steeped myself in a few of your finest, I felt like actually slapping you. [. . .] Write! Do you hear? Write! Talent among Negroes is a common thing. Power rare. You have power; will to use it now as you have done before!” Jones ended by accusing Grimké of letting down her people as well as herself: “You, Angelina Grimké, who has written poetry, started in a race, a runner among runners. A strange race, one in which each entry felt a power beyond himself driving him on. You flashed form, ability, quality—and that indefinable gift of the gods—class—and stopped running—got right off the track—and watched.”154 Jones’s admonishing assessment of Grimké’s failure to write is as accurate an explanation as any when we speculate about the puzzling 28-year silence of a woman who had dedicated her life to writing for forty years and then moved off stage. The delicate balancing act of confronting in

94  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters her art the demons of loss, regret, remorse, death, and loneliness perhaps became too difficult to maintain. Maybe getting off the race track once the anchor of her father disappeared was in part a relief. The mature Angelina, residing in New York City, could read, attend plays, visit art museums, see friends, enjoy flowers and music, paint, write the occasional private verse, and rest easy in the knowledge that she was a devoted daughter who had seen to it that her father’s legacy would be honored. Perhaps she knew the dark muse she worshipped from afar had already brought out the best in her as an artist, providing a measure of comfort as she set aside the mantle of courageous poet, going out into the night, following desire wherever it would take her. One of the final poems to anticipate her retirement, one that remained unpublished, suggests that Grimké’s worship of Aphrodite allowed her to find a final spiritual home in a world marred by racism, disappointment, pain, and regret. She could imagine an ending to the 40-year story of her writing life without succumbing to despair and immerse herself in a tableau of beauty that was once presided over by her now-absent goddess of the dusk. It perhaps expresses best Angelina Grimké’s ability to turn anguish into art and to contemplate with serenity the lonely road ahead. At the End Thus may it be with me, When at the dusk His call Rings through the silences Into my turret tall,— I may arise and go Down ’neath the poplars four, Down ’neath the star-flecked skies, Down where the sibilant shore, Sighs and sighs and sighs, Through its veil of amethyst. Then may I swiftly embark And slip away through the mist; Slip far out and yet out, Where thwart the deeps on deeps, Straight ’neath a moon of gold, Golden a pathway creeps.

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire   T  95 And then may sleep hush my heart Sweet as the croon of the sea, Soft as the mist is soft; Thus may it be with me.155

Figure 9. Gwendolyn Bennett in the 1920s. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

3 Harlem’s Phoenix Gwendolyn B. Bennett

I

n contrast to Angelina Weld Grimké, whose birth in 1880 precluded her inclusion in the youthful vanguard of the Harlem Renaissance, Gwendolyn Bennett (July 8, 1902–May 30, 1981) hit the 1920s arts movement at just the right time. Not only was Bennett born twenty-two years later than Grimké, she was a New Yorker poised to enter the vibrant scene of Harlem after World War I. She went to public high school in Brooklyn and entered Columbia University in 1921, whereas Grimké was largely educated in Massachusetts private schools and did not move to New York until the early 1930s. Grimké was reclusive and painfully shy, while Bennett entered Harlem’s social scene with gusto. The two could not have been more opposite in terms of temperament, and Bennett’s Brooklyn roots served her well as she navigated New York’s arts scene while only an undergraduate at Columbia and at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. Yet despite their differences, Bennett and Grimké shared some things: both were single children estranged from their mothers and doted on by their fathers, and both forged independent lives as teachers and writers. They both suffered from painful romantic disappointments in the midst of professional success and explored intimacy in their verse with surprising frankness. Grimké centered her lyricism on inaccessible women, while Bennett focused on men, but both created pastoral landscapes in which speakers commune with an ethereal goddess of the dark. My starting point for Bennett is an unpublished verse she penned in 1928 on a train from New York to Philadelphia. In contrast to Grimké’s “A Mood” (1902), which is set on a wooded path at night with a speaker

97

98  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters immersed in protective darkness, Bennett’s speaker stares out the window at a forbidding rural landscape during the harsh light of day. The scene contrasts starkly with that of the bustling city in which Bennett lived, but rather than providing joyful release, as the rural countryside does for Grimké’s speaker, Bennett’s is moved to somber reflection by the scene she contemplates. “Train Monotony” opens with an image of barren train tracks across bleak stretches of field as a simile for the speaker’s quotidian life: My days are like these fields, Bleak stretches With now and then Some homely thing— Houses or trees Or tiny crooked paths Where leaden feet have trod . . . . Looking out the window, Bennett, who had not long before returned from a year in Paris, where she had studied oil and watercolor painting, used a metaphor drawn from her tools as a painter when the speaker describes patches of landscape: Drab stretches of canvas, Taut between the pegs Of towns or cities, So [are] my days . . . Barren tracks Between the mounds Of some joy or sadness.1 While Grimké’s “A Mood” celebrates the speaker’s private perambulations through a sleeping town at a moment well before the poet’s fame, Bennett’s poem is striking for its undertone of sadness even as the poet is at the peak of her literary career. By 1928, Bennett had published twenty-two poems in leading venues of the Harlem Renaissance, including Opportunity, The Crisis, Palms, and Year Book of American Poetry, William Stanley Braithwaite’s Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1927 and Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927).2 Her two published short stories, “Wedding Day” and “Tokens,” had recently appeared in Wallace

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  99 Thurman’s Fire!! (November 1926) and Charles S. Johnson’s anthology Ebony and Topaz (1927), respectively.3 She was comfortably ensconced as literary editor of Opportunity (1926–1928), for which she wrote book reviews and a column, the Ebony Flute. Bennett’s poetry had been well regarded from the moment she stepped into the public spotlight just two years after completing high school, when “Nocturne” and “Quatrain” had been published in the November and December 1923 issues of The Crisis, respectively, and “Heritage” had been published in the December 1923 issue of Opportunity. In January 1924, Bennett participated in poetry readings with Countee Cullen at the 135th Street Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn YWCA that received excellent reviews in the Chicago Defender.4 By March 1924, she was so well regarded that she was asked to create a poem, “To Usward,” for the landmark Civic Club dinner honoring Jessie Fauset and other new black writers, an event that marked the official beginning of the Harlem Renaissance and one that she had suggested to Charles S. Johnson. That year, when she was just twenty-two, Howard University hired her as an assistant professor of fine art; she taught design and watercolor there from October 1924 to June 1925. At that point, a Delta Sigma Theta scholarship took her to Paris for a year of art study at the Académie Julian, the Académie Colarossi, the Académie de la Grand Chaumière, and the École du Panthéon; she also took a course in French literature at the Sorbonne. The black press lauded her achievements, from her first public reading in 1924 through the 1927–1928 Barnes Foundation Fellowship she shared with Aaron Douglas.5 By 1928, in other words, Gwendolyn Bennett was a star, the epitome of a New Negro artist blazing trails forward into the twentieth century of modern America with her creative writing, visual art, youth, beauty, and education. Sandra Y. Govan, who rediscovered Bennett in the late 1970s, described her central participation in the Harlem Renaissance: “The excitement of Harlem was in her blood; she moved among Harlem’s intelligentsia with consummate ease.”6 Her home turf was Brooklyn, where she appears to have lived with her father and stepmother at 64 Brooklyn Avenue while in college and during summers after she moved to Washington, D.C. She was friends with Harlem luminaries Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Eric Walrond, Aaron Douglas, Jessie Fauset, and Paul Robeson. While in Paris, she became acquainted with superstar modernists Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, and Konrad Bercovici.7 She attended the October 2, 1925, première of La Révue Nègre on the Champs Élysée, where Josephine Baker

100  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters wowed French crowds with her exotic dancing.8 She went to the SteinToklas household for tea and roomed for a time at a hotel over the Brown Jug Café, just down the street from the center of modernist writing, Sylvia Beach’s bookstore Shakespeare & Company, which she visited frequently.9 With her cover art for Opportunity and The Crisis, exhibitions in Paris and at the Barnes Foundation, editorial work on Fire!!, Ebony Flute columns for Opportunity, and status as a professor at the nation’s premier historically black university, Gwendolyn Bennett seemingly could do anything and everything while leading a social life that took her to cabarets and to conferences, to parties large and small. Her glowing round face, flashing dark eyes, and lit-from-within smile defined New Negro womanhood at its ebullient best. Bennett’s persona and creative work made her the ideal artist to lead the race forward into a new age of opportunity for modern young artists. “Train Monotony” calls attention, however, not to the “mounds of some joy or sadness” punctuating the speaker’s linear trajectory from point to point but to the empty space in between, the “bleak stretches,” the “drab stretches of canvas taut between the pegs” of her daily life, unfolding in iron-straight lines. Such imagery belies the unbroken record of success charted in Bennett’s public life, the self-actualizing productivity and positive press attending her rise as New Negro artist in the heart of Harlem. It also seems to stand in contradiction to the mood of her uplift verse of the 1920s, which celebrated a renaissance of black art in modern America that this young poet symbolized with a focus on song, springtime, and fecundity. “Heritage” (1923), for example, features a speaker who listens for singing from the moon and the chanting of Africans around a fire, while in “Fantasy” (1927), she whistles a song to the beautiful woman she finds in dreams.10 “Song [1]” (1925) begins with the speaker informing us of the sweet joyful song she is fashioning from the music of her dark ancestors: I am weaving a song of waters, Shaken from firm, brown limbs, Or heads thrown back in irreverent mirth. My song has the lush sweetness Of moist, dark lips Where hymns keep company With old forgotten banjo songs.11

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  101 “To Usward” (1924) embraces a collective voice of multifaceted unity: If any have a song to sing That’s different from the rest, Oh let them sing Before the urgency of Youth’s behest! The speaker in “To Usward” joins the “whetted passions of a throng,” declaring, “We want to sing the songs of birth!”12 The imagery in Bennett’s published verse shimmers with iridescent beauty as nature frames the speaker’s transport into a realm where whiteness and black bodies coexist in harmony under the spell of a figure Nina Miller calls a Nightwoman embedded in the night sky.13 “Fantasy” presents the foundational image of black female eroticism to which Bennett would often return over the course of her twenty years writing poetry. She sets in motion a dark Aphrodite who reigns in quiet splendor surrounded by fantastical birds and flowers brought to life by moonlight, not by sun and water, as in classical representation: I sailed in my dreams to the Land of Night Where you were the dusk-eyed Queen, And there in the pallor of moon-veiled light The loveliest things were seen . . . A slim-necked peacock sauntered there In a garden of lavender hues, And you were strange with your purple hair As you sat in your amethyst chair With your feet in your hyacinth shoes. Oh, the moon gave a bluish light Through the trees in the land of dreams and night. I stood behind a bush of yellow-green And whistled a song to the dark-haired Queen . . .14 Here the speaker pays homage to a magical beauty of the unconscious, whom she summons with her song and finds in her dreams, a dark woman of mesmerizing allure who keeps company with strutting peacocks and

102  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters flowers that bloom at night. The eroticism of this figure is repeated in the octave “Street Lamps in Early Spring” (1926): Night wears a garment All velvet soft, all violet blue . . . And over her face she draws a veil As shimmering fine as floating dew . . . And here and there In the black of her hair The subtle hands of Night Move slowly with their gem-starred light.15 This velvet-clad Salomé, a popular figure of the period who symbolized sexual allure, seductively runs bejeweled fingers through her black hair while covering her face with a shimmering veil of mystery and softness, drawing the viewer’s gaze and holding it in wondrous desire. This imagery of a veiled Nightwoman provides a protective cover, according to Miller, even as it opens our eyes to a black woman’s erotic power: “The night is larger than life, metaphorically magnificent, but simultaneously veiled; prominent, powerful, yet unavailable to prying eyes; ubiquitously ‘public’ yet private unto herself.”16 She also functions as a dark muse who transcends limitations placed on the speaker, a flesh-andblood black woman living under the shadow of segregation. Cheryl Wall notes, for example, that the speaker in “Fantasy” hides behind a bush as she whistles a song to the dark-haired queen, thus serving as a metaphor for the woman writer of the Harlem Renaissance, “a woman ‘half in shadow.’” But her song testifies to her existence, and the night queen she summons with it is an emblem of female power: “Rather than evoking ignorance or terror, the Land of Night is a place of magical beauty. One assumes the ‘dusk-eyed,’ ‘dark-haired’ queen is also dark skinned, but since she commands a realm where racial designations are not required, the speaker need not say. The poet recognizes that such a realm is the stuff of fantasy, but the Land of Night remains the destination of the speaker’s dreams. In the process of the journey, she achieves her voice.”17 Bennett shares with Grimké an attraction to the night and a reverence for the dark goddess who rules while humanity is sleeping, but rather than inspiring worship in her speakers, Bennett celebrates an overtly sexual energy that Grimké’s speakers can only glimpse from afar. The repression

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  103 of women’s sexuality in Grimké’s era at the turn of the century had given way to the 1920s explosion of Victorian mores by the time Bennett began publishing, and she could celebrate the female body more explicitly in the public realm than Grimké could two decades earlier. Bennett’s most famous poem, “To a Dark Girl” (1927), for example, conflates her goddess of the night with earth-bound black women basking in her reflected glory: I love you for your brownness, And the rounded darkness of your breast. I love you for the breaking sadness in your voice And shadows where your wayward eyelids rest. Something of old forgotten queens Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk, And something of the shackled slave Sobs in the rhythm of your talk. Oh, little brown girl, born for sorrow’s mate, Keep all you have of queenliness, Forgetting that you once were slave, And let your full lips laugh at Fate!18 Bringing into view “the rounded darkness of your breast,” “shadows where your wayward eyelids rest,” “the lithe abandon of your walk,” and laughing “full lips,” Bennett highlights black female sexuality at a time when the Jezebel stereotype demeaned African American women, yet she boldly highlights the sexuality of her dark girl as an empowering quality.19 The poem also subverts more generally dominant cultural portrayals of white feminine allure. As Lorraine Roses and Ruth Randolph note, “‘To a Dark Girl’ is an ode to black beauty, defying a society that judges physical beauty only by an Anglo-Saxon ideal.”20 Mirroring Grimké’s many poems set at dusk, however, Bennett echoes her predecessor’s blurring of black and white lines in poetic subversion of segregation’s firm hold. If sexual constraints have loosened for women of Bennett’s era, race lines were still starkly drawn, and Bennett blends black and white in tableaux of beautiful harmony. Glowing images of soft whiteness after nightfall are featured in the following lines of “Dear Things” (1926):

104  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters The moon’s cool opalescent light, Azaleas and the scent of them, And honeysuckles in the night.21 In “Moon Tonight” (also 1926), the speaker addresses her beloved at another moment of moonlit quiet in the wake of a dusk goddess’s gentle departure: When twilight Has gathered together The ends Of her soft robe And the last bird-call Has died.22 The speaker’s tranquility at twilight, a time when black and white are merged into grey, is also highlighted in an unpublished 1925 cinquain Bennett wrote while in Paris: Twilight is like a gray mantle That drops itself stealthily About the corners of my heart, Covering my day-thoughts With a tenderness.23 A quatrain that was published in The Crisis (December 1923) also brings color and whiteness together as it focuses on the speaker’s rapt meditation on snowfall and grass, here linked by their paradoxical qualities: How strange that grass should sing— Grass is so still a thing . . . . And strange the swift surprise of snow,— So soft it falls and slow. “Song [II]” (1926), a love poem published in Palms, paints a word picture of spring with soft pastels as the speaker describes a pastoral countryside graced by clouds and sheep: “Cool greens and sheep / Upon a smoke-blue hill, / And now and then / A puff of snow-white cloud.”24 Bennett’s striking combination of eroticism, song, brown female

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  105 bodies, goddesses of the night, iridescent jewel tones, and soft whites that harmonize with color or furnish sparkling highlights to dark backgrounds creates a vibrant poetic landscape of impressionist verbal brush strokes. The imagery is softened and blurred, the song joyful, while the mood is contemplative, and the scenario conveys a quiet appreciation of life’s renewal as the speaker pauses to dream or to savor moments of beauty and desire. Govan insightfully frames these poems as skillful renderings of images drawn from Bennett’s training as a visual artist: “This Renaissance artist’s visual sensibilities often were reflected in her poetry as though she were painting with words.”25 Miller also calls attention to Bennett’s “imagist aesthetic” in her lyric poetry, noting that poems such as “Moon Tonight” reflect Bennett’s roots in graphic art.26 These verses appeared at the height of Bennett’s artistic success, and in the late 1920s her romantically lonely days appeared to be over as well. In 1928, she solidified what seemed to be an ideal romantic partnership with Howard University medical school graduate Alfred Jackson, whom she married in April of the year “Train Monotony” was written. The event was covered by the Pittsburgh Courier, which framed the April 14 wedding as that of the ideal New Negro couple: “Dr. Jackson and his bride are pursuing their respective studies; nevertheless they will struggle hand in hand for the success that must surely crown the efforts of such ambitious, accomplished and deserving representatives of the New Negro!”27 In 1928, Gwendolyn Bennett seemed to have a golden future ahead of her and was still very much at the center of New York and Washington, D.C. artistic circles, in which she was respected and well liked. She was married to a young doctor yet she remained determined to have her own career and keep her own name. As Bernice Dutrieuille noted in the Pittsburgh Courier article, “[She is] a firm believer in the principles of the Lucy Stone League, an organization for the protection of women’s personal rights.”28 Despite the accolades, the poetic vitality, and Bennett’s joyful image in the black press, however, after 1928, she evidently published no more poetry except for reprints in William Stanley Braithwaite’s Anthology and Yearbook of American Poetry for 1929, James W. Johnson’s revised edition of The Book of American Negro Poetry (1931), and one poem (“Epitaph”) that appeared in the March 1934 issue of Opportunity.29 Her marriage quickly disintegrated. In addition, in the mid-1930s, she became entangled in an affair that caused her considerable soul-searching, and her alcoholic husband spiraled downward into heart failure, dying prematurely in 1936. While she continued to play a robust role in Harlem’s art scene during

106  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters the 1930s, on a personal level, the New Negro star found herself mired in a quagmire so suffocating that she could not bring herself to talk about the events of that period in her interview with Sandra Govan nearly fifty years later: “Gwendolyn Bennett is still hesitant, still extremely reluctant to respond when questioned about her life and career in the Thirties and Forties.”30 The unexpected fall from grace she suffered is reflected in the baleful “Epitaph” of 1934, which describes the speaker’s bleak view of her life on the gravestone she imagines for herself: When I am dead, carve this upon my stone: Here lies a woman, fit root for flower and tree, Whose living flesh, now mouldering round the bone, Wants nothing more than this for immortality, That in her heart, where love so long unfruited lay, A seed for grass or weed shall grow, And push to light and air its heedless way; That she who lies here dead may know Through all the putrid marrow of her bones The searing pangs of birth, While none may know the pains nor hear the groans Of she who lived with barrenness upon the earth.31 The image of grass being rooted in the speaker’s rotting corpse contrasts markedly with the singing grass of “Quatrain” (1923) while “the searing pangs of birth” she endures—“the groans / Of she who lived with barrenness upon the earth”—could not be farther from the sensuous celebration of rebirth Bennett became famous for in the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance. Bennett’s poetry of song is nowhere present in this last published verse—the speaker is buried so deeply that even her groans go unheard by passersby. “Epitaph” seems to announce the death of Gwendolyn Bennett the poet and the New Negro spirit of youth she embodied even as Bennett continued to fashion a vibrant career as a reporter for the Welfare Council of New York, director of the Harlem Community Art Center, president of the Harlem Artists’ Guild, and cofounder of the George Washington Carver School for Democracy. “Train Monotony,” then, can be seen as less an anomaly than a prescient vision of what would come later in Bennett’s private and creative life during the 1930s: “bleak stretches” of “tiny crooked paths where leaden feet have trod,” “drab stretches of canvas taut between the pegs,” “barren

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  107 tracks between the mounds of some joy or sadness.” In addition, if we look closely at the published verse that precedes “Train Monotony,” there is a strain of negativity and harshness that points to currents of distress in the young poet’s life that she manages to transcend in the 1920s but that would come to the fore in her nadir years of the Depression. One of her best-known poems, “Hatred” (1926), for instance, features a speaker who launches lethal projectiles at someone whom she wishes to wound so deeply that he will feel the depths of her hatred forever. I shall hate you Like a dart of singing steel Shot through still air At even-tide. Or solemnly As pines are sober When they stand etched Against the sky. Hating you shall be a game Played with cool hands And slim fingers. Your heart will yearn For the lonely splendor Of the pine tree; While rekindled fires In my eyes Shall wound you like swift arrows. Memory will lay its hands Upon your breast And you will understand My hatred.32 The fierce desire to inflict pain on a hated target hints at a side of Bennett’s persona that was far removed from the dreamy softness of her other work, as does the haunting reverie at the center of “Lines Written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas,” a poem published in 1926 and evidently written in Paris. It opens with the lines Cemeteries are places for departed souls And bones interred,

108  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Or hearts with shattered loves. The speaker warns us that a cemetery is no place to find joy, A woman with lips made warm for laughter Would find grey stones and silent thoughts Too chill for living, moving pulses. . . . The second stanza repeats the reference to cemeteries as places of loss made in the opening lines, A cemetery is a place for shattered loves And broken hearts. . . . The third stanza begs the dead writer, Alexander Dumas, to create for the speaker “a tale of happy loves and gems and joyous limbs and hearts where love is sweet!” The final stanza, however, ends where the speaker began her journey, as she laments: A cemetery is a place for broken hearts And silent thoughts. . . . And silence never moves, nor speaks Nor sings.33 In these pieces, love seems to be dead and buried, leaving in its wake silence and bitter fantasies of revenge that include images of weaponry, coldness, and stone. This harsh landscape of lost love is drawn in some of the poems even at the beginning of Bennett’s career. “Your Songs,” which she read at the Brooklyn YWCA in 1924 and later published in 1927, describes the speaker’s bittersweet memory of love from a person now absent: When first you sang a song to me With laughter shining from your eyes, You trilled your music liltingly With cadences of glad surprise. [. . .] And now I cannot hear you sing, But love still holds your melody

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  109 For silence is a sounding thing To one who listens hungrily.34 “Nocturne,” an imagistic sestet published in the November 1923 issue of The Crisis, evokes a similar moment of cold silence: This cool night is strange Among midsummer days . . . , Far frosts are caught In the moon’s pale light, And sounds are distant laughter Chilled to crystal tears.35 The unpublished “City Snow,” also from the reading of January 1924, turns on images of cold as it portrays Bennett’s beloved New York as a harlot mercifully covered by a purifying snowstorm: “The city leaned against the sky / Her gaunt and naked frame— / The wretched beauty of her face / Was dark with dirt and shame.”36 In “Purgation,” published in Opportunity the following year in 1925, the speaker is chilled to the bone as she looks at the grave of someone dearly loved: You lived And your body Clothed the flames of earth. Now that the fires have burned away And left your body cold, I tremble as I stand Before the chiseled marble Of your dust-freed soul.37 “Sonnet [I],” published in 1927, casts a male lover as death itself and features a speaker who is kissed by what she thinks is love everlasting only to find herself in a lethal embrace: He came in silvern armour, trimmed with black— A lover come from legends long ago— With silver spurs and silken plumes a-glow, And flashing sword caught fast and buckled back

110  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters In a carven sheath of Tamarack. He came with footsteps beautifully slow, And spoke in [a] voice meticulously low. He came and Romance followed in his track. . . . I did not ask his name—I thought him Love; I did not care to see his hidden face. All life seemed born in my intaken breath; All thought seemed flown like some forgotten dove. He bent to kiss and raised his visor’s lace . . . All eager-lipped I kissed the mouth of Death.38 “Train Monotony” fits this bleaker strain of Bennett’s poetry about romantic dreams disappearing into thin air, leaving the speaker almost frozen in shocked contemplation of her forlorn state. In these poems, singing grass, soft clouds, enticing melodies, and dark-haired goddesses vanish just as suddenly as dreams dissipate with the light of day. As is the case with Grimké, it is hard to say who or what may have inspired these love poems, whether rapturous or desolate, since Bennett’s first visible long-term relationship began in the summer of 1926 when friends introduced her to Alfred Jackson.39 There are hints that at least some of the love poetry was based on real people, such as a man Bennett referred to in the October 1, 1925, entry of the diary she kept in Paris: “Lying in my bed [last night], bathed in [the moon’s] light, I thought me of how I used to lie nude in the moonlight and write love letters and poetry to a certain young man.”40 She alludes in the diary to romantic relationships with men named Gene and Norman, but they do not appear to have lasted very long, and she writes of enjoying cabaret life on the Rue Pigalle or the Latin Quarter with friends, not lovers.41 Her need for companionship in Paris evidently was largely met by friends such as Laura Wheeler, Paul Robeson, Aulston Burleigh, and Harold Jackman.42 In her 1936 diary, Bennett alludes to a past romance with someone named Frank: “All thru this weary rainy night I have felt a hopeless loneliness when a rainy night at home under the same roof with the man you love should be such a comfort. Makes me think of Frank and how we loved the rains so much together.”43 These few references, however, provide us with no details about Bennett’s intimate relationships as a single woman. Before her marriage Bennett may have dated more than the three

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  111

Figure 10. Gwendolyn Bennett with a group of male friends, sometime in the 1920s. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

men named in her diaries, given her outgoing personality, active social life, and intelligence, but we don’t know how many or who they might have been. She would have been brought into contact with a wide range of men during the 1920s as a college student and an artist, people who could have taken her to dinner and clubs in Harlem and in Paris. When she lived with Joshua and Marechal Neil Bennett as a college student in Brooklyn, however, she was well chaperoned, and later, in Paris, she was scrupulous about protecting her reputation as a single woman. The first entry in her 1925 diary, for instance, mentions that when Aulston Burleigh called on her soon after she moved into the Hotel Orfila, he went “right up to my bedroom[;] [. . .] I wasn’t at all comfortable so we went out.”44 Nowhere does Bennett refer to specific intimate encounters before her marriage, so we don’t know who may have inspired these verses, yet the love poetry formed the central block of her output in the 1920s. Despite this lack of specificity about her intimate life, she created speakers in the published work who delight in the transport of romantic fantasies and suffer devastating bouts of heartache when lovers disappeared. Whereas Grimké’s speakers are preternaturally mature in their ability to bear sorrow and loss, Bennett’s possess almost a childlike vulnerability. They are often shy and have a rich inner life they are eager to share with someone; they long to express their love in visual art, verse, or music:

112  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters “Oh, my sweet, / I shall paint you a picture / And call it Spring . . . . ,” the speaker announces in “Song [II]” (1926). I shall write you a poem And call it spring, too— A poem of soft, warm words With little shocks of bright delight. . . . Deep in the center Of my inmost self There sleeps a song— A laughing tune Of trills and rhymes . . .45 “Secret,” published in 1927, is addressed to a lover with gold hair and blue eyes by a speaker whose fingers caress him “gently.” The poem’s last seven lines reveal the speaker’s tender inner self: I shall sing a lullaby To the song I have made Of your hair and eyes . . . And you will never know That deep in my heart I shelter a song of you Secretly. . . .46 Her shyness and reluctance to openly declare love mark this speaker as guarded and vulnerable, even as she yearns to share the rich inner life of fantastic beauty she keeps hidden from view. This is a speaker who has immense tenderness, a deep need to believe in romantic ideals, and a great capacity to love but who is well aware of her dream’s fragility, of cupid’s slings and arrows.

Childhood Dislocations The contrasting sides of Bennett’s speakers in the published love poetry, ranging from soft-spoken shy dreamer through joyful singer of ecstasy to rueful chronicler of love betrayed, point to Bennett’s complex personal life, which is recorded in her diaries and memoirs but that she kept hidden in interviews with the press. Govan comments insightfully on

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  113 how Bennett’s cheerful public persona masked private pain: “There were many silences in Bennett’s life, periods when she remained silent by choice or social circumstance. . . . Seldom did an informant report that he or she ever saw Bennett angry. Consistently, all of them often recalled a gracious, charming, warm, and generous person.”47 As with Angelina Grimké, who similarly conducted herself in public with superb composure while charting a turbulent romantic life in poetry, Bennett comfortably inhabited her role as New Negro artist and representative even as she sustained multiple blows to her emotional stability and romantic dreams. It is in the creative writing that we see her transform these blows into art, particularly the love poetry, which expresses anger, disillusionment, hurt, and betrayal in poetic frames of the sonnet, quatrain, sestet, and modernist imagism. Like Grimké, too, she found in the emphasis on true expression of feeling and meditation on the moment of the New American Poetry a vehicle for handling the challenges of finding intimacy. 48 Most importantly, as with Grimké, whose verse reflects similar feelings of transport and bitterness, it is clarifying to look at Bennett’s family history of divorce, the permanent separation from her mother as a child, and the extraordinarily close relationship she had with her father for insight into her lyric poetry. To fully appreciate the strength of Bennett’s personal resilience, it is illuminating to look backward at her childhood, her adolescence, and, most centrally, the loss of her mother that was compounded by the loyal attachment to and searing loss of her father. Publically, Bennett credited her father with establishing a firm foundation for her as a New Negro woman but remains silent about the problematic elements in his history. In the first public mention of her father in “Art Weds Science,” Bernice Dutrieuille reports Bennett as saying “one week before [his] death [. . .] he divulged to his daughter the secret of his greatest disappointment in life, that he had had no son to carry on his name.”49 Reassuring him that she would always be a Bennett, she framed the revelation at her marriage that she will be keeping her maiden name as a daughter’s loving tribute to her father’s last wish. Many years later, she made a second public statement about Joshua Bennett’s importance in her upbringing as a disciplinarian who was dedicated to providing her with tools for independence. In an interview with the Chicago Defender in 1946, Bennett brought up her father’s desire for a son to carry on the family name and become a lawyer: “But since she was a girl, she was subjected to a kind of Spartan discipline, her father having decided she might as well be a smart girl if she couldn’t be a good male

114  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters lawyer. His idea of what she ought to do, if not law, was to teach Latin in a New York high school. And he was disappointed when she took up art.”50 What these accounts elide is the shocking nature of Joshua Bennett’s death in August of 1926, the scandal that accompanied it, and the preceding years of periodic upheaval he brought to the young artist’s life. Although Bennett lavished attention on his precocious only child and saw to it that she went to the best schools, including the Brooklyn Girls’ High School, Columbia University, and the Pratt Institute, her life with him was hardly idyllic. Indeed, his profile in the press is as disturbing as the daughter’s is exemplary. There are news stories of his alleged infidelity to Gwendolyn’s mother in the Washington Post’s 1909 announcement of their divorce; warrants issued for his arrest for forgery in the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader in 1915; and charges of embezzlement in the Harrisburg Evening News in 1918.51 All of these unsavory reports pale, however, in comparison to the lurid descriptions of Joshua Bennett’s death on August 13, 1926, at the age of fortysix, when he was run over by a New York City subway car in the Fourteenth Street station, where his second wife, Marechal Neil Bennett, and possibly Gwendolyn had come to meet him. An August 14 New York Times article, “Falls In Subway, Killed,” describes the incident as follows: “While waiting to meet his wife in the Fourteenth Street station of the west side subway at noon yesterday, Joshua R. Bennett, 46 years old, an attorney of 64 Brooklyn Avenue, Brooklyn, fell in front of a northbound express train and was killed. Before the train arrived in the station, he was seen to stagger and it is believed that a sudden illness caused him to fall. [. . .] Several women in the crowded station became hysterical.”52 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle also described the event as a subway accident, stating that both Bennett and her stepmother witnessed the event. With the headline, “Family Sees Man Killed as He Falls before Tube Train,” the article relays that Bennett “fell” in front of a subway train on the 7th Avenue line at the 14th Street Station in Manhattan in full view of his wife and daughter, “Miss Gwendolyn Bennett,” who were waiting to greet him.53 In a yet more alarming description of the incident, the Pittsburgh Courier asserted that Joshua Bennett had in fact committed suicide, either because he was in despair over an illicit affair with “his former stenographer Miss Clara B. Hicks” or was fearful of arrest “for misappropriation of funds to the amount of $1,100, or all these things.” The article provides scandalous details of the alleged affair that Clara Hicks’s mother allegedly revealed in an interview with an unidentified New York newspaper. Annie Hicks Norwood stated in this unnamed newspaper, according to the Courier,

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  115 that her daughter was employed by Bennett two years before he died, when the girl was seventeen, and began an affair with him, which caused her to leave the parental home in Brooklyn. She further recounted that her daughter had to seek alternate employment when Bennett was disbarred by the state of New York and opened a law office in Philadelphia in March 1924, “where he practiced until recently.” Mrs. Norwood allegedly told the interviewer that “[Bennett] wrote impassioned love letters and telegrams to Miss Hicks, declaring that he would die for her” and sent her money regularly. The New York paper’s account that the Courier quoted goes on to say, “Extracts from these letters appear in another column” and that Joshua Bennett had moved back to Brooklyn after he was disbarred by the state of Pennsylvania. The Courier’s quotation of this shocking interview ends with the line, “There were rumors that [Bennett] visited Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn where Miss Hicks was confined a day or so before his death.”54 How much of this back story is true can only be surmised, but the fact it appeared in one of the most respected and widely read African American newspapers of the day, the Pittsburgh Courier, suggests how profoundly upsetting it had to be for Joshua Bennett’s daughter. The article was printed just fifteen days after the catastrophe, on August 28, with the subheading, “Father of Gwendolyn Bennett, Howard University Art Teacher and Writer, Thought Victim of Illicit Love Affair.” Even if she could dismiss the piece as rumormongering by the mother of a disgruntled former clerk, the violent nature of her father’s death, which her beloved stepmother and perhaps she herself witnessed, had to have been traumatizing. The Courier’s opening line could not have been clearer about the pain Joshua Bennett both suffered and inflicted on his family in the final moments of his life: “A tale of mystery, love and tragedy that outrivals fiction is involved in the death a week ago of Atty. Joshua R. Bennett, father of the distinguished art teacher and writer, Gwendolyn Bennett, when he threw himself beneath the grinding wheels of a subway express train at the 14th street station, and was mangled beyond recognition before the eyes of his wife who was to meet him there.”55 When her father died, Bennett had just returned from a magical year in Paris and was probably living with her father and stepmother in Brooklyn that summer; she had become assistant editor of Opportunity and worked on the editorial board of Fire!!, both New York City publications. His violent death and the swirling rumors of suicide, infidelity, and financial malfeasance must have hit her hard. She adored her father and deeply loved Marechal Neil,

116  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters whom she regarded as her true mother, since she had last seen her biological mother, Mayme Abernathy, when she was just a child. Indeed, it appears that Marechal, who was only seven years older than Gwendolyn, became an important source of stability in Bennett’s childhood.56 Such a disaster would have been hard to recover from for anyone, of course, but Bennett, like Grimké, had an unusually close relationship with her father, who had been at the center of her life for as long as she could remember. Thus, his untimely and spectacularly ugly end would have presented tremendous challenges for her. Bennett was able to reflect on these challenges only in private short essays written years later, during the 1930s and early 1940s, when she was approaching middle age. These essays shed light on the wellsprings of her poetic imagination, which was characterized by a bifurcated portrait of fairytale love and vanished dreams. One of these memoir essays, dated October 29, 1941, is an account of what Bennett characterizes as some of the earliest memories she has of her life, when her parents moved to Washington, D.C. in 1906 from the Nevada Navajo reservation where they had been teachers. Tellingly, the first memory she recalls is of herself all dressed up with a big red bow in her hair, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk in front of their house, waiting for her father to come home from work. This early memory of excited anticipation at Ward Place triggered in the adult Bennett a reflection on her lifelong attraction to streets: “A street out of many streets on which I have walked. [. . .] I remember it with a nostalgic sadness—not just the nostalgia of things past and out of sight but as though all my life would be a succession of streets or remembered moments spent on some street.”57 Home for Bennett, then, was less a dwelling, which changed often until the Bennett household took root at 64 Brooklyn Avenue, than a street leading somewhere and coming from somewhere else, a public throughway marked by anticipation of a returning beloved parent but tinged by “nostalgic sadness,” the knowledge that her past would never produce memories of a real home, a solid haven, but would instead consist of “remembered moments spent on some street.” The label of “nostalgic sadness” Bennett gives to her bittersweet memory of Ward Place as symbolic of a life “spent on some street” nuances the nostalgia and homesickness that surface in both her private and creative writing. The second entry of her Paris diary, for instance, articulates how acutely she registered separation from her New York friends and family: “Could I mark this day I would put a black ring around it as one of the saddest days I have ever spent. I moved today to my new hotel. For two

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  117

Figure 11. Gwendolyn Bennett as a child, ca. 1907. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

days now it has rained—the people tell me that this is typical Paris weather. A cold rain that eats into the very marrow of the bone and I am alone and more homesick than I ever believed it possible to be.”58An unpublished 1925 poem written in Paris that Bennett titled “Nostalgia” expresses this initially sharp separation pain. The speaker laments: “I shall always think of home / At twilight-time . . . / Just before night comes / With soothing weariness, / The thoughts of home / Will come / Like little, old, forgotten friends / To sit and chat a while / And nod their shadowy heads / Through the dusk / Of my loneliness.”59 A later entry in the Paris diary provides insight into Bennett’s attraction to such melancholy moments: “Things seem so simple here, so remote. The smell of trees and grass ought to relieve anything, even the human heart. I wonder will all my life be this way, retreating to some impersonal calm to escape thinking. Always this change of scene to ease the heart.”60 Here Bennett couples nostalgia for an imaginary space called home with her attraction to change and a life in motion as she adjusts to the beauty and solitude of Paris.

118  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Unlike Bennett’s public image of sunny middle-class stability, the portrait that emerges of her childhood in this and other memories is of a loving home punctured by marital fracture and of a child who was well loved by middle-class professionals but was subjected to frequent and jarring ruptures. That acute sense of dislocation, indeed, is what helped define Bennett as a member of the international circle of modernism in Paris. As Claire Oberon Garcia asserts in her study of that city’s black modernist women writers, psychic dislocation lies at the heart of black women writers of this era, including Bennett.61 The diaries of 1925 and 1936, along with the memoirs she wrote in her thirties and even the poetry itself, can be seen as Bennett’s attempt to impose some order on a life marked by geographic and familial change. As Leonore Hoffmann asserts, “Dislocation, both geographical and emotional, is the impetus for [Bennett’s] 1925 diary,” a notion underlined by Hoffmann’s quoting of Margaret Culley: “Keeping a life record can be an attempt to preserve continuity seemingly broken or lost.”62 It is in these private writings that we glimpse the emotional ups and downs of Gwendolyn Bennett’s personal relationships and perhaps one of the sources of her speakers’ alternating views on love gained and lost. Bennett relates happy moments of her childhood in her 1941 piece, such as shopping with her mother in downtown Washington, D.C., and the Christmas Eve her father brought home a live turkey, but sad and painful memories overshadow them: a fruit vendor’s “sad rising inflection” as he sings out the watermelon he has for sale; extraordinarily painful visits to an eye doctor who repeatedly lances her infected tear duct without anesthetic; a twelve-year-old babysitter, the son of a family with whom the Bennetts lived, who exposes himself to her while her parents are out for the evening. Worse than any of these, however, is her memory of the first quarrel she witnessed between her parents, which, even at the young age of five, Bennett knew to have been occasioned by her father’s extramarital affair: “I remember holding myself upright by the foot of the large wooden bed in which I had apparently been put to sleep and screaming at my father through the intensity of their quarrelling, ‘I hate that nasty Jeannette Carter!’” In the final paragraph of the essay that reports this incident, Bennett underlines the significance of that moment and acknowledges the hardships she faced even in childhood, the very adult problems she was forced to confront as her parents’ marriage disintegrated before her eyes: “The memory of the street is the flawless memory of childhood and yet here already were the seeds of what my life was to be like. When I

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  119 look back on my childhood I seem never to have been young. If there is a place from which to start remembering, it might easily be Ward Place in Washington, D.C., for from that point on life for me has never been without care.”63 Bennett was open in her interview with Govan about her parents’ divorce and her father’s violation of the agreement that granted custody to her mother when he abducted her in 1910, when she was seven, and took her to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he raised her with his second wife, Marechal Neil. She was less open about the emotional fallout from the 1909 divorce, however, and it is only in the memoirs, diaries, and poetry that we see some of its deep scars. In a piece titled “My Father’s Story,” Bennett describes the heartbreaking loss of love between her parents, whose wedding at the home of Joshua’s parents is touchingly described in a newspaper clipping mounted in her scrapbook.64 Joshua Bennett, a graduate of Prairie View College and the son of a barber in Giddings, Texas, met Mayme Abernathy, the essay states, at the school in a neighboring town where both had been hired as teachers. As Bennett describes their young marriage, she casts her father’s obtaining of two teaching positions on a Nevada Indian Reservation soon after she was born in much the same terms as her own marriage to a young doctor in 1928 was cast in the Pittsburgh Courier: “It must have been a beautiful ride across those lonesome prairies for that young couple as they set out to conquer the world. . . . Nothing but beauty had touched their lives and mine in those far days.”65 The essay goes on to describe the family’s move to Washington, D.C., in 1906, when Joshua secured a job as clerk in a government office while he went to law school at night, where he evidently began an affair with another law student. At the same time, Mayme’s world, Bennett writes, grew smaller as a full-time wife and mother. In charting the demise of her parents’ marriage, Bennett reveals the toll it took on her: “I remember so well as a small but precocious child hearing the endless quarrels between my parents, both of whom I loved with a passion which [was] more than the love of a child for its makers. [. . .] My baby heart ached with the horror of what was happening between them.” The adoring child who eagerly awaited her father’s return from work was also extremely close to her mother at that time: “Those years of struggle had made me more than a baby; I had been my mother’s sole companion and confidante.”66 The estrangement of 1907, when Joshua Bennett apparently moved out, forced Mayme to seek work as a hairdresser, among other things, but her only

120  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters viable employment came as a live-in domestic worker and hairdresser at a private school for wealthy white girls on Connecticut Avenue, which is where Bennett lived while attending an African American elementary school in the segregated school system. Of this bifurcated existence—a black girl living with a single mother at an exclusive finishing school for white girls while attending a black public school—Bennett writes: “With [my mother] I had already begun to feel that I was not quite up to the standard of some of the other little colored girls with whom I went to school [. . .] [who] had upon occasion taunted me about not being able to give parties at my house because I lived with white folks. I remember well having come home crying to my mother with the stories of these painful thrusts.”67 Relaying that her mother threw a birthday party for her in the finishing school’s large backyard in response to her daughter’s distress, Bennett then describes the ensuing disaster when a white adult they considered a friend loudly complained to the directress about the black children’s noisy gaiety, insisting that they be admonished: “As I look back on it now it must have been a pitiful thing to see my mother scurrying about, sending someone to the nearest druggist to buy ice-cream boxes [. . .] filling them with the uneaten ice-cream, quickly slicing the birthday cake with no ceremonious blowing [out] of candles and bundling off my guests before the childish happiness caused any trouble for the school. Let me say here that I never had another birthday party until I was eighteen years old.”68 In this more extended commentary on the years of her early childhood, we get a sense of how painful the estrangement of her parents was for Bennett and how disruptive the ensuing divorce was to her stability and even to her social identity. Bennett looks back on this life with her mother as a memory of loving companionship framed by painful limitation, hard work, privation, and estrangement from children her age. The essay also sheds light on Bennett’s attraction to romantic fantasy as a young poet, to her creation of dreamlike settings in which beauty and harmony reign, and to the central role Joshua Bennett played in constructing such fantasies. Recounting the Sunday visits with her father, for which her mother dressed her in beautiful clothes she had sewn, Bennett contrasts the hardships of “solid domesticity that surrounded my life with my mother” with the happy outings to which her father treated her: With him I was a person and he was somebody, a promising young lawyer. We did all the things that were fondest to my heart. He took me to dinner with families where I played with the children of the

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  121 family with no shadow to cross the horizon; we went to the theatre, to restaurants for dinner; we went for long car rides and to all sorts of places of amusement; we laughed and played together. My father always seemed to be free from cares and worries; there was no job to which we had to hurry back; no pennies to be pinched for future necessities. I was indeed happy with him.69 It is this backdrop of carefree Sundays and holidays that perhaps reconciled Gwendolyn to her abrupt removal from Mayme’s life in 1910, when Joshua promised his daughter a long-awaited visit to Mount Vernon on George Washington’s birthday, only to whisk her away to Pennsylvania as part of

Figure 12. Gwendolyn and Joshua Bennett, ca. 1909. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

122  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters a plan “to have me all for himself.” The essay ends with a poignant last memory of Bennett’s mother kissing her good-bye with tears in her eyes, as if she knew her daughter was not coming home. They did not see each other again for sixteen years. A third essay in this group of memoirs characterizes life with Bennett’s father as “our long pilgrimage”: “We’d stay a year in one place and then suddenly, with some engaging promise of newer, more exciting scenes, he would announce that we were going to a new city.” One of these stopovers, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is the essay’s focus, and it suggests the magical effect on nine-year-old Gwendolyn of her father’s peripatetic existence as he tried to make a living doing odd jobs while seeking a Pennsylvania law license.70 They lived with relatives who ran a “negro hotel” in Lancaster, and Bennett fondly recalls “Grandma Scott’s ghost stories,” the black vaudeville performers who wandered through its doors, and “a very beautiful, statuesque woman of a light cream color, with fine uncurling hair piled high on her head in a wonderful pompadour, who used to play piano in the dining-room and sing songs to me as I sat beside her.” It is while living at the ramshackle Elite Hotel that Bennett began going to the movies, theaters, and opera houses. She relates that “even at nine years of age I had begun to be a romantic girl.” The Elite Hotel’s exotic clients provided the opportunities she had there to hear stories or sing songs. Living at this hotel became a romantic interlude that Bennett later remembered as happy but illusory, “of such a character as to belong to a long ago past that had no place in real things.”71 Another description of her early attraction to fairy tales occurs in a fourth essay in which Bennett recounted her visit of August 1935 to another town from her childhood where she went to elementary school, Westchester, Pennsylvania. This trip began her journey on “the road back into memory”: “The almost imperceptible spell of this quaint little town seems to have impelled me to begin writing the memory of things and people I have known.” She went to the Westchester Public Library on Lafayette Street, the site of girlhood visits that acquainted her with classic children’s books such as those by Louisa May Alcott and “the Green, Red and Blue Fairy Books”: “Inside the library the same librarian greets me who knew me as the little girl who used to bring all the cocker spaniels to the library.” Bennett located the library she visited in girlhood as the origin of what became a lifelong attraction to public libraries in Paris, New York, and Washington, D.C., and “the part they have played in my life.”72 In the essay, she related that reading such literature became for her

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  123 in adulthood what it was for the young dreamer—a pathway to imagined worlds where delight, positive feelings, and adventure took center stage, worlds inhabited by magic, fairies, and elves. Miller identifies these rather childlike fantasies as a valuable alternative for Bennett to the exoticized racial stereotypes of the modernist era: “In the context of the renaissance, Bennett’s ‘fairy sketches’—pagan fantasies of animistic nature—displace exotic Africa as the terrain in which to establish artistic positionality.”73 In 1925, when she first arrived in Paris, Bennett alluded in her diary to her propensity for fairy tales, describing the city as if it were covered with fairy dust: “One has the impression of looking through at fairy-worlds as one sees gorgeous buildings, arches and towers rising from among mounds of trees from afar.”74 Several months later, she described herself as “a dream-girl in a land of dreams.”75 In a similar vein, she quoted Floyd Dell’s This Mad Ideal a few weeks later: “‘I didn’t know grown-up people like fairy-tales, Daddy Kiernan.’ ‘O, yes, only some people make up their own fairy tales, instead of reading them out of books. We all have to believe in fairy tales of one kind or another.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because real life is such a poor thing.’”76 This attraction to the romantic fantasies of childhood also runs through Bennett’s recollection of the first poem she ever recited to an audience. Bennett relates that while still in high school she was asked to read a verse to Frank Horne, who was visiting her family in Brooklyn. She recalled the poem at the end of her life as “a romantic lyric about an ethereally beautiful maiden of cream complexion and luxuriant hair.”77 This propensity for romance, which early on was associated with her magical father-daughter outings as a child, is reflected in poems of the 1920s that are set in exotic fairylands, idyllic countrysides, or imagined celestial realms. The nostalgia Bennett evinces in these memories of childhood while living with her father suggests that he or his lifestyle fostered in his little girl a rich fantasy life that may have transformed his well-hidden struggle to keep afloat financially into magical moments of storytelling, reading, and music. Though he clearly ran afoul of the law numerous times and moved frequently, Joshua Bennett evidently shielded his daughter from the sordid side of his life, from his failures. She saw him only as a rising young lawyer and solid family man. In her retrospective essay, “My Father’s Story,” Bennett tried to reconcile the reality of her father’s horrific end with the accomplished lawyer and gift-giver who secured her love as a child by providing at least the illusion of a world in which beauty, romance, and fairy tale love were possible. To see this world come tumbling down as a

124  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters 24-year-old, when Joshua Bennett was crushed under a subway car, she admitted, was profoundly painful: “This story [of her father’s death] may never be written. [. . .] It never has been written because it is still, after many years, too close to me for printed words. [. . .] I cannot tell this story without telling it with all my heart, and in that heart there are still places that have not healed with time.” To bring these polar-opposite images of her father together, she painted him as a sweet innocent child who raptly absorbed the stories of his slave grandparents that his mother told him and who worked his way into college by picking cotton and hoeing potatoes in Giddings so that “his quick brain would [not] become dulled having to do hard labor.” Bennett describes Joshua, the last of eight sons, as “the youngest and smartest,” “a sturdy little brown boy with his dusky hair tightly curled upon his little upright head as he looked with clear, innocent eyes at his mother as she told him at her knee miraculous tales of slavery that her mother had told her.” In Bennett’s imagination, her father’s childhood, like her own, was “simple and sweet, unmarred by the tragedies that were to follow his hectored days.” She described her father as a brilliant student and a skilled orator who “held both students and faculty [at Prairie View College] spellbound by his easy flow of words.” Unwilling to lay blame on him for his moral failings, Bennett instead located her father’s downward trajectory after the move to Washington, D.C., in “the endless struggle to get ahead”: “I don’t know what had happened to him but something hard began to creep into his nature.” In the end, Bennett blamed the world for her father’s problems and presented him as a brilliant and ambitious man from a good family of sound values who was brought down by the hardships of raising his station in life from son of a rural black barber just one generation removed from slavery to urban lawyer: “I can see him as he stood a young man just entering college with eyes glowing for having reached this goal. [. . .] So he started toward the great world that was to receive him, honor him, and then kill him.”78 There is an element of truth in Bennett’s idealization of her father in this piece. During the Reconstruction era, when Joshua was a young man in a large black family, Giddings, Texas, a small town located sixty miles east of Austin, relied on cotton. Giddings, the largest town in the sparsely populated Lee County, was established in 1872, a few years before Joshua was born, but even before the Civil War, Lee County had “a sizable black population, as many of the new settlers brought their slaves with them.”79 A 1945 description of Lee County suggests that its black residents were

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  125 subjected to Old South plantation stereotypes and submissive roles well after Emancipation: “Seldom has there been any friction between the large Negro population of this County and the whites, because all are of Southern birth and breeding, and understand each other. Each respects the rights and privileges of the other, with never a thought of social equality. [. . .] Lee County Negroes, sitting before cabin doors at the end of their day’s work, picking their banjos and crooning age-old spirituals, have their full share of musical ability.”80 A young black man growing up in such an environment would have had his work cut out for him to keep his head down in deference to the white farmers who employed him and the white businessmen who frequented his father’s barber shop in Giddings. That Joshua escaped without drawing the ire of such a backwater town, which was founded largely by slaveholding migrants from nearby southern states, speaks to his family’s solidarity, grit, and protectiveness. That he became an educated young black man with a college degree in such an environment indicates a high degree of self-discipline, ambition, and intelligence. These qualities propelled him out of Texas to a teaching position in Nevada and ultimately to a law degree in the nation’s capital. Bennett took note of these qualities in her essay and generously acknowledged the powerful barriers her father encountered in this rural Texas backwater of the nineteenth century. Govan’s three-day groundbreaking interview with Bennett in 1979 indicated she had only positive memories of her childhood and life with her father, but Govan incisively concluded that Joshua’s peripatetic existence after he kidnapped his child cast him in “a dual role,” “the hero who rescues his daughter from an unsatisfactory custody judgment; and the villain, who removes her from and then banishes his daughter’s mother, thus engendering a divided emotional response—tremendous love and muted hate.”81 A poem that can be read as possibly reflecting this duality as it describes the end of a love affair is “Dirge,” published in Palms in October of 1926, It asks a departed loved one to bury his love for the speaker by covering it with the music he had created to convey that love: Bury the love you bore for me Deep beneath your laughing songs. Cover it well with melody, Let it lie where its ghost belongs.

126  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Laughter was what you had given me, That and joyous songs to rue. Cover your love with melody, For so it thrived and grew. The speaker here is metaphorically burying someone who gave her both laughter and “joyous songs to rue,” whose love for her was expressed in a “laughing song” she no longer hears. She is burying more than a person, for she asks the one no longer in her life to bury his love beneath the melody that allowed it to flourish: “Let it lie where its ghost belongs.” It is a haunting verse that gently but firmly establishes the speaker’s intention to put the past behind her, to set aside the laughter, joy, and song that once nourished her. We get a sense of how devastating the loss of this person is, how connected the lost love has been to a strain of music that will never be heard again. In a striking parallel with Angelina Grimké’s fractured childhood, Bennett looked up to her handsome lawyer father just as Grimké admired her own lawyer father’s oratorical gifts and depended on him from the age of seven. Neither poet had an adult relationship with her mother or any siblings to cushion the blow of being a motherless child. On the positive side, their fathers expected them to excel at school and encouraged their daughters to read widely. While very young, they were thrust into ever-changing environments but were allowed to be quite independent even as they were mentored by family, friends, and teachers. Unlike Grimké, however, whose father was an exemplar of fidelity, dependability, and integrity, Bennett had a complex relationship with her father that was compounded by his shocking early death. This seems to have left her without the emotional foundation Archibald Grimké provided for Angelina. While both women grappled with romantic failure, Grimké seems to have achieved a measure of serenity in her loneliness that eluded Bennett until she constructed her own foundation instead of looking for it in the men to whom she was drawn. Like Grimké, she turned pain into poetry, but Bennett’s incredible resilience and gifts for connecting with people created a hard-won platform for moving forward even as life’s disappointments threatened to undermine her self-worth and optimism. In the immediate aftermath of her father’s death, for example, Bennett threw herself into work, became engaged to a young medical student, and looked forward to a bright future instead of ruminating on a past she could not change. She even reconnected with her mother, who wrote to her at

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  127 Howard in response to Joshua’s tragic death, then traveled in the fall of 1926 to Washington, D.C., from Philadelphia for their first meeting in sixteen years.82 Although Bennett soon thereafter visited Mayme in Philadelphia, where she had remarried and was a switchboard operator in a small hotel, the reunion was not a lasting one and it was tinged with racial undertones.83 Many years later, Bennett told Sandra Govan that she was “a brown-skin replica” of her mother, whose complexion she described as “this creamy color that I was always dreaming about” and that the visit of her darker daughter had cost Mayme her job.84 Testifying to the impact of Jim Crow on the job market of large urban centers of the North during the Jazz Age, her mother was fired after she asked the darker-skinned Bennett to meet her at work.85 Mayme could have been passing for white in a highly segregated job market of Philadelphia, where only white women were hired as telephone operators, just as they were everywhere in the nation.86 Whether the incident soured their newly rekindled relationship or they had grown too far apart in the sixteen years they were separated, Mayme and Gwendolyn did not meet again, and Bennett retained her primary bond with Joshua’s second wife, Marechal Neil, for the rest of her life. Bennett lost more than her father in the summer of 1926. All of the artwork she had brought back from Paris was destroyed in a fire in Marechal’s basement that year.87 Most of the inaugural issues of Wallace Thurman’s Fire!!, for which Bennett had served on the editorial board, were also consumed in a fire shortly after it was published in November of 1926. Undeterred by these disasters, Bennett continued to socialize with New Negro artists, cheerily conveying their successes and whereabouts in her column, the Ebony Flute. She resumed teaching at Howard and published her creative work in all the major venues of the Harlem Renaissance. Of Bennett’s twenty-three published poems, fifteen appeared in the period 1925 to 1927; eight came out in 1926 alone, a year she also published three book reviews.88 In addition, she successfully applied for a fellowship to the Barnes Foundation, married in the spring of 1928, and secured a teaching position at the Agricultural and Industrial State College in Nashville the following summer.

Married Life and the 1930s Bennett’s move to Eustis in the fall of 1928, where her husband had set up a medical practice in his home state, brought a halt to her creative writing career even as she tried to be a modern New Negro wife. She

128  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters taught in Florida’s segregated public school system for two years, supporting her husband as best she could while his beleaguered medical practice succumbed to the economic woes of his patients. By the spring of 1930, she was so unhappy with life in the South that she convinced her husband to set up a practice on Long Island. They moved back to New York, where she found brief employment as a publicity agent for the W. C. Handy Music Publishing Company. She served as director of the Hempstead Colored YWCA in 1932–1933 and as a reporter for the Welfare Council of New York City from January 1934 to December 1935. Bennett also returned to school in the hope of reviving her creative talents. She enrolled in Columbia University’s Teachers College in September of 1935, from which she earned a degree in fine arts education in 1937, and then completed two years of graduate work in the history and criticism of art at New York University.89 On the surface, it appears that Bennett reinvented herself as an artist-activist in Harlem while leading a middle-class suburban lifestyle in Hempstead, where she and her husband bought a home in 1933. The New Negro dream couple seemed to have escaped the rural backwater of Eustis to resume life at the heart of modern black life in New York, as Bennett reconnected with what was left of the Harlem Renaissance crowd that had nurtured her talent in the 1920s. She was active in the Harlem arts scene. Notices appeared in the black press during the early 1930s of Bennett’s speaking engagements at the Brooklyn YWCA lecture series on Contemporary Poetry; she served as a judge in the first national poetry contest for “colored children”; she was the featured speaker at a James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild luncheon honoring the winners of that contest; and she served as judge in the second children’s poetry contest.90 In addition, in the fall of 1934 and spring of 1935, Bennett emerged in the news as a top-notch bridge player.91 In the mid-1930s, she helped organize the Harlem Artists’ Guild, serving on the executive board for four years before becoming its president in 1938. She assumed leadership of the WPA Federal Art Project’s Harlem Community Art Center the same year, a post she held until 1941.92 In her private writing, however, which includes over fifty unpublished poems that appear to have been written in the 1930s and 1940s, the reflective essays on her childhood, and a diary from March 1936 to March 1937, Bennett reveals that she was struggling with a harsh reality. For one thing, Harlem in the Great Depression was a far cry from the vibrant scene

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  129 she had left in 1928, a change she described in an unpublished essay written some time in 1935, the year she moved back to Harlem: “In those days [the late 1920s], despite the underlying reason of real necessity, rent parties were given by the so-called literati with the same nonchalant gaiety one may toss off a cocktail. It was more or less smart to be poor and talented.” Assigned to interview professionals in Harlem by the Department of Education and Information of the Welfare Council of New York City in 1935, Bennett found a very different scene of widespread hardship, which she detailed in her description of those she interviewed: “Lawyers, teachers, doctors, and professional people of all walks of life were hurtled [sic] together in a maelstrom of misery.” In the essay, she told of a pharmacist who had been reduced to running an elevator in a downtown office building: “This was a man who had graduated with honors some twenty years before from one of America’s leading universities and had studied abroad on a scholarship for several years. His wife, a graduate of the Sorbonne in Paris, who had been accustomed to giv[ing] French lessons to aspiring debutantes of Park Avenue [. . .] was forced [. . .] to work as a ladies’ attendant for some of these same debutantes.” Bennett was shocked by the state of Harlem’s middle class in 1935: “I had found that almost no physician in Harlem, almost no dentist or lawyer, had escaped a closer contact with poverty than the ordinary middle-class white person could ever imagine.” Searching for remnants of the vibrant artistic community she had left, Bennett visited the 135th Street New York Public Library and found no sign of the poets, writers, and intellectuals who had fueled the Harlem Renaissance: “I felt like some drunken soul [stumbling] from place to place through the streets, [. . .] only to find everyone busily seeking some solution for this tragedy that had descended upon them. I stayed indoors, I didn’t want to see it, I didn’t want to believe it. Where was Harlem?”93 At this point, Bennett had separated from Alfred Jackson to live in Harlem, and her personal story was not so different from those of the people she was interviewing. Although her public image was that of a suburban middle-class modern wife and artist who had the freedom to carve out a career while living happily with her husband on Long Island, we can see from evidence in Bennett’s second diary and in other unpublished work that her marriage was crumbling. Employment was nearly impossible to find. In an undated unpublished piece of fiction she wrote set in 1935, we see the tremendous stress Bennett underwent as she and Jackson tried to put their lives together in New York. We see the toll the Depression

130  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters took on them. “Last night I nearly killed my husband!” features a firstperson narrator who describes a violent scene of domestic conflict when she wanted to kill her husband. Only the husband’s blocking of her access to a gun she had planted prevents her from carrying out the murder, and the narrator explains what led to this desperate moment: “The problems that confronted me seemed so insurmountable that I could see no other way out than killing myself. Driven to the consideration of killing myself I had maddened into almost killing him.” The narrative describes the husband as “a young physician at the end of seven years of hard work to build his practice caught in some spiritual turmoil from which he could find surcease only in drink.”94 Now alcoholism was destroying his career and their marriage. Govan describes this piece as an “autobiographical short story” in which the two main characters—“unquestionably replicas of Alfred Jackson and Gwendolyn Bennett”—reenact the author’s fracturing marriage.95 The story sheds light on Bennett’s precarious financial and personal situation as she struggled to keep her head above water in Harlem during the Depression. The fact that the doctor in the story has struggled for seven years to establish his practice establishes the biographical element of the 1935 narrative, since Alfred Jackson set up his first practice in 1928. Trying to find reasons for her husband’s descent into alcoholism, the narrator also echoes descriptions of the Jackson-Bennett wedding in “Art Weds Science”: “Fresh from his internship after graduation from medical school with highest honors he had married me as I stood on the threshold of my own career. Together we would conquer the world—the bright hope of every young married couple.” The fictional couple moves to Florida in late 1928 and in 1930 moves to Long Island when the combined impact of the Mediterranean fruit fly and the collapse of Florida’s real estate boom destroys her husband’s practice, which was located “largely among the poorer people who made their living picking oranges and working in the packing houses.” For three years after her husband established his Florida practice, she tells us, “my husband and I again thought we were on the road to prosperity and happiness.” Borrowing money to buy a home, as Bennett and Jackson did in real life, the young couple soon falls victim to the economic collapse when they and most of the doctor’s patients lose their money in bank failures: “It soon became evident that unless something happened we would not be able to make the payments on the house and the money we had borrowed to buy it. Each night we went to bed sick with worry for what the new day would bring. [. . .] It became increasingly

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  131 difficult to keep up the front that is necessary for a professional man and his family in a small town.” Desperate to avoid foreclosure, the narrator searches for work in New York City, only to find that none was to be had: “Heartsick and discouraged, I would return home only to be blamed for having spent the money in going to town.”96 The narrator’s unemployment woes in the early 1930s echo those of Bennett herself, who complained to Louia Jones in February 1931 that she had been out of work since August 1930.97 There is a two-year gap in Bennett’s résumé between her work for the W. C. Handy Music Publishing Company in 1930 and her employment by the Hempstead Colored YWCA in 1932.98 In the story, “a newly opened publishing house” that recognizes the narrator’s name “in the days before I had married” unexpectedly hires her “to assist with the entertainment of visiting authors and publishers.” As was typical in the Depression, when married women were routinely denied employment, the narrator has to lie about her marital status and pretend she is single. When she is offered a promotion, the ruse is jeopardized when the company insists that she move to the city so that she can “step out a little, go to parties, meet the folks that are writing, find new talent for us.” Taken aback at first, the narrator decides to accept the position, rent a cheap room in Manhattan, and surreptitiously commute to her home in the suburbs: “That meant late trains and being dog tired in the mornings.” This is where the unfinished story ends, and we are left with a vivid impression of the couple’s ongoing conflicts regarding the husband’s infidelity, his resentment of his wife’s bigger paycheck, and his ruinous relationship with drink, despite Bennett’s notes that the ending will be a happy one.99 Although “Last night I nearly killed my husband!” is fiction, it appears to chronicle the disintegration of Bennett’s suburban life with Jackson, whom Bennett evidently grew to hate. During the year this story was set, for instance, Bennett’s own move to Harlem occurred in 1935, and by the fall of that year she had become involved in a relationship with fellow Harlem Artist Guild member Norman Lewis. By the time she began a second diary on April 7, 1936, she and Lewis were living in separate apartments of a Harlem boardinghouse and appear to have been deeply in love. She was so alienated from Jackson that she made no mention of her husband in the diary until May 5, when, she recorded, a friend told her that she needed to go see him immediately “because Jack has really been very sick.” The next day, May 6, she described the visit as an onerous duty, one she could barely make herself carry out, and we

132  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters get a sense of how hard her feelings had become toward Jackson: “The trip out tired me considerably and I am alarmed at Jack’s condition— eyes staring, very short of breath and restless. [. . .] I feel somewhat useless and unhappy to see him ill and yet in my heart, dastardly as it appears, I felt that my life would be so simple if he were to die. I wondered a great deal whether he was having any long thoughts about the cruel things he had done to me as he lay there with plenty of time to think.”100 The following day Bennett provided a detailed account of her afternoon visit “at the sweet little house I once called home.” Jackson’s doctor told her that his heart had a leaking valve for which there was seemingly no remedy, and though she was concerned enough to visit, the news did not seem to bother her all that much. While she was at the house, she found a letter from his mistress and sarcastically wrote, “I have the privilege afforded to few wives of reading a letter to Jack from one of his sweethearts recalling past joys and planning a rendezvous with him for June.”101 Just a couple weeks later, Alfred Jackson died at the age of thirty-seven. A notice of his funeral in Hempstead appeared in the May 23, 1936, issue of the New York Amsterdam News, which identified the cause of death as complications from a childhood case of rheumatic heart disease: “Hundreds of friends crowded the Union Baptist Church on Mill Road in Hempstead, L.I., last Friday to attend the funeral services for Dr. Alfred Joseph Jackson, physician of Amherst Street, Hempstead.” The paper list the survivors as Jackson’s mother, “a teacher in the Jones High School in Orlando, Fla.,” and “Mrs. Gwendolyn Bennett Jackson, well-known writer and artist and now assistant district supervisor in the federal art teacher project in Harlem.”102 Some unpublished poems in the Bennett archive depict the anger Bennett articulated about Jackson in her diary entries and short story. Two poems dated 1933 that are identified as having been written in Hempstead suggest that her marriage had been disintegrating almost from the moment the young couple relocated to Long Island. “Longing” is typed on a page bearing the address of “Gwendolyn Bennett, Amherst Street near Union Avenue, Hempstead, L.I.” and on which appears in Bennett’s crossed-out handwriting, “To Good Housekeeping, 8th Ave. & 57th St., Jan. 2, 1933.” Although the couple had been living on Long Island since 1930, their mortgage for the Amherst Street house in Hempstead is dated March 3, 1933, so it is hard to determine exactly when “Longing”

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  133 was written, despite the date in the note.103 The poem may portray a scene from a place other than Amherst Street or the Bennetts may have been renting the house they bought, but wherever the poem’s setting, it suggests that the marriage was already in trouble. The speaker places herself next to trees that have been “old familiar friends” and says that the wind rustling their leaves “has often kissed me so.” “I have loved the calm that surges here,” she tells us, but the stanza that follows is addressed to a person who is now gone: “You knew these things with me; / You taught me what they meant. . . . / Without you now, they are so strange / And all their beauty spent.”104 “Poem,” written on a page on which Bennett has noted “[Hempstead L.I. 1933],” conveys harsher imagery of a lover who has wounded the speaker so painfully that she feels cannibalized by his lovemaking: With clink of hammer I cut each word. Oh, my darling, have you heard? Each shining thought I knead And turn into a spirit’s bread for you to feed. I squeeze each trickling drop of pain For you who will not drink of stream or rain. My body I have decked in glistening fable For napery, spread upon love’s table. My every furtive thought made ripe by sorrow’s yeast I lay upon the board for your dear feast. You eat my meat and of my wine drink deep, Then stretch your limbs in glutted sleep, While I, on tiptoe, gather bit by bit Each crumb of laughter or of wit. When you have eaten, drunk and slept, You charge me with what meager host I’ve kept. For you I carved and polished every word.

But, ah my darling, you have never heard! Bracketing the long middle stanza are the speaker’s angry introduction to and conclusion of her metaphorical love feast with images of a sculptor’s tools to describe her writing of the poem: “With clink of hammer I cut

134  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters each word, / Oh, my darling, have you heard? [. . .] For you I carved and polished every word. / But, ah my darling, you have never heard!”105 In “Hatred” (1926), Bennett had presented a speaker capable of murderous revenge, but this later poem is even more cold-blooded. Like “Hatred,” in which Roses and Randolph note that Bennett uses visual art metaphors that “convey the severity one finds in a painting’s contrasting colors or edges,” “Poem” alludes to an artist’s ability to use the lethal weapons of a sculptor against someone who has hurt her.106 Echoing too the speaker’s grim determination in “Hatred,” another unpublished verse, “Gesture,” takes to task a lover who has betrayed the speaker so egregiously that she vows to torture him to death: I will not be torn by loving you, With your lethal voice and hands— You shall not crush my willing heart Upon the rack of swift, unstudied lies. I’ll coin a mite of hate and shoot it through With calm disgust and calculated skill. When you beg [for] mercy, searching out my eyes, My thumb will turn, my stone lips say, “Kill!”107 Anger also is at the center of “Dirge for a Free Spirit,” in which the speaker looks impassively at the corpse of someone for whom she has such contempt that she imagines him mocking the “silly lies” of those who had gathered for his funeral service. The following second and final stanza makes clear that this dead soul is heading for his just reward: They laid you out in saintly white, Surrounded you with candle light, And knelt beside your flowered bier Shedding for you tear on pious tear, While all the time I knew Heaven was no place for you. They prayed for you and laid you in the ground— I heard your laughter, such a wicked sound!— Go gaily on the breeze And tangle in and out the trees.

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  135 How should they know? Why should I tell? That you were happy now in hell.108 Much of the unpublished poetry in Bennett’s archive, of which there is over twice as much as what appeared in print, centers on the themes of love that characterize her earlier pieces, but the imagery is even more sharply drawn, as we see in these bitter poems of cold revenge and hatred for a lover who has lied to and betrayed the speaker. In the earlier published “Nocturne” (1923), for instance, there are sounds of distant laughter frozen into tears, but the imagistic quatrain conveys a cold beauty: Far frosts are caught In the moon’s pale light, And sounds are distant laughter Chilled to crystal tears. These images are repeated more chillingly in “Thin Laughter,” which places the speaker “Among ice-covered trees / In late December.” In this later unpublished poem, the moon participates in the speaker’s heartache instead of merely illuminating frosty air, and the distant laughter of Bennett’s 1923 piece is now transported into the speaker’s heart, painfully curled and thin: The moon wore a sinister smile That August night When we said Good-bye, As thin laughter Crept into my heart And curled painfully About my lips.109 Echoing the bitterness of these pieces about lost love are undated poems that allude to the speaker’s loss of creative inspiration, the beautiful Nightwoman muse who was so central to Bennett’s early work. Love is as central as ever in the unpublished verse, even framed as religious transport, but Bennett’s goddess of the night is hidden, her song muffled. “To an Aloof Lady” captures this change in Bennett’s poetic imagination and announces the end of speakers who glimpse fairylands of magical

136  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters harmony. “You are too far away as you stand smiling there,” the poem begins, “Too much like honeyed ether is the shining of your hair.” Were you to speak, your voice would slip With measured slowness through a film of years. Were you to weep, I fear your tears Would be as cool as spaces where the pale stars dip. The speaker tries to reanimate her moribund muse in the second and last stanza as she implores her to come back to life: Come, rend the veil that dims your loveliness, And break the calm that makes your breathing still. Let loose the fire that smolders in your eeriness, And come to life . . .  . . you who are here, but oh so chill!110 Bennett’s goddess of the night, her dark Aphrodite, so alluringly veiled in the published “Street Lamps in Early Spring” of 1926, is here so distant she can hardly be seen, and she is frozen in a calm silence that is closer to death than the erotic fire smoldering beneath her icy smile. The goddess’s veil so alluringly drawn over her face in the published poem now dims her beauty. Like virtually all the unpublished poetry, “To an Aloof Lady” is undated and cannot be dated by handwriting. Unlike Grimké, who wrote in a distinctive hand on specific kinds of paper at different points in her life, Bennett’s unpublished poems are uniformly typed with titles in all caps followed by a period (if they have a title) and verses that begin with capitalized lines neatly aligned on a left-hand margin. Very few carry a date or address. Yet the uniformity creates a sense of coherence, as if Bennett thought of the poems as a group, a collection, a record of her ongoing creative work, invisible to the world because she had neither publication outlets nor the time to find them. It is also possible that she failed to send them out for publication, aware as she had to have been of her status as a physician’s wife then widow in the black community when some of them were written. The at-times seething anger and terrible bitterness they articulate, not to mention the eroticism, as we shall see, perhaps would have struck her as too intimate or revealing to share with a public readership. We will never

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  137 know, for Bennett is silent about this unpublished poetry, and we are left with a somewhat mysterious body of work that did not appear in print and was not dated beyond cataloguing in files marked Published Poetry, 1933–1938; Poetry, 1941--; and Poetry n.d., with just a few dates recorded in the occasional handwritten note. Although it is not possible to link particular poems in this body of work with specific men in Bennett’s life at specific times, they appear to have been mainly written in the 1930s, a decade when two relationships ended and a third took root. Half of them appear in a folder marked Published Poetry, 1933–1938, and the uniform appearance of these and poems both with and without dates suggests that Bennett at least typed them all at much the same time. Some of these unpublished pieces allude to events that happened in that decade. The subjects of “Threnody for Spain” and “Peace,” for example, are the Spanish Civil War and battlefields in Europe. They also break into new proletarian areas for Bennett, who wrote long ballads about the hard work black laborers do for povertylevel wages. “The Hungry Ones,” for example, describes Depression-era breadlines: “Men, irresolute and desolate, / Crouch close to buildings, / Yearning toward the small opening / Through which will come the bowl of soup.”111 The undated love poems, which constitute the lion’s share of her unpublished poetry, are typed in the same format as these identifiable pieces. Of course it is possible that Bennett typed up some undated poems that had been written in the 1920s, just as she did her published work from that era, but it seems unlikely she would not have found outlets for them during the Harlem Renaissance. Moreover, Govan’s 1979 interview with Bennett provides evidence that she did little creative writing while she and Jackson lived in Florida. Maintaining that Bennett was already struggling with self-doubt and had trouble focusing on a creative path, Govan asserts that her marriage seriously impacted Bennett’s ability to write: “Early in the marriage she was forced to compromise the time and energy she had previously devoted to artistic production in order to try to make the marriage work. . . . To be a Black woman artist, with all the weight the first two identities must carry, let alone the discipline required of the professional artist, is a triple threat. Add to this equation . . . marriage to a partner who ultimately is unsupportive and insensitive to the needs of the creative partner, and it is not surprising that what remains of the creative urge is almost overwhelmed.”112 Even if some of the undated

138  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters poems were written before her marriage ended, they can be organized into thematic groups of love lost and regained, of cold anger or transforming erotic connection, of calm serenity after a lashing storm. We see in both the dated and undated lyric poetry Bennett’s exploration of intimacy issues regardless of with whom she might have been involved at the time they were written. We should not overdetermine, in other words, the unpublished love poems as exact representations of Bennett’s love affair of the 1930s or the bitter verses of disillusionment as descriptions only of her disintegrating marriage. Rather, they chart for us in greater detail than the limited published verse possibly can how challenging her deepest feelings of longing and loss were for Bennett. Bennett’s second diary illuminates the fears and needs to which such poems give voice. In this second attempt to keep track of her days, Bennett recorded deep anger at her husband and anguish over her inability to feel secure in her new relationship with Lewis as she broke away from a marriage that had become unendurable. The diary also sheds light on when the unpublished poetry might have been written. After a preamble written in March, its entries from April 7, 1936, to March 31, 1937, lay out in remarkable detail the suffering Bennett endured as she struggled to put her life back together in the depths of the Depression. We also see her valiant effort to have faith in her talent and hone her skills as a visual artist by taking art classes at Columbia University.113 Tellingly, Bennett begins her first entry of April 7, 1936, with a poem by Robert Browning. She has awakened Lewis so that they can walk together to Columbia, where both are taking art classes. Still married to Jackson, who is gravely ill in Hempstead with heart failure, she reveals that Lewis “has filled my every waking and sleeping moment for about six months.” Poetry is on her mind in this entry, specifically Robert Browning’s “Parting at Morning,” which she starts to recite to Lewis before remembering that “it would mean little to him”: “I’ve tried reading him poetry before,” she wrote. “I know he doesn’t feel that way about it [at] all.” Her impulse to recite the Browning poem prompted Bennett to reflect on what she said had been a long hiatus from writing poetry: “The thought comes unbidden of how much poetry seems to have gone out of my life. Perhaps I have at last reached through senseless pain and uncalled for suffering that nirvana which somehow frees me from the past, present and future.”114 “Longing” and “Poem” are both dated 1933, but this diary entry suggests that most of the unpublished poetry perhaps was written in the mid- to late 1930s. At the time of this entry, Bennett was living in a Harlem rooming

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  139 house where she and Lewis had separate apartments. They were members of the Harlem Artists’ Guild, headed by Aaron Douglas, and were striving to exhibit and sell their work. Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, Bennett’s students, became famous painters from the guild, but in 1936, Lewis was an emerging star. Born in Harlem, Norman Lewis was the son of immigrants from Bermuda, and in 1935, when he became involved with Bennett, he was only in his mid-twenties, seven years younger than she. The diary entry of January 3, 1937, mentions one of his most famous works, Yellow Hat (1936), but Lewis’s greatest achievement is that he later became the first African American artist to identify himself with a school of art associated with Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollack—abstract expressionism—to which he turned in the postwar period. Lewis excelled at this genre of painting, and Bennett admired his work, even as she disparaged her own. She hoped his paintings would be shown at major exhibitions and declared her wholehearted support for him in her January 3, 1937, entry: “He deserves success.”115 In sharp contrast to her robust faith in the artistic talents of her male colleagues in the guild, Bennett’s diary entries reflect doubts about her own art abilities; she fretted over botching an aquatint, for example, and not making enough progress on her paintings. She tried not to give in to “a growing conviction that I will never excel in the Graphic Arts”116 or come up to the level of her male peers: “I keep saying to myself that I must not jump to conclusions but must wait for the future to decide how important this period will be in the making of me and those who are working closely with me—Norman and [Fred] Perry.”117 Having largely stopped trying to publish her creative writing evidently so that she could develop herself as a visual artist, Bennett recognized Lewis’s talent but struggled to find an artistic identity for herself that would provide her with solid ground for moving forward in her life. Compounding Bennett’s anxiety over her visual art skills was the estrangement from her husband, whose infidelity and verbal abuse, she said, had driven her away. Govan describes the effect of multiple blows Bennett sustained in the 1930s: “Her marriage . . . and the move to Florida created tremendous stress. And even though she returned to New York within two years, the Renaissance was over and her professional life had begun to ride a wildly arching seesaw. . . . She was black, a woman, and an artist—triple jeopardy. Compounding her problems further, she was also an artist divided—uncertain of her road. She could not find a center within and that she built without continually falling apart.”118

140  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters One of the emotional upheavals that challenged Bennett at this time was the fact that her powerful egalitarian relationship with Lewis did not seem to be moving into a stable intimate connection. Indeed, her worst fears about infidelity seem to have been fueled by the very modern freedom she and Lewis allowed each other as they sought the autonomy they each needed to be comrades in leftist politics, art, and community activism. In the diary, for instance, she repeatedly described the delightful closeness they enjoyed as sweet hours broken up by endless quarreling over daily aggravations and, more devastatingly, Bennett’s insecurity about other women. At one point, she described a failed attempt to articulate her feelings to a man she considered her best friend: “Norman and I spend a sweet sort of sad half hour on the bed trying to talk out the same thing we attempted to say with our bodies last night (Friday morning).”119 Repeatedly Bennett berated herself in the diary for putting up with what she considered Lewis’s hurtful behavior, his inability to make her feel loved. She wrote on April 13, 1936, for instance, “Seemingly I have sunk so low that I haven’t even a modicum of self-respect left and so I have cried and begged [Norman] to stay with me and acted in general like the perfect fool loving him has made of me. I feel so common and degraded to have begged a man to allow me the privilege of feeling his body next to mine when he so obviously would rather be anywhere in the world but with me.”120 Three days later, on April 16, Bennett again chastised herself for wanting to be with Lewis because she doubts that he truly loved her: I go over to Augusta’s [sculptor Augusta Savage] and stay until 10:15 [p.m.] then back home to heat water for a bath, write in my diary, and live through the gnawing, heartsick wait for a man to come to bed with me who does not want to sleep with me [. . .]. And even lying beside me because [. . .] he will be wishing I were someone else. So low I have sunk to cling to someone who no longer wants me and perhaps never did except as an adventure.121 The next day, April 17, Bennett ruminated again about what she believed to be Lewis’s lack of love for her: I take a bath and hold myself into a forced stillness until I could have cried out and torn my hair in anguish. And even after all that wait Norman comes downstairs and suggests that he sleep upstairs[. . . .] We have some bitter, unkind words in which I am again made to feel

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  141 that I am less than nothing—just a filthy old woman to be pushed about by a man who no longer wants her.122 Bennett was only thirty-three years old when she wrote these entries, and although Lewis was a mere seven years younger than she was, she felt like “a filthy old woman” who was helplessly dependent on his attention. Despite their travails, the diary indicates that Bennett and Lewis spent almost every minute together and clearly had a close loving friendship of mutual respect. They went to the movies, attended the theater, took art classes together, participated in guild meetings and art exhibits, visited his mother in Harlem, ate out, played chess at home, and enjoyed parties with their many friends. They were seemingly inseparable. When Lewis broke off all relationships with other women to gain her trust, Bennett wrote, “I am prepared to trust him as long as he remains trustworthy. He doesn’t realize how eager I am to trust him—I go around with a silent hope in my heart that now, after all my months of misery and loyalty to him, he will not fail me.”123 By May 1936, when Bennett was dealing with Alfred Jackson’s impending death, however, she seemed to reach a breaking point when she found Lewis in the arms of another woman. She wrote on May 7: “Lonely and ever so sick of what I consider a dirty mess, Norman is so sweet and loving most of the time that I can’t understand how he continues to subject me to such mental torture.”124 The unpublished love poetry reflects many of the feelings Bennett recorded in this diary but with the steely intelligence and self-respect it sorely lacks. In the poetry, she was able to find meaning in her intimate experiences, whether they were happy or sad, transporting or disappointing. Despite her misery, self-doubt, and failure to publish them, many of the fifty-three poems in her archive that did not make it into print are daring, innovative, probing, and honest. We hear a voice that was muted in the 1920s, a woman’s full-throated song of hard-won wisdom as she plumbs the depths of her erotic awakening. What is perhaps most striking about these poems is the centrality of erotic experience to the speaker’s life. Bennett had been drawn to the erotic in her poetry of the 1920s, as we saw in “Fantasy” (1924), “Street Lamps in Early Spring” (1926), and “To a Dark Girl” (1927). Dark female sexuality is celebrated in these early pieces as a source of power and an alternative to white standards of beauty. She returned to the erotic as a mature poet in the 1930s, but portrayed it as a double-edged sword. Speakers succumb to its power, even worship

142  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters eros as a holy force, but love does not necessarily follow intimate union with the beloved, and speakers often describe lovemaking as bruising and anguishing. An untitled piece begins with the line, “I will love you always” as the speaker recounts the “dizzy labyrinthian maze of song” she and her lover created in their lovemaking the night before: I will love you always—simple and trite, you say. Words with which I shield against a rainy day. We have sought many words, you and I, To spear the moon, to cup the sea, to clutch the sky; And in a dizzy labyrinthian maze of song We labored, searching through the whole night long For some new word to tell the plain and ancient tale, Syllables of fire, encomiums of wind and wave and hail To tear the heart and rend the flesh. Shafts of ice and flame To carve out what our hearts full well may label some new name. Exhausted, panting, clinging each to each, We cry aloud against the limits of our speech, And I say simply, acknowledging our sheer defeat, That love for you shall last within my heart so long as it shall beat.125 These lovers are communicating with their bodies and ecstatic exhalations, as a raging fire of lust consumes the speaker’s ability to talk. They are unable to articulate words of love, but their bodies create a new kind of language by surrendering to the power of erotic connection. “Comrades” portrays the speaker’s lover as someone she vows to keep as a friend when, as she believes will inevitably happen, passion has cooled, “When the minutes / Pulse more slowly, / And the rich, dark stream / Of your willful love / Has ebbed through / The ravaged quiet / Of my breasts / And thighs.” Anticipating the tender calm that she hopes will follow, the speaker says that making of her lover a friend will be sweeter than any sound she might make in the frenzy of passion: More dear than any name Our tortured love might sing; A crutch against the storm, Sword, clarion and shield— Through hurt and ravished lips

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  143 My anguished heart will cry Friend!126 Although the poem calls attention to the speaker’s most private parts, she characterizes friendship with her loved one as sweeter and truer than any breathtaking physical moment they can create. Similarly, although erotic connection is celebrated in these pieces, there are others in which the limits of sexual desire are painfully evident. In “Your Lips,” for example, the speaker recalls her lover’s now-invisible ardor of the night before, describing his lips as “little passive curves” and listening to “the tinkling grace-notes” of his “silly conversation”: I cannot quite believe They are the same still candles That burned last night About the altar Of your deeply throbbing kiss.127 “Communion” elaborates on the difference between emotional intimacy and sexual transport hinted at in “Your Lips.” The speaker urges her lover to savor the meal she is about to serve, for eating together is more deeply intimate than anything their lovemaking can produce: Come, break bread with me, beloved. Over crystal goblets let our eyes drink the while we sup. Glassware and silver— Penny-whistle foils for our majestic symphony— Slow cadences of words that slip across the golden fruit, And thoughts more precious than rare viands, More dear than lethal wine or song . . . . Break bread with me, I pray you my beloved, For food and drink to those who love More sweet communion are than any holy grail, More consecrated are than any sacred cup.128 Bennett explores in these verses both the transcendent rapture and the limits of sexual intimacy, along with its ability to wound or mislead. Her speakers embrace their sexuality, even celebrate their bodies, but the

144  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters beloved remains at a distance and the lovemaking produces only fleeting moments of bliss. “Secret,” which recalls Bennett’s 1927 poem of the same title, places the speaker in bed with her lover, and we see her unable to communicate her feelings because he is in a different sphere: It was a dear secret I had thought to hold— That I had looked upon you While you slept, So ineffably dear And unsuspecting. A particular sweetness caught And held me Bound so insufferably silent I would hold it secret, Mine—intimate, inviolate, A something You could neither understand Nor share. This speaker is unable to articulate the profound tenderness she feels for her sleeping lover because she believes he can neither hear nor reciprocate it. Likewise, in another bedtime moment described in the second and last stanza, her beloved awakens the speaker and tells her he has similarly watched and embraced her while she slept. He has reciprocated the tenderness she feels for him, but not while she is conscious and not by putting it into words: One morning, dream drugged, Your eyes pried open mine. “I held you lovely while you slept— I kissed you sleeping, unawares.” You said.129 These lovers feel the same sweet feelings for each other but are unable to express them openly and freely. These unpublished poems extend a theme of asceticism Miller identifies in Bennett’s poetry of the 1920s in which speakers are reduced to a core self that has been stripped of its outward bodily form in moments

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  145 of annihilating erotic transport. In her discussion of the 1926 “Moon Tonight,” for example, Miller points to the speaker’s portrayal of the moon as “cool,” “forgotten,” a “dream” and to the poem’s “lost twilights” and birds who “sing / No more.” These are images, she maintains, that are symbolic of a past love affair that has left the speaker with “a metaphorically and artistically enhanced self ”: “The felicity of the moon in this love scenario lies in the aesthetic residue it retains after the affair itself has burned away.” Miller sees a similar ascetic impulse in the 1925 “Purgation”: “The speaker . . . avoids any proximity to the lover and his body while they ‘live.’ Once ‘the fires’ have put an irrevocable distance between them, however, the speaker appears, passionately embodied in her ‘trembling’—but trembling in response to the work of art the lover has left in his place. . . . The purgation of the title, most obviously a reference to the lover’s transition into death, more importantly describes the process by which the affair itself achieves the purity of art—and lends the woman speaker a comparably timeless and exalted self.”130 The “exalted self,” which survives the fires of eros in this early poetry, reappears in the unpublished erotic verse as a soul that has come through burning lust to a purified hardness, to a place of self-sufficiency that allows the speaker to survive her lover’s distanced love-making. She is able to articulate her pain in such a truthful way that she creates beauty out of the ashes left behind. During these years of emotional turbulence, Bennett’s work with the Harlem Artists’ Guild and prominence in Harlem’s art community continued to bring her accolades, and it is clear this aspect of her life provided a lifeline as she battled for balance amid artistic insecurity, the end of her marriage, and her turbulent love affair. She was mentioned positively in a number of newspaper reports during this growth-producing though difficult period in her personal life. An April 17, 1937, article in the New York Amsterdam News, for instance, reported on her role introducing Claude McKay at a luncheon of the James Weldon Johnson Literary League honoring his new autobiography: “Miss Gwendolyn Bennett, a poet herself, introduced Mr. McKay.” Its December 25 article the same year reported on Bennett’s address to the American Artists’ Congress on the topic of “the special problems of the Negro artist in the United States.” The News also featured her as art director of Langston Hughes’s play, Don’t You Want to Be Free, which inaugurated the Harlem Suitcase Theatre in April 1938. In May of that year a smiling Bennett was pictured by the same newspaper with Augusta Savage and other artists at the Savoy ballroom at a benefit for the Harlem Community Art Center. She was pictured

146  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters

Figure 13. Gwendolyn Bennett at a Harlem Community Arts Center benefit at the Savoy Ballroom on May 24, 1939. Bennett is third from right. Photo © Morgan and Marvin Smith. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

again in June 1938 at another such benefit, at which she gives a speech tracing the center’s history, while Norman Lewis was said to have donated a painting as one of the prizes people competing in the card tournament could win. Another benefit dance at the Savoy features Bennett as one of the hostesses in May 1939 (see figure 13). In July she was honored as a “Distinguished Woman of Today” at the New York World’s Fair, along with Augusta Savage, Jessie Fauset, and Ethel Waters.131 As late as December 31, 1938, however, Bennett’s unpublished poetry reflects continuing torment over her inability to form a lasting relationship, an issue she told Sandra Govan in 1979 severely impacted her. Saying she was “trapped in a very unhappy marriage for eight long years,” Bennett added: “Marriage has played a very great part in my life. You can’t underestimate the fact of marriage, the need to have a successful

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  147 marriage played in my life.”132 She channeled this yearning for intimacy into poetry that may not have been meant for publication, given how little of the unpublished work was evidently sent out. The bitter “New Year’s Eve—1938” comes at the nadir of this period as its speaker bids a fond farewell to the “bastard year”: Year that gave me love, A draught of vinegar Upon the crucifixion nails; Year that gave me hope, A bitter wormwood At the macabre feasting-board. “I bid you farewell,” the speaker exults, Full knowing you will come again, And over again, To pick the flesh anew From the healing sore Of each new day.133 Bennett wrote a note at the end of this poem relaying she did not receive a telegram informing her that an anticipated date could not make it, someone with whom she was planning to spend “a lovely New Year’s Eve,” so she sat waiting until 2 a.m. “not knowing what to think and feeling thoroughly miserable.” As the clock struck midnight and her radio broadcast toasted the New Year, she wrote, “I said out loud bitterly, ‘Farewell, you bastard year’—and then wrote the poem.”

Rebirth of Joy and Return to the Spirit Within Reflecting Bennett’s resilience in the face of self-doubt, moments of despair, and an inability to believe that lasting love would ever materialize, however, is a group of the unpublished poems that feature speakers closer to the shy idealist of her younger work, who feels a sense of comfort, beauty, and peace from someone who speaks to her with a tenderness that allows her to soften. Three of these use imagery associated with Aphrodite

148  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters in classic representations of her as a goddess of the sea attended by birds and surrounded by flowers. In “Fulfillment,” the speaker locates herself on the seashore: To be with you is to know peace again, And the deep understanding of things. The height of sky and depth of sea Are become simple and plain. [. . .] With you I am fulfilled, And made alive to all the pulsing things of earth. No quickest wind nor swiftly rising tide Can shake the deep peace of my understanding; Nor quickened moment disturb the height and depth Of my fulfillment.134 An untitled piece that similarly alludes to a reawakened Aphrodite features a speaker who looks to her beloved for help in healing from a painful past: Give me your hand, beloved, That I may walk safely Through the broken stubble Of the long forgotten years. Clasp my hand tighter As my breath catches At the sight of a broken flower Or a fallen bird. Guide my feet gently Around the edge of bog or cliff. Lay cooling hands Across my eyes That I may not be blinded By the bright mirage Of Forever.135 Another verse with such imagery is an untitled sonnet broken into two seven-line stanzas:

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  149 For me . . . . You are a tall tree, Deep-rooted on the side of a hill; The over-tone of a wave Fingering the sand with lacy swirls, When the white foam has died away; A bird daring the regions of the sun. Give me . . . . Shade for the weary hour, Murmuring tenderness when the day is over; The quiet pattern of peace Beneath the turbulent crest of pain, Small melody within the crashing chord; A shining wing to soar upon.136 These three poems recall the elegiac lyricism of Bennett’s youth, but they resonate with the wisdom of a survivor. The speaker has come through a fiery furnace but is now at the water’s cool edge with someone she trusts. She can withstand the rising tides and bright sunlight, appreciate a bird’s soaring flight toward the sun, and let herself come alive and remember “the long forgotten years.” Among these poems of quiet love is one that recalls the 1923 quatrain about singing grass with which Bennett began her career. Titled simply “Quatrain,” the verse centers on the speaker’s gift to her beloved of a “single word”: I lay this single word in the palm of your hand— A little word, content and sparkling true, Quiescent set in the lambent hand of you. No name it has save a glow you will understand.137 In contrast to the poems of burning lust in which lovers cannot express their love in words, the speaker in “Quatrain” places in the palm of her lover’s hand a word that is quiet, even soundless. She resides in an emotional realm of calm. Soft glowing imagery returns in these pieces that feature a speaker such as the one in “[For me . . . you are a tall tree,]” who is able to float on a rising tide of desire, watch its retreating wave trace “lacy swirls” in the sand

150  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters “when the white foam has died away,” and find “the quiet pattern of peace beneath the turbulent crest of pain.” Again, it is impossible to say who inspired these verses of quiet love and peace that echo some of Bennett’s most beautiful poems from the 1920s, but they reflect her ability to heal and recapture some of the idealism she celebrated in her youth. For all the agony recorded in her 1936 diary and poems of elusive love, Bennett is able to revive her chilled muse, push through her goddess’s veil of silence, and sing a song of sweet rapture once more. There is one final man in Bennett’s life who seemed to have provided her with the stability and safety speakers yearn for in these poems of a love that nurtures rather than destroys. In June of 1940, Bennett married Richard Crosscup, a white Harvard-educated English teacher who was working in Boston at the time of their marriage. The New York Amsterdam News reported on the wedding, which took place at Marechal Neil Bennett’s home at 64 Brooklyn Avenue, and tells us that the couple began a relationship sometime in the spring of 1939: “The couple had courted for about a year. [. . .] For her wedding Miss Bennett wore a pretty dress of powder blue lace and marquisette,” the article reports, and “the groom and his best man wore white linen suits.” Among those listed as witnessing the ceremony was Norman Lewis, who clearly at this point had become a good friend.138 At the time of her second marriage, Bennett was directing the Harlem Community Art Center at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, which offered

Figure 14. Gwendolyn Bennett and her second husband, Richard Crosscup, with other members of the Antique Dealers Association of Berks County, Pennsylvania. Reading Eagle, June 6, 1973. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  151 free courses on everything from photography to jewelry design, weaving, and sculpture. Painfully dismissed from her post a year later in 1941 by the WPA for alleged subversive political activities, Bennett was able to continue her community education efforts, and the marriage was able to withstand this political assault. By the fall of 1943, the couple was at the heart of a newly opened George Washington Carver School on West 125th Street, with Bennett as director and Crosscup as a teacher of literature. In a 1946 interview published by the Chicago Defender on January 5, reporter Earl Conrad gives us a glimpse of Crosscup in his profile of Bennett. Describing him as having been a teacher for seven years in Cambridge and then for four years at New York’s Walden School, a progressive institution based on ideals of Thoreau, Conrad quotes one of Crosscup’s former Carver students: “My first English class at the Carver school was very impressive. [. . .] I wondered about the teacher’s life (Mr. Crosscup). I thought life for him at intervals must have been sad, beautiful, colorful and progressive— because in my mind’s eye I beheld all this. I also thought that he must be interested in the problems of the working class since he used politics to illustrate the meaning and use of words.”139 An undated clipping in Bennett’s archive that appears to be from the same year, given its allusions to Bennett’s postwar plans, mentions that Crosscup was the director of education at a Camp Wochica while Bennett directed the Carver School: “[Bennett] has a flower garden at the camp [. . .] and goes every weekend ‘just to raise flowers.’ [. . .] She has another hobby that vies with her art— writing poetry.”140 These brief glimpses of Richard Crosscup working alongside Bennett in her community activism of the 1940s suggest that she finally found a relationship in which she could function as an equal and someone with whom she shared core values and interests. The 39-year second marriage, which ended only with Crosscup’s death, appears to have been happy—at long last. It seems to have been a relationship in which Bennett could feel respected and loved. She could thrive as her own person while also sharing a political commitment to progressive interracial organizations in New York with her friend, lover, and husband, a man who also loved literature. Bennett would be a working married woman throughout the postwar period, blending marriage with jobs that expressed her political ideals of democracy, interracial harmony, justice, and community betterment. She was a secretary for the Consumers Union after the Carver School was forced to close after continuing harassment from the House Un-American

152  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Activities Committee, earning her own paycheck until 1968, when she and her husband decided to retire and start an antiques business in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. One of the last public pictures of Gwendolyn Bennett shows her smiling at her tall distinguished-looking husband as they prepare for an antique fair with other members of the Antique Dealers Association of Berks County, Pennsylvania in a photo published by the Reading Eagle on June 6, 1973 (see figure 14).141 Bennett never lost her radiant smile through all the travails of her personal, creative, and political life, but this photo is particularly emblematic of her ability to rise from the ashes of disappointment, failure, and self-doubt, for she is with her beloved still and is about to celebrate their thirty-third anniversary with him. If her fame as a New Negro poet was far behind her at this point, Bennett could appreciate the contentment left in its wake and enjoy the fruits of her long labor to calm the storm within. In the foreword to her 1936–1937 diary, Bennett provided a comment that echoes “the mounds of some joy or sadness” in “Train Monotony” and hints at the wisdom she achieved in dealing with the intense emotions reflected in her poetry: “If dawdling and putting off things steals away Time itself, it in like manner steals away the sting of pain and the exultation of joys that are at best ephemeral. [. . .] I can find no better excuses for my tardiness than that my delay [in starting a diary] has at least spared the number of days indelibly written down in the passing fury of joy and sorrow. [. . .] And so no matter how morbidly I delve into past joys and sorrow they can never quite come alive.”142 Procrastination is here framed as a virtue and a balm, a way to ride the heart’s highs and lows without mistaking its “passing fury of joy and sorrow” as “indelibly written down.” Gwendolyn Bennett had the courage, however, to indelibly write down her journey through fairylands and barren landscapes in poems that capture ephemeral moments with the power of art to make time stand still. That she could contain this power while surviving despair, betrayal, poverty, dislocation, and professional disappointment is a testament to her deep intelligence and love of life. A poem that perhaps best expresses this resilient strength is the unpublished “Quiescence,” in which the speaker reaches serenity. It appears in Bennett’s typed stack of her final unpublished verses, and we see in it the mature woman emerging from her youthful turbulence and idealistic

Harlem’s Phoenix  T  153 vulnerability. We see the wise realist who finds shelter from the storm and relief from her demons, the woman Gwendolyn Bennett searched for in twenty years of poetry and finally found. Quiescence I have lost the feel of rain, Wet, slashing against me Like unseen foes Of a sudden come to sight. Lost, too, the joy in cool, moist smells That come after rain. Rather for me The simmer of tea, And rain flung, a futile banter, Against the fairy armour Of a window-pane.143

Figure 15. Portrait of 1927 Krigwa Prize winner Mae V. Cowdery at age nineteen. The Crisis, January 1928. Cowdery graduated from the Philadelphia High School for Girls in June 1927 and moved to New York City to attend the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn that fall.

4 Shattered Mirror The Failed Promise of Mae V. Cowdery

I

f Angelina Grimké’s and Gwendolyn Bennett’s verse from the late 1920s came at the end of their public creative writing careers, Mae Cowdery’s poetry as the decade drew to a close marked the beginning of hers. Mae V. Cowdery (January 10, 1909–November 2, 1948) was only seven years younger than Bennett and she had the benefit of following in the path of her groundbreaking role models, but her early promise as a prizewinning poet faded more quickly than did their careers. Cowdery was just as precocious, her sensibility equally lyrical and modern, but her rapid ascent in New Negro journals of the 1920s and the boost from her well-received collection of 1936 were followed by a decade of silence before her premature death in 1948. This descent came in spite of the mentoring Cowdery received from Langston Hughes when she fervently responded to his call for a fresh kind of poetry that would break all the rules of New Negro art. Cowdery’s poems represent a lyrical side of the breakthrough modern poetics Hughes spearheaded. Though she avoided the jazz rhythms and street culture he prized, Cowdery brought to the surface of her verse a complex sexuality that Grimké and Bennett could access only in their unpublished work. Bolstered by his mentorship, Cowdery broke free of her conservative Philadelphia roots to create speakers who express open desire for female and male lovers, and she is one of the first African American women to do that in published poetry. She also built on the dark muse Grimké and Bennett created but shaped that figure into an earth goddess who empowered speakers to tear down race prejudice with the strength of gods.

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156  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Resurrecting poets who provided us with archives is challenging, but we at least have letters, photographs, manuscripts, diaries. In the case of a vanished writer such as Cowdery, and there are many others in this category, we must rely on public records and the published work alone. Fortunately, there is one archival resource provided by Hughes, who saved letters Cowdery had written to him at the dawn of her writing career, from 1926 to 1929, which provide a vivid portrait of her charismatic personality and fierce ambition and the modernist persona she created in her lyrics. Cowdery’s twelve letters to Hughes are the only pieces of personal writing we have from this elusive writer, who would go on to publish twenty-one poems in all the major journals of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the few poetry collections by an African American woman of her era.1 Although she identified herself as Mae V. Cowdery, public records indicate she was born Mary Wilson Cowdery on January 10, 1909, and died on November 2, 1948, but no private papers survived her death; we have known very little about her life.2 The outlines of a personality, however, surface in the Hughes correspondence, African American newspapers of the era, and in the poetry. Only in the letters to Hughes do we hear Cowdery’s personal voice, and they provide a limited but illuminating understanding of her mindset when she began publishing poetry. It is noteworthy that Hughes was already a famous poet when schoolgirl Cowdery began writing to him in 1926. In contrast to his young friend, who had only lived in Philadelphia, Hughes had already traveled to Africa, Spain, and Paris after dropping out of Columbia University in 1922. He had found sudden fame in 1925 when Vachel Lindsay took a look at his poems when he was a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. That same year, he had won first prize in Opportunity’s literary contest for his poem “The Weary Blues” and a scholarship to Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania. In his freshman year, 1925, he had come to the attention of power broker Carl Van Vechten, who persuaded Alfred E. Knopf to publish Hughes’s first collection, The Weary Blues (1926). In 1927, he published his second poetry volume, Fine Clothes to the Jew. At the same moment when Cowdery wrote her first letter to Hughes in the fall of 1926, Hughes’s groundbreaking essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” appeared in The Nation.3 This article launched a radical new phase in the New Negro Movement when Hughes declared that young poets should not be confined to oldguard notions of poetry that emphasized traditional formats and middleclass subject matter. Young black artists, he asserted, valued the “low-down

Shattered Mirror  T  157 folk” and the culture of the street—the blues and jazz. African American poets should not be confined to staid propaganda pieces designed to please a white audience, the essay asserted, but should be dedicated to pursuing art for art’s sake and celebrating the real New Negro—the young urban black person eager to identify with modern life. This was a movement with which Mae Cowdery wholeheartedly identified, and her friendship with Hughes moved her quickly to the center of his bohemian artistic circle. Cowdery’s first dated letter to Hughes, written when she was a high school senior, opens a window on the insouciant spirit that underlay what would become her strikingly bold poetic persona. Sitting in study hall at the Philadelphia High School for Girls on October 8, 1926, the seventeen-yearold Cowdery wrote this chatty letter to her mentor before she had published any verse and while she was living with her parents in Philadelphia, far from the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. The letter suggests that they had already established a friendship because in it Cowdery discusses his poet friend at Lincoln University, Lee Raye, who has asked her to visit him and Hughes in Oxford on October 16, and who had come to see Mae the week she wrote the letter. Her salutation and breezy tone suggest an easy camaraderie had sprung up between them even though Hughes was a star: Hey there “ole lady-in-law”! You see I’m feeling rather good today, and in compliance with the wish of your ole lady, or shall I say, the other “Nursling” [,] I thought I’d drop you a line. You have no objections have you? I don’t care if you do, [. . .] Smile. By the way, I hear you & Lee [Raye] have started a nursery. What’s the big idea? Just what is it for[,] a play room for rising young poets or a museum of queer species? I haven’t seen any of your poems dedicated to “The Nursery” [;] you should be very good at writing nursery rhymes in that atmosphere. Smile.4 Only at the end of this letter does the teenage Mae reveal her awareness of the gap between her and Hughes’s accomplishments, which must have loomed large over her fledgling efforts to become a poet herself: “Pardon this silly note,” she writes, “but I can’t think or write interesting things comme vous.” Apart from this sardonic self-deprecation, Cowdery assumed an air of nonchalant self-assurance with her illustrious correspondent and made clear that she identified with the young urban artists Hughes described in

158  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters his manifesto of rebellion. Her letters are sprinkled with slang, deliberate misspellings, puns, and satire as she placed herself in the circle of young men gathering around Hughes in his fraternity, Omega Psi Phi.5 Undaunted by the sophisticated male college crowd of which he was the center, Mae visited her older friend at Lincoln University. Hughes and men in his social circle also visited her at the Cowdery home in Philadelphia’s Germantown, just fifty miles away from the university. Although from the beginning her poetry was surprisingly mature, frank, and often despondent, in her letters to Hughes, Cowdery was off-hand, flirtatious, bubbly, and full of energy. In contrast also to her poetic expressions of anger about racism, sensual transport, and moments of despair, in the Hughes letters she presented herself as effervescent, youthfully enthusiastic about life, and on top of the world. As lighthearted and gossipy as they are, however, these late 1920s letters make clear that Cowdery was serious about her poetry, and her comments about it shed light on the spare unrhymed verses that became her trademark. Remove the dated exclamation points, apostrophes and contractions she was prone to use and Cowdery’s best poems speak to us in familiar tones of lyrical meditations on the moment, often erotically charged and emanating from speakers who express themselves with modern directness. The correspondence she conducted with Hughes makes clear that her ambitions were serious and that she saw herself as a rebel determined to take on the established order. We also see that Hughes put a lot of time into mentoring Cowdery, that he saw in her a spark of the true modern artist. At one point, for instance, she thanked him for typing some poems she had sent in an earlier letter and added, “Glad you liked the poems. I find it hard to write decent rhymes, because by the time I’ve the proper words the tho’t is spoiled . . . . So it’s only on rare occasions that I write fairly nice ones.”6 In another letter, she said: “You’ve given me inspiration . . . . I wrote some more poems when I came home [from a visit to Lincoln University] & I’m getting industrious & typing them all. I’m really glad you like my “String of Pearls” cause that’s my heart.”7 In another letter, she wrote: “Thanks for the advice . . . . I more than agree with you . . . . . but some folks need convincing . . . . . I’m trying . . . . from time . . . . to time, to write the lyrics. . . . I have attempted sonnets . . . . they’re not so bad . . . . but they’re not so good . . . . however. . . . I love sonnets. . . . ”8 On January 14, 1929, she wrote, “I’m taking your advice . . . . . per usual . . . and am attempting some rhyme & rhythm,” but the poem she included contains only the subtlest of rhymes, and unrhymed verse would become her trademark.9

Shattered Mirror  T  159 Hughes encouraged Cowdery to submit two poems lacking traditional formal structure, “Longings” and “Lamps,” to The Crisis in 1927 and enter them in its poetry contest: “I am glad you liked the poems & I am really going to enter them, now that final judgment has been passed.”10 When Cowdery won the Krigwa Prize for these poems, she wrote her shortest but most exuberant letter: Lankie! Lankie! I’m so nervous & excited I don’t know what to do—Can you guess what has happened to me[,] your ex-old lady-in-law . . . . ? Mother just called up & told me that she had a letter . . . . . which she read to me—the content of it was—I won the first prize in “Krigwa” with 2 poems! Can you beat it? I just had to tell you—y’understand.11 Identifying with the fiery New Negro youth movement Hughes celebrated, Cowdery represents the urban bohemian rebellion at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance in its final wave. Just as Bennett was moving away from the Renaissance at its peak in 1928 and Grimké was beginning her retreat into silence, Cowdery appeared on the scene with joyful abandon as she presented her own version of the dark erotic muse they created. Cowdery’s speakers announce a fierce determination to attack racism and celebrate erotic encounters from the very beginning of her writing career. Her poetic landscape is decidedly non-Christian and animated by powerful dark goddesses whom the speaker emulates as a source of truth and beauty. The imagery is erotic, bodies are naked, and sexual liberation is intertwined with the purity of the black artist’s fight against racial prejudice. Among Cowdery’s first poems, for instance, is “Goal,” published in the 1927 first issue of Black Opals when she was a high school senior. It features a speaker who places herself center stage as a fearless truth teller confronting a malevolent lynch mob of hate before a wall of prejudice that hides the glory of black people. In the first stanza she characterizes her fiery message as a volcanic eruption flowing over a sleeping city that is falsely secure in its ignorance of the mountain’s power, recalling the power of Mount Vesuvius when it destroyed Pompeii: My words shall drip Like molten lava

160  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters From the towering black volcano, On the sleeping town ’Neath its summit. My thoughts shall be Hot ashes Burning all in its path. This speaker has superhuman powers; she is placed at the mountain’s summit, towering over the ignorant crowd, and her domain is nature’s limitless realm. Her path is lit by the sun. I shall not stop Because critics sneer, Nor stoop to fawning At man’s mere fancy. I shall breathe A clearer freer air For I shall see the sun Above the crowd. In stanza four, the speaker vows she will not be intimidated by anyone: I shall not blush And make excuse When a son of Adam, Who calls himself “God’s Layman,” Slashes with scorn A thing born from Truth’s womb and nursed By beauty. It will not Matter who stoops To cast the first stone. Does not my spirit Soar above these feeble Minds? thoughts born

Shattered Mirror  T  161 From prejudice’s womb And nursed by tradition? The final stanzas leave no doubt that this warrior’s words will tear down the wall of prejudice erected against black people, for whom she will serve as a juggernaut of truth. I will shatter the wall Of darkness that rises From gleaming day And seeks to hide the sun. I will turn this wall of Darkness (that is night) Into a thing of beauty. I will take from the hearts Of black men— Prayers their lips Are ’fraid to utter. And turn their coarseness Into a beauty of the jungle Whence they came. The lava from the black volcano Shall be words—the ashes—thoughts Of all men.12 Cowdery’s fecund metaphor of volcanic fire is intertwined with racial uplift in “Goal,” as her speaker locates the power to destroy race hatred within her own body. Molten lava spewing from a black volcano conveys an image of black rage as well as lethal menstrual blood, while allusions to wombs and nursing infants reinforce the gendering of the speaker’s power as specifically female. Her thoughts are the volcano’s hot ashes, and in the poem’s final stanza, its lava is her tongue that will utter the words that turn the thoughts of all men into ashes. Other poems from the late 1920s also feature speakers who draw on nature’s power for their inspiration in a landscape infused with female erotic energy. “Of the Earth,” for example, published in the May 1928 issue of

162  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Carolina Magazine, features a black earth goddess who kisses the sun, defies satanic efforts to defeat her with “verdant joyous prayer,” and yet sheds unending tears over deep sources of anguish. A mountain Is earth’s mouth . . . She thrusts her lovely Sun painted lips To the clouds . . . for heaven’s kiss. A tree Is earth’s soul . . . She raises her verdant Joyous prayer To the slowly sinking sun And to evening’s dew. She flings her rugged defiance To hell’s grumbling wrath And deadly smile; Then rustles her thanksgiving To the dawn. A river Is earth’s tears . . . Flowing from her deep brown bosom To the horizon of Oblivion . . . O! Earth, why do you weep?13 Echoing New Negro tropes connoting endurance and struggles against racism in her portraits of a mountain, tree, and river, Cowdery draws attention to a black woman’s body—“lovely sun painted lips” pursed for a kiss, a “deep brown bosom” from which tears flow in rivers “to the horizon of oblivion.” “A Prayer,” published in The Crisis in September 1928, elaborates on Cowdery’s emerging portrait of a higher truth to which her nature-worshipping speakers have access. Repeating images from “Of the Earth,” it suggests that the goddess’s prayer and tears in that poem are prompted by the horrors of racism. The speaker witnesses in her mind’s eye the final

Shattered Mirror  T  163 journey of a “dark boy” trudging down “a dreary road blacker than night.” He sings and laughs to keep his spirits up but stumbles and staggers beneath his heavy load. Covered by “a long white mist,” the boy keeps climbing, and the speaker hears his anguished cries for mercy as a whip lashes his bleeding body. When day breaks, the boy is “cold and still / High on a bare bleak tree / His face upturned to heaven.” Overwhelmed by the scene, the speaker cannot get it out of her mind when images of the boy “in the heavens” come to her at twilight, and she begs to be taken there too: Lord, lift me up to the purple sky That lays its hand of stars Tenderly on my bowed head As I kneel high on this barren hill. My song holds naught but tears My prayer is but a plea. Lord, take me to the clouds To sleep . . . to sleep.14 Although eros is missing from “A Prayer,” and the poem lacks the vivid imagery of “Goal,” the repeated motifs of the boy’s prayers for mercy as he is being whipped, his dead face twisted grotesquely by a lynch rope, and the speaker’s own tears and prayer to join him recall the goddess’s tears in “Of the Earth.” In both poems, black female power and spirituality do battle with malevolent forces set loose at night, inflicting damage that evokes deep mourning, and “A Prayer” defines that evil as racism. Adding further significance to “A Prayer” is that it may be a response to Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “A Prayer,” which had appeared three months earlier in the same May 1928 issue of The Carolina Magazine in which “Of the Earth” was published. In it, we perhaps see Cowdery’s tendency to recall, revise, or riff on earlier poems by New Negro women. Although it’s possible that Cowdery did not have Dunbar-Nelson’s verse in mind when she wrote “A Prayer,” it is likely that she read Dunbar-Nelson’s sonnet of the same title when her own verse, “Of the Earth,” appeared in the same magazine; their poems were separated by only eight pages. Since her identically titled poem appeared three months later in The Crisis, Cowdery would have had time at least to write it in response. As we shall see, some of Cowdery’s verse from the late 1920s echoes titles of and lines from poems by Gwendolyn Bennett, Helene Johnson, and Angelina Weld Grimké, so “A Prayer” fits this larger pattern. In Dunbar-Nelson’s “A

164  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Prayer,” the speaker prays to remove bitterness from her heart to which she sees others succumbing: Lord, keep my soul from bitterness and sting, My heart from searing scorch and crushing blight; I would not, by my gloom, obscure the light Which might illumine rocks where others cling. Far better, Lord, my eager hands should bring Some little gift with my heart’s blood a-light, To this great good. Ere I shall merge in night, Let me not grovel, Lord, aloft, I’d sing. In Dunbar-Nelson’s second stanza, the speaker chastises victims of race hatred who have turned away from the power of God’s love: For those who stand with twisted fear-clenched hands, And heart’s red chalice brimming full of hate, See life’s gold gates swing open far too late, And peace go streaming by with hurried stare. Far better ’twere to face the hoarse-voiced crowd, And hoist love’s guidon in the turgid air.15 Cowdery’s “A Prayer,” in contrast, starkly describes a lynching and is set on “a dreary road / Blacker than night.” Its opening on the dark boy’s cries and unanswered prayers presents an image of martyred innocence, whereas Dunbar-Nelson begins with a speaker who prays to be delivered from bitterness and despair: “Ere I shall merge in night, / Let me not grovel, Lord,” she implores. Cowdery’s speaker, in dramatic counterpoint, kneels on a “barren hill” and prays to be transported to the lynched boy’s heavenly side: “Lord, lift me up to the purple sky / That lays its hand of stars / Tenderly on my bowed head.” “My song holds naught but tears,” she tells us, “My prayer is but a plea.” The two speakers pray for deliverance from strife, but DunbarNelson’s speaker asks to be spared the gloom from which Cowdery’s observer cannot extricate herself after witnessing such savage injustice. Cowdery explicitly attacked Dunbar-Nelson just two months after her own version of “A Prayer” appeared by pointedly dedicating to Alice Dunbar-Nelson a manifesto of New Negro youth, “The Young Voice Cries,” which appeared in Wallace Thurman’s single issue of Harlem in November 1928. Cowdery’s speaker challenges an older generation to accept the

Shattered Mirror  T  165 earthy sensuality of young poets who “send our singing into the wind” and blow away “ugly mists of dogmas and fear.” She asserts that this new group displays and celebrates the body, “the naked loveliness of things.” “We yearn to hear the beauty of truth from your lips,” she proclaims, “We look to see the naked loveliness of things . . . thru your eyes[,] a barren cliff . . . made a crimson rise of earth’s breast against the sky.” The failure of those who came before to embrace the new poetic vision, however, produces a declaration in the second stanza that the speaker’s generation of young voices will have to take the lead in moving the race forward: But We must be the roots Of the tree And push up alone Thru earth Rocky with prejudice And foul with smirking Horrors . . . Until at last We thrust our rough virile Bodies into the sun And lift verdant arms in prayer That we might drip soft rain On the budding flowers ’Neath our feet. The older poets to whom the speaker lays down her challenge are described as “deaf to our pleading” and “blind to our silent weeping,” and, she warns, they are in danger of being left behind: “Look not down in frowning anger! / Else tired of futile tears . . . / We blaze a new path into depths you / Cannot enter.” The last stanza frames the conflict as one between those who can see the naked beauty “of earth’s breast against the sky” and others who adhere to outmoded dogmas that reveal only “a barren cliff”: The young voice cries For the pagan loveliness Of a moon For the brazen beauty Of a jazz song . . .

166  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters The young voice Is hushed In silent prayer At beauty’s shrine . . . 16 Dunbar-Nelson’s “Cano—I Sing,” published in 1929, a year after the appearance of “The Young Voice Cries,” illustrates the older poet’s blending of religion with uplift and her alienation from the banner of art for art’s sake that young poets such as Cowdery proclaimed. The poem, which appeared in the issue of the American Inter-Racial Peace Committee Bulletin for October 1929, criticizes young New Negro artists as navel-gazing nihilists. That Dunbar-Nelson centers her jeremiad on a Christian god highlights Cowdery’s poetic landscape of nature’s “pagan loveliness” in “The Young Voice Cries,” which replaces “a barren cliff veiled in ugly mists of dogmas and fear” with an earth goddess’s crimson breast. Dunbar-Nelson describes the new poets in disparaging terms: Let others sing in their intricate strophes Of sorrow and grim despair And wail of the snares that beset the race, Of the hate that befouls the air; Let them beat their breasts at the lynching tree, And clench their fists at the sky— My soul sinks, too, but I will not wail, I know there’s a God on high. Dunbar-Nelson’s speaker acknowledges that injustices plague the earth, especially the horrors of lynching and racism, but urges the young to turn away from what she considers useless rage and embrace a loving Christian optimism: Let despairing youth carve in their cameos, Black, lurid, and hellish hate; Paint a Japanese couplet to emblazon the screed That Christ came to earth too late; ’Twas ever the way of the young to forget That Love is the one great rule; Through ultimate tears this lesson is drilled, For this God sends us to school.17

Shattered Mirror  T  167 Cowdery’s boldness in arguing with an adopted Philadelphian, one of the senior leaders of the New Negro Movement and the widow of the revered Paul Laurence Dunbar, is noteworthy given that she was only nineteen when she published “The Young Voice Cries” and Dunbar-Nelson was a prominent civil rights activist and well-regarded poet. We see in her challenging riposte Cowdery’s fierce identification with rebellious young writers dedicated to pursuit of beauty, sensuality, exploration of the moment, and feelings rather than adherence to religious tenets or political imperatives as an expression of New Negro modernity. Using DunbarNelson as a representative of the older generation that she felt was opposed to the new poetry, Cowdery embraced worship of nature and emotion as a pathway to liberation and equality, not submission to a Christian god or standards of middle-class propriety. The verses for which Cowdery won The Crisis’s Krigwa Prize, “Lamps” and “Longings,” both published in the magazine’s December 1927 issue, amplify this conjoining of nature worship, celebration of dark female bodies, and pursuit of racial justice as a new paradigm of liberation fashioned by the young. In “Lamps,” the speaker describes holy receptacles of “Ivory, Gold, Bronze and Ebony” “in the tabernacles of the most high” as human bodies whose “life is the light”: “Swinging aloft in great Cathedrals / Beaming on rich and poor alike—are lamps. / Flickering fitfully in harlot dives / Wanton as they that dwell therein—are lamps.” Instead of ministers, priests, and preachers leading the way toward God’s truth, the poem features ordinary people from all walks of life moving toward a better world, even prostitutes. “You and I are lamps—Ebony lamps,” the speaker declares. “Our flame glows red and rages high within.” Appearing in the same 1927 issue, “Longings” echoes Helene Johnson’s “Fulfillment,” published in the June 1926 issue of Opportunity, which also proceeds with a series of stanzas beginning with infinitives.18 Cowdery’s speaker is alone, in contrast to the speaker in “Lamps,” but the poem similarly foregrounds the human body as a gateway to enlightenment and a better world. She finds her way to a higher truth through a moonlit dance, dreams, folk songs, and immersion of her nude body in a pool lit by the dawn’s first light. In stanza two, the speaker tells us that one of her longings is to fall asleep in a jungle and be cradled by the earth’s maternal body: To dream— ’Neath the bamboo trees On the sable breast

168  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Of earth— And listen to the wind. Stanza four brings the speaker’s naked body into view as she yearns to see the sun rise while floating on water: To plunge— My brown body In a golden pool, And lazily float on the swell Watching the rising sun. Only after satisfying these sensual desires does the speaker arrive at her last longing—to climb up to the top of a mountain and commune with a higher power: To stand— On a purple mountain Hidden from earth By mists of dreams And tears— To talk— With God.19 As did Angelina Grimké and Gwendolyn Bennett, Cowdery casts nature as an alternative to manmade religious institutions and portrays that landscape as ruled by a female deity. All three poets infuse erotic images of pastoral beauty into a higher plane of spirituality as their speakers celebrate a goddess of the night. If Grimké created a religion of desire ruled by Venus and Bennett a queenly ruler of the night sky, Cowdery set in motion a seductive dark female sexuality that communed with God. “Totality,” from her 1936 collection, elaborates on the godlike wisdom that she had iterated in the 1927 “Longings.” “Totality” features a speaker who imagines herself inhabiting the realm of the earth goddess who was so central to Cowdery’s cosmology. “I turned my thoughts inward today / As I sat on a high and lonely hillside,” it begins. And it seemed that I outgrew my body For when I stretched out my left hand

Shattered Mirror  T  169 I gathered all the seas And with my right hand Upheld the mountains. And when I laid down I covered all the earth And when I unbound my hair It covered all the heavens And when my eyes opened It was dawn And when my lids drooped It was night. Here the speaker enters the body of the goddess described in the 1928 “Of the Earth” and is transported to the center of all life: When I drew breath It seemed as tho’ I inhaled Winds from the four corners Of the world. And in my ear flowed All the music of the universe . . . As in “Goal,” from 1927, the speaker is filled with divine power: “And then . . . . when at last / I spoke . . . . God’s voice was mine.” Suddenly great peace Came upon me . . . and fear left . . . and sorrow . . . And I knew that I was God And God was me. That I was all mankind And all mankind was me! “Totality” positions the speaker as an ordinary woman who can transcend her limited existence once she realizes there is no separation between her body and the natural world. She ecstatically embraces her connection to every beautiful thing on the planet and thus feels empowered to speak with infinite knowledge:

170  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters I returned at last to my small self But I saw with new eyes And walked with new vigor And I knew great love And great content . . . And when I spoke aloud . . . or silently . . . God spoke For God was me And I was God!20 Claiming no less than a right to inhabit the universe, to speak with God’s voice, Cowdery created a poetic canvas that asserted her power as a black woman “to see the naked loveliness of things” and to celebrate her sexuality as a holy part of creation. Nina Miller’s comments on women’s lyric poetry of the Harlem Renaissance as “the projection of an unassailable and free-standing feminine self ” apply particularly well to the speaker’s godlike vision in “Totality”: “Seeming to escape time and the social contract, suffused with the emotion of a single consciousness, the lyric poem echoes the perfect self-sufficiency of pre-Oedipal subjectivity, that state before the fall into ‘lack’—of maternal nurturance, of personal wholeness, of an unmediated relation to the universe—a state characterized by the utopian fullness of plenitude.”21 That sexuality is central to Cowdery’s transcendent vision is brought to the fore in “The Wind Blows,” published in the fall 1927 issue of Opportunity. This was the poem she chose to open her 1936 collection, We Lift Our Voices. It echoes Bennett’s sonnet “Wind,” which was published in Opportunity in 1924.22 In Bennett’s piece, however, the wind is a masculine destructive force that rips up trees. In contrast, Cowdery’s “The Wind Blows” features a female speaker whose sexuality is brought to life and nourished by the wind: The wind blows— My soul is like a tree Lifting its face to the sun, Flinging wide its branches To catch the falling rain, To breathe into itself a fragrance Of far-off fields of clover,

Shattered Mirror  T  171 Of hidden vales of violets— The wind blows— It is spring! The erotic undertones of a tree flinging wide its branches to receive a spring shower and savor the fragrance of flowers associated with love are brought to the surface in stanza two: The wind blows— My soul is like sand Hot, burning sand That drifts, and drifts, Caught by the wind Swirling, stinging, smarting, Silver in the moonlight Soft breath of lovers’ feet— Lulled to sleep by the lap of waves, The wind blows— It is summer!23 This second stanza, set on a moonlit night at the edge of a sea where lovers fall asleep after hot burning sand swirls about them, stings and smarts, is a veiled allusion to lovemaking and Aphrodite’s arrival on a shore accompanied by birds and flowers. These lovers, however, are cast in moonlight. They come alive at night and fall into a peaceful slumber on the hot sand that whips against their nude bodies. The imagery in “The Wind Blows” lies at the center of Cowdery’s one piece of fiction, “Lai-Li,” published in the second issue of Black Opals in 1927, which provides a narrative frame for her larger poetic landscape of moonlight, shorelines, flowers, darkness, seductive dancing, fire, and song. In the story, Aphrodite is brought to life as a black woman who lures a white fisherman to her island at night. “Lai-li was dancing in the moonlight . . . . Once more. Her brown body gleamed like gold in its path.” This is the second time the white fishing captain has encountered Lai-li and he is now old, suffering from a bad cough, as we find out later when his shipmates come ashore looking for him. He has jumped ship to look for his nighttime lover, whom he had foolishly cast aside in his youth for sexual adventure, “a regular circus in all the sea ports.” Seeking forgiveness,

172  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters he whispers her name in the dark and slowly she appears, dancing: “There was no sound save for the pounding of his heart and the magic melody of the waves rolling slowly to shore. . . . . . . . . . . .” Afraid that Lai-li has forgotten their youthful encounter, the captain is overjoyed to realize she is embracing him: “Her golden arms were twining around his neck. Her body yielded, as on that night—so long ago. Her lids drooped over eyes like midnight pools, hiding the fire within. . . . . . . . Her lips were cool, like dew, on his feverish ones. . . . . . . . ” Shocked to find how stiff he has grown and that he cannot carry her to the shadows for lovemaking as he did the first time, the captain begs her not to disappear: “Lai-li! Lai-li! Do not go! Stay! Stay! I am coming! I . . . . . . . . am . . . . . . . . coming.” The scene ends with a cloud passing over the moon and the waves suddenly pausing, signaling the lovers’ carnal reunion: “Again two figures danced a jungle dance in the moonlight. . . . . . . . Cold and ivory blending, caressed by the moon’s silver breath. . . . . . . . Two figures slept once more in the soft embrace of the sand, watched over by the cool shadows. . . . . . . . Two loved once more. . . . . . . .” The next day the captain’s shipmates come ashore looking for him, concerned because he has been deathly ill. Finding his lifeless body, they decide to leave him there. “Poor ole Capt. I’m glad he’s happy! Lookit the smile on his face! There ain’t a blooming wrinkle on it. I’m so glad he’s happy. . . . . . . . ”24 The story is full of clichés and is not very well written, but it fleshes out Cowdery’s emerging portrait of female sexual power set free within natural settings and speakers’ transcendence of manmade barriers through the consummation of sexual longings. Not only are the lovers in “Lai-Li” able to overcome time, geographic distance, and racial segregation, they overcome death itself as they joyfully emerge on the shore when the captain’s ship departs onto the open sea: “The two on its deck failed to see . . . . . . . . to hear . . . . . . . . Lai-li and the “Capt.” walking arm in arm (as of yore) and singing to them a farewell song . . . . . . . . could not see their figures blend in the spray of the waves as their lips met.”

Erotic Poetry of the Moment The verses extolling a poet’s power to tear down walls of prejudice and those mapping out a terrain of higher truth on which dark female bodies merge seamlessly with wind, water, mountains, and trees formed a New

Shattered Mirror  T  173 Negro foundation for Cowdery’s most erotic poetry—lyrical descriptions of fleeting intimacy. It is in these poems that Cowdery begins to build a more modernist persona, based on a speaker who gives voice to her very human lust, vulnerabilities, and heartache. Some of these continue the theme of harmonious merger between speakers’ souls and nature when they find intimate connection. “Nameless,” for example, which appeared in the last issue of Black Opals in 1928, foregrounds sexual passion as integral to the natural world: How like the restless beating Of our hearts Is the surge of the sea; How like the tumult Of our souls Is the lashing of the storm; How like the yearning In our song Is the wind, How like a prayer Is night.25 The better-written and more explicitly erotic “Farewell,” published in the February 1929 issue of The Crisis, similarly portrays sexual ecstasy in metaphors drawn from the natural world, but the rhetoric is innovatively spare and direct, unlike the somewhat clichéd “Nameless.” The opening stanzas describe the speaker’s nude body as a “dark heaving ocean” set in motion by a lover’s sure hand and lips so lush that she opens herself in sweet surrender to sexual arousal. It begins: No more The feel of your hand On my breast Like the silver path Of the moon On dark heaving ocean No more The rumpled softness Of your hair

174  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Like wind In leafy shadowed trees. No more The lush sweetness Of your lips Like dew On new-opened moon flowers. The speaker ruefully recalls whole nights spent in the wake of blissful intimate connection and her lover’s “drowsy murmurings” now replaced by the silence of predawn solitude: No more The poignant melody Of hours spent Between moonlight And sunrise Like the song Of a crystal river Going out to sea . . .26 Such foregrounding of female sexuality was rare in New Negro poetry by women; we have seen how Grimké and Bennett left most of their erotic poetry unpublished. Cowdery, however, found early on in the body’s desires and longings rich terrain for bringing to light hidden truths, and she went beyond even Bennett’s more open approach to sexual imagery. Whatever those truths were, Cowdery’s speakers declared, they connected the woman who voiced them to divine knowledge. Cowdery’s best poetry focuses on love’s ephemeral moments of union followed by inevitable separation within a discourse that sounds quite near to our own. “Some Hands Are Lovelier,” for example, from the 1936 collection, describes brief encounters as central to the beauty of love affairs. The poem compares intimate contact with such lovers to the communion of two trees breathing “the same sweet air.” Whose branches touch And now withdraw . . . and meet again In undreamed ecstasy.

Shattered Mirror  T  175 The poem celebrates temporary bliss: Some lips are sweeter To capture in mad beauty And then release— Some hands are lovelier To clasp awhile— And then, let go!27 A similar awareness of intimacy’s timeless beauty, residing as it does outside life’s predictable rhythms, lies at the heart of her collection’s “Love Song for Summer”: With your breath upon my cheek There is no spring nor autumn . . . Only when distance stretches Long grey arms between us Do I know whether A rain-wind or a sun-breeze Has blown across my face. With your lips on my lips There is no dawn nor dark. . . . Only when we are apart Is there a space between Noon-sun and evening star. With your heart on my heart There is no time nor place. . . . I live in a world Made from the glamour of my love And the tempestuous beauty Of your desire. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28 That the moment of intense intimacy was fated to disappear enhanced its compelling power in these verses that celebrate desire as a vital part of living life to its fullest. The collection’s “Lines to a Sophisticate” articulates this dedication to sexual experience unbound by commitment or possessiveness:

176  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Never would I seek To capture you with tempestuous ardor Nor hold you at arm’s length In carnal anticipation . . . . But like a wine of rare vintage I would savor and sip slowly That I might know each separate scent Of your elusive fragrance. Never would I seek to capture all your beauty And imprison it in the mouldy bottle of my lust, Rather would I pour it into the chalice of my love And let its bouquet escape to mingle with the air That I might breathe again your perfume Long after you are gone . . . 29 The speaker’s frank references to “tempestuous ardor,” “carnal anticipation,” and the “mouldy bottle of my lust” expand significantly the boundaries of poetic expression for women. Cowdery appropriates sexual stances understood as masculine while creating a speaker whose sensuality emanates from a love so powerful it cannot be confined. She vows she will never try to possess her object of desire, for that would destroy the essence of intimacy. Only in allowing her lover complete freedom can the speaker plumb the depths of her desire.

Gender Bending in Erotic Poetry to Women and Men Although many of her love poems are not gender specific and some are clearly heterosexual, Cowdery published others in which the speaker describes a desired woman, placing her among the few New Negro writers to create what we now understand as lesbian verse but that emerged from a distinctly different cultural atmosphere than the one we have today. “Insatiate,” also published in her collection, frames the speaker’s libidinous desire for other sexual partners as a drive that would be instantly cut short if her female lover were to make overtures to anyone else. If my love were meat and bread And sweet cool wine to drink,

Shattered Mirror  T  177 They would not be enough For I must have a finer table spread To sate my entity. If her lips were rubies red, Her eyes two sapphires blue, Her fingers ten sticks of white jade, Coral tipped . . . and her hair of purple hue Hung down in a silken shawl . . . . They would not be enough To fill the coffers of my need. If her thoughts were arrows Ever speeding true Into the core of my mind, And her voice round notes of melody No nightingale or lark Could ever hope to sing . . . . Not even these would be enough To keep my constancy. But if my love did whisper Her song into another’s ear Or place the tip of one pink nail Upon another’s hand Then would I forever be A willing prisoner . . . Chained to her side by uncertainty!30 “Insatiate” not only repeats the sexual appetite of the speaker in “Lines to a Sophisticate,” it also brings to the surface the latter poem’s possible female love object, whose “beauty,” “perfume,” and “elusive fragrance” overwhelm the speaker, for these are qualities more commonly associated with women. The lost lover in “Farewell” from 1929 is also ambiguously gendered; the speaker refers to “the rumpled softness of your hair like the wind in leafy shadowed trees.” The lover’s lips in “Farewell” are of such “lush sweetness” that they are “like dew on new opened Moon-flowers,” an image that can be applied to labia, but the connection to an aroused woman is not explicitly made. “Insatiate,” however, makes clear that the

178  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters lover is a woman with ruby red lips, delicate fingers, painted nails, and long purple hair. There is no doubt that the speaker is in love with a compellingly beautiful woman. It is unclear when “Lines to a Sophisticate” and “Insatiate” were written, since they were only published in the 1936 collection, but two of Cowdery’s earliest love poems also portray women as the speaker’s love object. “Dusk,” an imagist octave published in the 1927 anthology Ebony and Topaz, captures the speaker’s desire as she gazes upon a beautiful woman: Like you Letting down your Purple-shadowed hair To hide the rose and gold Of your loveliness And your eyes peeping thru Like beacon lights In the gathering darkness.31 The startling eroticism of “Dusk” is in part due to the speaker’s direct address of a “you” rather than a more general audience, a “you” who is a woman seductively covering herself by letting down her long gorgeous hair, while her glowing eyes boldly return the speaker’s appreciative gaze. The darkening room highlights the sexual tension set up in the first lines as the speaker gazes upon a woman’s lovely body. “Dusk” recalls the similarly imagistic “Dusk” by Angelina Grimké, which Opportunity published in April 1924 and Countee Cullen reprinted in Caroling Dusk in 1927: Twin stars through my purpling pane, The shriveling husk Of a yellowing moon on the wane,— And the dusk.32 Cowdery echoes Grimké’s quatrain by using the same title and repeating a one-stanza image. She also substitutes a lover’s eyes for Grimké’s “twin stars.” Further revising Grimké’s “Dusk,” Cowdery presents a speaker who gazes at a flesh-and-blood woman as dusk falls, whereas Grimké’s speaker meditates alone on the darkening sky. In Grimké’s twilight po-

Shattered Mirror  T  179 ems, such as “Dusk,” the speaker is a woman devoted to Venus who becomes consumed with regret over lost love, while Cowdery’s speaker in “Dusk” savors a moment of intimate connection with a real woman in private space. “Time” is another early poem in which Cowdery portrays a woman lover. It appeared in the Christmas 1927 issue of Black Opals, guest-edited by Gwendolyn Bennett. Here the lover is also compared to dusk. She is described as dark-skinned, unlike the speaker’s previous longing for someone “soft and white.” I used to sit on a high green hill And long for you to be like the clouds, Soft and white . . . . . . . . And your eyes be like heaven’s blue And your hair like the tree sifted sun . . . . . . . . But then I was young, and my eyes yet Round with wonder. Now I sit by an endless road and watch As you come . . . . . . . . swiftly like dusk Your hair like a starless night Your eyes like deep violet shadows, And soft arms cradle me on your sweet Brown breast . . . . . . . . for I have grown old And my eyes hold unshed tears, And my face is lean and hard in daylight’s Mocking glare. But with the night Dusk fingers and lips like dew Erase each wound of time And my eyes grow round with wonder At your beauty.33 The speaker’s wounds from unspecified encounters are healed by a woman’s dark fingers and lips as she is enfolded in her arms and cradled on her breast. The speaker characterizes herself as having been hurt so deeply that she has become like a stone, but her youthful ideals of love are reawakened by this brown woman’s tender embrace.

180  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Among the poems Cowdery shared with Langston Hughes in their correspondence of the late 1920s was a now-lost verse that might have been an early version of “Poem . . . for a Lover,” which was published later in We Lift Our Voices. Her comment to him about it provides evidence that she may have consciously addressed women in some of her love poetry. The published poem alludes in the last stanza to “gay little songs / And lips . . . redder / Than bitter-sweet berries” and its subject is ambiguously gendered: I would give you The blue-violet dreams Of clouds . . . forgotten And left to grow old In the sky. I would give you The dew-drenched hope Of flowers . . . . forgotten By a long dead lover And left in a garden to die. But you have no need Of my meager gifts With your gay little songs And lips . . . redder Than bitter-sweet berries Left on a leafless bush By the frost . . . 34 Hughes evidently assumed that Cowdery wrote this or a similar poem she had sent him with a male friend of theirs in mind, but she corrected him: “I remember the incident, without the ‘subtle’ reminder from you. You may rest assured I wasn’t speaking of the ‘other guy’s’ red lips. . . . In fact, if I remember clearly there was no one person in mind . . . . . but perhaps it was a subconscious wish . . . . . and maybe a memory, but not of our friend. Wow.”35 Calling attention to Hughes’s gendered characterization of the subject of her piece by quoting and underlining the terms he used, she implies with a question mark that red lips are not likely to be

Shattered Mirror  T  181 those of a man. Not only does she make clear that her poetry is not always addressed to a real person or drawn from a specific experience, she seems to indicate an awareness that her reference to red lips points away from a male subject. The androgynous photo of Cowdery that appeared in the January 1928 issue of The Crisis reflects what appears to have been her consistent comfort level with gender bending (see Figure 15). This issue honored the winners of its literary contest, in which she took first place in December 1927. Wearing what appears to be a dark suit with a corsage and white shirt adorned with a silk bow tie, Cowdery wears tiny hoop earrings and her hair is styled close to the head—shaved on the back and sides with short curls rakishly arranged on her forehead. Unlike the other female prizewinners, all of whom wore soft dresses and looked directly at the camera, Cowdery’s dancing eyes glance to the left, creating a dramatic profile of mischievousness, flirtation, and independence. This photograph of Cowdery conveys a decidedly modernist bohemianism. Although her allusions to female lovers can be read as lesbian verse, it is important to note that Cowdery’s lyrics are sometimes addressed to a man, such as “Love in These Days” published in the June 1928 issue of Black Opals, which depicts the end of a love affair: Her eyes were hard And his bitter As they sat and watched The fire fade From the ashes of their love. Then they turned And saw the naked autumn wind Shake the bare autumn trees, And each one thought As the cold came in— . . . . . . . . “It might have been.” . . . . . . . . 36 Further complicating our view of her sexual orientation, Cowdery married twice, and there is evidence that she was attracted to men even as she composed love lyrics to women. She wrote to Langston Hughes, for instance, of her disappointment that his friend, Lee Raye, had discouraged her from making a planned trip to Lincoln University: “Mr. Raye suddenly

182  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters states that he does not want me to come out on the 16th! (Suspicious!), giving as reasons—it will be too expensive—you won’t have a good time. [. . .] Now don’t you agree with me that this is a rather sudden & queer change? Of course I listened to the reasons he gave but believed them not! My conclusion is—‘Another Woman’! or The Reason for the Nursery! Now your services are required to find out the REAL reason and let me know toute de suite.”37 In a later message, she alluded to a romantic relationship with Raye that had gone sour: “I am really sorry to hear that Lee is sick—it’s not serious I hope, Langston, I wish I knew what happened to him Xmas[;] it’s more than I can figure out. All I can say is that he hurt me terribly & I don’t think I can ever trust him again—not even as a friend. “Nothing lasts forever.” So it is with Lee’s love for me!”38 In other letters, Cowdery confided to Hughes that she was attracted to his close friend Melvin Ross: “But no foolin’ Lang—I’ve got one of those crushes on your boy-friend . . . . But I’m afraid I register below par in his estimation. I have a most uncanny feeling that I bore him terribly . . . . . if I do, well I won’t bother to write anymore . . . . . I hate to bore people unnecessarily . . . . . Tell me what to do will you . . . It’s only a crush . . . I at least want my crush to like me, but I don’t think this one does. I know I sound terribly silly & school-girlish . . . awful dumb . . . but I can’t help it . . . . you know how ’tis.”39 In a later letter proposing that she get together with Hughes during the Penn Relays, she recounted a surprise visit from Mel at Easter that only reinforced her “crush” on him: That boy is a riot . . . . . even my mother has a crush on him. She said he was the cutest boy she’s ever seen at 222! Even as I write this letter, Dad is playing “How about Me?” . . . . . Melvin spent the most part of his visit at the piano trying to get that piece . . . . . I hope he has it by now. And then I saw him Easter Monday . . . . . & I think that while my seeing him merely increased my so-called “crush,” I think that I have let myself down in his opinion . . . . I did the dumbest thing Monday. But, after all, he may not have even noticed it. [. . .] I realize I’m doing a very foolish thing in letting myself get such an awful case on said person, I should know better . . . . shouldn’t I? And I’ve made resolutions not to fall in love again with anyone. Of course I haven’t gone that far, we can’t do that without a little reciprocation . . . . but it won’t take much. Fortunately he doesn’t know it & I don’t think you’ll let me down. ’Cause he is so damn sweet . . . . 40

Shattered Mirror  T  183 Cowdery was clearly attracted to Hughes’s male friends, and her frank description of Melvin Ross as Hughes’s “boy-friend” suggests a level of comfort with same-sex love as a legitimate form of intimacy. There are other hints in the letters that she was comfortable with elastic gender roles. Thanking Hughes for the fine time she had with her friend Frances Waugh when they visited Lincoln University, for instance, she wrote: “I really enjoy coming out there to see you, ’cause it’s such a relief not to be “pawed” on & handed a line[;] you & Melvin are both unique in that respect. Frances said it was quite a discovery . . . . .”41 Although it’s impossible to identify the actual lovers or friends who may have inspired the love poems written with female or unclearly gendered subjects, Cowdery would have had many opportunities to socialize with lesbian, gay, and bisexual bohemians from Greenwich Village and Harlem after she moved to New York in the fall of 1927 to attend the Pratt Institute.42 Just after graduating from high school, Cowdery entered the vibrant center of New York, where she studied art in Brooklyn for at least one academic year and became part of the literary group she yearned to join. She may also have enrolled briefly at New York University, for a photo of her looking very much like a flapper appeared in the January 1928 issue of The Afro-American with Hunter College student Louise Pelham, and the caption described her as “Miss Mae Cowdrey [sic] of New York University” (see Figure 16).43 Mae’s joy at being in New York was expressed

Figure 16. “Both Brains and Beauty Here,” Baltimore Afro-American, January 28, 1928. Mae Cowdery (right) and Louise Pelham. Cowdery is described as a recent winner in The Crisis prize context for versification and as a student at New York University. Louise Pelham is described as specializing in domestic art at Hunter College. Courtesy of Afro-American Newspapers Archives.

184  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters in a December 10, 1928 letter to Hughes from her parents’ home; she wrote glowingly of a trip she had just made to Harlem nightclubs and her attendance of the hit Broadway show Blackbirds: “Gee! the ‘Big City’ was gorgeous! And I had a perfectly marvelous time! [. . .] Of cose [sic] I went to see Black birds! and Lankie . . . . ‘I Must Have that Man!’ . . . . . . . ‘O! What a Nite!’” In Harlem of the 1920s and early 1930s, same-sex love appeared in bawdy blues songs by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Gladys Bentley, who performed in cabarets and clubs and at private parties and drag balls.44 These were sites of a vibrant postwar gay culture and were associated with the most hedonistic aspects of the Roaring Twenties. In the same 1928 letter to Hughes in which she described a visit to Harlem clubs, Cowdery casually commented on the gender ambiguity of some of the patrons: “I went to Sugar Cane with all the low-down scrumpty negroes . . . . and then to Club Harlem with all the nice little white ‘boys’(?) and the rest of the low-down painful O! Fays!”45 Lillian Faderman’s analysis of the decade’s fascination with “lesbian chic” and bisexual experimentation sheds light on these comments and on Cowdery’s erotic poetry directed at both men and women: In addition to the effects of Freud and the war, bisexual experimentation was also encouraged in some circles by a new value placed on the unconventional and daring. By the 1920s, young American intellectuals, bohemians, and generic nonconformists were determined to rout with a vengeance the last vestiges of Victorianism in the country. . . . But although the “heterosexuals” in such places may have played for a while with homosexuality, they generally did not see themselves as homosexual. Since “homosexual” was in the process of becoming an identity, one now might feel forced to choose either to accept or reject that label. But an erotic interest in another female, and even sex with another female, was not necessarily sufficient to make a woman a lesbian. She might consider her experiences simply bisexual experimentation, which was even encouraged in certain milieus.46 Faderman locates bisexuality specifically in metropolitan regions such as New York and especially in Harlem, which, she asserts, was a magnet for people of all races interested in “rebel sexuality” and a haven for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals: “While there were black lesbians in 1920s Harlem

Shattered Mirror  T  185 who committed themselves to ‘the life’ and sometimes lived with other women . . . many who had affairs with other females were married to men. . . . Among Harlem women of wealth or fame, bisexuality was not uncommon, though few would have admitted to exclusive homosexuality. Perhaps to Harlem sophisticates, who in this respect do not appear to have been very different from white sophisticates of the 1920s, the former seemed like adventure.”47 This was the milieu to which Cowdery flew in 1927, and the fact that she did not adopt a clear male persona in her lyric poetry addressed to women encourages us to read her speakers as female, especially in verses she published while living in New York. Her bold portrayal of both genders as objects of desire in the published verse while using an “I” point of view is a significant departure not only from her nineteenth-century predecessors but also from other New Negro women poets. As Keith D. Leonard says, “Cowdery’s poems are noteworthy for their explicit treatment of sexuality, a topic that many women poets avoided, perhaps due to their consciousness of negative stereotypes.”48 Angelina Grimké’s Sapphic poetry of desire is comparably radical, but it remained unpublished, aside from “A Mona Lisa,” as did Gwendolyn Bennett’s heterosexual erotic verse. Public literary representations of same-sex love carried the risk of public condemnation, as we see most dramatically in the obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall after publication of The Well of Loneliness in 1928. That Mae Cowdery failed to be intimidated by that risk, particularly in straitlaced Philadelphia, suggests how firmly she adhered to a vision of the artist as truth teller and seer. If immersion in the moment or the plumbing of the body’s desires meant crossing gender boundaries, her poetry seems to say, the true artist does not succumb to dogma of any sort, and she helped open a door to openly lesbian poetry many decades later.

A New Negro Rebel from Philadelphia The bohemian sensibility underlying Mae Cowdery’s poetry and her artistic ambition were an unlikely outcome of her staid Philadelphia upbringing. To appreciate her youthful daring, it’s important to reconstruct the particularly confining social atmosphere for Philadelphia’s black professional class, a group to which her parents and grandparents belonged. The Cowdery family’s relatively affluent status in black Philadelphia and membership in its professional community as government workers and caterers required them to participate in formal dances, philanthropic work in

186  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters betterment societies, and membership in private clubs. Although Philadelphia’s largely poor black population was confined to a few South Philadelphia wards where they could find only low-end working-class jobs, a small group of doctors, lawyers, businessmen, teachers, and social workers were making inroads into white areas such as Germantown at the city’s north end, where the Cowderys lived at 222 W. Penn Street.49 Lemuel Cowdery and Mary Wilson had been married in one of the oldest black churches in Philadelphia, African St. Thomas Church, an Episcopalian congregation, in 1906, and they appear to have been well integrated into Germantown’s black middle class. They enrolled their only child in the predominantly white Philadelphia High School for Girls and the African American social club of the Girl Reserves. Mary played a dual role as homemaker and assistant director of the Bureau for Colored Children, while Lemuel worked at the post office.50 The Cowderys and Wilsons had been well known and highly respected in Philadelphia since the late nineteenth century. Born in Philadelphia in 1879, Lemuel was the youngest child of Martin Van Buren Cowdery, a caterer, and his wife, Anna Powell.51 Mae’s mother, Mary Valentine Wilson, after whom Mae was named, was an only child who arrived in Philadelphia with her parents from New Orleans sometime after her birth on Valentine’s Day in 1879.52 Mary’s father, Charles B. Wilson, a teacher and journalist, served as deputy grand master in the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows in the late nineteenth century, a prestigious post that placed him at the center of Philadelphia’s emerging black middle class.53 W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1899 landmark study The Philadelphia Negro identified the Caterers’ Guild, to which Mae’s paternal grandfather belonged, as one of the two most powerful organizations there in the late nineteenth century: “The whole catering business, arising from an evolution shrewdly, persistently and tastefully directed, transformed the Negro cook and waiter into the public caterer and restaurateur, and raised a crowd of underpaid menials to become a set of self-reliant, original businessmen, who amassed fortunes for themselves and won general respect for their people.”54 Martin Van Buren Cowdery was one of the post–Civil War immigrants Du Bois described who started as a cook and waiter and then became a caterer. Lawrence Graham also identifies occupation groups such as the caterers and social organizations such as the Odd Fellows as the foundation for what he termed Philadelphia’s black upper class: “Whereas the crowds or cliques in Atlanta and Nashville were formed around the various black colleges, Philadelphia had no black universities, thus leaving the divisions to

Shattered Mirror  T  187 be drawn around certain professions—mostly the legal and medical professions. And there were also entrepreneurs.”55 Both of Cowdery’s grandfathers, Martin Van Buren Cowdery and Charles Wilson, penetrated this elite entrepreneurial class, and historian Roger Lane lists them, along with Lemuel Cowdery, as among the most affluent and respected members of Philadelphia’s nineteenth-century black population.56 By the turn of the century, however, the Caterers’ Guild had weakened, according to Du Bois, the victim of changing economic forces when white foreign immigrants began to dominate the city’s hotels and restaurants.57 This reversal of fortune is reflected in the career of Mae Cowdery’s father. Although he started as a caterer in his father’s business, Lemuel Cowdery became a window clerk at the 30th Street Main Station of the U.S. Postal Service in the early twentieth century, the only federal job open to African Americans. He held that post for thirty-six years, until his death at age sixty-five in 1945.58 Although the Cowderys were well off compared to the vast majority of African Americans struggling to make ends meet as domestic servants and laborers, Du Bois makes clear that people of their class were hemmed in by racist employment patterns in Philadelphia that severely limited access to well-paid jobs. He asserts that their incomes paled in comparison to those of upper-class whites: “Even more than the rest of the race [prosperous African Americans] feel the difficulty of getting on in the world by reason of their small opportunities for remunerative and respectable work. . . . A white Philadelphian with $1500 a year can call himself poor and live simply. A Negro with $1500 a year ranks with the richest of his race and must usually spend more in proportion than his white neighbor in rent, dress and entertainment.59 Du Bois documented at length the futile attempts of well-educated black Philadelphians to find professional or white-collar jobs at the turn of the century. Those with degrees in law, medicine, or mechanical engineering were unable to find work in the city’s white law firms, hospitals, or industrial plants. Women with college degrees could teach only in black schools, primarily at the elementary level.60 Although all black people suffered from racist employment patterns, Du Bois maintained that they hit people of this educated group with terrible force: “What becomes of the graduates of the many schools of the city? The answer is simple: Most of those who amount to anything leave the city, the others take what they can get for a livelihood. . . . It is the better class of educated Philadelphia-born Negroes who have the most difficulty in obtaining employment.”61

188  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Vincent Jubilee similarly describes Philadelphia as a racist stronghold that presented formidable barriers to middle-class families such as the Cowderys. Indeed, he says, conditions worsened in the early twentieth century when blacks were barred from all central city restaurants, hotels, lunch counters, drugstore counters, and theaters. Jubilee provides the following summation of the city’s Jim Crow environment: “By the 1920s, Philadelphia Negroes experienced the negative effect of Southern migration as they were rejected and ostracized from virtually every facet of civic, economic, political and social life in Philadelphia.”62 Specifically mentioning racism at Cowdery’s high school while she was there, Jubilee documents the prejudice she faced: “Segregation of black students at Girls’ High, the school Mae V. Cowdery attended, was reported in a newspaper article in February, 1924. On January 31, 1925, another press notice reported that a black member of the graduate class from the same school was assigned a separate table at the class luncheon at MacAllister’s, a restaurant on Spring Garden Street.”63 Both Du Bois and Jubilee cite Philadelphia’s deeply entrenched racism as a major factor that inhibited the city’s young writers, who lacked the publication support, sites of interaction with other artists, and bohemian culture of New York. Indeed, it was the very thin line between penury and membership in the black professional class, they assert, that made ostentatious social activities so crucial to maintaining middle-class identity, another inhibiting force for artists. Du Bois rooted the preponderance of genteel social gatherings within Cowdery’s class in its narrow employment opportunities, because that was a way for middle-class blacks to distinguish themselves from a mass of common laborers: It is a class small in numbers and not sharply differentiated from other classes, although sufficiently so to be easily recognized. Its members are not to be met within the ordinary assemblages of the Negroes, nor in their usual promenading places. They are largely Philadelphia born, and being descended from the house-servant class, contain many mulattoes. . . . Their conversation turns on the gossip of similar circles among the Negroes of Washington, Boston and New York. . . . In the upper class alone has the home begun to be the centre of recreation and amusement. There are always to be found parties and small receptions and gatherings at the invitations of musical or social clubs. One large ball each year is usually given, which is strictly private. Guests from out of town are given much social attention.64

Shattered Mirror  T  189 Mae Cowdery’s activities in the 1920s enacted the social realm of debutante leisure of her class that Du Bois describes. Her appearances in society columns of the black press at the time Cowdery started publishing paint a picture of party life, but the staid settings are miles apart from Hughes’s bohemian circle and there is no sign of an ambitious young poet drawn to artistic centers of the Jazz Age fluent in the argot of “flaming youth.” The contrast between the profiles of Cowdery in her personal correspondence with Hughes and in these columns points to challenging fault lines as she tried to be a new kind of poet while remaining enmeshed in Philadelphia’s tight circle of bourgeois respectability. Artistic expression battled with conventional expectations for black middle-class women in Philadelphia, and Cowdery’s poetic sensibility cut against the grain of a life path set before her. The combination of that discord and the disappearance of publishing outlets for black writers in the 1930s seems to have helped bring a premature end to Mae Cowdery’s promising career and may have cast an impenetrable shadow over her artistic sensibility. We get a sense of the social context in which Cowdery operated from the first newspaper mention of her in the July 5, 1924, issue of the Pittsburgh Courier, which reported on fifteen-year-old Mae’s participation in the Germantown YWCA’s fashion show benefit in June. It, like the columns that follow, provides a window on how wide the gulf was between her social position as a young woman of the city’s black professional class and her aspirations to join Hughes’s circle of revolutionary New Negro poets. “The hall was made to look like a lovely garden, with huge palms and lovely flowers used as decorations. The opening number was a dance by Aplenia Young. She acted as the page and announced the scene.” Cowdery is listed among the young women who acted out scenes in fashionable outfits: “Miss May Cowdery looked very sweet in her many costumes.”65 Similarly, the October 9, 1926, issue of the Courier details the high school graduation party Mae attended for a former Philadelphia resident, Dorothy Aldena Young, shortly before she wrote her October 8 letter to Hughes. It was hosted by the parents of Cowdery’s closest friend, Marion Virginia Turner, the daughter of a surgeon: “Auto riding, dinners, theatre parties, house parties and everything that would make a young debutante who has just graduated from a New York High School and is on her way to Washington, to take up the Academic Course at Howard [University], happy.” The reporter focuses on the party the Turners hosted, at which “May” Cowdery was a guest: “The evening was spent in dancing and song, terminating with an appetizing menu.”66 Similarly, a society column in the February 14, 1929, issue of the Philadel-

190  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters phia Tribune mentions Cowdery’s attendance at a dance “in a soft frock of powder blue taffeta.”67 Although Cowdery had already begun to publish verse in high-ranking New Negro journals and anthologies, these columns reveal that she was very much a part of Philadelphia’s social scene and moved among the polished debutantes of a black middle class that was grooming its daughters for marriage to lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, and other professionals who had attended historically black institutions such as Howard and Lincoln. It was a scene far removed from the circles in which Langston Hughes moved, and to which Cowdery was so powerfully attracted. Emblematic of her conservative upbringing is Cowdery’s membership in Philadelphia’s segregated YWCA social club, the Girl Reserves, which was established in 1918 for adolescents aged twelve to eighteen and open only to the city’s most affluent African American families. The slogan of the Girl Reserves was “Face Life Squarely,” but its rituals, emblems, and Christian foundation conflicted with Cowdery’s secular, even pagan, artistic vision. Cowdery, it seems, would have still been a member of the organization when she struck up her friendship with Hughes in 1926. The African American chapters of the Girl Reserves that sprang up across the country in 1922 included monthly meetings, choral presentations, service activities, camp outings, an insignia of a blue triangle hand-stitched by its members, and sedate uniforms. According to a web site on the Girl Reserves, the 1928 uniform consisted of a white middy blouse, a white or navy pleated skirt, a blue silk bandana tie, long cotton stockings, and dark low shoes.68 Its 1921 handbook, The Girl Reserves: A Guide for Every Loyal Blue Triangle Girl, makes clear this organization was dedicated to Christian religious principles and the development of sound character as girls transitioned from childhood to adult responsibilities. Its pledge reflects that conservative religious foundation:

As a Girl Reserve I will try to be

Gracious in manner Impartial in judgment Ready for Service Loyal to friends Reaching toward the best Earnest in purpose Seeing the beautiful Eager for knowledge

Shattered Mirror  T  191 Reverent to God Victorious over self Ever dependable Sincere at all times69 As a member of the Girl Reserves, Cowdery would have been encouraged to conform to mainstream middle-class values and norms of feminine behavior while dedicating herself to community service within a Christian framework. As late as February 9, 1929, when she was living in New York, the Courier noted that Cowdery attended a reunion of the Philadelphia Girl Reserves.70 That she participated in this event suggests a long-standing relationship with the organization during her adolescence, years when she was beginning to write poetry about the most intimate aspects of love and in which she expressed disdain for dogma, prejudice, and narrow-minded conformity. Illustrating the double world she inhabited at the dawn of her writing career is Cowdery’s attendance of the 1929 Penn Relays, an annual track and field competition open to all college students, white or black, that was held at the University of Pennsylvania. It was considered a premiere social gathering for the region’s most notable African Americans. A letter Cowdery wrote to Hughes during his senior year described her dull Easter holiday in Germantown and indicated that she intended to be at the Relays and wanted to set up a date with him: “Well, the Penn Relays’ll soon be here, & I suppose I’ll get a chance to see you . . . . Say Sunday at mealtime . . . . both you & Melvin! Now don’t make any dates for that day please! No doubt you’ll be in for the Omega Formal [a dance held by Hughes’s fraternity], I think it’s the Friday nite preceding.”71 Cowdery excitedly anticipated the day she would spend with the poet, even though she was suffering from a bad head cold. That the formal dances to which she alluded were starchy elite affairs and starkly unlike the unscripted visits with Hughes is evident in a Pittsburgh Courier account of the evening festivities inaugurating the Penn Relays on May 4, 1929. Cowdery’s friend, gossip columnist Bernice Dutrieuille, breathlessly described the dances Mae attended as “two brilliant formals staged just prior to the relays” and as “colorful proms staged by the various fraternities and sororities.” Beginning with the first weekend formal held at the Elks Club, Dutrieuille described the venue as “[a] very pretty ballroom [. . .] where Delta Sigma Theta sorority girls so elegantly held sway.” The women attending were described as glamorously attired: “beautiful faces enhanced by shimmer-

192  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters ing satins, web-like chiffons, silken velvets, and these in turn [were] embellished with glittering ornaments.” Twenty-year-old Cowdery and her friend Marion Turner were among the guests at the Omega Relay prom that was held by Hughes’s fraternity the following evening, according to this article: “Miss Cowdery [was] in blue taffeta, the shoulders and back of which were of blue velvet bands.”72 Despite glittering descriptions of the balls and parties she attended, the gowns she wore, and the elite company she kept, Cowdery lived in a small duplex that housed two families. Germantown was recognized as a primary location for the Old Guard black aristocracy, but its narrow streets, brick sidewalks, tiny yards, and simple house façades were a far cry from mansions of the white upper class.73 Her parents held down two demanding jobs to support what for a white family would have been a modest middle-class lifestyle. Her father died while he was still employed at age sixty-five, and her mother worked until she was past eighty.74 Roger Lane asserts that Philadelphia’s black balls in the late nineteenth century imitated those of white society: “[They] directly derived from the formal dances held by the city’s white elite.”75 Daily life for the black middle class, however, was highly restricted by de facto segregation and inscribed black subordination regardless of class status. Despite this imposition of racial boundaries and her parents’ modest incomes, maintaining an image of genteel aristocratic lineage was central to Mae Cowdery’s upbringing. If daughters were to be kept out of menial occupations or positioned for upward mobility in marriage, they needed to be schooled in the art of gracious living even if actual living meant doing your own housework, making every penny count, and enduring a narrowly restricted job market. In addition to being hemmed in by racism, Old Guard Philadelphia was not the most hospitable environment for a budding artist such as Cowdery. Vincent Jubilee relays that the city “lacked a ‘bohemian’ haven for its black writers” and describes a cultural milieu that provided “no atmospheric refuge for intellectuals and radical thinkers”: “Black middleclass Philadelphians demonstrated a greater inclination to model their progress after performances given before white upper and middle-class members of the Art Alliance and Franklin Inn Club.”76 Arthur Huff Fauset, who started the arts magazine Black Opals as an outlet for Philadelphia’s young writers, echoes Jubilee’s assessment of the city’s poor artistic resources: “Mae Cowdery lived all the way up in Germantown. . . . If there had been a place to meet, we could have had a permanent literary group.”77

Shattered Mirror  T  193 In his introductory essay for the inaugural issue of Black Opals, in which Cowdery debuted as a poet, Philadelphia-born Alain Locke painted an equally bleak picture of her social circle: “Philadelphia is the shrine of the Old Negro. . . . I was taught . . . to reverence my elders and fear God in my own village. But I hope Philadelphia youth will realize that the past can enslave more than the oppressor, and pride shackle stronger than prejudice. . . . The Negro needs background—tradition and the sense of breeding, to be sure. . . . But if the birth of the New Negro among us halts in the shell of conservatism, threatens to suffocate in the close air of self-complacency and snugness, then the eggshell must be smashed to pieces and the living thing freed.” Locke urged the city’s young writers to become “ugly ducklings, children too strange for the bondage of barnyard provincialism, who shall some day fly in the face of the sun and seek the open seas.”78 Despite a history of producing distinguished black writers such as Charlotte Forten Grimké, Frances E. W. Harper, and Jessie Fauset and world-class opera singer Marian Anderson, Philadelphia in the 1920s was not fertile terrain for New Negro art. It appears from her letters to Hughes that Cowdery chafed at the city’s confining strictures and inhospitable atmosphere. In a late 1928 missive, for instance, where she glowingly praised Hughes’s contributions to the November 1928 issue of Harlem, Mae derisively mocked her town: “Gee! Thanksgiving is certainly here almost too soon . . . . Why Xmas’ll be here before I know what’s all about. What are you planning for that gala season . . . . Surely you’ll take a peep . . . at ‘Ape-ville’? Ugh! You know I want to be just as far away from here as possible. [. . .] It’ll be either . . . N.Y., Baltimore or Boston!”79 In her December 10, 1928, follow-up describing her exciting visit to Harlem, she lamented having to stay in Philly for the holidays: “I’m having all manner of fits & conniptions! I have to stay in this man’s town for Xmas! You can imagine how I’ll like that!! I’ll feel out of place in the zoo! Think of me Lang, when you [. . .] are raving in Bawston!”80 Cowdery moved to New York as soon as she could after graduating from high school, but she made frequent prolonged visits to insular Germantown throughout the peak of her publishing success, and there are signs that she struggled to balance the two worlds she inhabited. There is no indication of friction between Mae and her parents in the entire correspondence with Hughes, which she appears to have conducted largely from their home at 222 W. Penn, but in a late 1928 letter, she conveyed her fury over ugly gossip in her friendship circle, perhaps a reflection of the cultural divide between her home and newly adopted city: “Lank . . . . .

194  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters I’m downright . . . . mad. . . . . . [. . .] seeing red, ’n all that . . . . . I ’spect you’ve heard a little of the dirt that’s flying . . . . . but, ’tho’ ordinarily it would make no difference . . . . it gets me when my BEST friend starts chewing . . . . “O! Friends, when I start chewing . . . . I shall miss Nobody!” Only the fine ART of “back-biting” has no appeal to me . . . . I prefer a square meal to just a little bite . . . .”81 This outburst, along with several allusions to failed love affairs and her hatred of Philadelphia, suggest that Cowdery may have felt somewhat at odds with her tightly-knit buttoned-down community. Although she was a good Germantown girl who showed up at parties, dances, and Girl Reserves reunions, the bohemian poet who was making such a big splash in the journals of New York may well have found such an environment both vapid and suffocating. Perhaps reflecting a desire to escape her hometown social circle, an alienated side of Cowdery surfaces in the poetry she was writing in the late 1920s. It features speakers who long to escape the crowd and breathe a freer air. They also suffer terrible disappointment in love and despairing states of solitude. In an unpublished verse Cowdery sent to Hughes in one of her undated letters, “Poem,” the speaker describes herself as an old soul pierced by keen-edged ruminations and broken dreams: I am not young I am old . . . . Like the last star. I have tho’ts That are sharp . . . . . . A silver line On the edge of a mountain. I have dreams . . . . . . Moonlight Splintered by an empty tree.82 Similarly, Cowdery’s “Want,” published in the November 1928 issue of The Crisis, recalls Gwendolyn Bennett’s joyful “Heritage” (1923), which also features a series of stanzas beginning with “I want.”83 Cowdery’s speaker, however, can find solace from her daytime loneliness only in nightly vigils communing with the stars, moon, and wind: I want to take down with my hands The silver stars

Shattered Mirror  T  195 That grow in heaven’s dark blue meadows And bury my face in them. I want to wrap all around me The silver shedding of the moon To keep me warm. I want to sell my soul To the wind in a song To keep me from crying in the night. I want to wake and find That I have slept the day away. Only nights are kind now . . . With the stars . . . moons . . . winds and me. . . . 84 The bitter “God Is Kind,” one of her last journal publications, which appeared in the June 1930 issue of The Crisis, sarcastically presents the speaker’s vision of happiness as the illusion of a foolish dreamer: God Is kind, He lets us dream Of untarnished silver . . . Of skies that have never known The pain of a storm . . . Of the peace and contentment In a robin’s even’song. We dream of love Without its aftermath Of loneliness . . . . God Is kind, He lets us dream Of unattainable things!85 Of course, as a poet of the moment, Cowdery did not shrink from re-

196  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters cording the valleys along with the peaks of experience, but her poems are often lamentations over lost connections within a coldly lonely space, and they contrast markedly with her exuberant pieces. Beginning her career with bold visions of a pagan universe attuned to a poet’s rapturous soul, Cowdery’s other poems of the 1920s, ending with the forlorn “Having Had You” in the August 1930 issue of The Crisis, point consistently to the more painful side of her poetry in which disillusioned speakers suffer devastating heartbreak and isolation.

From New York Art Student to Philadelphia Civic Matron It is not clear where in New York Cowdery lived (it was most likely in Brooklyn), but in the fall of 1930, the New York Amsterdam News reported her presence at the Brooklyn YWCA, a safe environment for young single women: “Among the recent arrivals at the residence are Mae V. Cowdery of Germantown, Pa.”86 Although we have no way of knowing how long she lived in Brooklyn or with whom she connected, by the spring of 1932 she was listed as a member of the James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild, a Harlem-based group established in 1931 that included Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Gwendolyn Bennett, the latter of whom played a leading role at the guild in the early 1930s.87 At this point Cowdery had published twenty poems over a four-year period from 1927 to 1930 in Black Opals, Opportunity, The Crisis, The Carolina Magazine, Harlem, Charles S. Johnson’s Ebony and Topaz, and William Stanley Braithwaite’s annual anthologies of magazine verse in 1928 and 1929. It was an impressive record for someone who was barely in her twenties. Early in the new decade, however, her life dramatically changed when the very young Mae became a wife and mother at age twenty-three. She suddenly married African American journalist Harry B. Webber in May 1932, already pregnant with Judith Lynn Webber, to whom she gave birth in late November of that year, an event she commemorated with poems included in her 1936 collection.88 The New Jersey–based Webber served as associate editor of the Philadelphia Independent while reporting for the New York Amsterdam News, the Afro-American, and other black newspapers, so the couple may have settled in New Jersey, where it appears they were married in Atlantic City. They seem to have had a modern marriage, for Cowdery continued to maintain a public persona as a practicing poet while keeping her name. She was mentioned in the Afro-American when she gave a read-

Shattered Mirror  T  197 ing at the Kaighn Avenue Baptist Church in Camden, New Jersey, in the spring of 1933, for example; it identified her as “Mae Cowdery Webber, that charming girl poet, Philadelphia.”89 At the same time, she returned at times to the socialite presence she had established in the 1920s that clashed with her bohemian sensibilities. “Mrs. Mae Cowdery Webber” was among the friends who supported Philadelphia society columnist Bernice Dutrieuille during her long illness in the summer of 1933, for instance.90 The same summer, a photograph of Cowdery in her bathing suit at an Atlantic City beach with longtime friend Marion Turner was printed in the Pittsburgh Courier with the caption, “Miss Marion Turner and Mrs. Mae Cowdery Webber of Philadelphia after taking a sea dip” (see Figure 17).91

Figure 17. “‘Lazy Bones’ . . . Here They Are Basking in Atlantic City Sun,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 19, 1933. Mae Cowdery (center photo on right) with best friend Marion Turner in Atlantic City. They are described as “Miss Marion Turner and Mrs. Mae Cowdery Webber of Philadelphia after taking sea dip.” Cowdery is twenty-four years old in this photo. Photo courtesy of the Pittsburgh Courier Archives.

198  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Trying to remain a central part of Philadelphia’s social elite as a young wife and mother, Cowdery’s persona as “charming girl poet” would become increasingly at odds with her writing career, which showed no signs of ending in the fall of 1936, when her well-received collection, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems, was published. By June of that year, Cowdery had moved back to Philadelphia as a modern married working woman. She wrote her last letter to Langston Hughes that month, on letterhead stationery of the Armstrong Association, for which she was the librarian of “Negro literature”: “It’s a nice job and I like it lots,” she reported.92 Hughes was busy with his own writing so had to pass on her request that he write the introduction for her collection, but influential critic William Stanley Braithwaite stepped into the role when the volume was self-published that fall by a small Philadelphia printer, Alpress. In his introduction, Braithwaite forecasted a bright future for a poet he believed was on the cusp of a brilliant career, not at the end point. He praised the quality of Cowdery’s verse while emphasizing that she was one of the few New Negro poets to survive the end of the 1920s: Very few of [the] fugitives of the period between 1922 and 1930 emerged from the pages of the Anthologies to acquire a . . . challenging, and independent name and place among contemporary poets. . . . Now Miss Cowdery emerges . . . nearly a decade later. . . . During these years when the members of the Renaissance group scattered and declined, Miss Cowdery with quiet devotion practiced and matured her art. . . . The true lover of poetry will keenly enjoy this collection, for its sincerity and freshness, for its delicate and sensitive rhythm and imagery. I think it needs but a substantial expression of public appreciation to support and encourage the author’s talents to greater accomplishments.93 Both Braithwaite and Benjamin Brawley, whose The Negro Genius (1937) praised her verse, admired Cowdery’s ability to create pathos with her beautiful imagery and achieve a level of emotional intensity in only a few lines that moved the reader in surprising ways.94 They saw consistent quality in her verse over a ten-year period and refreshing directness, honesty, and innovation. They believed she had the talent and drive to continue maturing as a poet, given the depth of her talent. Alain Locke had seen that talent early in her career, when he included a stanza of her first poem, “Goal,” at the end of his 1928 essay “The Message of the Negro

Shattered Mirror  T  199 Poets”: “If there is to be a brilliant restatement of the African tradition, it cannot be merely retrospective. That is why even this point of view must merge into a rather culturistic transposition of the old elemental values to modern modes of insight. This is just on the horizon edge in Negro poetry and art, and is one of the goals of racialism in the new aesthetic of Negro life. No better advance statement has been made than Mae Cowdery’s lines: ‘I will take from the hearts / Of black men— / Prayers their lips / Are ’fraid to utter / And turn their coarseness / Into a beauty of the jungle / Whence they came.”95 On the surface, it looked like Cowdery had finally meshed the two strands of her life, solidifying an identity as a poet with the publication of We Lift Our Voices while establishing a family within the framework of Old Guard Philadelphia. Cowdery’s appearances in Philadelphia newspapers, for example, portray her as a proper Germantown mother whose poetry burnished a youthful image of popularity and beauty. Like her mother, she now had a daughter and was earning money in a white-collar job, but she added to those roles an artistic persona rooted in the New Negro arts movement that had brought her such early success. The Pittsburgh Courier proudly announced the collection’s imminent arrival: “Soon a very attractive and beautiful book of poems will be given to lovers of poetry. It is the creation of one of Philadelphia’s own, Mae Cowdery.”96 The Baltimore Afro-American reprinted one of the book’s poems and praised the volume as “a pleasure to read and a gratifying gift to receive.”97 In December, the Courier’s society columnist asserted that Philadelphia needed more poets like Cowdery, who had “refreshed the dusty social circles.”98 On both a professional and personal level, however, Cowdery’s life took a sharp turn away from this blended persona at the very moment of her most substantial publication. We know she had continued writing poetry from 1930 to 1936, when forty new pieces appeared in We Lift Our Voices, but only two poems would ever be published outside of the collection: “I Sit and Wait for Beauty,” which came out in the third issue of Dorothy West’s Challenge in 1935, and “Having Had You,” which was partially reprinted in Benjamin Brawley’s The Negro Genius in 1937.99 Although she seemed to be on the threshold of a distinguished career in 1936, Cowdery’s published poetry came to an end, undoubtedly because all black writers found it increasingly difficult to find publishers, even well-established writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Jessie Fauset. At the same time, a personal element appears to have inhibited her creative activity beyond 1936. If we look closely at her poetry and life, there are signs

200  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters that she faced overwhelming emotional and relationship stresses at this time that exacerbated the impact of vanished creative outlets. For one thing, the modern marriage with Harry Webber came to an abrupt halt less than three years after it began. The couple’s breakup was first announced by the Afro-American in March of 1935, when gossip columnist and Cowdery friend Malcolm B. Fulcher wrote that “the Harry (Mae Cowdery) Webbers are at the Great Divide, with the grounds for divorce being incompatibility.”100 A year later, the Philadelphia Tribune announced that “Mrs. Mae Cowdery Webber of West Philadelphia” had filed for divorce from Harry Webber, who was “now living in New York City.”101 It was not until spring of 1937, however, that the divorce was finalized: “A final decree in divorce was granted Mrs. Webber, the one-time Mae C. [sic] Cowdery, youthful poet who achieved national distinction some years ago as a result of her literary efforts, last Friday. . . . Their marriage followed a whirlwind courtship while Miss Cowdery was a student at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, N.Y.”102 Pointedly absent from the black press’s prominent coverage of the Cowdery-Webber marriage and divorce was her evidently clandestine marriage to Lincoln University medical student Cyril A. Riley on December 19, 1936, just as her collection of that fall was being reviewed.103 It is unclear how or when they met, but Cowdery dedicated a poem to Riley in the volume (“Pastorale”) and both of them are mentioned as attending the same Philadelphia parties as early as March of 1935, the same month papers announced that the Webber marriage was on the rocks.104 The relationship with Riley remained invisible in reporting on her just before and immediately after their wedding ceremony at St. James Presbyterian Church in Harlem. As late as May 30, 1936, just a few months before she married Riley, the Chicago Defender reported that “Mrs. Mae Cowdery Webber” had developed a special project in connection with the Armstrong Association’s library of Negro literature and on an address she delivered about a Philadelphia composer. The Philadelphia Tribune identified “Mrs. Mae Cowdery Webber” as leading a study group for the Armstrong Association in September 1936.105 Only three months after this Tribune piece, however, Cowdery embarked on a second marriage at age twenty-seven to the younger Riley. Although she was lauded for her creative accomplishments in the 1930s, Mae Cowdery the poet would begin to fade into Mrs. Mae Cowdery Riley in the black press, as her second husband completed his degree at Lincoln and established a medical practice in Philadelphia. The couple became a fixture at the city’s social events. A matriarchal group photograph pub-

Shattered Mirror  T  201

Figure 18 (left). “Four Philadelphia Generations,” Baltimore Afro-American, May 15, 1937. The caption reads as follows: “Left to right: Miss Mae Cowdery, seated; Mrs. Alice J. Wilson, great-grandmother; Mrs. Mary W. Cowdery, mother of Mae, and Judith Cowdery.” Judith is Cowdery’s four-year-old daughter by her first husband, journalist Harry Webber, whom she divorced shortly before this photo appeared. Photo courtesy of Afro-American Newspapers Archives. Figure 19 (right). “Will They Be The Lucky Ones?” Baltimore Afro-American, December 18, 1937. Cowdery, twenty-eight years old, is on the right. She was married to her second husband, Dr. Cyril Riley. The caption reads: “So intent on punching their card in a game called ‘lucky’ at an added feature at the Topnotchers’ Club dance in Philadelphia last Friday to benefit Mercy and Douglass Hospitals, Misses Kathleen Perez and Mae V. Cowdery, left to right, didn’t realize that the photographer was taking them until after the flash.” Photo courtesy of AfroAmerican Newspapers Archives.

lished around this time in the Afro-American with Cowdery, her daughter, her mother, and her maternal grandmother captures her emerging persona of domestic bourgeois respectability (see Figure 18). In it, she regained her maiden name as “Miss Mae Cowdery,” but her matronly hairstyle and dress and her dainty necklace present an identity that was a far cry from the androgynous bohemian who won the Krigwa Prize in 1927 or the flapper who had “Both Brains and Beauty” in 1928.106Similarly, although she is identified as “Mae V. Cowdery” in a December photograph that same year of 1937 taken at the Topnotchers’ Club dance at a benefit for Mercy and Douglass Hospitals, Mae is playing a game called Lucky while glamorously attired in a shimmering velvet evening gown with matching gloves and hat (see Figure 19).107

202  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Symbolizing this new civic-minded maternal role, in January 1938, a few months after these photographs appeared, Cowdery helped her closest friend, Marion Turner Stubbs, by now also married to a doctor, begin the Jack and Jill Club of America for children of black professionals who had grown up together in South Philadelphia but were now dispersed throughout the city so that their children could know each other “the way they did.” The organization, which is still in existence on a national level, focused on socializing members’ children in what some thought was an elitist way and others saw as a viable route necessitated by segregation, “instilling values and leadership skills in their children and providing ‘all the opportunities possible for a normal and graceful approach to a beautiful adulthood.’”108 A society column of the Philadelphia Tribune a month after the club had its first meeting in 1938 lists “Judith Cowdery Riley” as a member of “this kiddies club [which] reads like a veritable Juvenile ‘Who’s Who’ in and around the Quaker City.”109 The last mention of Cowdery’s poetry collection in the black press is in the spring of 1938, when the Chicago Defender reported on a Chinese tea put on by Les Beaux Arts, a Philadelphia fine arts club. Although her book is highlighted in the piece, it is merely on display as part of the backdrop to a genteel party atmosphere: “A savory aroma of Chinese sandalwood incense permeated the spacious studio and lent atmosphere as the guests arrived and were greeted by a fetching little Chinese maiden, Miss Alma Johnson (a member of the club), in a piquant pink and robin’s egg blue coolie costume. [. . .]Presiding at the tea table [. . .] were the fashionable members of the Pierians Club, a group of older ‘cultural-ites’ of this city.”110 By 1940, Cowdery’s poetry was no longer on Philadelphia’s social radar screen in any kind of setting, and she appears to have fallen into the role for which she was groomed: wife of a Germantown doctor, cultivated mother of a well-educated child, devoted daughter of a distinguished Old Guard family, and popular social butterfly among Philadelphia’s black professional class. She surfaced in the 1940s as a well-traveled cosmopolitan fixture of a young professional group that had somehow avoided the worst aspects of the Depression. In June 1940, the Pittsburgh Courier briefly mentioned, for instance, that “Mr. and Mrs. Cyril A. Riley (she was the former Mae Cowdery),” residents of Germantown, had motored to visit friends in New York City and Boston.111 In early 1942, the Philadelphia Tribune reported that “Mrs. Mae Cowdery-Riley” was again living with her parents in Germantown while her husband was stationed at a South Carolina hospital as part of the war effort.112 By August of that year, Mae herself

Shattered Mirror  T  203 had joined the home front army as a federal government clerical worker in Washington, D.C., where her husband joined her to complete his medical degree at Howard University.113 In 1943, the Afro-American tellingly failed to mention her war job when it announced Cowdery’s Philadelphia visit: “Mae Cowdery Riley, wife of the young Howard medico, Cyril, was in town from Washington, D.C. to visit her parents.”114 Although she clearly saw creative writing, public service, and whitecollar employment as a legitimate part of her married role, at the war’s end portrayals of Cowdery in the black press hewed to a traditional outline of the black professional homemaker that was consistent with the dominant culture’s postwar valorization of the full-time mother and wife. Emblematic of this treatment is a 1945 Tribune column announcing the Rileys’ move to a flat in West Philadelphia, where they set up a household over Cyril’s new office: “Two of Quaker Towne’s popular and smart young medics and their families have just entered lovely new homes. [. . .] Dr. and Mrs. Cyril A. Riley and their daughter, Judith Lynne, are happily engaged in completing their cozy new quarters at 302 N. 41st Street, where they entertained as their first guest, Mr. Roland Johnson of Germantown, last Friday, at dinner. Mrs. Riley, the former Mae Cowdery, well-known poet, is doing a marvelous job of decorating upstairs, while the doctor has nearly completed his offices downstairs.”115 Indicative of how close Mae was to her parents, the column also announced the simultaneous move of “Mr. and Mrs. Lemuel Cowdery and her mother, Mrs. Alice Wilson” to 4230 Powelton Avenue, just a few short blocks from the Rileys’ 41st Street home. Cowdery lived with her husband and daughter in this flat until her death, seemingly invisible to the world beyond her narrow social set.

The Invisible Poet and Her Disappearing Muse Vincent Jubilee’s assessment of Cowdery’s failure to publish after 1936 centers on Philadelphia’s inhibiting social atmosphere, which he described at length in his 1980 study. Jubilee interviewed several of her peers who were still alive in the 1970s and cites the following comment of Richard Long, who met Cowdery in the final years of her life. Long viewed her as an artist who was ill suited to the cultural environment in which she was enmeshed: “She seemed a bright intelligence made bored and restless by her ordinary surroundings.”116 To what degree her creative writing was inhibited by the Old Guard role of respectable womanhood for

204  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters which she had been raised can be gleaned partially from the 1936 volume, which forecasts her disappearance as a public poet and suggests that her creative muse was not firmly in her grasp. The speaker in “I Sit and Wait for Beauty,” which was also published in Challenge in 1935, recalls Dunbar-Nelson’s World War I piece, “I Sit and Sew.” While Dunbar-Nelson’s speaker expresses frustration over not being part of America’s war effort because she is confined to a female sphere, Cowdery’s speaker despairs of ever reaching the artistic vision she has long pursued.117 Her muse is cast as an elusive Aphrodite figure residing in the waves, trees, and bird calls of her imagination: Long have I yearned and sought for beauty And now it seems a futile race To strive to look upon the marvel Of so fair a face. She is not here with the trees That bend to wind in endless grace, Nor has she come from a blue sea In the frothing lace That breaks upon the shore in white ecstasy. She did not come on the piercing call Of wild birds in flight, Nor in young love did I find her— Nor in the wordless wonder of the night, Or with yon’ star that holds my breath Upon a silver spear. Thus I know her to be more than all These things . . . Than life or death— And even tho’ I become a God With all magic secrets at my command She will ever hide her face And elude my grasping hand.118 A similar lament lies at the heart of “Resurrection,” in which the speaker tries to resuscitate her soul, now alarmingly moribund before her: “ Awake my soul . . . Awake!

Shattered Mirror  T  205 I have lighted fragrant candles ’Round your bier. Does all this burning beauty Stir you not? The moth and firefly hover near . . . Can you not feel the brushing of their wings? Promising not to waste her time in any more meaningless distractions, the speaker assures her inanimate spirit that she never forgot what was most important to its nourishment: Come back my soul . . . come back! I shall not forsake you For those myriad pleasures Once so dear. Did you not know It was you I was seeking, When I went off and left you Hungry and forlorn? Tell me that this fire I bring Is not too late That you will awake and see my gifts . . . The firefly . . . the moth . . . This perfumed glimmering light! Or must I who have come back With the sight of heaven’s Unconquered citadels in my eyes And the sound of unheard music in my ear Cast myself upon your funeral pyre And die again with you? Afraid she has returned too late, the speaker asks whether she will have to lay her body over the soul’s burning corpse and reunite with it only in death.119

206  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Finally, uneasiness with her life lies at the heart of the speaker in “Mood.” She describes the pleasure in performing domestic tasks, but the feeling is threatened by “some straying thought [that] will grow into a sullen cloud”: I am a strange creature Of precarious moods More changeful than the weather . . . Today I did a simple task (I darned a sock and made a bed) And now my heart is singing . . . It will not last—I know too well How soon some straying thought Will grow into a sullen cloud And brood across my sky . . . So I will sing the while This errant sunlight glimmers Through my day.120 Other pieces from We Lift Our Voices forecast a mood and an end of a more alarming sort, such as two poems that describe the speaker’s attraction to death, portrayed as an alluring lover whom she longs to follow. “I Look at Death” describes the speaker’s attraction to lifelessness because it offers a gentle garden of repose in contrast to her history of anguish, “a spilled cup of wine . . . my heart’s own blood”: I looked into the face of death And found it kind. I looked at life that offered me No more than before . . . a spilled cup Of wine. . . . My heart’s own blood. Death was friendly And showed me pale gardens And trees with silver fruit And slender jade grass With pearls for dew . . . I am in a quandary— There is something so strange

Shattered Mirror  T  207 . . . So still . . . about this loveliness Of death . . .121 In “Each Night,” which immediately follows “I Look at Death,” the speaker describes death as a lover for whom she waits every night, only to have him refuse her entreaties to take her with him: Each night I wait For Death to come And stand beside my bed And stoop with tender eyes And eager lips . . . to kiss me. But each night is as before He only gazes longingly And then goes sadly thru the door. Telling her he cannot penetrate the barrier separating their worlds, “For you are light and I am shadow,” the speaker comes to the realization that death’s stronger rival is the live man sleeping next to her, whose love is more powerful than death, at least for the moment: Now, I know he will not come While you are sleeping By my side, But his shadow casts A silver pallor o’er your face And I know that he is not Far from me . . . 122 These verses hauntingly foreshadow Cowdery’s last appearance in the newspapers that had traced her youthful ascent from debutante to accomplished poet to civic-minded matron. On November 6, 1948, both the Philadelphia Independent and the Afro-American ran front-page stories announcing Mae Cowdery’s death by suicide at the age of thirty-nine on November 2 (see Figure 20). A week later, the Chicago Defender reported Cowdery’s death as a suicide brought on by trouble in her marriage: “Apparently despondent over failure to patch up a quarrel with her husband, Mrs. Mae Cowdery Riley [. . .] took her life by inhaling gas from her kitchen stove.” The article goes on to say that the couple had separated

208  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters

Figure 20. “Gas Casualty,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 6, 1948. The caption reads: “Mrs. Mae Riley, wife of Dr. C.A. Riley, who was found dead in her kitchen of poisonous gas fumes . . . by her husband and his nurse, Miss Theresa Snowden, as they entered her apartment for the doctor’s offices on the first floor of the home.” Cowdery died in Philadelphia on November 2, 1948, at the age of thirty-nine. Photo courtesy of Afro-American Newspapers Archives.

two weeks earlier after a failed attempt at reconciliation.123 The Independent reported that “Mrs. Mae Cowdery Riley [had been] despondent since a reconciliation with her medico husband petered out two weeks ago” and that he had found her dead in their flat above his office “with gas streaming from two jets of a kitchen stove”: “Dr. Riley told Detective Cecil Joyner the gas was first smelled by his nurse, Miss Teresa Snowden. He had sent her to the apartment to inquire about a picture removed from the wall. [. . .] Police estimate that Mrs. Riley had been dead from four to six hours before her body was discovered shortly before 10 o’clock [a.m.].” The article further reports that “Mrs. Riley . . . followed her husband to Colorado when he left her several months ago.”124 The Afro-American added poignant details to this description of the circumstances surrounding Cowdery’s death: “Mrs. Mae V. Riley was found dead in a gas-filled kitchen of her home at 302 N. 41st St., Tuesday morning, by her husband,

Shattered Mirror  T  209 Dr. Cyril A. Riley, a physician. [. . .] Gas poured from the unlit oven burners. [. . .] The kitchen of her home, one of the most modern in the city and probably unmatched for post-war innovations, was her pride.” The article quoted friends as saying, “Mrs. Riley had been despondent for some time, but appeared in good spirits Monday, when she returned from a trip to New York.” Cowdery’s nearly sixteen-year-old daughter, Judith, the piece reports, had spent the night of her mother’s death at her grandmother’s, within walking distance from the Riley residence at 4230 Powelton Avenue, and had gone to school that morning.125 All three of these newspaper reports on her death focus on Cowdery’s prominent place in Philadelphia’s black elite and make no mention of the fact that she was an accomplished poet. The Independent identified her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lemuel Cowdery, as a Germantown family with a catering business and asserted that “Mrs. Riley was one of the most active and popular members of the younger set when a sub-deb. A member of many fashionable clubs, she was associated with the well-known ‘Girl [Reserves].’”126 The Afro-American said of her, “The widely-known matron was a member of the Lincolnettes [women who dated men from Lincoln University] and an amateur artist. In recent years, she had been studying the piano.”127 Like the Afro-American and Philadelphia Independent, the Chicago Defender did not mention Cowdery’s poetry career but rather described her as a member of Philadelphia’s social elite: “[Mrs. Riley] was a prominent socialite, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Lemuel Cowdery of Germantown.”128 The erasure of Mae Cowdery’s literary achievements in these death notices speaks volumes about what she was up against in post– Harlem Renaissance Philadelphia as she strove to be a New Negro writer carving bold paths toward a modern age of racial equality and creative opportunity for African American women who identified as artists, wives, and mothers while maintaining public roles that advanced the race. Cowdery’s first husband, Harry Webber, was the only journalist who reported on her death to shine a bright light on her poetry: Jerseyites [. . .] remember well Mae Cowdery Riley, whose suicide was reported last week in Philadelphia. [. . .] When her book of poetry was published back in 1936 it proved highly popular in this state and has become such a rare book as the edition was limited. Her poetry was deeply romantic and her love sonnets unmatched. She was of that poetry school which Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes

210  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters and Gwendolyn Bennett founded, and she first came to notice as an Opportunity [sic] magazine poetry contest winner. Her favorite poet was Edna St. Vincent Millay. Mrs. Riley was a member of the celebrated James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild.129 Adding to Cowdery’s literary erasure in her home city was her habit, according to Webber in this report, of treating her poems so casually they could easily disappear: “She used to write verse on the backs of old envelopes, sometimes leaving them to lay around and perish, unknown to the world.”130 That Webber was in New York when he wrote this piece for the New York Age and addressed it to readers in New Jersey suggests how great the cultural distance was between Philadelphia and metropolitan New York, even though they were geographically close. Though Philadelphia undermined her as an artist and its conventional mores contributed to her suicidal despair, the city was also an emotional center for Cowdery, a place where she had stature, where her family had long enjoyed respect and admiration; her parents never stood in the way of her career or her personal choices. In the end, however, straitlaced Philadelphia claimed Mae V. Cowdery as one of its own. The local papers published no obituary and no announcement of a funeral service; her cremated body was buried in Philadelphia’s historically black Eden Cemetery next to her father in the Wilson-Cowdery family plot where her grandparents, Charles and Alice Wilson, also lay.131 Her death certificate lists the occupation of the deceased as “Housewife.”132 Riley maintained his practice at 301 N. 41st for forty more years, raising his adopted daughter Judith with the help of her widowed maternal grandmother and surprising people six months after his wife’s death by marrying a young art student who had moved to Philadelphia in early 1949. Her sister had lived there for several years whose doctor was Cyril Riley.133 It is tempting to see Cowdery’s suicide as caused by the devastating collapse of her marriage at a vulnerable moment. Undoubtedly postwar America’s enshrinement of the neo-Victorian feminine mystique added to the confining insularity of Philadelphia’s black professional class for this sensitive poet. Long before she met Riley, however, Cowdery had written anguished poems of lost love whose speakers face endless vistas of desolation. The haunting last stanza of her 1929 piece “Farewell,” for example, foreshadows the poet’s final moments of pre-dawn solitude in 1948 (her estimated time of death was between 4:00 and 6:00 a.m.).134 The last stanza of “Farewell” conveys the speaker’s temporal location as just before dawn after she has

Shattered Mirror  T  211 voiced multiple good-byes to her lover’s touch and words. It is at that moment she describes the empty space now yawningly open before her: Only the awful sound Of silence In that hour Before dawn When the moon has waned, The stars died, And the sun is buried in mist.135 The first stanza of an unpublished piece Cowdery sent Langston Hughes in the 1920s, “Après Amour,” also points to her speaker’s exquisite sensitivity to those first shocking tremors that surface in the wake of romantic disappointment: I wake and think to find you at my side Forgetting the space of stillness, So deep . . . . so high . . . . so wide, . . . At your infidelity . . . . . That is between you & I Like the shadow of a bird Between water and the sky.136 Coming at the end of her career in 1936, “Shattered Mirror” similarly describes the speaker’s desolation after a passionate love has burned out and left her staring at an unrecognizably fractured self-reflection: I am weary of passion And its nuances of color— Colors that have become A fierce glaring of light That blinds the sight To the subtler meanings of shade. Ah love—you were that prism Whereon light did play And threw off rainbowed hues

212  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters That lured my eyes away From the peaceful monotones of complacency. Oh love—you are a mirror That lies shattered at my feet!137 These verses suggest that Cowdery took love as seriously as she did the poetry to which it gave rise and opened herself to its power to both transform the mundane and destroy. Perhaps the mirror shattered at her feet one too many times or the muse that had guided her to make art out of feeling no longer danced and sang. Whatever the curtain of darkness was that fell over Cowdery’s vision just weeks before her fortieth birthday, it seems to have pushed her over the thin line separating life’s magical allure from death’s beautiful still garden. Because of her suicide and the many poems of despair, it is tempting to fixate on these negative parts of her life and Cowdery’s seeming surrender to internal demons in the face of external forces stronger than her considerable gifts. Charting the pain at the base of her artistry, however, should not blind us to her capacity for joy. Poems to her baby daughter, such as “For a New Mother,” suggest that Cowdery reveled in motherhood: O lovely form That has lain so long Beneath my heart Now looking up at me With star-filled eyes . . . What can I teach thee Of singing? Who are the meaning of all sound. What can I give thee Of beauty? Who are the source of all loveliness. What can I tell thee Of life? Who are the only reason for my birth.138

Shattered Mirror  T  213 She also responded wholeheartedly to beauty and dedicated herself to pursuit of the beautiful in her art. Nature furnished an especially fruitful tableau of inspiration, a scene in which Cowdery could find solace and safety for her sensitive soul. “Feast,” for example, is a one-stanza celebration of fall: I am drunk with beauty For I have had a feast Of gold and scarlet leaves And the deep blue wine Of autumn wind!139 Similarly, the speaker in “Pastorale” is transported by the autumnal beauty dancing before her delighted eyes as she stares out the window: Such simple things Can make me know a deep exultant joy— The rush and flash of wings As birds turn southward thru an autumn sky— This latticed sunlight on my counterpane, This buoyant wind now dancing with rain, Now dashing madly by with leaves . . . It is a never ending balm to weariness To know I need but lift my eyes Or turn my head To find breath-taking loveliness!140 If she found in poetry a way temporarily to endure unbearable pain, Cowdery also was able to experience the ecstasy of being completely alive within the moment, and these vibrant poems are just as central to her work. “Exultation” brings this aspect of Cowdery’s sensibility vividly to the surface: Oh day! With sun glowing— Gold Pouring through

214  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters A scarlet rustling tree! Oh night! With stars burning— Fire falling Into a dark and whispering sea!141 Most importantly, Cowdery was willing to pay the price of deep despair if that is what it took to unleash her passionate appetite for experience. “If I must know sorrow / To live,” the speaker declares in “If I Must Know” (1930): “Then burden my soul / With the frustrated dreams / Of good women”: If I must know torture Then bind me with vows To complacency! If I must know love To live Then be quick! Give me back this elusive thing Men call love!142 Similarly, “Poet’s Query (Ennui)” entwines the speaker’s passionate response to beauty, love, and dreams with her ability to write poetry. Without the intensity of vision and feeling, the poems disappear. When there is no longer love Over which to grieve And white plum blossoms Against the dark backdrop of night No longer catch the breath Within your throat— When there is no song to stir your blood And cause your feet to beat the rhyme When gulls falling in sudden silver arrows Down the golden slant of sun

Shattered Mirror  T  215 Are birds flying—nothing more . . . What is left to dream of . . . to pray for . . . Or even write a verse about?143 Cowdery vowed early on to throw herself into life’s tempestuous center, like her favorite poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and to release the fire within by burning the candle at both ends. That her flame was extinguished as she fell into “a dark and whispering sea” does not erase the artistic legacy of a poet whose modernity put her on a road she could navigate for only two decades. Her suicide will forever stand as a symbol of Cowdery’s tragic inability to rebound from a lost love that seemingly could not be translated into art or put into a larger framework of life’s remaining joys. Cowdery was, in some sense, a victim of her times, an era when lyricism in American literature gave way to social realism and when women were confined to the domestic realm once more. It should not, however, stand as an incriminating summation of all that went before, for this was a woman who loved beauty, adventure, pleasure, creativity, and intimacy so much that her poetry preserves magical moments that were experienced long ago by speakers we have never met but who sound like people we might know and would like to know. One of her self-published verses, the ironically titled “Nostalgia,” expresses this exuberance in a valentine to the future people her speaker has yet to meet, and it can be read as a love letter to us today, hinting at all Mae V. Cowdery has to offer these many years later: Nostalgia For gardens I have never seen And birds and winds And waters. For footsteps I have never heard Handclasps, smiles and tears— For dreams That I have yet to dream And clouds and moons And fairy stars.

216  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters For lips That I have never kissed And sun-bright hair And night-dark eyes. With you Whom I have never Chanced to meet These things to share.144

Epilogue

A

fter combing through the contours of their lives and aligning the verse with those remarkable journeys, I am struck by how open Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery were in their lyric poetry when all of them were so visible in their communities. Grimké was the daughter of a major organizer for the NAACP in Washington, D.C., with whom she lived, and the niece of the city’s most influential black pastor, with whom she also lived. She was a schoolteacher, a race activist, and she was well known to pioneering abolitionists and New Negro leaders alike. Bennett lived with her attorney father in Brooklyn during the early 1920s; was a faculty member at the nation’s premier historically black university in conservative Washington, D.C.; and became a doctor’s wife and prominent community leader. Cowdery lived with her parents in staid Philadelphia when she started publishing poetry in the late 1920s, where her ancestors were legendary business leaders; was later the wife of a journalist and then a Philadelphia doctor; became a mother; and was at the center of society columns in that city throughout her life. For such women to bare their souls in lyric poetry that addressed longing, desire, intimacy, heartache, and sensual transport required both immense courage and passionate engagement with the deepest wells of their imagination. Although Grimké and Bennett kept much of this poetry private, they carefully preserved it along with their diaries, correspondence, and other personal papers, making sure to donate their estates to Howard University

217

218  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters in Grimké’s case and the Schomburg Center in Bennett’s. In that sense, they were making the private public while also publishing lyrical meditations on intimacy, heartache, desire, loss, and mortality. Cowdery left published work that is startlingly frank in its erotic treatment of both same-sex and heterosexual desire. All three looked at life and death squarely in the face. They were pioneers in opening up for poetic discourse women’s sexuality as a source of power, creativity, and liberation. These three poets’ linking of erotic power to social change in their art anticipates Audre Lorde’s iconic 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” There, Lorde urged women to resist suppression of the erotic; she saw such suppression as a tool of the oppressor that was designed to deprive women of an important source of power and knowledge: “The very word ‘erotic’ comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the life-force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”1 Lorde rooted her creativity in her attraction to women and collapsed what she saw as the false dichotomy between the spiritual and the political by situating the erotic as a bridge between the two. For her, the erotic was a guiding force for selfempowerment and social change: “Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world. [. . .] For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society.”2 Although women’s poetry of the Harlem Renaissance had not yet been recovered when Lorde wrote this essay, she articulated the foundation Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery established for uses of the erotic as power during the Harlem Renaissance. I see this study as part of a long chain linking New Negro women’s poetry to contemporary treatment of the erotic by black women in art. In her 1987 profiles of Angelina Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Georgia Douglas Johnson, Gloria Hull highlighted Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and Ntozake Shange, along with Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Margaret Walker, as contemporary poets walking in the footsteps of their Harlem Renaissance predecessors, artists who opened the door for black women writers to center poetry on the innermost self. In Hull’s view, the lyric “I” of these early twentieth-century writers created a path inward that has furnished rich material for African American women

Epilogue  T  219 poets of our own modern era: “From this surety of self, black women writers are consciously exploring their ancient wisdoms and spiritual selves, their relationships with other women [. . .] their ties to their black communities and culture, their place in the African diaspora, their multivalent eroticism. [. . .] More than this, out of their sense of a black female ‘writerly’ self, they are, like their white contemporaries, devising new, more appropriate forms in which to package their experiences.”3 More recently, in her 2007 study of African American women poets and self-representation, Ajuan Maria Mance cites Shange, Clifton, and Lorde as poets who are notable for portraying the dark female body as a counterhegemonic force in white patriarchal society. Mance maintains that their poetry is rooted in a mythology of black female sexuality that overturns white male systems of power: “Shange, Clifton, and Lorde have each used mythical language and imagery to create portraits of the Black female body that, in resisting the narrow definitions of womanhood that have hidden the Afro-American woman from view, undermine the system of socio-political hierarchies that perpetuates Black women’s invisibility.”4 Mance also affirms the value of black women poets who portray sexuality as a source of power against racism, and Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery are among the first to enact that connection by following a dark muse. Looked at in this larger historical context, then, it is perhaps not so surprising that Angelina Grimké, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Mae Cowdery would have turned inward toward the deepest recesses of their erotic knowledge to drink from its wellsprings and find their creative voice. They were merely expressing their modernity and claiming the artistic right to enter the modern world. They were honoring their sexuality as a pathway to spiritual enlightenment, as modern women artists have continued to do, not only on a personal level but also as a way out of the false dichotomy of black and white enforced by racism. The specific figure of Aphrodite may have lost her magnetic appeal for artists today, but the power of her realm is as strong as ever. Whether expressed in the erotic self-presentation of musical artists such as Beyoncé, Janelle Monáe, and Rihanna or the sexual female characters of writers such as Terry McMillan, Alice Walker, Sapphire, and Toni Morrison, female sexuality has become a modern source of creative power that challenges racism’s stranglehold on the black woman’s dignity, beauty, and strength. As Melissa Harris-Perry puts it in the foreword to a recent collection of essays on black women’s sexuality: “To be an embodied black woman is also to know joy, subjectivity, pleasure, and the latent capacity to enjoy being seen: to, in a sense,

220  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters transcend invisibility and to resist erasure.”5 This study of three pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance honors that power as we peel back the layers of historical invisibility hiding its deep lyrical roots in the 1920s. They anticipate our own valorization of black women’s right to sexual expression and the freedom to define themselves on their own terms. Angelina Grimké, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Mae Cowdery were courageous poets who dared to explore the forbidden in strikingly similar ways, and though they traveled along separate journeys, I am reluctant to let them go without picturing them in the same place at the same time. Since I began their collective story in the spring of 1927, a felicitous endpoint for my study might be the spring of 1932, when all three were in New York. Although their paths would cross at times and they undoubtedly knew of each other’s work, they were not friends due to their age differences and varying life paths, but this particular spring the three of them could all have been present at an April event on Riverside Drive in New York—at least I like to imagine they were. This was a celebration that occurred on a Sunday afternoon in midApril of 1932, sponsored by the James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild for a Youth Day program in which prizes were awarded to young poets who had entered its first poetry contest for children of color. Among those who won awards that day was Margaret Walker, aged fifteen, of New Orleans, whose poem, “When Night Comes,” received honorable mention. The guild had only recently been formed and consisted of women artists, among whom were Zora Neale Hurston, Helene Johnson, Dorothy West, and Mae V. Cowdery. Contest judges included Countee Cullen, Jessie Fauset, and Gwendolyn Bennett. The list of patrons for the ceremony was studded with leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Sterling Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Anne Spencer, Walter White, and Langston Hughes.6 Although Angelina Weld Grimké’s name is noticeably absent from the guild’s list of members or the event’s judges, she was living in New York by this time and was only a subway ride away from Riverside Park, where the event was being held at the International House. I can imagine her being lured out of her Washington Heights apartment that afternoon, if only to enjoy the beautiful Hudson River on a spring day.7 The Baltimore Afro-American correspondent who reported on this event was Harry B. Webber, Cowdery’s fiancé at the time, with whom she had fallen in love while a student at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute earlier in the year. They would be married just a few weeks later on May 6, 1932, in At-

Epilogue  T  221 lantic City, and Cowdery was already pregnant with their child.8 Although Webber enumerated who was in the guild and who judged the contest, he did not name those in attendance. Because Cowdery, a member of the guild, lived in New York at the time and was about to marry the event’s reporter, it seems plausible that she might have been there. Bennett was living on Long Island with her first husband and directing the Hempstead Colored YWCA in 1932, but Harlem and Brooklyn were where her heart was.9 Since the Youth Day program took place on a Sunday, and given her gregarious personality and role as judge, it is feasible that Bennett might have come into Manhattan to join the festivities. As early as 1930 Bennett had rejoined New York’s art community after ending her exile in rural Florida. In October of that year, she was a speaker at a series of lectures, “Contemporary Poetry,” at the Brooklyn YWCA, where Cowdery had taken up residence in September of 1930.10 Just a month after the children’s poetry celebration, Bennett was featured as the guild’s guest speaker for a luncheon at the Civic Club. She spoke about “The Child and His Poetry” and read prize-winning poems from the contest.11 Given her public profile, it is not hard to imagine her attending the April celebration. Of course none of the three may have been at the James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild poetry contest awards ceremony of 1932, but I like to picture them there—all in the same place on a magical April day in New York, where they had each come to live and at a point when they could bask in the glow of their accomplishments as New Negro poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Although its vibrant scene had vanished with onset of the Depression, its literary lights dimmed, there were still echoes of its exuberant song, outlines of its beautiful flowering in America’s most cosmopolitan city. Whether they were together on Riverside Drive that day or not, all three had somehow ended up in New York at the same time, refugees from Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Florida. They had already published much of the striking verse that we are reading decades later, and they inhabited the same lyrical orbit as poets of eros who bravely displayed their innermost desires in lasting art. The poetic gifts of these three writers include the ability to access, articulate, and share the human heart beating within so vividly that twenty-firstcentury readers can feel its rhythm and hear its voice in an infinite variety of ways. We can all enjoy the illusion of closeness provided by their use of the lyric “I,” a persona known only to the poet but familiar enough to be embraced by modern readers these many years later. Angelina Grimké,

222  T  Aphrodite’s Daughters Gwendolyn Bennett, and Mae Cowdery have left us a legacy of courage, resilience, and artistry that not only challenged segregation’s stranglehold on the dawning new age of modern America but also provided us with a road map to the autonomous, powerful, and inviolable women artists they were—poets who helped create our own modern world.

A ppe n di x A

List of Published Poetry (First A ppear ance) Gwendolyn B. Bennett

“Advice,” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 156 “Dear Things [Sonnet 2],” Palms, October 1926, 22 “Dirge,” Palms, October 1926, 22 “Epitaph,” Opportunity, March 1934, 76 “Fantasy,” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 158 “Hatred,” Opportunity, June 1926, 190 “Heritage,” Opportunity, December 1923, 371 “Lines Written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas,” Opportunity, July 1926, 225 “Moon Tonight,” Gypsy, October 1926, 13 “Nocturne,” The Crisis, November 1923, 20 “On a Birthday,” Opportunity, September 1925, 276 “Purgation,” Opportunity, February 1925, 56 “Quatrain [1],” The Crisis, December 1923, 65 “Quatrain [2],” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 155 “Secret,” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 155 “Song [1],” in Opportunity, October 1926, 305 “Song [2],” Palms, October 1926, 21 “Sonnet [1],” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 160. “Street Lamps in Early Spring,” Opportunity, May 1926, 152 “To a Dark Girl,” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 157. “To Usward,” The Crisis, May 1924, 19; Opportunity, May 1924, 143 “Wind,” Opportunity, November 1924, 335 “Your Songs,” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 157

Mae V. Cowdery

“A Prayer,” The Crisis, September 1928, 300 “Dusk,” in Charles S. Johnson, ed., Ebony and Topaz: A Collecteana (1927), 23 “Farewell,” The Crisis, February 1929, 50 “Goal,” Black Opals, Spring 1927, 8

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224  T  Appendix A “God Is Kind,” The Crisis, June 1930, 207 “Having Had You,” The Crisis, August 1930, 273 “Hidden Moon,” Black Opals, Spring 1927, 14 “I Sit and Wait for Beauty,” Challenge, May 1935, 20 “If I Must Know,” The Crisis, July 1930, 235 “Lamps,” The Crisis, December 1927, 337 “Longings,” The Crisis, December 1927, 337 “Love In These Days,” Black Opals, June 1928, 17 “My Body,” Black Opals, Spring 1927, 7 “Nameless,” Black Opals, Christmas 1928, 19 “Of the Earth,” The Carolina Magazine, May 1928, 32 “Time,” Black Opals, Christmas 1927, 15 “Tree,” Opportunity, September 1928, 258 “Want,” The Crisis, November 1928, 372 “The Wind Blows,” Opportunity, October 1927, 299 “The Young Voice Cries,” Harlem, November 1928, 14 We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems (Philadelphia: Alpress, 1936): “Pastorale” “Advice to the Lovelorn” “And So It Is with Love” “Poem . . . for a Lover” “Contrast” “Poet’s Query (Ennui)” “Dawn Cities” “Poplar Tree” “Denial” “Resurrection” “Each Night” “Sequel” “Exultation” “Shattered Mirror” “Feast” “Some Hands Are Lovelier” “Four Poems after the Japanese” “Spring Lament” “Haunted” “Spring Poem in Winter” “Heritage” “Strain of Music” “I Look at Death” “Three Poems for My Daughter” “If We Part Now” “To a New Mother” “Insatiate” “To the Veterans of Future Wars” “Interlude” “Totality” “Lines to a Sophisticate” “Unknown Soldier” “Love Song for Summer” “We Lift Our Voices” “Mood” “Young Wisdom” “Nostalgia” We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems also republished “Dusk,” “Farewell,” “Goal,” “God Is Kind” “Having Had You,” “I Sit and Wait for Beauty,” “If I Must Know,” “Lamps,” “Longings,” “Of the Earth,” “Tree,” “The Wind Blows,” and “The Young Voices Cry.”

Angelina Weld Grimké

“A Mona Lisa,” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 42 “A Struggling Soul,” The Boston Transcript, May 16, 1901 “A Winter Twilight,” in Robert T. Kerlin, ed., Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923), 153 “At April,” Opportunity, March 1925, 83

Appendix A  T  225 “At the Spring Dawn,” in Robert T. Kerlin, ed., Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923), 154 “Beware Lest He Awakes,” The Pilot, May 10, 1902 “The Black Finger,” Opportunity, November 1923, 343 “Dawn,” in Robert T. Kerlin, ed., Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923), 153 “Death,” Opportunity, March 1925, 68 “Dusk,” Opportunity, April 1924, 99 “El Beso,” The Boston Transcript, October 27, 1909 “Epitaph on a Living Woman,” in J. C. Byars, ed., Black and White (1927), 20 “The Eyes of My Regret,” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 37 “For the Candle Light,” Opportunity, September 1925, 263 “Grass Fingers,” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 38 “The Grave in the Corner,” The Norfolk County Gazette, May 27, 1893 “Greenness,” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 36 “Hushed by the Hands of Sleep,” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 36 “I Weep,” Opportunity, July 1924, 196 “Little Grey Dreams,” Opportunity, January 1924, 20 “Longing,” The Boston Transcript, April 16, 1901 “May,” The Boston Transcript, May 7, 1901 “Paradox,” The Carolina Magazine, May 1927, 38 “The Puppet-Player,” in Robert T. Kerlin, ed., Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923), 153 “Street Echoes,” The Boston Sunday Globe, July 22, 1894 “Surrender,” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 38 “Tenebris,” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 40 “Then and Now,” in Anna Julia Cooper, Life and Writings of the Grimké Family (1951), 28 “To Clarissa Scott Delany,” in Charles S. Johnson, ed., Ebony and Topaz: A Collecteana (1927), 67 “To the Dunbar High School,” The Crisis, March 1917, 222 “To Joseph Lee,” The Boston Transcript, November 11, 1908 “To Keep the Memory of Charlotte Forten Grimké,” The Crisis, January 1915, 134 “To Theodore D. Weld on His 90th Birthday,” The Norfolk County Gazette, November 25, 1893 “Trees,” The Carolina Magazine, May 1928, 35 “Under the Days,” The Carolina Magazine, May 1927, 38 “The Want of You,” in Robert T. Kerlin, ed., Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923), 154 “The Ways O’ Men,” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 39 “When the Green Lies over the Earth,” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 41 “Where Phyllis Sleeps,” The Boston Transcript, July 31, 1901 “Your Hands,” in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), 44

A ppe n di x B

Selected List of Unpublished Poetry “City Snow,” 1924 “Communion” “Comrades” “Dirge for a Free Spirit” [For me . . . you are a tall tree] “Fulfillment” “Gesture” [Give me your hand,

“Après Amour,” 1926–1929

“A Mood,” February 8, 1902 “A Trilogy,” September 12–17, 1901 “An Epitaph” “At the Autumn Dusk” “At the End” “At Morn” “Babette” “Beautiful Death,” March 18, 1891 “Brown Girl” “Butterflies” “Caprichosa,” December 12, 1901 “Despair,” December 8, 1901 “Dreamy Night,” January 1893 “Evanescence” “The Garden Seat,” January

Gwendolyn B. Bennett beloved] [I will love you always] “Longing” January 2, 1933 “New Year’s Eve—1938” “Nostalgia” Paris, 1925 “Penance” “Poem,” Hempstead, L.I., 1933 “Quatrain”

Mae V. Cowdery

“Dream?” January 14, 1929

“Quest” “Quiescence” “Secret” “Sonnet [I–IV],” late 1938 “Thin Laughter” To an Aloof Lady” Train Monotony,” 1928 “Twilight,” Paris, 1925 “Your Lips”

“Poem,” 1926–1929

Angelina Weld Grimké 6, 1902 “Give Me Your Eyes” [Hands of her, white hands of her] [I let you kiss my mouth] [I shall remember eons hence her eyes] [Keep this lily that I fold,] 1912 [Love me to-day] “My Lilies at Dusk” “My Shrine,” February 24, 1902 “My Star” [My sweetheart walks down laughing ways] “Naughty Nan,” February 23, 1902 “Regret”

226

“Rest,” February 1893 “Rosabel” [So you strolled along the terrace] [The sun is shining, I see a robin] “Thou Art So Far, So Far,” December 26, 1901 “To My Father upon His Fifty-Fifth Birthday,” August 1904 [’Twas twilight time when Alice came] “The Violets Narritive [sic],” February 15, 1891 [What can I give my happy dark-haired mother] [When you walk] “You”

Notes

The Lyric Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery 1 Angelina Weld Grimké, “At April,” Opportunity, March 1925, 83; Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Street Lamps in Early Spring,” Opportunity, May 1926, 152; Mae V. Cowdery, “Spring Poem in Winter,” in Cowdery, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems (Philadelphia: Alpress 1936), 49. 2 In 1927, Grimké and Bennett each published several poems in Countee Cullen ed. Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927). Poems by Bennett and Cowdery were included in William Stanley Braithwaite, ed., Anthology of Magazine Verse; and Year Book of American Poetry for 1927 (New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1927). Poems by Grimké and Cowdery and a short story by Gwendolyn Bennett were published in Charles S. Johnson, ed., Ebony and Topaz: A Collecteana (New York: National Urban League 1927). In 1927, all three poets were published in Opportunity and Cowdery debuted in Philadelphia’s new journal Black Opals and published two prize-winning poems in The Crisis. Grimké also published verse that year in the University of North Carolina’s The Carolina Magazine and in J. S. Byars, ed., Black and White (Washington, D.C.: Crane Press, 1927). 3 Carolivia Herron, ed., Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 4 Belinda Wheeler has advanced our understanding of Bennett as a modernist writer in “Gwendolyn Bennett: A Leading Voice of the Harlem Renaissance,” in A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson (West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 203–218. Wheeler has also renewed interest in Bennett as a columnist in “Gwendolyn Bennett’s ‘The Ebony Flute,’” PMLA 128 (May 2013): 744–755. 5 Gloria T. Hull examines Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Georgia Douglas Johnson in Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Cheryl A. Wall focuses on Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston in Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Sandra Y. Govan was the first to recuperate Bennett after decades of neglect in “Gwendolyn Bennett: Portrait of an Artist Lost” (PhD diss., Emory University, 1980). 6 See, for example, Gloria T. Hull, ed., The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Verner D. Mitchell, ed., This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). Claudia Tate, ed., The Selected Works of Georgia Douglas Johnson (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1997); Lorraine Elena Roses, ed., Selected Works of Edythe Mae Gordon (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996); J. Lee Greene, Time’s Unfading Garden: Anne Spencer’s Life and Poetry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977). 7 Angelina Weld Grimké, “A Mona Lisa,” in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 42; Gwendolyn Bennett, “Comrades,” box 2, Poetry n.d., folder 5, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library (hereafter Gwendolyn Bennett Papers); Mae V. Cowdery, “Insatiate,” in Cowdery, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems, 57 8 Angelina Weld Grimké, [“I let you kiss my mouth”], box 10, Untitled Poetry, folder 159, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University

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228  T  Notes to Pages 6 to 14 (hereafter Angelina Weld Grimké Collection); Gwendolyn Bennett, “To a Dark Girl,” in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 157; Mae V. Cowdery, “Longings,” The Crisis, December 1927, 337. 9 Stephanie Leigh Batiste, Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). 10 Erin D. Chapman, Prove It on Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press 2012). See especially chapter 3, “Consuming the New Negro: The Whirlpools of the Sex-Race Marketplace.” See also Shane Vogel, “The Sensuous Harlem Renaissance: Sexuality and Queer Culture,” in A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson (West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 267–284. 11 Nina Miller, Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York’s Literary Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 152. Miller’s groundbreaking chapter on the modernism of love poetry by Gwendolyn Bennett and Helene Johnson is one of the earliest pieces of scholarship to identify them as modernists. 12 Angelina Weld Grimké, “A Trilogy,” September 12, 1901, Scrapbook of Poetry, 43–46, box 15, folder 243; Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. I have used bracketed ellipses to indicate where I removed lines or stanzas and as a way to differentiate these ellipses from those that are part of the original poetry. 13 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Fantasy,” in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 158. 14 Mae V. Cowdery, “Four Poems after the Japanese,” in Cowdery, We Lift Our Voices, 12. 15 Angelina W. Grimké, “My Shrine,” February 24, 1902, Scrapbook of Poetry, 78, box 15, folder 243, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 16 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Street Lamps in Early Spring,” Opportunity, May 1926, 152. 17 Mae V. Cowdery, “The Young Voice Cries,” Harlem, November 1928, 14. 18 Miller, Making Love Modern, 217–219. 19 Angelina Weld Grimké, “Thou Art So Far, So Far,” December 26, 1901, Scrapbook of Poetry, 55, box 15, folder 243, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection; Gwendolyn Bennett, “Communion,” box 2, Poetry n.d., folder 5, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers; Mae V. Cowdery, “The Young Voice Cries,” Harlem, November 1928, 14. 20 These tenets of modernism are described in Amy Lowell, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (New York: Macmillan, 1917); Harriet Monroe, Poets and Their Art (New York: Macmillan, 1932); and Louis Untermeyer, The New Era in American Poetry (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1919). 21 This aspect of Aphrodite as ruler of subjective states is described in Paul Friedrich, The Meaning of Aphrodite (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). See also Rachel Rosenzweig, Worshipping Aphrodite: Art and Culture in Classical Athens (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 22 Angelina Weld Grimké, “The Eyes of My Regret,” in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 37. 23 Gwendolyn Bennett, “To an Aloof Lady,” box 2, Poetry n.d., folder 5, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 24 Mae V. Cowdery, “I Sit and Wait for Beauty,” Challenge, May 1935, 20. 25 Angelina Weld Grimké, “Grass Fingers,” in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 38; Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Song,” Palms, October 1926, 21; Mae V. Cowdery, “Interlude,” in Cowdery, We Lift Our Voices, 44. 26 After her father died in 1930, Grimké moved to the Washington Heights area of New York, where she lived until her death in 1958. Bennett went to high school in Brooklyn, spent much time with her parents there after graduating, attended Columbia University and the Pratt Institute, and lived in New York from 1930 until her retirement to Kutztown, Pennsylvania, in 1968. Cowdery moved to New York after graduating from high school in 1927 and visited the city frequently even after she moved back to Philadelphia in the early 1930s. 27 Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) depicts the conflict between respectable New Negro women activists and women who ventured out into Harlem’s cabarets. 28 K. T. Ewing, “What Kind of Woman? Alberta Hunter and Expressions of Black Female Sexuality in the Twentieth Century,” in Black Female Sexualities, edited by Trimiko Melancon and Joanne M. Braxton (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 102.

Notes to Pages 14 to 17  T  229 29 Miller, Making Love Modern, 211. 30 Ibid., 216. 31 Ajuan Maria Mance, Inventing Black Women: African American Women Poets and SelfRepresentation, 1877–2000 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 71. Emily J. Orlando also critiques conservative images of women New Negro men created during the Harlem Renaissance in “‘Feminine Calibans’ and ‘Dark Madonnas of the Grave’: The Imaging of Black Women in the New Negro Renaissance,” in New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance: Essays on Race, Gender, and Literary Discourse, edited by Australia Tarver and Paula C. Barnes (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press 2010), 59–95. 32 Chapman, Prove It on Me, 17. 33 Ibid., 18. 34 Melissa Girard, “‘Jeweled Bindings’: Modernist Women’s Poetry and the Limits of Sentimentality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 96–119. 35 Although several scholars have characterized Millay and others as sentimental modernists, a good description of this perspective is provided in Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 36 Girard, “‘Jeweled Bindings,’” 116. Girard participates in a larger critique of high modernism as sexist and racist. The most influential studies on my own thinking in this regard include Houston Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Walter Kalaidjian, The Edge of Modernism: American Poetry and the Traumatic Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Seth Moglen, Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007); Cary Nelson, Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (New York: Routledge, 2001); James Smethurst, The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Laura Doan and Jane Garrity, eds., Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality and National Culture (Boston: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Alan Filreis, CounterRevolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of California Press, 2008). 37 Keith D. Leonard, “African American Women Poets and the Power of the Word,” in The Cambridge Companion to African American Women’s Literature, edited by Angelyn Mitchell and Danielle K. Taylor (New York: Cambridge University Press 2009), 32–49. 38 Jane Kuenz, “Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Harlem Renaissance: The Case of Countee Cullen,” Modernism/modernity 14, no. 3 (2007): 507–515. 39 Cynthia Davis and Verner D. Mitchell, “Modernism and the Urban Frontier in the Work of Dorothy West and Helene Johnson,” in A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson (West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 103–118. Davis and Mitchell have contributed significantly to the recuperation of Johnson’s poetry as modernist. 40 Nina Miller has greatly advanced our understanding of Johnson’s and Bennett’s lyric poetry as modernist in Making Love Modern. See also T. J. Bryan, “The Published Poems of Helene Johnson,” Langston Hughes Review 6, no. 2 (1987): 11–21. 41 Examples of revisionary scholarship on lyric poetry of the Harlem Renaissance include Suzanne Churchill, “Modernism in Black & White,” Modernism/modernity 16, no. 3 (2009): 489–492; Heather Hathaway, “Exploring ‘Something New’: The ‘Modernism’ of Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows,” in Race and the Modern Artist, edited by Heather Hathaway, Joseph Jařab, and Jeffrey Melnick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 54–68; and Melissa Prunty Kemp, “African American Women Poets, the Harlem Renaissance, and Modernism: An Apology,” Callaloo 36 (Summer 2013): 789–801. 42 Mark A. Sanders, “American Modernism and the New Negro Renaissance,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, edited by Walter Kalaidjian (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 130. 43 Andrew Thacker, “The Free Verse Controversy,” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 2, North America 1894–1960, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 193–198.

230  T  Notes to Pages 17 to 32 44 Jennifer Wilks, Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacasade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne Cesaire, Dorothy West (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). 45 Sandra Y. Govan has taken the lead in documenting Bennett’s activism during the 1930s. See, for example, “After the Renaissance: Gwendolyn Bennett and the WPA Years,” MAWA-Review 3 (December 1988), 27–31. 46 Angelina Weld Grimké, “Tenebris,” in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 40; Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Song,” in Opportunity, October 1926, 305. 47 Mae V. Cowdery, “Lamps,” The Crisis, December 1927, 337; Mae V. Cowdery, “A Prayer,” The Crisis, September 1928, 300. 48 Bennett recounts being denied jobs in New York because of racism and her stint at a batik factory passing as Javanese in an untitled memoir essay in her papers. Another untitled essay describes Ku Klux Klan nightriders parked in front of the Bennett household in Eustis, Florida, on March 30, 1929. Her essay “I Have Seen . . . ,” submitted to The Nation in 1929, describes the routine racism she witnessed and experienced in Eustis after moving there in the fall of 1928. All three unpublished essays are in box 2, Prose n.d., folder 10, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 49 Miller, Making Love Modern, 211. 50 Ibid., 212. Angelina Weld Grimké’s Sapphic Temple of Desire 1 Angelina W. Grimké, “A Mood,” February 8, 1902, Scrapbook of Poetry, 66–67, box 15, folder 243, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Library, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Angelina Weld Grimké Collection). 2 George H. Emerson, The Life of Alonzo Ames Miner, S.T.D., L.L.D. (Boston: Universalist Printing House, 1896). Joseph Lee’s claim to fame was as a black inventor. See Gaius Chamberlain, “Joseph Lee,” The Black Inventor, November 26, 2012, http://blackinventor. com/joseph-lee/. 3 Joseph and Christiana Lee, their three daughters, Genevieve, Therese, and Narka, and a servant are listed as occupants of 528 Columbus along with Angelina and Archibald Grimké in the federal manuscript census returns; Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Boston, Twelfth Census of the United States (1900), page 2B. The Lees’ only son, Howard, was not living there at the time. Interestingly, the servant and Christiana and Joseph Lee are designated as white, while the Lees’ children and the two Grimkés are listed as colored. 4 An excerpt from this letter draft by Angelina Grimké to an unknown recipient is reprinted in Carolivia Herron, ed., Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 411–412. 5 Gloria Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Harlem Renaissance Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). The value of Hull’s groundbreaking resurrection of Grimké cannot be overstated. 6 The Archibald H. Grimké Papers and the Francis J. Grimké Papers are both housed at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 7 Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 98. Two of Grimké’s unpublished poems, “Rosabel” and “Brown Girl,” are published in The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall, edited by Terry Castle (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 616–618. 8 Melissa Prunty Kemp, “African American Women Poets, the Harlem Renaissance, and Modernism: An Apology.” Callaloo 36 (Summer 2013): 789–801. 9 Although she is by no means the only scholar to frame Grimké as a genteel poet, JeanneMarie A. Miller is representative of this school of thought. See Jeanne-Marie A. Miller, “Angelina Weld Grimké: Playwright and Poet,” CLA Journal 21 (Spring 1985): 9–13. 10 It appears that Grimké concentrated on prose in the century’s second decade and then returned to poetry in the 1920s. Her signature drama, Rachel, was performed in 1916, and

Notes to Pages 33 to 36  T  231 her short stories “The Closing Door” and “Goldie” were published in The Birth Control Review in 1919 and 1920, respectively. 11 Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 145. 12 Ibid., 139. 13 Herron, Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké, 4. Herron’s invaluable work in recovering the unpublished verse has made possible the kind of critical exegesis so necessary for understanding Grimké’s artistry. 14 Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 21. 15 Scholars have speculated that the 1903 diary records heartbreak over a woman, most likely Mamie Burrill, but a close reading makes it clear Grimké had fallen in love with a man, although she says in the diary no physical intimacy occurred. This emotional affair was threatening to Grimké’s father precisely because it was a male suitor who could have set up a separate life with her. The first scholar to identify the lover as a man is Brett Beemyn; see “The New Negro Renaissance, a Bisexual Renaissance: The Lives and Works of Angelina Weld Grimké and Richard Bruce Nugent,” in Modern American Queer History, edited by Allida Black (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 83–203. Beemyn correctly points out that although Grimké wrote some love poetry to men, the vast majority of it is addressed to women. In the 1903 diary, Grimké addressed three poems to an absent male beloved: “If” (July 31 entry); “[There came unto my door one night a little weeping boy]” (September 10 entry); and “[Shy succory blue]” (final page). All in box 15, folder 248, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 16 Diary entry for July 21, Diary 1903, box 15, folder 248, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 17 Angelina Grimké to Archibald Grimké, July 11, 1904, box 3, folder 60, Archibald H. Grimké Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Archibald H. Grimké Papers). 18 Diary entry for September 21, Diary 1909. This entry identifies the 1903 male suitor as Hinton Jones, a singer whom Grimké described as having set up a successful career in London. The last entry of the 1903 diary, dated September 10, mentions that Grimké had to stop the loved one from singing “My Rosary” because his beautiful voice pierced her “as though you had taken a knife and run it all around and, in and out an old unhealed wound.” Diary 1903 is in box 15, folder 248; Diary 1909 is in box 15, folder 249, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 19 Immediately following her comment on Hinton Jones in the 1909 diary, Grimké described two other men she had been seeing as a passing fancy only: “And that other one who isn’t worth it, well, let me see how long I shall care in his case. And the other one still. I saw him to-day. I don’t care at all for him. All the trouble that we caused wasn’t worth it for that poor little girl. I am sorry. It is not well to play with hearts when some one is bound to be hurt.” Diary entry for September 21, Diary 1909, box 15, folder 249, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 20 Laura Doan and Jane Garrity, eds., Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality and National Culture (Boston: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1, italics in original. 21 Laura Doan, “Topsy-Turvydom: Gender Inversion, Sapphism, and the Great War,” GLQ 12, no. 4 (2006): 517–542. 22 Dagny Boebel, “The Sun Born in a Woman: H.D.’s Transformation of a Masculinist Icon in ‘The Dancer,’” in Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-Readings, edited by Elizabeth Harrison and Shirley Peterson (Memphis: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 17. 23 Shari Benstock identifies American writers who drew inspiration from Sappho’s poetry for a new kind of erotic writing; see “Expatriate Sapphic Modernism: Entering Literary History,” in Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, edited by Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow (New York: New York University Press, 1990). See also Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 24 See, for example, Laura Doyle, “The Flat, the Round, and Gertrude Stein: Race and the Shape of Modern(ist) History,” Modernism/modernity 7 (April 2005): 249–271; and Diana Collecott, H.D. and Sapphic Modernity, 1910–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 25 Anna Clark, “Twilight Moments,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14 (January/April 2005): 139–160.

232  T  Notes to Pages 36 to 48 26 Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in TwentiethCentury America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 6. 27 For descriptions of these New American Poetry tenets, see Amy Lowell, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (New York: Macmillan, 1917); Harriet Monroe, Poets and Their Art (New York: Macmillan, 1932); and Louis Untermeyer, The New Era in American Poetry (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1919). For a comprehensive contemporary account of the free verse movement, see Walter Kalaidjian, ed., The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 28 Ajuan Maria Mance posits that the New Negro male literary establishment’s conservative norms for middle-class women inhibited women poets of the Harlem Renaissance from creating modernist verse. See Ajuan Maria Mance, “The Black Woman as Object and Symbol: African American Women Poets in the Harlem Renaissance,” chapter 2 of Inventing Black Women: African American Women Poets and Self-Representation, 1877–2000 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007). 29 Angelina W. Grimké, “Caprichosa,” December 12, 1901, Scrapbook of Poetry, 52, box 15, folder 243, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 30 Angelina W. Grimké, “Naughty Nan,” February 23, 1902, Scrapbook of Poetry, 76–77, ibid. 31 Angelina W. Grimké, “Babette,” box 10, folder 161, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 32 Angelina W. Grimké, “You,” box 10, folder 156, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 33 Angelina W. Grimké, “[Love me to-day],” box 10, folder 155, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Melissa Prunty Kemp accurately identifies this poem as emanating from “a decidedly female voice that likely addresses another female.” Kemp, “African American Women Poets, the Harlem Renaissance, and Modernism,” 799. 34 Angelina W. Grimké, “[I let you kiss my mouth],” box 10, folder 159, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 35 Angelina W. Grimké, “Give Me Your Eyes,” box 10, folder 154, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 36 Angelina W. Grimké, “[I shall remember eons hence her eyes],” box 10, folder 159, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. From the handwriting and ink, it appears that this poem was written or copied in the mid-1920s. 37 Angelina W. Grimké, “My Shrine,” February 24, 1902, Scrapbook of Poetry, 78–81, box 15, folder 243, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 38 Hull found evidence that Grimké substituted “he” for “she” as “My Shrine” underwent revision, but I failed to locate an earlier draft. See Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 141. The line appears in the following section of the poem: “The candles that I placed / Upon its sacred steps / Were not of dazzling grace, / Nor burned with light so bright / That one who passed afar / Might step with widened eyes, / And say mid loud guffaws, / “Behold the one he loves!” 39 Angelina W. Grimké, “My Star,” box 10, folder 155, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 40 Angelina W. Grimké, “Thou Art So Far, So Far,” December 26, 1901, Scrapbook of Poetry, 55, box 15, folder 243, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 41 Angelina W. Grimké, “[My sweetheart walks down laughing ways],” box 10, folder 158, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 42 Angelina W. Grimké, “[When you walk],” box 10, folder 156, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 43 Angelina W. Grimké, “El Beso,” Boston Transcript, October 27, 1909. 44 Angelina W. Grimké, “A Mona Lisa,” in Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, edited by Countee Cullen (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927), 42. 45 Melissa Girard, “On ‘A Mona Lisa,” in Modern American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson and Bartholomew Brinkman, 2001, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/ grimke/monalisa.htm. 46 Angelina W. Grimké, “Evanescence,” box 10, folder 153, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. This poem is written in the same blue ink and style as “Blue Cycle,” which is dated October 5, 1925. 47 Angelina W. Grimké, “Brown Girl,” enclosure in an envelope postmarked October 5, 1925, containing poems sent to Charles Johnson, box 10, folder 178, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection.

Notes to Pages 48 to 57  T  233 48 Angelina W. Grimké, “The Want of You,” Diary 1912, final page, box 15, folder 250, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Published in Robert T. Kerlin, ed., Negro Poets and Their Poems (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, Inc., 1923), 154. 49 Angelina W. Grimké, “Regret,” box 10, folder 156, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 50 Angelina W. Grimké, “Dusk,” Opportunity, April 1924, 99; also published in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 46. 51 Angelina W. Grimké, “A Winter Twilight,” in Kerlin, Negro Poets and Their Poems, 153; Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 46. 52 Angelina W. Grimké, “At the Autumn Dusk,” box 10, folder 153, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 53 Angelina W. Grimké, “The Eyes of My Regret,” in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 37. 54 Julie Butler Armstrong, “Grimké, Angelina Weld,” in Writing African American Women: An Encyclopedia of Literature by and about Women of Color, edited by Elizabeth A. Beaulieu (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006), 648–650. 55 K. T. Ewing observed the same silence about blues singer Alberta Hunter’s attraction to women in her private papers and concludes that Hunter did not want to be embroiled in the homophobic sexual politics of her era but challenged them in her public performances. K. T. Ewing, “What Kind of Woman? Alberta Hunter and Expressions of Black Female Sexuality in the Twentieth Century,” in Black Female Sexualities, edited by Trimiko Melancon and Joanne M. Braxton (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 100–112. 56 The photographs are in box 40, folders 813 and 810, respectively, Archibald H. Grimké Papers. The Fairmount School photo is undated, but in it, Angelina appears to be around twelve years old. 57 Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, edited by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 53–76. Brett Beemyn also links the romantic discourse in Grimké’s and Burrill’s letters to the concept of romantic friendship articulated in these studies, but only in an endnote. Beemyn, “The New Negro Renaissance,” 45n9. 58 Gloria Hull was the first to link the teenage Angelina with Burrill based on correspondence in the archive. 59 Charlotte Forten Grimké’s closest friend, Anna Julia Cooper, describes these gatherings in Chapter 4 of her memoir, “Reminiscences.” Cooper describes Friday evenings of interracial cultural gatherings at Francis and Charlotte’s home, which at that time was at 1526 L Street, and Sunday evenings of music at Cooper’s home, 1706 Seventeenth Street. Anna Julia Cooper, Life and Writings of the Grimké Family (Washington D.C.: self-published, 1951), 18–21. Mamie’s mother, Clara Burrill, was a member of Francis’s congregation for thirty-two years, and Francis officiated at her funeral, which took place in the Burrill home on Seventeenth Street. “Death of Mrs. Clara E. Burrill,” Washington Bee, June 13, 1908. 60 Mary Burrill to Angelina Grimké, February 25, 1896, box 1, folder 2, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 61 Archibald Grimké to Angelina Grimké, January 11, 1899, box 4, folder 69, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 62 Photograph of Mary Burrill, box 40, folder 851, Archibald H. Grimké Collection. Two photographs of Burrill’s sister Carrie are also in this folder. 63 Scant biographical information is available on Mary Burrill. These dates and institutions are provided in Lorraine Elena Roses and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph, eds., Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 36–38. 64 Note from Mary Burrill to Angelina Grimké, July 1911, box 1, folder 2, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. See also Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 139. 65 Burrill’s play They That Sit in Darkness and Grimké’s story “The Closing Door” were both published in the September 1919 issue of The Birth Control Review. 66 The information on Burrill’s relationship with Lucy Diggs Slowe comes from Paula Mar-

234  T  Notes to Pages 57 to 62

67 68 69

70

71

72 73 74 75 76

77

tinac, “Howard’s Intrepid Dean,” The Queerest Places: A Guide to Gay and Lesbian Historic Sites, June 14, 2014, http://queerestplaces.com/2009/06/16/howards-intrepid-dean. See also “Half of Dean Slowe’s Estate Goes to Her Sister,” Washington Bee, November 13, 1937. This article states that Burrill and Slowe jointly owned the house in which they lived: “The will pointed out that Miss Burrill has contributed her personal money to the purchase and carrying charges of the property. Joint tenancy meant that while each lived, each owned equally and the survivor had the right of survivorship.” Angelina Grimké, draft of a letter to “Mamie,” box 1, folder 2, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Gloria Hull speculated that this letter was addressed to Burrill in part because the letter is filed as Mary Burrill correspondence in the Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. See Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 139. Beemyn, “The New Negro Renaissance,” 38. Beemyn points out that Grimké wrote Mamie E. Karn’s name under the body of her letter and that Karn was enrolled at Carleton from 1895 to 1898. He correctly notes that there is no correspondence from Karn in the Grimké archive, suggesting that after Grimké left Carleton in 1897, they had no further contact. Angelina W. Grimké, “[’Twas twilight time when Alice came],” box 10, folder 159, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. There are two versions of this untitled poem, and these are four stanzas from one of them. The photograph of Alice Stacy is in box 40, folder 881, Archibald H. Grimké Papers. Angelina W. Grimké, “Rosabel,” box 10, folder 156, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. The poem is dated October 25 but has no year. Since Grimké wrote to her father of her love for Rosabelle Temple that month in 1897, it’s possible she wrote “Rosabel” at the same time. Archibald Grimké to Angelina Grimké, December 20, 1897, box 4, folder 67, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Frank Prentice Rand, Cushing Academy, 1865–1965 (Brattleboro: The Book Press, 1965), 52–53. A photo of Rosabelle Temple appears on p. 54A and shows her to be an attractive woman with beautiful jewelry and an elegant coiffure. Letter from Marie Vose to Angelina Grimké dated October 21, 1898, box 1, folder 11, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. This letter is misfiled under “Marie Leverette,” Archibald’s landlord in Hyde Park before he and Angelina left in late 1894. Archibald Grimké to Angelina Grimké, March 29, 1898, box 4, folder 68, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Angelina was a student at Cushing at the time Archibald wrote this letter. The Vose family is featured in Rand, Cushing Academy. These gymnastics programs are described in Chapter 7 of Martha H. Verbrugge’s AbleBodied Womanhood: Personal Health and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Boston (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Founded by philanthropist Mary Hemenway, the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics was established in 1889 and centered on Swedish gymnastics as a path toward health with emphasis on women students. In 1908, it merged with Wellesley College’s Department of Hygiene and Physical Education, and in 1917 became its graduate school. Verbrugge could find only one mention of an African American student at BNSG in the 1890s, whose name she did not furnish. See also Jacqueline G. Haslett, “Mary Hemenway: A Woman Ahead of Her Time,” Women in Sport and Physical Activity 7, no. 1 (Spring 1998), 191–209; and Bryan A. McCullick and Michael Lomax, “The Boston Normal School of Gymnastics: An Unheralded Legacy,” Quest 52 (February 2000): 49–59. Information on the Lee family is drawn from Bernard E. Powers, Jr., Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822–1885 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994); Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995); and Jerome T. Peoples, Lee’s Bread Machine: The Father of Automated Bread Making (Parker, Colo.: Outskirts Press, 2011). Articles from the black press on Tessa Lee include “Teachers Get Promotions,” Washington Post, September 25, 1902, 2; “Washington, D.C.,” New York Amsterdam News, November 23, 1927, 12; “Washington, D.C.,” Chicago Defender, November 19, 1932, 21; “Take Vows at

Notes to Pages 62 to 73  T  235

78 79 80 81

82 83

84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Church,” New York Amsterdam News, July 11, 1936, 6; “Mrs. Therese Robinson: Veteran D.C. Teacher,” Washington Post, January 2, 1951, D2; “Ex-D.C. Teacher Dies in NYC,” Baltimore Afro-American, January 12, 1952, 20. It is possible Tessa Lee and Angelina saw each other after Grimké moved to the Washington Heights area of New York given that Lee’s daughter, Barbara, lived on 153rd Street near Grimké, who was on 151st Street, in 1936. Barbara Connelly moved to 110th Street, where Tessa visited and finally lived with her shortly before Tessa’s death in 1952. Grimké lived in the same apartment building on 151st Street from 1930 to 1958. Tessa Lee to Angelina Grimké, December 27, 1894, box 1, folder 11, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Tessa Lee to Angelina Grimké, June 20, 1895, ibid. Tessa Lee to Angelina Grimké, September 23, 1901, box 1, folder 3, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Because Tessa married Robert Connelly in 1914, some of her letters are filed under “C” in the box of personal letters in the Grimké archive. While traveling in a sleeper coach to Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the summer of 1911, Grimké suffered a severe injury to her back when the train derailed. Several people were killed, including a wealthy white woman with whom she was sharing a car. Angelina was laid up in a cast for six months at Francis and Charlotte Grimké’s row house in Washington, D.C. Angelina and her father lived at Archibald’s brother’s two homes in D.C., at 1526 L Street (1898–1904) and 1415 Corcoran Street NW (1904–1930) until Archibald’s death in 1930. Tessa Lee to Angelina Grimké, August 4, 1911, box 1, folder 3, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Adelaide M. Cromwell describes this community in The Other Brahmins: Boston’s Black Upper Class, 1750–1950 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), 55–82. Cromwell refers specifically to Joseph Lee and Archibald Grimké as among the city’s most important civic leaders at the turn-of-the-century when Tessa Lee and Angelina were schoolmates and living in the Lee household. She locates the Lee move from Beacon Hill to Columbus Avenue on the South End in 1899 as the leading edge of African American advancement into a prosperous white neighborhood when it was not uncommon for black professionals to have white friends and employees. Angelina W. Grimké, “[Hands of her, white hands of her],” box 10, folder 159, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Angelina W. Grimké, “[So you strolled along the terrace],” box 10, folder 158, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Angelina W. Grimké, “[Keep this lily that I fold],” box 10, folder 159, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Angelina W. Grimké, “My Lilies at Dusk,” box 10, folder 167, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Angelina W. Grimké, “The Garden Seat,” January 6, 1902, Scrapbook of Poetry, 59, box 15, folder 243, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Angelina W. Grimké, “Where Phyllis Sleeps,” Boston Transcript, July 31, 1901, 35. Angelina W. Grimké, “Grass Fingers,” in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 38. Angelina W. Grimké, “Epitaph,” poetry sent to Charles S. Johnson, October 5, 1925, box 10, folder 178, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Angelina W. Grimké “Epitaph on a Living Woman,” in Black and White, edited by J. S. Byars (Washington D.C.: Crane Press, 1927). Angelina W. Grimké, “Under the Days,” The Carolina Magazine, May 1927, 38. Angelina W. Grimké, “The Violets Narritive [sic],” February 15, 1891, Scrapbook of Poetry, 1, box 15, folder 243, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Angelina W. Grimké, “Beautiful Death,” March 18, 1891, Scrapbook of Poetry, 1 ibid. Angelina W. Grimké, “Rest,” February 1893, Scrapbook of Poetry, 14, ibid. Angelina W. Grimké, “Dreamy Night,” January 1893, Scrapbook of Poetry, 15, ibid. Angelina W. Grimké, “The Grave in the Corner,” Norfolk County Gazette, May 27, 1893, 18. Sarah Stanley to Archibald Grimké, March 1, 1879, and May 29, 1879, box 3, folder 76, Archibald H. Grimké Papers.

236  T  Notes to Pages 73 to 79 100 Mark Perry, Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimké Family’s Journey from Slaveholder to Civil Rights Leaders (New York: Viking Press, 2001), 265. 101 Photo of Sarah Stanley and Angelina Grimké, box 40, folder 807, Archibald H. Grimké Papers. 102 Carolyn Amonitti Stubbs, “Angelina Weld Grimké: Washington Poet and Playwright” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 1978), 27. Stubbs adds that Archie blamed a neighbor for poisoning Sarah’s mind against him in a May 18, 1883, letter he wrote to Sarah’s father. 103 M. C. Stanley to Archibald Grimké, May 22, 1883, box 3, folder 74, Archibald H. Grimké Papers. Although Rev. Stanley initially opposed the marriage, he quickly came to embrace his black son-in-law as a child of his own and fought hard on his behalf to save the marriage. 104 Perry, Lift Up Thy Voice, 266. 105 Perry identifies Archibald’s relationships as occurring in the mid-1870s in Boston with Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman, the daughter of abolitionists, and Ellen (Nelly) Bradford, a descendant of passengers on the Mayflower. “Both women were very intelligent and very pretty,” Perry says. He characterizes Archie’s courtship of Bradford as intense: “The two were inseparable. . . . She was a constant visitor in the Weld home.” The relationship ended when her father took a job outside Boston. Perry, Lift Up Thy Voice, 256–257. Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman, who became a writer, corresponded with Angelina. Several of her letters are in the Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 106 Stubbs cites a letter Sarah wrote to Archie expressing this fear. Stubbs, “Angelina Weld Grimké,” 27. 107 Sarah Stanley to Archibald Grimké, May 5, 1883, box 3, folder 78, Archibald H. Grimké Papers. There is a gap in the correspondence from Sarah Stanley to Archibald from July 25, 1882, when she was in Michigan with Angelina, to the May 5, 1883 letter, suggesting that she lived with him in the Hyde Park flat he rented in September of 1882. It is possible that she took Nana with her to Hyde Park, but if she did so, she had clearly returned to Michigan with her by early 1883. 108 Sarah Stanley to Francis Grimké, September 22, 1884, box 3, folder 78, Archibald H. Grimké Papers. 109 Archibald Grimké to Sarah Stanley, January 6, 1887, and Sarah Stanley to Archibald Grimké, May 11, 1888, box folders 78 and 79, respectively, Archibald H. Grimké Papers. Archibald did not file for divorce, as Sarah asked, and they appear to have still been legally married when she died in 1898. 110 Sarah Stanley to Archibald Grimké, April 25, 1887, box 3, folder 79, Archibald H. Grimké Papers, emphasis in the original. 111 Frances Morehead, Los Angeles, to Angelina Grimké, June 26, 1887, box 1, folder 12, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 112 Sarah Stanley to Angelina Grimké, letter #1, n.d., box 5, folder 92, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 113 Sarah Stanley to Angelina Grimké, letter #2, n.d., box 5, folder 92, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 114 Sarah Stanley to Angelina Grimké, letter #7, n.d., box 5, folder 92, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection, emphasis in the original. 115 Sarah Stanley to Angelina Grimké, letter #6 and letter #10, no date, box 5, family correspondence folder 92, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 116 Angelina Weld Grimké, “A Biographical Sketch of Archibald H. Grimké,” Opportunity, February 1925, 44–47. 117 Patricia Young, “Shackled: Angelina Weld Grimké,” Women and Language 15, no. 2 (1992): 26. 118 “[What can I give my happy dark-haired mother]” and “[The sun is shining, I see a robin],” box 10, folder 158, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Neither poem is dated, but the childish handwriting is identical to that in the scrapbook dated 1891–1893 and they are written on the same notebook paper on which Grimké wrote her other juvenile poems. 119 Perry, Lift Up Thy Voice, 266.

Notes to Pages 79 to 88  T  237 120 Emma Tolles to Angelina Grimké, October 1, 1898, box 2, folder 19, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 121 M. C. Stanley to Archibald Grimké, November 16, 1898, box 3, folder 74, Archibald H. Grimké Papers. 122 M. C. Stanley to Archibald Grimké, February 18, 1899, ibid. 123 Angelina W. Grimké, “Longing,” July 18, 1899, Scrapbook of Poetry, 33 box 15, folder 243, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. This poem was published in the Boston Transcript, April 16, 1901, n.p. 124 Brian Russell Roberts, “Metonymies of Absence and Presence: Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel,” chapter 4 of Roberts, Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 93–94. 125 Ibid., 94–96. 126 Ibid., 103. 127 Ibid., 298. 128 The Archibald H. Grimké Papers contain four studio photographs of Angelina Grimké in Dominican native dress; box 46, folder 812. 129 Carleton Academy was established in 1867 and is still in existence. Unlike many institutions of higher education, it was coeducational from the beginning and relatively progressive, but it banned alcohol and tobacco from campus and strictly regulated men’s calls on women. Its roots in the Congregational Church perhaps appealed to Francis Grimké. For more on Carleton in the late nineteenth century, see Michael David Cohen, “‘What Gender Is Lex?’: Women, Men, and Power Relations in Colleges of the Nineteenth Century,” History of Higher Education Annual 24 (2005): 41–90. 130 This rupture with Mrs. Lee is described in letters Archibald wrote to Angelina in May and June of 1899, in which he begs his daughter to forgive Mrs. Lee and return to the Lee household. Box 4, folder 69, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 131 “The Closing Door” was published in two parts in volume 3 of The Birth Control Review: part 1 in the September 1919 issue, 10–14, and part 2 in the October 1919 issue, 8–12. 132 Grimké, “A Biographical Sketch of Archibald H. Grimké,” 45. 133 Angelina W. Grimké, “To Keep the Memory of Charlotte Forten Grimké,” The Crisis, January 1915, 134; also in Kerlin, Negro Poets and Their Poems, 55–56. 134 The current owner of 1417 Corcoran told me that she inherited the residence from her grandmother, who remembered 1415 being there throughout the 1930s. After Archibald died, Francis continued to live at 1415 until his own death in 1937. 135 Angelina W. Grimké, “Butterflies,” box 10, folder 153, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. Grimké’s neatly written draft is signed with the 1415 Corcoran address below her name. 136 These journals have been collected in Brenda Stevenson, ed., The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). For a biography, see Peter Burchard, Charlotte Forten: A Black Teacher in the Civil War (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995). 137 Angelina Grimké Weld, a feminist abolitionist of the nineteenth century, was the sister of Archibald’s white father. She and her sister Sarah are described in Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967). Archibald Grimké supported the suffrage movement in the late nineteenth century and marched in suffrage parades. Ribbons with his name on them as parade participant are in the Archibald H. Grimké Papers. 138 Laine A. Scott, “Grimké, Angelina Weld,” in African American National Biography, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 622–624. 139 Archibald Grimké to Angelina Grimké, June 12, 1899, and July 8, 1899, box 4, folder 69, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 140 Archibald Grimké to Angelina Grimké, May 5, 1901, box 4, folder 71, Archibald H. Grimké Papers; Tessa Lee to Angelina Grimké, September 23, 1901, box 1, folder 3, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 141 Archibald Grimké to Angelina Grimké, October 22, 1905, box 4, folder 74, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection.

238  T  Notes to Pages 88 to 89 142 Diary entry for September 10, 1903, Diary 1903, box 15, folder 248, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 143 Diary entry for July 21, 1903, ibid. 144 Diary entry for September 10, 1903, ibid. 145 Diary entry for December 31, 1911, Diary 1912, box 15, folder 250, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 146 Angelina W. Grimké, “To My Father upon His Fifty-Fifth Birthday,” August 17, 1904, box 10, folder 156, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 147 Perry, Lift Up Thy Voice, 234. 148 Ibid., 239. 149 Ibid., 241. 150 Box 2, folder 51, Archibald H. Grimké Papers. These notes accompany the typescript of Grimké’s biographical sketch of her father. 151 William Storm perceptively links Rachel’s main character to the author and cites Rachel’s highlighting of this racist incident when she was twelve. “Reactions of a ‘Highly-Strung Girl’: Psychology and Dramatic Representation in Angelina W. Grimké’s Rachel,” African American Review 27 (Fall 1993): 461–471. Reprinted in The Harlem Renaissance: A Gale Critical Companion, vol. 2, edited by Janet Witalec (Detroit, Mich.: The Gale Group, 2003), 507–538. 152 Teenage Angelina chafed under the guardianship of her strict uncle while her father was in Santo Domingo, and Francis’s letters to her at this time chided her repeatedly for spending too much money, taking unauthorized trips to Boston, failing to write, and in other ways being a disappointment to the family. Within a month of Archibald’s death, Angelina moved out of the home she had shared with her uncle for over thirty years; Francis forwarded letters sent to Angelina at 1415 Corcoran during that period to another address in Washington, D.C. Francis was a teetotaling puritanical minister whose strictness was significantly softened by his deep love for Charlotte Forten Grimké. Anna Julia Cooper described these hard and soft sides of Francis in her biography of the Grimkés; see Cooper, Life and Writings of the Grimké Family, 24–26. See also Henry Justin Ferry, “Francis James Grimké: Portrait of a Black Puritan” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1970). 153 Anna Julia Cooper to Angelina Grimké, April 21, 1930, box 1, folder 3, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 154 Henry B. Jones to Angelina Grimké, May 1, 1932, box 1, folder 9, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 155 Angelina W. Grimké, “At the End,” box 10, folder 153, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. The original poem is in the same blue ink and handwriting as others from the 1920s. Harlem’s Phoenix: Gwendolyn B. Bennett 1 Gwendolyn Bennett, “Train Monotony,” box 2, Poetry n.d., folder 5, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library (hereafter Gwendolyn Bennett Papers). The poem is typed and this note is at the bottom in Bennett’s handwriting: “Written 1928. On a train going from New York to Philadelphia—feeling blue and aware of life’s emptiness at times.” 2 William Stanley Braithwaite, ed., Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1927; and Year Book of American Poetry (Boston: B. J. Brimmer Co., 1927); Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927). 3 Gwendolyn Bennett, “Wedding Day,” Fire!!: A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists (November 1926), 25–28; Gwendolyn Bennett, “Tokens,” in Ebony and Topaz: A Collecteana, edited by Charles S. Johnson (New York: National Urban League, 1927), 149–150. Bennett served on the editorial board of Fire!!. 4 “Brooklyn Y. W. Notes,” Chicago Defender, January 26, 1924, 9; “Poets Evening,” undated, unsourced article in box 3, Scrapbook 1914–1927, folder 1, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. The article reported that Bennett read “City Snow,” “To a Negro Boy,” “Fantasy,” and “Patterns,” while the YWCA article adds to that list “Cool Sounds,” “Your Songs,” and “Dear Things.”

Notes to Pages 99 to 105  T  239 5 These events were covered in headlined articles, frequently accompanied by a photo of Bennett, in the following venues: “Poets Evening”; “Easy to Look at and Easy to Study Under,” Pittsburgh Courier, September 6, 1924, 3; “Howard Teacher Wins Foreign Scholarship,” Washington Daily American, December 30, 1924; “Art Scholarship Winners,” New York Amsterdam News, October 26, 1927. All are in box 3, Scrapbook 1914–1927, folder 1, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 6 Sandra Y. Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett: Portrait of an Artist Lost” (PhD diss., Emory University, 1980), 99. Govan’s groundbreaking work on Gwendolyn Bennett, including a personal interview that extended over three days, is the invaluable foundation for all scholarship on her. 7 Ibid., 75. 8 Bennett’s account of the La Révue Nègre première, “Let’s Go: In Gay Paree!,” is in box 2, Prose n.d., folder 10, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 9 Govan was the first scholar to describe Bennett’s rich life in Paris; Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett: Portrait of an Artist Lost,” 71–77. In a letter to Langston Hughes, Bennett described her growing friendships with Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, George Antheil, Gertrude Stein, Matisse, and other luminaries of the modernist era. Gwendolyn Bennett to Langston Hughes, December 2, 1925, box 14, file 317, Langston Hughes Papers, James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, MSS 26, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. 10 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Heritage,” Opportunity, December 1923, 371; Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Fantasy,” in Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, edited by Countee Cullen (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927), 158. 11 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Song,” in Opportunity, October 1926, 305. 12 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “To Usward,” The Crisis, May 1924, 19; simultaneously published in Opportunity, May 1924, 43. 13 Nina Miller, Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York’s Literary Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 214–220. 14 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Fantasy,” in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 158. Miller insightfully points out that “Fantasy” echoes Bennett’s March 1924 cover for The Crisis, which depicts fauns and nymphs dancing and playing pipes before a daydreaming young black man underneath a tree. Miller, Making Love Modern, 222. 15 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Street Lamps in Early Spring,” Opportunity, May 1926, 152. 16 Miller, Making Love Modern, 217. 17 Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), xiii–xiv. 18 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “To a Dark Girl,” in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 157; William Stanley Braithwaite, ed., Braithwaite’s Anthology and Yearbook of American Poetry for 1929 (New York: George Sully and Company, 1929); and James Weldon Johnson, ed., The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1931), 243. 19 Miller maintains that “To a Dark Girl” honors a debased figure of black female sexuality, the prostitute: “Bennett wrests the Brown Girl . . . from the disembodied gaze of her usual bourgeois viewer and sets her before a woman of the street.” Miller, Making Love Modern, 231. 20 Lorraine Elena Roses and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph, eds., Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 13. 21 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Dear Things,” Palms, October 1926, 22. 22 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Moon Tonight,” Gypsy, October 1926, 13. 23 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Twilight,” box 2, Published Poetry, 1933–1938, folder 3, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 24 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Song,” Palms, October 1926, 21. 25 Sandra Y. Govan and Jerry Langley, “Gwendolyn Bennett: The Richest Colors on Her Palette, Beauty and Truth,” International Review of African American Art 23, no. 1 (2010): 9. 26 Miller, Making Love Modern, 220.

240  T  Notes to Pages 105 to 114 27 Bernice Dutrieuille, “Art Weds Science,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 28, 1928, 6. 28 Ibid. 29 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “To a Dark Girl,” “Nocturne,” “Sonnet—2,” “Heritage,” and “Hatred” were reprinted in Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry, 1931. 30 Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett: Portrait of an Artist Lost,” 10. 31 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Epitaph,” Opportunity, March 1934, 76. 32 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Hatred,” Opportunity, June 1926, 190; reprinted in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 160; Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry, 246; and the New York Amsterdam News, November 25, 1931. 33 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Lines Written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas,” Opportunity, July 1926, 225. 34 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Your Songs,” in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 157. 35 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Nocturne,” The Crisis, November 1923, 20; reprinted in Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry, 244. 36 Gwendolyn B. Bennett read “City Snow,” at the 135th Street New York Library and the Brooklyn YWCA in 1924. It appears in typescript in box 2, Poetry n.d., folder 5, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 37 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Purgation,” Opportunity, February 1925, 56. 38 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Sonnet [1],” in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 160. 39 Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett: Portrait of an Artist Lost,” 80. 40 Diary entry for October 1, 1925, box 1, Diaries 1925, 1936, 1958, folder 2, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. “Moon Tonight” (1926) evokes just such a scene as the speaker contemplates a beloved in a moonlit moment: “Cool as a forgotten dream, / Dearer than lost twilights / Among trees where birds sing / No more.” Opportunity, October 1926, 13. 41 The allusion to “Gene” occurs in the entries for June 25 and 27, 1925, the Paris diary’s first entries. This was perhaps Gene Lyons, a student Bennett met at City College of New York, where she took courses from 1923 to 1924. Norman Rolff, who is mentioned in the entry for April 29, 1926, was a white man Bennett met at the Académie Colorossi whom she appears to have dated for a while. Box 1, Diaries 1925, 1936, 1958, folder 2, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 42 Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett: Portrait of an Artist Lost,” 71. 43 Diary entry for April 9, 1936, box 1, Diaries 1925, 1936, 1958, folder 2, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. Bennett is possibly referring to African American poet Frank Horne, with whom she had a lifelong close friendship. Horne’s papers are located in the Bennett archive, since she was entrusted with his literary estate when he died. 44 Diary entry for June 25, 1925, box 1, Diaries 1925, 1936, 1958, folder 2, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 45 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Song,” Palms, October 1926, 21. 46 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Secret,” in Cullen, Caroling Dusk, 155. 47 Sandra Y. Govan, “A Blend of Voices: Composite Narrative Strategies in Biographical Reconstruction,” in Recovered Writers/Recovered Texts: Race, Class, and Gender in Black Women’s Literature, edited by Nolan Hubbard (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 101. 48 Sue E. Barker highlights Bennett’s engagement with the political and aesthetic issues of modernism even as she expressed those of the Harlem Renaissance: “The [lyric] poems also often play with conventional forms, using a loosely structured free verse and take surprising turns invoking the freedom of the new literary sensibilities”; Sue E. Barker, “Gwendolyn Bennett,” in Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers, edited by Yolanda Williams Page (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007), 36. 49 Dutrieuille, “Art Weds Science.” 50 Karl Conrad, “A Lady Laughs at Fate,” Chicago Defender, January 5, 1946, 9, box 2, George Washington Carver School Writings, folder 2, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 51 “Some Local Jottings,” Washington Post, September 11, 1909, 3; “Warrants Issued for Local Lawyer Now in Harrisburg,” Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, July 22, 1915, 18; “Seek to Settle Bennett Case,” Harrisburg Evening News, August 7, 1918. 52 “Falls in Subway, Killed,” New York Times, August 14, 1926, 5.

Notes to Pages 114 to 125  T  241 53 “Family Sees Man Killed as He Falls before Tube Train,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 14, 1926, 2. 54 “Eastern Social Circles Agog over Bennett’s Suicide(?),” Pittsburgh Courier, August 28, 1926, 3. 55 Ibid. 56 Govan relates that Bennett was extremely close to her stepmother and thought of her as her real mother. Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett: Portrait of an Artist Lost,” 86. The birthdate of Marechal Neil Briscoe Bennett is listed on her application for a Social Security number as December 15, 1894. Social Security Administration, Application #13309-0303, March 16, 1938, Freedom of Information Office, Social Security Administration, Washington, D.C. 57 Untitled essay dated October 29, 1941, box 2, Prose n.d., folder 10, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 58 Diary entry for June 26, 1925, box 1, Diaries 1925, 1936, 1958, folder 2, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 59 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Nostalgia,” box 2, Published Poetry, 1933–1938, folder 3, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 60 Diary entry for September 27, 1925, box 1, Diaries 1925, 1936, 1958, folder 2, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 61 Claire Oberon Garcia, “Black Women Writers, Modernism, and Paris,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 14, nos. 1–2 (2011): 27–42. Garcia focuses on the lives and careers of Jessie Fauset and Paulette Nardal in Paris between the wars. 62 Leonore Hoffmann, “The Diaries of Gwendolyn Bennett,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 17, nos. 3–4 (1989): 66. 63 [Gwendolyn Bennett,] untitled essay dated October 29, 1941, box 2, Prose n.d., folder 10, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 64 “Orange Blossoms” by Robert L. Moore, the best man at her parents’ wedding, appears on the first page of Bennett’s Scrapbook and describes the December 26 wedding (no year) of Joshua Bennett and Mayme Abernathy in Giddings, Texas, at the home of Joshua’s parents: “Under an arch of lace draperies, white chrysanthemums and roses, the young man and woman were made husband and wife by Rev. Dr. Q. T. Simpson, pastor of the white Baptist church. . . . Quite a number of both white and colored friends witnessed the occasion.” Box 3, Scrapbook 1914–1927, folder 1, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 65 [Gwendolyn Bennett,] “My Father’s Story,” box 2, Prose n.d., folder 10, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Govan relates that Joshua Bennett took janitorial and other such jobs to support his daughter and second wife. Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett,” 58. 71 [Gwendolyn Bennett,] untitled and undated essay, box 2, Prose n.d., folder 10, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 72 Ibid. 73 Miller, Making Love Modern, 221. 74 Diary entry for June 27, 1925, box 1, Diaries 1925, 1936, 1958, folder 2, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 75 Diary entry for September 2, 1925, ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett: Portrait of an Artist Lost,” 63. 78 [Gwendolyn Bennett,] “My Father’s Story.” box 2, Prose n.d., folder 10, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 79 Christopher Long, “Lee County,” in Handbook of Texas Online, accessed February 24, 2012, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hc106. 80 Julia Jones, Lee County, Historical and Descriptive (Houston: Gulf Coast Baptist Print, 1945), 18–20.

242  T  Notes to Pages 125 to 132 81 Sandra Y. Govan, “Kindred Spirits and Sympathetic Souls: Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Bennett in the Harlem Renaissance,” in Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence, edited by James C. Trotman (New York: Garland Press, 1995), 76. 82 Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett: Portrait of an Artist Lost,” 182. 83 In 1920, Mayme Frances Abernathy married Anselmo Pizarro-Ressy, a Puerto Rican–born American, in Philadelphia. At the time, Anselmo was a machinist and Mayme a waitress, according to their marriage certificate. This document states that both were “colored,”, that Mayme had not been previously married and that she had been born in Texas, where her mother had also been born. Certificate No. 434849, November 19, 1920, Orphans’ Court, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, County of Philadelphia. Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia. 84 Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett: Portrait of an Artist Lost,” 188. 85 Bennett wrote of her stint as a batik worker and passing for Javanese in an untitled essay among her memoirs. To make herself look “exotic” or “foreign,” Bennett wore a colorful flowered print dress to the interview, hung a number of strings of beads around her neck, and wore large, heavy silver earrings she had bought in Paris. The ruse worked, and that job is how she filled the gap between her resignation from Howard in the spring of 1927 and the beginning of her fellowship stipend at the Barnes Foundation, which started in the fall. Untitled and undated essay, box 2, Prose n.d., folder 10, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 86 Roses and Randolph, Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, 14–15. Mayme’s second husband, identified as Anselmo Ressy Pizarro in this document, is described as a white man on his April 27, 1942, draft registration card; it is possible that the couple passed for white. Anselmo Ressy Pizarro, 1942, World War II Draft Registration Cards, microfilm series M1951, roll 247, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C. 87 Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett: Portrait of an Artist Lost,” 138. 88 Poems published in 1926 include “Dear Things,” “Dirge,” “Hatred,” “Lines Written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas,” “Moon Tonight,” “Song [II],” and “Street Lamps in Early Spring.” Bennett’s book reviews of 1926 all appeared in the June and September issues of Opportunity. 89 Box 1, Educational Records 1925–1946, folder 4, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 90 “Brooklyn Notes,” Chicago Defender, October 11, 1930, 14; “Winners in Poetry Contest Get Prizes,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 23, 1932, 2; “Miss Bennett Talks to Club,” New York Amsterdam News, May 11, 1932, 5; “Second Children’s Poetry Contest Is Announced,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 11, 1933, 2. 91 Bennett’s prowess at the bridge table is documented in articles that appeared in the New York Amsterdam News, including “The Bridge Table,” September 1, 1934, 2, 9; “Club Arranges Card Tourney,” New York Amsterdam News, June 22, 1935, 8; “Brooklyn Teams Bridge Winners,” New York Amsterdam News, August 31, 1935, 1. 92 For a detailed account of Bennett’s leadership of the Harlem Community Art Center, see Sandra Y. Govan, “After the Renaissance: Gwendolyn Bennett and the WPA Years,” MAWA Review 3 (December 1988): 27–31. 93 [Gwendolyn Bennett,] untitled essay, box 2, Prose n.d., folder 10, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 94 [Gwendolyn Bennett,] “Last night I nearly killed my husband!,” box 2, Printed Matter 1928–1942, folder 9, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 95 Govan, “After the Renaissance,” 28. 96 [Bennett,] “Last night I nearly killed my husband!” 97 Gwendolyn Bennett to Louia Vaughn Jones, February 10, 1931, box 1, Correspondence 1926–1946, folder 3, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 98 “Training and Experience Record,” box 1, Employment Records 1925–1938, folder 5, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 99 [Gwendolyn Bennett,] “Last night I nearly killed my husband!” box 2, Printed Matter 1928–1942, folder 9, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers 100 Diary entry for May 6, 1936, box 1, Diaries 1925, 1936, 1958, folder 2, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers.

Notes to Pages 132 to 147  T  243 101 Diary entry for May 7, 1936, ibid. 102 “Physician Gets Final Service: Heart Trouble Fatal to Dr. Jackson,” New York Amsterdam News, May 23, 1936, 4. 103 The mortgage for the Bennett-Jackson home in Hempstead is in box 1, Estate of Alfred Jackson 1933–1939, folder 7, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 104 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Longing,” box 2, Published Poetry, 1933–1938, folder 3, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 105 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Poem,” ibid. 106 Roses and Randolph, Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, 13. Bennett also used imagery drawn from sculpture in “Moon Tonight” (1926), in which the speaker refers to “the chiseled marble / Of your dust-freed soul.” Gypsy, October 1926, 13. Although Bennett’s art work was in the field of painting and batik, it is worth noting that her close friend, Augusta Savage, was a sculptor. 107 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Gesture,” box 2, Published Poetry, 1933–1938, folder 3, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 108 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Dirge for a Free Spirit,” box 2, Poetry n.d., folder 5, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 109 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Thin Laughter,” ibid. 110 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “To an Aloof Lady,” ibid. 111 “Threnody for Spain,” “Peace,” and “The Hungry Ones,” all in box 2, Published Poetry, 1933–1938, folder 3, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 112 Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett: Portrait of an Artist Lost,” 206–207, italics in original. 113 Bennett enrolled in the fine arts education program at Teachers College in September 1935 and graduated in February 1937; box 1, Educational Records 1924–1940, folder 4, Gwendolyn Brooks Papers. She helped found the Harlem Artists’ Guild in 1934, serving as its president in 1938. She helped Augusta Savage run the WPA-funded Harlem Community Art Center, then served as director from 1938 to 1941, when she was dismissed by the WPA over allegations that she was a communist. 114 Diary entry for April 7, 1936, box 1, Diaries 1925, 1936, 1958, folder 2, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 115 Diary entry for January 3, 1937, ibid. 116 Diary entry for April 9, 1936, ibid. 117 Diary entry for April 15, 1936, ibid. 118 Sandra Y. Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett: Dramatic Tension in Her Life and Art,” Langston Hughes Review 6 (Fall 1987): 29–35. 119 Diary entry for April 10, 1936, box 1, Diaries 1925, 1936, 1958, folder 2, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 120 Diary entry for April 13, 1936, ibid. 121 Diary entry for April 16, 1936, ibid. 122 Diary entry for April 17, 1936, ibid. 123 Diary entry for April 21, 1936, ibid. 124 Diary entry for May 7, 1936, ibid. 125 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “[I will love you always,]” box 2, Poetry n.d., folder 5, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 126 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Comrades,” ibid. 127 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Your Lips,” ibid. 128 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Communion,” ibid. 129 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Secret,” box 2, Published Poetry, 1933–1938, folder 3, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 130 Miller, Making Love Modern, 220–221. 131 “Variety of Faces at Literary Tea,” April 17, 1937, 2; “Speaker,” December 25, 1937, 10; “Suitcase Theatre Group Is Brilliant in Premiere,” April 30, 1938, 16; “They Had a Ball!,” May 14, 1938, 16; “At Card Tourney,” June 25, 1938, A3; “They Were Hostesses at Harlem Art Center’s Dance,” June 3, 1939, 9; “Women of Today Honored with Medals at the Fair,” July 1, 1939, 7. All are from the New York Amsterdam News. 132 Govan, “Gwendolyn Bennett: Portrait of an Artist Lost,” 206–207.

244  T  Notes to Pages 147 to 158 133 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “New Year’s Eve—1938,” box 2, Published Poetry, 1933–1938, folder 3, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 134 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Fulfillment,” box 2, Poetry n.d., folder 5, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 135 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “[Give me your hand beloved],” ibid. 136 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “[For me . . . you are a tall tree],” ibid. 137 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Quatrain,” ibid. 138 “Gwen Bennet [sic] Weds Teacher,” New York Amsterdam News, June 29, 1940, 13, box 2, Clippings 1925–1946, folder 12, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 139 Conrad, “A Lady Laughs at Fate,” 9. 140 Leotha Hackshaw, “Harlem Portraits,” box 2, Clippings, 1925–1946, folder 12, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 141 Photo of Gwendolyn Bennett and Richard Crosscup, Reading Eagle, June 6, 1973, 18, box 2, Clippings 1925–1946, folder 12, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 142 Foreword to 1936 Diary, box 1, Diaries 1925, 1936, 1958, folder 2, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 143 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Quiescence,” box 2, Published Poetry, 1933–1938, folder 3, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. Shattered Mirror: The Failed Promise of Mae V. Cowdery 1 Mae V. Cowdery, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems (Philadelphia: Alpress, 1936). Thirteen of the poems in this collection had been previously published. Cowdery published a total of sixty-two poems, including the ones in this volume and those published in The Crisis; Opportunity; Black Opals; Challenge; The Carolina Magazine; Harlem; Charles S. Johnson, ed., Ebony and Topaz: A Collecteana (New York: National Urban League, 1927); William Stanley Braithwaite, ed., Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1928; and Year Book of American Poetry (New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1928); and William Stanley Braithwaite, ed., Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1929; and Year Book of American Poetry (New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1929). Three other unpublished poems appear in the letters to Langston Hughes. The poem “A Brown Aesthete Speaks,” published in The Crisis in 1928, has been misattributed to Cowdery because it was printed next to one of her pieces and had no author’s name attached. 2 Bibliographic entries on Cowdery contain her correct birth date but an erroneous death date of 1953, which was incorrectly provided by an informant for a 1980 dissertation on Philadelphia New Negro writers and by a second informant who thought he had seen her in the early 1950s. Vincent Jubilee, “Philadelphia’s Afro-American Literary Circle and the Harlem Renaissance” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1980): 59 and 67. The incorrect middle name of Virginia also came from one of Jubilee’s informants, who may have confused it with Cowdery’s best friend’s middle name, Marion Virginia Turner. Cowdery’s mother, after whom she was named, was Mary Valentine Wilson, and Mae seems to have adopted the middle initial V. for her pen name. I have not yet located a birth certificate for her, but the 1910 federal census lists Lemuel, Mary, and Mary Wilson Cowdery living with John and Tillie Robinson at 1327 S. Garnet Street in Philadelphia. Mae’s age is given as one year, three months. Entry for Lemuel and Mary Cowdery, sheet 6-A, 1910 federal census, City of Philadelphia, Thirty-Sixth Ward, lines 43–47. 3 Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation, June 28, 1926, 692–694. 4 Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, October 8, 1926, letter 1, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers, JWJ MSS 26, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (hereafter Langston Hughes Papers). Although the page of the letter on which this passage appears is marked 1, the catalogue numbering of the remaining letters, most of which are undated, does not follow the chronology of dates Cowdery recorded. The letters have been numbered by an archivist and are all together in one folder. 5 Omega Psi Phi, an African American fraternity Hughes joined, was established in 1911 by Howard University graduates. Its cardinal principles were manhood, scholarship, persever-

Notes to Pages 158 to 180  T  245

6 7

8 9 10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

ance, and uplift. In 1924, it launched Negro History and Literature Week, the forerunner of today’s Black History Month. Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 10, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 16, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. College Humor was a popular magazine of the 1920’s that published Jazz Age luminaries, such as H.L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and other notable writers. Cowdery mentions in a previous letter that Hughes had advised her to a send a poem to this periodical. Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 14, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, January 14, 1929, letter 3, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 12, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. The Crisis said that the Krigwa Prize contest winners would be announced October 24, 1927, so Cowdery’s undated letter here had to have been written around that date. Announcement of deadline for submissions to and winners of the Krigwa Prize, The Crisis, March 1927, 28. Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 13, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. Mae V. Cowdery, “Goal,” Black Opals, Spring 1927, 8–9. Mae V. Cowdery, “Of the Earth,” The Carolina Magazine, May 1928, 32. Mae V. Cowdery, “A Prayer,” The Crisis, September 1928, 300. Alice Dunbar-Nelson, “A Prayer,” The Carolina Magazine, May 1928, 40. Mae V. Cowdery, “The Young Voice Cries,” Harlem, November 1928, 14. Alice Dunbar-Nelson, “Cano—I Sing,” American Inter-Racial Peace Committee Bulletin, October 1929. Reprinted in Gloria Hull, ed., The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 92–93. Helene Johnson’s “Fulfillment” appeared in the June 1926 issue of Opportunity and is similarly arranged in a series of infinitives expressing the speaker’s deepest wishes. It is reprinted in Maureen Honey, ed., Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 193–194. Mae V. Cowdery, “Longings” and “Lamps,” The Crisis, December 1927, 337. Mae V. Cowdery, “Totality,” in Cowdery, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems, 33. Nina Miller, Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York’s Literary Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 211. Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Wind,” Opportunity, November 1924, 335. Mae V. Cowdery, “The Wind Blows,” Opportunity, October 1927, 299. Mae V. Cowdery, “Lai-Li,” Black Opals, Christmas 1927, 6–8. Mae V. Cowdery, “Nameless,” Black Opals, Christmas 1928, 19. Mae V. Cowdery, “Farewell,” The Crisis, February 1929, 50. Mae V. Cowdery, “Some Hands Are Lovelier,” in Cowdery, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems, 40. Mae V. Cowdery, “Love Song for Summer,” in ibid., 52. Mae V. Cowdery, “Lines to a Sophisticate,” in ibid., 50. Mae V. Cowdery, “Insatiate,” in ibid., 57. Mae V. Cowdery, “Dusk,” in Ebony and Topaz: A Collecteana, edited by Charles S. Johnson (New York: National Urban League, 1927), 27. Angelina W. Grimké, “Dusk,” Opportunity, April 1924, 99; reprinted in Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927), 46. Mae V. Cowdery, “Time,” Black Opals, Christmas 1927, 15. Mae V. Cowdery, “Poem . . . for a Lover,” in Cowdery, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems, 51. Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 10, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers.

246  T  Notes to Pages 181 to 187 36 Mae V. Cowdery,” Love in These Days,” Black Opals, June 1928, 17. 37 Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, October 8, 1926, letter 1, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. 38 Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 12, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. 39 Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 16, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. 40 Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 5, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. 41 Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 16, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. 42 The Pratt Institute confirmed in its e-mail to me that Cowdery was enrolled there in the fall of 1927 and spring of 1928. 43 “Both Brains and Beauty Here,” Afro-American, January 28, 1928, 5. 44 George Chauncey describes these drag balls and other sites of gay/lesbian activity in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 45 Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, December 10, 1928, letter 15, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. 46 Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in TwentiethCentury America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 64–67. See also Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). 47 Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, 74. 48 Keith D. Leonard, “African American Women Poets and the Power of the Word,” in The Cambridge Companion to African American Women’s Literature, edited by Angelyn Mitchell and Danielle K. Taylor, 32–49. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 39. Leonard asserts that the shift among Harlem Renaissance poets to lyric verse and explicit portrayals of desire marked a dramatic change from conservative religious poetry by African American women up until that point. 49 The address of 222 W. Penn Street, Philadelphia, for the Cowdery family is provided in Vincent Jubilee, “Philadelphia’s Literary Circle and the Harlem Renaissance,” in The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, edited by Amritjit Singh, William S. Shriver, and Stanley Brodwin (New York: Garland Press 1989), 37. 50 Lemuel Cowdery and Mary Wilson’s marriage license is dated February 15, 1906. License No. 196258, Orphans Court, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia. 51 Six-month-old Lemuel is listed as the youngest of several children for Martin Van Buren and Anna Cowdery in the 1880 federal census. Entry for Martin Van Buren Cowdery, federal manuscript census, Seventh Ward of the City of Philadelphia, Philadelphia County Enumeration District 129, p. 22, Tenth Census of the United States (1880). 52 Lemuel and Mary Cowdery’s birth dates and places of birth are listed on their marriage license. See note 50. 53 The occupations of Martin Van Buren Cowdery and Lemuel Cowdery are provided in Jubilee, “Philadelphia’s Literary Circle and the Harlem Renaissance,” 37. A photo of Charles Wilson in the New York Public Library Digital Gallery describes him as Deputy Grand Master, 1889 to 1894, G.U.O. of O.F., America [Grand United Order of Odd Fellows in America]. Image ID 1229362, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-9535-a3d9e040-e00a18064a99. 54 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899), 33. 55 Lawrence Otis Graham, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 369. 56 Roger Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia and Ours: On the Past and Future of the Black City in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 421–422. 57 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 120. 58 A fellow postal worker, William C. Jason, said that Lemuel Cowdery had worked with

Notes to Pages 187 to 196  T  247 him for thirty-six years in his eulogy. See “Cues and Keys,” Philadelphia Tribune, July 7, 1945, 4. 59 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 178. 60 Philadelphia native Jessie Fauset dramatized these employment limitations for well-educated black Philadelphians in her novel Plum Bun (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1929). 61 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 352–354. 62 H. Viscount Nelson Jr., “Race and Class Consciousness of Philadelphia Negroes” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1969), 10, quoted in Jubilee, “Philadelphia’s Afro-American Literary Circle and the Harlem Renaissance,” 111. 63 Jubilee, “Philadelphia’s Afro-American Literary Circle and the Harlem Renaissance,” 111. 64 Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 318, 320. 65 “Eve Lynn Chats ’bout Society and Folks,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 5, 1924, 14. 66 “Eva Jay’s Letter about Philly Social Doings,” Pittsburgh Courier, October 9, 1926, 6. 67 Philadelphia Tribune, February 14, 1929, 4. 68 A description and photos of the 1928 uniform, 1922 ring and armband, and 1918–1946 dates of existence for the Girl Reserves are provided at “Girl Reserves—YWCA” at the Vintage Kids Clubs Online Museum; see titled http://www.vintagekidstuff.com/girlreserve/girlreserve.html. This page includes a 1932 photograph of African American Girl Reserves in uniform. 69 Ibid. 70 “Bits by Bernice,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 9, 1929, 6. 71 Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 6, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. 72 Bernice Dutrieuille, “The Social Side of the Penn-Relays Takes Prominent Place: Debs and Matrons Add Gay Charm,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 4, 1929, 6. Hughes graduated from Lincoln University in 1929, and it may be that Cowdery wrote this letter in 1929, since this column documents her presence at the 1929 Penn Relays. Her letter about the event is undated, however, so she may have written it in 1927 or 1928. 73 These observations come from a visit I made to 222 W. Penn Street in 2010. Although 222 and the adjoining 224 were well cared for, the three-story units were small and the street was pockmarked with dilapidated housing. 218 W. Penn, where the Cowderys once lived, was falling apart, and the neighborhood as a whole seemed to have fallen on hard times. 74 Mary Cowdery’s colleagues at the Bureau for Child Care, where she was then still assistant director, threw a big birthday party for her when she turned eighty-two. “Surprise Birthday Party with Hearts and Flowers,” Philadelphia Tribune, February 25, 1961, 7. 75 Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia and Ours, 328. 76 Jubilee, “Philadelphia’s Afro-American Literary Circle and the Harlem Renaissance,” 43, 118, 120. 77 Ibid., 44. 78 Alain Locke, “Hail Philadelphia,” Black Opals, Spring 1927, 1. 79 Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 14, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. 80 Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 15, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. 81 Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 14, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. 82 Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 10, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. 83 Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Heritage,” Opportunity, December 1923, 371. 84 Mae V. Cowdery, “Want,” The Crisis, November 1928, 372. 85 Mae V. Cowdery, “God Is Kind,” The Crisis, June 1930, 227. 86 “Brooklyn Y.W.C.A.” New York Amsterdam News, September 17, 1930, 14. 87 Cowdery is identified as a member of the James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild in William Pickens, “Reflections,” New York Amsterdam News, March 2, 1932, 8. 88 The engagement of Mae Cowdery and Harry Webber is mentioned in “The Sage of Quakerville,” Afro-American, March 12, 1932, 7; and “Evelyn Chats about Society & Folks,”

248  T  Notes to Pages 197 to 201 Philadelphia Tribune, May 12, 1932, 4. The announcement of Judith’s birth just six months after the engagement was announced was made in “Germantown, PA,” Philadelphia Tribune, December 1, 1932, 11: “Mrs. Alice Wilson is now a great-grandmother since Mrs. Harry Webber, the former Mae Cowdery, presented her husband with a baby girl last Saturday.” The birth was also announced in “Philly Personals,” Afro-American, December 10, 1932, 4: “The Harry (Mae Cowdery) Webbers are receiving congratulations upon the birth of a baby girl.” “For a New Mother” and “Three Poems for my Daughter” appeared in Cowdery, We Lift Our Voices, 46–48. The birthday poems carry the following dedications: “To . . . Judith Lynn . . . on Her First Birthday,” “To Judith Lynn . . . Who Is Just Two,” and “A Modern Mother Sings for . . . Judith Lynn Who Is Three!” 89 Notices of Cowdery’s poetry reading in New Jersey appeared in the Baltimore Afro-American on May 13, 1933, 9, and May 20, 1933, 9. 90 “Bits by Bernice,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 29, 1933, 8. 91 “’Lazy Bones’ . . . Here They Are Basking in Atlantic City Sun,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 19, 1933, 3. 92 Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, June 16, 1936, letter 8, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. Hughes could not write the foreword for We Lift Our Voices, as he was busy with his own projects. 93 William Stanley Braithwaite, “Introduction,” in Mae V. Cowdery, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems (Philadelphia: Alpress, 1936), 1–4. 94 Benjamin Brawley, The Negro Genius: A New Appraisal of the Achievement of the America Negro in Literature and the Fine Arts (New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1937), 265–266. 95 Alain Locke, “The Message of the Negro Poets,” The Carolina Magazine 58 (May 1928): 5–15. Locke also quoted the opening and closing stanzas of Gwendolyn Bennett’s “To a Dark Girl,” praising the poem as an example of a “current acceptance of race” that is supported by a deep undercurrent of “spiritual identification.” 96 Eve Lynn, “Seaboard Society Swishes By!” Pittsburgh Courier, September 26, 1936, 8. 97 Malcolm B. Fulcher, “Believe Me,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 17, 1936, 20. 98 Eve Lynn, “Seaboard Society Swishes By!” Pittsburgh Courier, December 26, 1936, A9. 99 Brawley, The Negro Genius, 266. 100 Malcolm B. Fulcher, “Believe Me,” Afro-American, March 9, 1935, 12. 101 “Mae Cowdery Webber Sues for Divorce,” Philadelphia Tribune, April 30, 1936, 1. 102 “Grant Divorce to Local Poet: Mae Cowdery Divorced by Harry B. Webber, N.Y. Newspaperman,” Philadelphia Tribune, May 27, 1937, 1. 103 Marriage Certificate for Cyril A. Riley and Mary Wilson Cowdery, No. 30080, dated December 19, 1936, Bureau of Records of the Department of Health, New York City, Municipal Archives of the City of New York for Manhattan. According to this certificate, the marriage was performed at St. James Church, 206 W. 127th Street, New York City. Cowdery identified herself as Mary Wilson Cowdery, age 27, on the certificate and said she had not been married before. She listed her address as 235 Brookfield Street, White Plains, New York. Riley listed his address as 36 W. 128th Street, New York City. Although Riley listed his age as twenty-four, it is possible he was younger than that, for a 1932 article on him as president of his high school debating society would make him only twenty-one or twenty-two at the time of his marriage. “Orange High School’s Winning Debaters,” Afro-American, June 4, 1932, 34. 104 Tad Winchester, “Society in the East: Fashionable Facts and Smart Gossip,” Afro-American, March 30, 1935, 10. This column lists “Cyril Riley of Lincoln University” and “Mrs. Mae Cowdery Webber” as guests at a birthday party for Mrs. Aleen Brehon Copper: “Groups assembled in every room to chat and dance and revel.” The Philadelphia Tribune located “Mrs. Mae Cowdery-Webber” and “Cyril Riley” at a 1936 party thrown by Roland, Johnson “that popular young bachelor known as ‘Tad.’” Priscilla Penn, “Society at a Glance,” Philadelphia Tribune, October 1, 1936, 6. Roland “Tad” Johnson was the Rileys’ first guest when they moved into 301 No. 41st street in 1945, according to Priscilla Penn, “Society at a Glance,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 17, 1945, 6. 105 “Activities of Armstrong Ass’n,” Chicago Defender, May 30, 1936, 18; “New Books Added to Armstrong Library,” Philadelphia Tribune, September 3, 1936. 106 “Four Philadelphia Generations,” Afro-American, May 15, 1937, 2.

Notes to Pages 201 to 210  T  249 107 “Will They Be the Lucky Ones?” Afro-American, December 18, 1937, 24. 108 “Jack and Jill Heritage,” Jack and Jill of America, Inc., http://jackandjillinc.org/jack-andjill-heritage/. A good article on Marion Turner Stubbs Thomas and the organization is Vernon C. Thompson, “Jack and Jill: Social and Civic Organization Is Top of the Hill for Black Professionals,” Washington Post, October 5, 1978, DC1. 109 Priscilla Penn, “Society at a Glance,” Philadelphia Tribune, February 17, 1938, 5. 110 “Les Beaux Arts Present Talent at ‘Chinese Tea,’” Chicago Defender, March 19, 1938, 15. 111 “Philly Personals,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 22, 1940, 8. 112 “Social Glances,” Philadelphia Tribune, January 17, 1942, 8. 113 Catherine P. Taylor, “Germantown,” Philadelphia Tribune, August 1, 1942, 17. 114 Sara Neely, “Quaker Quips,” Afro-American, March 20, 1943, 16. 115 Priscilla Penn, “Society at a Glance,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 17, 1945, 7. 116 Jubilee reported that when he interviewed Roland “Tad” Johnson on March 20, 1977, Johnson told him Cowdery committed suicide in 1953. Jubilee also interviewed Dr. Richard A. Long on April 1, 1979, who remembered meeting Cowdery in the 1950s. Since she died in 1948, Long clearly had to have met her before then and his memory must be of a few years earlier. Jubilee, “Philadelphia’s Afro-American Literary Circle and the Harlem Renaissance,” 59, 67. 117 Alice Dunbar-Nelson, “I Sit and Sew,” in Negro Poets and Their Poems, edited by Robert T. Kerlin (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1923), 145–146. 118 Mae V. Cowdery, “I Sit and Wait for Beauty,” Challenge, May 1935, 20. 119 Mae V. Cowdery, “Resurrection,” in Cowdery, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems, 60. 120 Mae V. Cowdery, “Mood,” in ibid., 56. 121 Mae V. Cowdery, “I Look at Death,” in ibid., 36. 122 Mae V. Cowdery, “Each Night,” in ibid., 37–38. 123 “Marriage Rift Causes Suicide,” Chicago Defender, November 13, 1948, 4. 124 “Doctor’s Estranged Wife Takes Own Life,” Philadelphia Independent, November 6, 1948, 1. 125 “Gas Kills Wife of Dr. C. A. Riley—Physician Finds Body in Reeking Kitchen,” AfroAmerican, November 6, 1948, 1. 126 “Doctor’s Estranged Wife Takes Own Life.” The report misidentified the Girl Reserves as “Girl Friends.” 127 “Gas Kills Wife of Dr. C. A. Riley.” 128 “Marriage Rift Causes Suicide.” 129 Harry B. Webber, “Jersey Journal,” New York Age, November 13, 1948, 5. 130 Ibid. 131 Deed #3736 identifies the Wilson/Cowdery plot as located in the John Brown Section of Eden Cemetery, Lot 445, Graves 1, 2, 3. Cowdery’s infant sister Alice (d. 1914), her mother Mary (d. 1971), and her daughter Judith (d. 1980) are also buried in these plots. Eden Cemetery is located in Collingdale, Pennsylvania. 132 Certificate of Death for Mae V. Riley dated November 8, 1948, #21384, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Health, Division of Vital Records, New Castle, Pennsylvania. The physician who signed the form on December 8, 1948 certified cause of death as carbon monoxide poisoning from gas jets on the kitchen stove but identified it as a probable accident, no doubt out of respect for the family’s wishes. Cowdery’s birth date is erroneously given as 1912 and her age at death as 36. 133 The accomplished and stunningly beautiful Anita Pina of New Bedford, Massachusetts, married Cyril Riley in Philadelphia after she moved there in 1949, and their long marriage in Germantown ended only with his death on December 19, 1986. The day Riley died would have been his 50th anniversary in the marriage to Mae Cowdery. Anita Riley told the Philadelphia Tribune many years later that she met her husband when he delivered her sister’s baby in Philadelphia during the 1940s. “Women in the News,” Philadelphia Tribune, November 15, 1960, 7. The Philadelphia Tribune and Baltimore Afro-American both covered the surprise wedding. A photo of the newly married couple appears in Afro-American, June 11, 1949, C6. A description of their Philadelphia socializing is provided in Ruby Smith, “Pitter Patter,” Afro-American, September 16, 1950, 18. A photo of the couple at a cocktail party with Roland

250  T  Notes to Pages 210 to 221

134 135 136

137 138 139 140 141 142 143

144

“Tad” Johnson and others appeared in New York Age, October 7, 1950, 8. Beautiful photos of Anita Riley appeared in Jet, March 20, 1958, 39; Ebony Magazine, June 1961, where she is one of the “Best Dressed Women of 1961”; and Jet, January 6, 1972, 41, where she appears with a piece of her sculpture in a photo entitled “Beauty and Brains.” The Philadelphia Independent reported: “Police estimate that Mrs. Riley had been dead from four to six hours before her body was discovered shortly before 10 o’clock.” “Doctor’s Estranged Wife Takes Own Life.” “Farewell” was first published in The Crisis, February 1929, 50; it also appears in Cowdery, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems, 29; and in Braithwaite, ed., Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1929. Mae V. Cowdery, “Après Amour,” in Mae Cowdery to Langston Hughes, n.d., letter 10, box 48, folder 893, Langston Hughes Papers. The poem is written on the letter. A reference Cowdery makes in this letter to Black Opals places it within the time frame of 1927 or 1928, since those were the only two years Black Opals was published. Mae V. Cowdery, “Shattered Mirror,” in Cowdery, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems, 55. Mae V. Cowdery, “For a New Mother,” in ibid., 46. Mae V. Cowdery, “Feast,” in ibid., 62. Mae V. Cowdery, “Pastorale,” in ibid., 63. This poem is dedicated “For Cyril.” Mae V. Cowdery, “Exultation,” in ibid., 26. Mae V. Cowdery, “If I Must Know,” The Crisis, July 1930, 235. Mae V. Cowdery, “Poet’s Query (Ennui),” in Cowdery, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems, 59. Mae V. Cowdery, “Nostalgia,” in ibid., 22.

Epilogue 1 Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Lorde, Sister Outsider (Freedom, Calif.: The Crossing Press, 1984), 55. 2 Ibid., 59. 3 Gloria Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 215. 4 Ajuan Maria Mance, Inventing Black Women: African American Women Poets and SelfRepresentation, 1877–2000 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 127–128. 5 Melissa Harris-Perry, “Foreword,” in Black Female Sexualities, edited by Trimiko Melancon and Joanne M. Braxton (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 2015), ix. 6 An account of the James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild Youth Day ceremony for prizewinning children’s poetry is provided in Harry B. Webber, “Maryland Girl of 5 Wins a Poetry Prize,” Afro-American, April 16, 1932, 8. 7 The first correspondence to Grimké addressed to West 151st Street is from a Columbia University English professor and is dated November 30, 1931. Walter E. Schutt to Angelina Weld Grimké, November 30, 1931, box 2, folder S, Angelina Weld Grimké Collection. 8 The certificate of marriage of Harry B. Webber and Mae V. Cowdery is dated May 6, 1932; it was issued in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Bureau of Vital Statistics, no. 340, State of New Jersey Archives and Record Management, Trenton, New Jersey. The account of their “whirlwind courtship while Miss Cowdery was a student at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn” is provided in “Grant Divorce to Local Poet,” Philadelphia Tribune, May 27, 1937, 1. Their daughter Judith was born in November 1932. See “Germantown, Pa.,” Philadelphia Tribune, December 1, 1932, 11; and “Philly Personals,” Afro-American, December 10, 1932, 4. 9 Bennett’s 1937 résumé indicates she was director of the Hempstead Colored YWCA in 1932 and 1933. “Employment Records, 1925–1938,” box 1, folder 5, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers. 10 Bennett’s participation in the Brooklyn YWCA series is reported in Carolyn J. Dublin, “Brooklyn Notes,” Chicago Defender, October 11, 1930, 14. Cowdery’s arrival at the Brooklyn Y appears in “Brooklyn Y.W.C.A.,” New York Amsterdam News, September 17, 1930, 14. 11 Bennett’s Civic Club talk is reported in “Miss Bennett Talks to Club,” New York Amsterdam News, May 11, 1932, 5.

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252  T  Bibliography Castle, Terry, ed. The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Chamberlain, Gaius. “Joseph Lee.” The Black Inventor, November 26, 2012. http://blackinventor.com/joseph-lee/. Chapman, Erin D. Prove It on Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Churchill, Suzanne. “Modernism in Black & White.” Modernism/modernity 16, no. 3 (2009): 489–492. Churchill, Suzanne, and Adam McKible, ed. Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2007. Churchill, Suzanne, and Ethan Jaffee. “The New Poetry: The Glebe (1913–14).” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 2, North America 1894–1960, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 299–319. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Clark, Anna. “Twilight Moments.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14 (January/April 2005): 139–160. Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Cohen, Michael David. “‘What Gender Is Lex?’: Women, Men, and Power Relations in Colleges of the Nineteenth Century.” History of Higher Education Annual 24 (2005): 41–90. Collecott, Diana. H. D. and Sapphic Modernity, 1910–1950. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Cooper, Anna Julia. Life and Writings of the Grimké Family. Washington D.C.: Self-published, 1951. Cowdery, Mae V. We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems. Philadelphia: Alpress, 1936. ———. “Lai-Li.” Black Opals, Christmas 1927, 6–8. Cromwell, Adelaide M. The Other Brahmins: Boston’s Black Upper Class, 1750–1950. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994. Cullen, Countee, ed. Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets of the Twenties. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927. Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Pantheon, 1998. Doan, Laura. Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. ———. “Topsy-Turvydom: Gender Inversion, Sapphism, and the Great War.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 517–542. Doan, Laura, and Jane Garrity, eds. Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality and National Culture. Boston: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Doyle, Laura. “The Flat, the Round, and Gertrude Stein.” Modernism/modernity 7 (2005): 249–271. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1899. Emerson, George H. The Life of Alonzo Ames Miner, S.T.D., L.L.D. Boston: Universalist Printing House, 1896. Ewing, K. T. “What Kind of Woman? Alberta Hunter and Expressions of Black Female Sexuality in the Twentieth Century.” In Black Female Sexualities, edited by Trimiko Melancon and Joanne M. Braxton, 100–112. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. ———. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1981. Ferry, Henry Justin. “Francis James Grimké: Portrait of a Black Puritan.” PhD diss., Yale University, 1970. Filreis, Alan. Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

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254  T  Bibliography Johnson, Charles S., ed. Ebony and Topaz: A Collecteana. New York: National Urban League, 1927. Johnson, James Weldon, ed. The Book of American Negro Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1931. Jones, Julia. Lee County, Historical and Descriptive. Houston: Gulf Coast Baptist Print, 1945. Jubilee, Vincent. “Philadelphia’s Afro-American Literary Circle and the Harlem Renaissance.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1980. ———. “Philadelphia’s Literary Circle and the Harlem Renaissance.” In The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, edited by Amiritjit Singh, William S. Shriver, and Stanley Bredwin, 35–47. New York: Garland, 1989. Jules-Rosette, Benetta. Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Kalaidjian, Walter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ———. The Edge of Modernism: American Poetry and the Traumatic Past. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Kemp, Melissa Prunty. “African American Women Poets, the Harlem Renaissance, and Modernism: An Apology.” Callaloo 36 (Summer 2013): 789–801. Kerlin, Robert T., ed. Negro Poets and Their Poems. Washington D.C.: Associated Publishing, 1923. Koger, Larry. Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790–1860. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Kuenz, Jane. “Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Harlem Renaissance: The Case of Countée Cullen.” Modernism/modernity 14, no. 3 (2007): 507–515. Lane, Roger. William Dorsey’s Philadelphia and Ours: On the Past and Future of the Black City in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Lauter, Paul. Canons and Contexts. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Leonard, Keith D. “African American Women Poets and the Power of the Word.” In The Cambridge Companion to African American Women’s Literature, edited by Angelyn Mitchell and Danielle K. Taylor, 32–49. New York: Cambridge University Press 2009. Lerner, Gerda. The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967. Locke, Alain. “Hail Philadelphia.” Black Opals 1 (Spring 1927): 1. ———, ed. The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925. Long, Christopher. “Lee County.” In Handbook of Texas Online. Accessed February 24, 2012. http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hc106. Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Lorde, Sister Outsider, 53–59. Freedom, Calif.: The Crossing Press, 1984. Lowell, Amy. Tendencies in Modern American Poetry. New York: Macmillan, 1917. Mance, Ajuan Maria. Inventing Black Women: African American Women Poets and Self-Representation, 1877–2000. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007. Martinac, Paula. “Howard’s Intrepid Dean.” The Queerest Places: A Guide to LGBT Historic Sites. June 14, 2009. http://queerestplaces.wordpress.com. McCullick, Bryan A., and Michael Lomax. “The Boston Normal School of Gymnastics: An Unheralded Legacy.” Quest 52 (February 2000): 49–59. Miller, Jeanne-Marie. “Angelina Weld Grimké: Playwright and Poet.” CLA Journal 21 (Spring 1985): 9–13. Miller, Nina. Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York’s Literary Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Mitchell, Verner D., ed. This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Moglen, Seth. Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007. Monroe, Harriet. Poets and Their Art. New York: Macmillan, 1932. Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Bibliography  T  255 ———. Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. New York: Routledge, 2001. Orlando, Emily J. “‘Feminine Calibans’ and ‘Dark Madonnas of the Grave’: The Imaging of Black Women in the New Negro Renaissance.” In New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance: Essays on Race, Gender, and Literary Discourse, edited by Australia Tarver and Paula C. Barnes, 59–95. Madison, Wisc.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010. Peoples, Jerome T. Lee’s Bread Machine: The Father of Automated Bread Making. Parker, Colo.: Outskirts Press, 2011. Perry, Mark. Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimké Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders. New York: Viking Press, 2001. Powers, Bernard E., Jr. Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822–1885. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994. Rand, Frank Prentice. Cushing Academy, 1865–1965. Brattleboro, Vt.: The Book Press, 1965. Roberts, Brian Russell. Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Rosenzweig, Rachel. Worshipping Aphrodite: Art and Culture in Classical Athens. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Roses, Lorraine Elena, ed. Selected Works of Edythe Mae Gordon. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. Roses, Lorraine Elena, and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph, eds. The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: The Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900–1945. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. Sanders, Mark A. “American Modernism and the New Negro Renaissance.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, edited by Walter Kalaidjian, 129–132. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Scott, Laine A. “Grimké, Angelina Weld.” In African American National Biography, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, 622–624. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Smethurst, James. The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” In Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, edited by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, 53–76. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Stevenson, Brenda, ed. The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Storm, William. “Reactions of a ‘Highly-Strung Girl’: Psychology and Dramatic Representation in Angelina W. Grimké’s Rachel.” African American Review 27 (Fall 1993): 461–471. Stubbs, Carolyn Amonitti. “Angelina Weld Grimké: Washington Poet and Playwright.” PhD diss. Washington D.C.: George Washington University, 1978. Tate, Claudia ed. The Selected Works of Georgia Douglas Johnson. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. Thacker, Andrew. “The Free Verse Controversy.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 2, North America 1894–1960, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 293–298. New York, Oxford University Press, 2012. Untermeyer, Louis. The New Era in American Poetry. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1919. Verbrugge, Martha H. Able-Bodied Womanhood: Personal Health and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Boston. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Wheeler, Belinda. “Gwendolyn Bennett: A Leading Voice of the Harlem Renaissance.” In A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, 203–218. West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. ———. “Gwendolyn Bennett’s ‘The Ebony Flute.’” PMLA 128 (May 2013): 744–755. Wilks, Jennifer. Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacasade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne Cesaire, Dorothy West. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Young, Patricia. “Shackled: Angelina Weld Grimké.” Women and Language 15, no. 2 (1992): 25–31.

Further Reading

Archer-Straw, Petrine. Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000. Barbee, Olivia. “A Black Girl Sings: Gwendolyn Bennett in the Harlem Renaissance.” Beltway Poetry Quarterly 9, no. 3 (2008): n.p. Bennett, Michael, and Vanessa D. Dickerson, eds. Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. “Disrupted Motherlines: Mothers and Daughters in a Genderized, Sexualized, and Racialized World.” In Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Twentieth-Century Literature, edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, 188–207. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Bruce Dickson, Jr. Archibald Grimké: Portrait of a Black Independent. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Chaney, Michael A. “Traveling Harlem’s Europe: Vagabondage from Slave Narratives to Gwendolyn Bennett’s ‘Wedding Day’ and Claude McKay’s Banjo.” Journal of Narrative Theory 32, no. 1 (2002): 52–76. Chinitz, David. “The New Harlem Renaissance Studies.” Modernism/modernity 12, no. 2 (2006): 375–382. Churchill, Suzanne. The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2006. Cornish, Jolanda. “The Poetry of Mae Cowdery.” In Cornish, Women and Literature: Discovery and Exploration, 88–96. Bloomington: iUniverse, 2008. Davis, Thadious. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Dinerstein, Joel. Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Doyle, Laura, and Laura Winkiel, eds. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Duvall, John. “Regionalism in American Modernism.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, edited byWalter Kalaidjian, 242–260. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. English, Daylanne K. Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Fabre, Genevieve, and Michel Feith, eds. Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Ford, Karen Jackson. Split-Gut Song: Jean Toomer and the Poetics of Modernity. Tuscaloosa: Alabama University Press, 2005. Garber, Eric. “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem.” In Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., 318–331. London: Penguin, 1991.

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Further Reading  T  257 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. Harlem Renaissance Lives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Greenberg, Cheryl. “Or Does It Explode”? Black Harlem in the Great Depression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Hackett, Robin. Sapphic Primitivism: Productions of Race, Class, and Sexuality in Key Works of Modern Fiction. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Hirsch, Jerrold. “T. S. Eliot, B. A. Botkin, and the Politics of Cultural Representation: Folklore, Modernity, and Pluralism.” In Race and the Modern Artist, edited by Heather Hathaway, Josef Jarab, and Jeffrey Melnick, 16–41. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Holcomb, Gary Edward. Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Hovey, Jaime. “Sapphic Primitivism in Gertrude Stein’s Q.E.D.” Modern Fiction Studies 42 (1996): 547–568. Hull, Gloria T. “‘Under the Days’: The Buried Life and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimké.” Conditions: Five 2, no. 2 (1979): 17–25. Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. ———. “The Whitman Legacy and the Harlem Renaissance.” In Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays, edited by Ed Folsom, 201–216. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. Jay, Karla. “Lesbian Modernism: (Trans)forming the (C)anon.” In Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature, edited by George Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman, 73–77. New York: Modern Language Association, 1995. Jimoh, A. Yemisi. Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction: Living in Paradox. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002. Jones, Meta DuEwa. The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Jones, Sharon L. Rereading the Harlem Renaissance. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Joyce, Joyce A. Ijala: Sonia Sanchez and the African Poetic Tradition. Chicago: Third World Press, 1996. Kramer, Victor A., and Robert A. Russ, eds. The Harlem Renaissance Re-Examined: A Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Whitson Publishing Co., 1997. Kutzinski, Vera M. “The Distant Closeness of Dancing Doubles: Sterling Brown and William Carlos Williams.” Black American Literature Forum 22 (1982): 19–25. Lauter, Paul. “Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon: A Case Study from the Twenties.” Feminist Studies 9 (1983): 435–463. Leininger-Miller, Theresa. New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922–1934. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Lemke, Sieglinde. Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Lewis, David Levering, ed. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. New York: Viking, 1994. ———. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. Lynes, Katherine Ruth. “‘A real honest-to-cripe jungle’: Contested Authenticities in Helene Johnson’s ‘Bottled.’” Modernism/modernity 14, no. 3 (September 2007): 517–525. Manganaro, Marc. Culture, 1922. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. McDowell, Deborah. The Changing Same: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. McKible, Adam. The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York. New York: Routledge, 2006. Melancon, Trimiko. Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. Mitchell, Angelyn, and Danielle K. Taylor, eds. The Cambridge Companion to African American Women’s Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Mitchell, Verner D., and Cynthia Davis. Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle, a Biography of the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012. Moglen, Seth. “Modernism in the Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and the Broken Cubes of Picasso.” Callaloo 25, no. 4 (2002): 1189–205.

258  T  Further Reading Monroe, Harriet, and Alice Corbin Henderson, eds. The New Poetry: An Anthology of TwentiethCentury Verse in English. New York: Macmillan, 1946. Morrisson, Mark. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audience, and Reception, 1905–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. ———. “Nationalism and the Modern American Canon.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, edited by Walter Kalaidjian, 12–38. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Nadell, Martha Jane. Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Nelson, Cary, ed. Anthology of Modern American Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. “Modern American Poetry.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, edited by Walter Kalaidjian, 68–101. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ———, ed. Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. ———. “The Future of an Allusion: The Color of Modernity.” In Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, edited by Laura Doyle and Laura A. Winkiel, 17–30. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2005. North, Michael. 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Patton, Venetria, and Maureen Honey, eds. Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Raitt, Suzanne. “Lesbian Modernism?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no.1 (2003): 111–121. Rampersad, Arnold. “Langston Hughes and Approaches to Modernism in the Harlem Renaissance.” In The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, edited by Amritjit Singh, Stanley Brodwin, and William S. Shaver, 49–71. New York: Garland Press, 1989. ———. “The Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance.” In The Columbia History of American Poetry, edited by Jay Parini, 452–476. New York: Columbia University Press 1993. Reimonenq, Alden. “Countee Cullen’s Uranian ‘Soul Windows.’” In Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of Color, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 143–164. New York: Routledge, 1993. Rhodes, Chip. Structures of the Jazz Age: Mass Culture, Progressive Education, and Racial Discourse in American Modernism. New York: Verso Press, 1998. Roses, Lorraine Elena, and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph, eds. Harlem’s Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900–1950. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Rossetti, Gina M. Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Rosenzweig, Rachel. Worshipping Aphrodite: Art and Cult in Classical Athens. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Sanders, Mark A. Afro-Modernist Aesthetics in the Poetry of Sterling Brown. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Schwartz, A. B. Christa. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Scott, Bonnie Kime, ed. Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015. Shearin, Gloria. “Angelina Weld Grimké.” In Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers, edited by Yolanda Williams Page, 229–234. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene. Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012.

Further Reading  T  259 ———. Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007. ———, ed. A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. Sherman, Joan R., ed. Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century. Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Soto, Michael. The Modernist Nation: Generation, Renaissance, and Twentieth-Century American Literature. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Spillers, Hortense J. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Stovall, Tyler Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Summers-Bremner, Eluned. “Unreal City and Dream Deferred: Psychogeographies of Modernism in T.S. Eliot and Langston Hughes.” In Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, edited by Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, 262–280. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Tarver, Australia, and Paula C. Barnes, eds. New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2006. Vicinus, Martha. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly, ed. Skin Deep and Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Whalan, Mark. “‘The Only Real White Democracy’ and the Language of Liberation: The Great War, France, and African American Culture in the 1920s.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 51 (2005): 775–800. Wheeler, Lorna. “Tracking Queer Desire in Black Women’s Writings, 1880–1940.” PhD diss., University of Colorado-Boulder, 2006. White, Newman, and Walter Jackson, eds. An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes. Durham, N.C.: Trinity College Press, 1924. Wintz, Cary D., ed. Remembering the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Garland Press, 1996. Wintz, Cary D., and Paul Finkelman eds. Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Routledge, 2004. Witalec, Janet. “Gwendolyn Bennett.” In The Harlem Renaissance: A Gale Critical Companion, edited by Janet Witalec, 1–34. Detroit: Gale Press, 2003. Wonham, Henry B., ed. Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Woods, Gregory. “Gay Re-Readings of the Harlem Renaissance Poets.” In Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of Color, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 127–142. New York: Haworth Press 1993.

Index

Note: References in italics indicate images. Abernathy, Mayme: marriage to Joshua Bennett, 118, 119–120, 241n64; separation from Gwendolyn Bennett, 116, 121–122; reconnection with Gwendolyn Bennett, 126–127; second marriage of, 242n83 American Inter-Racial Peace Committee Bulletin, 166 androgyny, 181, 184 Anthology of Magazine Verse and Year Book of American Poetry (Braithwaite), 25, 98, 105, 227n2 Aphrodite image, 5–12; in Bennett’s work, 101–103, 135–136, 147–148; in Cowdery’s work, 171–172, 204; darkened, 6–9; fading, 11–12; in Grimké’s work, 36, 43, 80 “Après Amour” (Cowdery), 211 Armstrong, Julie Butler, 52 Armstrong Association, 198 Artistic Ambassadors (Roberts), 81 asceticism: in Bennett’s poems, 144–145 “At April” (Grimké), 1 “At the Autumn Dusk” (Grimké), 50–51 “At the End” (Grimké), 94–95 “Babette” (Grimké), 39 Baltimore Afro-American: and Cowdery in New York, 183; and Cowdery’s death, 207, 208–209; and Cowdery’s marriage, 196–197, 200, 203; and Cowdery’s place in black social elite, 200, 201, 203, 209; and Cyril Riley’s second marriage, 249n133; and J. W. Johnson Literary Guild award ceremony, 220; and We Lift Our Voices, 199 Barnes Foundation, 99, 100, 127 Batiste, Stephanie, 6 Bearden, Romare, 139 “Beautiful Death, or In an Old and Broken Garret” (Grimké), 71 Beemyn, Brett, 57, 231n15, 233n57, 234n69 Bennett, Gwendolyn B., vii, 97–153; Black Opals guest-edited by, 179; career in the 30s, 105–106, 128–129, 131, 138–139, 145–146, 243n113; career of, 23–24, 98–100, 127; childhood of, 116, 117, 118–123, 125;

and Cowdery, 155, 163, 185; death in poetry of, 106, 107–108, 109–110; the erotic in work of, 10, 141–145; and Grimké, 97–98, 102–103, 113, 126, 136; and her father, 113–116, 120–122, 123–124, 125–126; and her mother, 116, 119, 121–122, 125, 126–127; and her stepmother, 115–116, 119, 127, 241n56; and J.W. Johnson Literary Guild poetry contest awards ceremony of 1932, 220, 221; limited scholarship on, 2–3; lost love in poems of, 107–110, 125–126, 134; marriage to Crosscup, 150–152; marriage to Jackson, 105, 127–128, 129–133, 137–138, 139, 146–147; negativity/harshness in poems of, 106–110, 125–126, 132–135, 147; parents’ divorce, 118–119; in Paris, 23, 99– 100, 110–111, 116–117, 123, 239n9; portraits of, xviii, 96, 111, 117, 121, 146, 150, 152; race activism of, 18; racism experienced by, 19–20, 120, 127, 230n48; relationship with Norman Lewis, 131, 138–139, 140–141; resilience of, 24, 147–150, 151–153; romantic childhood fantasies of, 122–123; romantic relationships of, 21, 110–111, 137–138, 240n41; sources of despair for, 112–122, 126–127; in spring of 1927, 2; uplift verse of, 100–101; visibility of in her community, 217; and visual arts, 23, 105, 138–139 Bennett, Gwendolyn B., works of: “City Snow,” 109; “Communion,” 10, 143; “Comrades,” 5, 142–143; “Dear Things,” 103–104; “Dirge,” 125–126; “Dirge for a Free Spirit,” 134–135; “Epitaph,” 105, 106; “Fantasy,” 7, 100, 101, 102, 141, 239n14; [For me . . . you are a tall tree], 149–150; “Fulfillment,” 148; “Gesture,” 134; [Give me your hand, beloved], 148; “Hatred,” 107, 134; “Heritage,” 99, 100, 194; [How strange that grass should sing] (Quatrain I), 99, 104, 106; “Hungry Ones,” 137; [I will love you always], 142; “Last night I nearly killed my husband!,” 130–131; “Lines Written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas,” 107–108; “Longing,” 132–133; memoir essays of, 116, 118–119, 120–121, 122–123, 123–124;

261

262  T  Index Bennett, Gwendolyn B., works of (continued): “Moon Tonight,” 104, 105, 145, 240n40, 243n106; “My Father’s Story,” 119, 123–124; “New Year’s Eve—1938,” 147; “Nocturne,” 99, 109, 135; “Nostalgia,” 117; “Peace,” 137; “Poem,” 133–134; “Purgation,” 109, 145; “Quatrain [I],” 99, 104, 106; “Quatrain [II],” 149; “Quiescence,” 152–153; “Secret,” 112, 144; “Song [I],” 18, 100; “Song [II],” 12–13, 104–105, 112; “Sonnet [I],” 109–110; “Street Lamps in Early Spring,” 1, 8–9, 102, 136, 141; “Thin Laughter,” 135; “Threnody for Spain,” 137; “To a Dark Girl,” 6, 103, 141, 239n19, 248n95; “To an Aloof Lady,” 11, 135–136; “Tokens,” 98–99; “To Usward,” 99, 101; “Train Monotony,” 23, 98, 100, 106–107, 110, 238n1; [Twilight is like a gray mantle], 104; unpublished poetry, 3–4, 132–137, 138, 141, 146–147, 147–150, 152–153; “Wedding Day,” 98–99; “Wind,” 170; “Your Lips,” 143; “Your Songs,” 108–109 Bennett, Joshua: youth of, 124–125; marriage to Mayme Abernathy, 118, 119–120, 241n64; career of, 241n70; Gwendolyn’s relationship with, 113–116, 120–122, 123–124, 125–126; death of, 114–115; portraits of, 121 Bennett, Marechal Neil: Gwendolyn’s closeness with, 115–116, 119, 127, 241n56; and Joshua’s death, 114, 115 “Beware Lest He Awakes” (Grimké), 87 biographies: importance of in framing literature, 3–4 Birth Control Review (magazine), 57, 82, 231n10, 233n65 bisexuality: in Cowdery’s work, 10, 155, 176, 180–183, 184–185; Faderman on, 184–185; in Grimké’s life, 34, 231n15, 231n18. See also same-sex desire Black and White (Byars), 70, 227n2 black and white, images of: and Aphrodite figure, 9; in Bennett’s poetry, 103–104; in Grimké’s poetry, 36, 57, 86. See also twilight “Black Finger, The” (Grimké), 87 Black Opals (magazine): Bennett guest-editing, 179; Cowdery’s poetry in, 2, 25, 159, 171, 173, 179, 181, 196, 227n2; founding of, 192–193; publication years of, 250n136 black professional class: Cowdery and Riley as members of, 202–203; in Philadelphia, 185–188, 188–190, 192 black womanhood: models of, 5, 14–15 bodies, female: in Bennett’s work, 103; in Cowdery’s work, 162, 167–168, 170–171; emphasis on in Harlem Renaissance, 6

Boebel, Dagny, 35 Bonner, Marita, 15 Book of American Negro Poetry, The (Johnson), 105 Boston Transcript, 44, 68, 80, 87 Braithwaite, William Stanley, 25, 98, 105, 196, 198, 227n2 Brawley, Benjamin, 198, 199 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 114 Brown, Jayna, 6 “Brown Girl” (Grimké), 47–48, 55 Browning, Robert, 138 Burleigh, Aulston, 110, 111 Burrill, Mary “Mamie,” 54–57, 56, 233–234n66 “Butterflies” (Grimké), 85–86 “Cano—I Sing” (Dunbar-Nelson), 166 “Caprichosa” (Grimké), 38 Carleton Academy, 237n129; Grimké at, 82; letter from Grimké at, 57–58; portrait of Grimké at, 52, 53 Carolina Magazine: Cowdery’s publications in, 25, 161, 163, 196; Grimké’s publications in, 70, 227n2; Grimké’s submissions to, 66 Caroling Dusk (Cullen), 70, 98, 178, 227n2 Caterers’ Guild of Philadelphia, 186, 187 Challenge (magazine), 199, 204 Chapman, Erin D., 6, 15 Chicago Defender: Bennett in, 99, 113–114, 151; Cowdery in, 200, 202, 207–208, 209 “City Snow” (Bennett), 109 Civil War, 92 Clark, Anna, 35–36 Clifton, Lucille, 218, 219 “Closing Door, The” (Grimké), 82–83 Columbia University: Bennett at, 19, 23, 97, 128, 138 “Communion” (Bennett), 10, 143 “Comrades” (Bennett), 5, 142–143 Conrad, Earl, 151 Cooper, Anna Julia, 54, 93, 233n59, 238n152 Cowdery, Judith. See Webber, Judith Lynn Cowdery, Lemuel: career of, 186, 246n58; census entries for, 244n2, 246n51; move to Mae’s neighborhood, 203; social status of, 186, 187, 209 Cowdery, Mae V., vii, 155–216; alienation in poetry of, 194–196, 204–207; and Bennett, 155, 163, 168, 185; biographical information on, 24–26, 244n2; bisexuality of, 180–185; challenging Dunbar-Nelson, 163–167; death in poetry of, 205–207; death of, 207–209, 210, 249n132; divorce from Webber, 200; early poems of, 159– 161; end of writing career, 199–200, 203–

Index  T  263 204; the erotic in work of, 10, 155, 159, 170–172, 172–180, 185; fleeting intimacy in work of, 172–176; gender bending in work of, 176–180, 185; and Grimké, 155, 163, 168, 178–179, 185; home of, 192; and J.W. Johnson Literary Guild poetry contest awards ceremony of 1932, 220–221; letters to Hughes, 156, 157–159, 180, 181–183, 184, 191, 193–194, 198; limited scholarship on, 2–3; lost love in poems of, 210–212, 214–215; marriage to Cyril Riley, 200–201, 207–208, 248n103; marriage to Harry Webber, 196–197, 200; as member of Philadelphia’s black social elite, 189–192, 197–198, 199, 200–203, 209–210; in New York, 183–184, 185, 196, 228n26; Philadelphia upbringing of, 185–193; portraits of, xviii, 154, 181, 183, 197, 201, 208; praise for work of, 198–199; race activism of, 18, 155, 159–161, 162–163; racism experienced by, 20, 188; romantic relationships of, 21, 181–183; in spring of 1927, 2; visibility of in her community, 217; winning Krigwa Prize, 2, 25, 159 Cowdery, Mae V., works of: “Après Amour,” 211; “Dusk,” 178–179; “Each Night,” 207; “Exultation,” 213–214; “Farewell,” 173–174, 177, 210–211, 250n135; “Feast,” 213; “For a New Mother,” 212; “Four Poems—After the Japanese,” 7; “Goal,” 159–161, 169, 198–199; “God is Kind,” 195; “Having Had You,” 196, 199; “If I Must Know,” 214; “I Look at Death,” 206–207; “Insatiate,” 5–6, 176–178; “Interlude,” 13; “I Sit and Wait for Beauty,” 11–12, 199, 204; “Lai-Li,” 171–172; “Lamps,” 18, 159, 167; “Lines to a Sophisticate,” 175–176, 177; “Longings,” 6, 159, 167–168; “Love in These Days,” 181; “Love Song for Summer,” 175; “Mood,” 206; “Nameless,” 173; “Nostalgia,” 215–216; “Of the Earth,” 161–162, 163, 169; “Pastorale,” 200, 213; “Poem,” 194; “Poem . . . for a Lover,” 180; “Poet’s Query (Ennui),” 214–215; “Prayer,” 18, 162–164; “Resurrection,” 204–205; “Shattered Mirror,” 211–212; “Some Hands Are Lovelier,” 174–175; “Spring Poem in Winter,” 1; “Time,” 179; “Totality,” 168–170; unpublished poetry, 194, 211, 244n1; “Want,” 194–195; “Wind Blows,” 170–171; “Young Voice Cries,” 9, 10, 164–165, 166, 167. See also We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems (Cowdery) Cowdery, Martin Van Buren, 186, 187 Cowdery, Mary Valentine (Wilson), 186, 201, 203, 209, 244n2

Crisis (magazine): Bennett’s publications in, 98, 99, 100, 104, 109; Cowdery’s publications in, 25, 159, 162, 163, 167, 173, 181, 194, 195, 196, 227n2; Grimké’s publications in, 84; Krigwa Prize, 2, 159; photos from, 154 Crosscup, Richard, 150, 151 Cullen, Countee: Bennett doing poetry readings with, 99; Caroling Dusk, 70, 98, 178, 227n2; and J.W. Johnson Literary Guild poetry contest, 220 Cushing Academy, 59–61, 82 Davis, Cynthia, 17, 229n39 “Dear Things” (Bennett), 103–104 death: in Bennett’s poems, 106, 107–108, 109–110; in Cowdery’s poems, 205–207; Grimké’s preoccupation with, 71–72; in Grimké’s writings, 54, 65–66, 67–70, 84–85, 85–86 Dell, Floyd, 123 “Dirge” (Bennett), 125–126 “Dirge for a Free Spirit” (Bennett), 134–135 Doan, Laura, 34–35 Don’t You Want to Be Free (Hughes), 145 Douglas, Aaron, 99, 139 “Dreamy Night” (Grimké), 72 Du Bois, W. E. B., 91, 186, 187, 188, 220 Dunbar High School. See M Street School (later Dunbar High School) Dunbar-Nelson, Alice: “Cano—I Sing,” 166; Cowdery’s response to, 163–165; criticism of young New Negro artists by, 166–167; and the erotic linked with social change, 4; Hull’s profile of, 218; “I Sit and Sew,” 204; “Prayer,” 163–164; race activism of, 18 dusk. See twilight “Dusk” (Cowdery), 178–179 “Dusk” (Grimké), 49, 178–179 Dutrieuille, Bernice, 105, 113, 191–192, 197 “Each Night” (Cowdery), 207 Ebony and Topaz (Johnson): Bennett’s publications in, 99, 227n2; Cowdery’s publications in, 25, 178, 196, 227n2; Grimké’s publications in, 70, 227n2 Ebony Flute column (Bennett), 99, 100, 127 “El Beso” (Grimké), 44–45 “Epitaph” (Bennett), 105, 106 “Epitaph, An” (Grimké), 69 “Epitaph on a Living Woman” (Grimké), 69–70 erotic, the, 4, 5–12; in Bennett’s work, 10, 141–145, 239n19; in Cowdery’s work, 155, 159, 170–172, 172–176; fluidity of, 34–35, 35–36; in Grimké’s work, 29–30, 31, 67– 68; linked to social change, 218–219

264  T  Index “Evanescence” (Grimké), 47 Ewing, K. T., 14, 233n55 “Exultation” (Cowdery), 213–214 “Eyes of My Regret, The” (Grimké), 11, 51 Faderman, Lillian, 36, 52, 54, 62, 184–185 Fairmount Grammar School, 52, 53 fairy tales, Bennett’s attraction to, 122–123 “Fantasy” (Bennett), 7, 100, 101, 102, 141, 239n14 “Farewell” (Cowdery), 173–174, 177, 210–211, 250n135 Fauset, Arthur Huff, 192 Fauset, Jessie, 199, 247n60; and Bennett, 99, 146; and the erotic linked with social change, 4, 15; and J.W. Johnson Literary Guild, 220; race activism of, 18 “Feast” (Cowdery), 213 femininity, New Negro models of, 5, 14–15 Fine Clothes to the Jew (Hughes), 156 Fire!! (magazine), 23, 98–99, 100, 115, 127 “For a New Mother” (Cowdery), 212 [For me . . . you are a tall tree] (Bennett), 149–150 “Four Poems—After the Japanese” (Cowdery), 7 Fulcher, Malcolm B., 200 “Fulfillment” (Bennett), 148 “Fulfillment” (Johnson), 167, 245n18 Garcia, Claire Oberon, 118 “Garden Seat, The” (Grimké), 67–68 Garrity, Jane, 34–35 gender: androgyny, 181, 184; New Negro models of femininity, 5, 14–15; readings of speakers as male or female, 33, 35, 185 George Washington Carver School, 106, 151 “Gesture” (Bennett), 134 Girard, Melissa, 15–16, 46, 229n36 Girl Reserves, 190–191 “Give Me Your Eyes” (Grimké), 41 [Give me your hand, beloved] (Bennett), 148 “Goal” (Cowdery), 159–161, 169, 198–199 goddesses: in Cowdery’s work, 155, 159, 168–170; darkened Aphrodite, 6–9; fading away of, 11–12. See also Aphrodite image “God is Kind” (Cowdery), 195 Govan, Sandra Y., 3, 227n5, 230n45, 239n6, 239n9; on Bennett’s childhood, 125; on Bennett’s family, 241n56; on Bennett’s father, 125, 241n70; on Bennett’s marriage, 137, 146; on Bennett’s participation in Harlem Renaissance, 99; on Bennett’s professional difficulties, 106, 139; on Bennett’s public persona, 112–113; on Bennett’s resilience, 24; on Bennett’s visual arts

training, 105; interview with Bennett, 106, 119, 125, 127, 137, 146; on “Last night I nearly killed my husband!,” 130 Graham, Lawrence, 186–187 “Grass Fingers” (Grimké), 12, 68–69 “Grave in the Corner, The” (Grimké), 72 Grimké, Angelina Weld, vi, 29–95; and Bennett, 97–98, 102–103, 113, 126, 136; biographical information on, 22–23; bisexuality of, 34, 231n15, 231n18; childhood poetry of, 58–59, 71–72, 78; and Cowdery, 155, 163, 178–179, 185; desire in work of, 9–10; despair and regret in poems of, 48–51, 64–70; earliest memories of, 77; the erotic in work of, 29–30, 31, 67–68; family’s tradition of activism, 86, 87; forgotten by the public, 2–3, 70, 93–94; fractured spine from railway accident, 63, 235n81; friendship with white girls/women, 52, 57–60; heartbreak/ lost love in poems of, 64–70; and her father, 1–2, 80–82, 87–91, 92–93; and her mother, 22–23, 74–75, 76–80; Hull’s profile of, 31, 218; imagistic verse by, 44–48; and J.W. Johnson Literary Guild poetry contest awards ceremony of 1932, 220–221; and Mamie Burrill, 54–57; portraits of, xviii, 28, 52, 53, 58, 74, 89; race activism of, 18, 83, 86–87; racism experienced by, 19; relationships with women, 21, 51–64; relationship with a man, 34, 88, 231n15, 231n18; schoolgirl connections with female friends, 52–54, 57–58, 60–63; sources of despair for, 70–83; sources of strength for, 83–87; and Tessa Lee, 29, 31, 60–63, 235n77; and twilight imagery, 35–37; visibility of in her community, 217 Grimké, Angelina Weld, works of: “At April,” 1; “At the Autumn Dusk,” 50–51; “At the End,” 94–95; “Babette,” 39; “Beautiful Death, or In an Old and Broken Garret,” 71; “Beware Lest He Awakes,” 87; “Black Finger,” 87; “Brown Girl,” 47–48, 55; “Butterflies,” 85–86; “Caprichosa,” 38; “Closing Door,” 82–83; “Dreamy Night,” 72; “Dusk,” 49, 178–179; “El Beso,” 44–45; “Epitaph,” 69; “Epitaph on a Living Woman,” 69–70; “Evanescence,” 47; “Eyes of My Regret,” 11, 51; “Garden Seat,” 67–68; “Give Me Your Eyes,” 41; “Grass Fingers,” 12, 68– 69; “Grave in the Corner,” 72; [Hands of her white hands of her] (Grimké), 64; [I let you kiss my mouth], 40; [I shall remember eons hence her eyes], 41; [Keep this lily that I fold], 65–66; “Longing,”

Index  T  265 80; [Love me to-day], 40; “Mona Lisa,” 5, 45–47; “Mood,” 22, 29–31, 97–98; “My Lilies at Dusk,” 66–67; “My Shrine,” 8, 41–42, 232n38; “My Star,” 43; [My sweetheart walks down laughing ways], 44, 55; “Naughty Nan,” 38–39; Rachel, 3, 18, 81, 83–84, 92, 238n151; “Regret,” 49; “Rest,” 71–72; “Rosabel,” 59; [So you strolled along the terrace], 64–65; “Tenebris,” 18, 87; [The sun is shining, I see a robin], 78; “Thou Art So Far, So Far,” 10, 43–44; “Three Angels,” 71; “To Keep the Memory of Charlotte Forten Grimké,” 84–85; “Trilogy,” 6–7; [’Twas twilight time when Alice came], 58–59; “Under the Days,” 70; unpublished poetry, 3–4, 32–33, 37–44; “Violets Narritive,” 71; “Want of You,” 48–49; [What can I give My happy dark-haired mother], 78; “Where Phyllis Sleeps,” 68; “Winter Twilight,” 49–50; “You,” 39–40 Grimké, Archibald: Angelina’s relationship with, 1–2, 87–91, 92–93; archives left by, 32; career of, 80–81, 86; childhood of, 91– 92; education of, 19; letters to Angelina by, 55, 59–60, 81–82, 87, 88, 90; marriage of, 73–76, 236n109; portrait of, 89; relationships of, 236n105; supporting suffrage movement, 237n137 Grimké, Charlotte Forten: Angelina’s relationship with, 81, 83, 86–87; home of, 54, 233n59; poems about, 84–86 Grimké, Francis: as Angelina’s guardian, 54, 238n152; archives left by, 32; childhood of, 91–92; education of, 19; home of, 233n59, 235n81, 237n134; marriage to Charlotte Grimké, 86; Sarah Stanley’s letter to, 76 Grimké, Henry, 91 Grimké, Montague, 91–92 Hall, Radclyffe, 185 [Hands of her white hands of her] (Grimké), 64 Harlem: cabaret scene of, 13–14; Depression’s effect on, 128–129; gay culture in, 184–185 Harlem (magazine), 25, 164–165, 196 Harlem Artists’ Guild, 106, 128, 139, 145, 243n113 Harlem Community Art Center, 106, 128, 145–146, 150–151, 243n113 Harlem Renaissance: female sexuality in, 6, 13–14, 218–219; generations of writers in, 4; racial uplift and, 14–15, 16–17; scholarship on, 3, 16–17. See also New Negro movement Harris-Perry, Melissa, 219–220

“Hatred” (Bennett), 107, 134 “Having Had You” (Cowdery), 196, 199 “Heritage” (Bennett), 99, 100, 194 Herron, Carolivia, 33, 231n13 heterosexuality: in Bennett’s work, 10; in Grimké’s life, 34, 231n15, 231n18. See also bisexuality; same-sex desire Hicks, Clara B., 114–115 Hoffmann, Leonore, 118 Horne, Frank, 123, 240n43 Howard University: archival research at, 4; Bennett teaching at, 99, 127; Grimké’s estate donated to, 217–218 [How strange that grass should sing] (Quatrain I) (Bennett), 99, 104, 106 Hughes, Langston: Bennett’s friendship with, 99; in comparison with Cowdery’s debutante life, 190; Cowdery’s letters to, 156, 157–159, 180, 181–183, 184, 191, 193–194, 198; as Cowdery’s mentor, 25, 155, 158; Don’t You Want to Be Free, 145; fame of, 156–157; Fine Clothes to the Jew, 156; and J.W. Johnson Literary Guild poetry contest, 220; “Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” 156; Weary Blues, 156 Hull, Gloria T., 3, 227n5; biographical work on Grimké, 31; on black women writers’ exploration of self, 218–219; on Grimké’s relationship with Mamie Burrill, 54, 56, 233n58, 234n68; on Grimké’s unpublished love poetry, 32–33; on pronoun switch in Grimké’s “My Shrine,” 232n38 “Hungry Ones, The” (Bennett), 137 Hurston, Zora Neale, 196, 199, 220 “If I Must Know” (Cowdery), 214 [I let you kiss my mouth] (Grimké), 40 “I Look at Death” (Cowdery), 206–207 imagism: in Bennett’s poems, 105, 109, 135; in Cowdery’s poems, 178; in Grimké’s poems, 37, 44–48, 49–50, 178; and modernist poetry, 16, 32 “Insatiate” (Cowdery), 5–6, 176–178 “Interlude” (Cowdery), 13 interracial relationships: Bennett’s, 150–151; Grimké’s, 52, 57–60, 71 [I shall remember eons hence her eyes] (Grimké), 41 “I Sit and Sew” (Dunbar-Nelson), 204 “I Sit and Wait for Beauty” (Cowdery), 11–12, 199, 204 [I will love you always] (Bennett), 142 Jack and Jill Club of America, 202 Jackman, Harold, 110 Jackson, Alfred, 105, 129–130, 131–132, 137

266  T  Index James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild, 128, 145, 196, 220–221 Johnson, Charles S., 99. See also Ebony and Topaz (Johnson) Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 1, 4, 16, 18, 199, 218 Johnson, Helene: Cowdery’s riffs on, 163, 167; and the erotic linked with social change, 4; “Fulfillment,” 167, 245n18; and J. W. Johnson Literary Guild, 220; Miller on, 228n11; urban vernacular of, 17 Johnson, James W., 105. See also James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild Jones, Henry B., 93 Jones, Hinton, 34, 231n18 Jones, Louia, 131 Jubilee, Vincent, 188, 192, 203, 249n116 Karn, Mamie E., 57, 234n69 [Keep this lily that I fold] (Grimké), 65–66 Kemp, Melissa Prunty, 32, 232n33 Krigwa Prize, 2, 25, 159, 245n10 Kuenz, Jane, 16–17 “Lai-Li” (Cowdery), 171–172 “Lamps” (Cowdery), 18, 159, 167 Lane, Roger, 187, 192 Larsen, Nella, 14, 15, 199, 228n27 “Last night I nearly killed my husband!” (Bennett), 130–131 Lawrence, Jacob, 139 Lee, Christiana, 30, 82, 83, 230n3 Lee, Joseph, 30, 60, 82, 230n2, 235n83 Lee, Thérèse (Tessa), 234–235n77; Grimké living with, 29, 61–62, 230n3; Grimké’s letters to, 31; letters to Grimké, 60, 62–63, 87–88; portraits of, 61 Leonard, Keith D., 16, 185, 246n48 lesbianism. See same-sex desire Leverette, Marie, 83 Lewis, Norman, 131, 138–139, 140–141, 146, 150 “Lines to a Sophisticate” (Cowdery), 175–176, 177, 178 “Lines Written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas” (Bennett), 107–108 Locke, Alain, 193, 220, 248n95; “Message of the Negro Poets,” 198–199; New Negro, 98 Long, Richard, 203 “Longing” (Bennett), 132–133 “Longing” (Grimké), 80 “Longings” (Cowdery), 6, 159, 167–168 Lorde, Audre, 218, 219 “Love in These Days” (Cowdery), 181 [Love me to-day] (Grimké), 40 “Love Song for Summer” (Cowdery), 175 lyric poetry: appeal of, to black women writ-

ers, 20–21, 170, 218–219; and biographical approach, 3; and modernism, 15–16, 17; and New Negro ideology, 12–17; as sentimental, 15–16 Mance, Ajuan Maria, 14–15, 219, 232n28 McDougald, Elise Johnson, 15 McKay, Claude, 13, 145 “Message of the Negro Poets, The” (Locke), 198–199 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 16, 210, 215 Miller, Nina: on asceticism in Bennett’s poetry, 144–145; on Bennett and Johnson as modernists, 228n11, 229n40; on Bennett’s attraction to fairy tales, 123; on black womanhood and the New Negro ethos, 14; on the erotic and modernist poetry, 6; on imagism in Bennett’s poetry, 105, 239n14; on lyric poetry’s appeal to black women writers, 20–21, 170; on Nightwoman image, 9, 101, 102; on sexuality in Bennett’s poetry, 239n19 Mitchell, Verner D., 17, 229n39 modernism: and the erotic, 6; Grimké’s place in, 32; and lyric poetry, 15–16, 17; as male domain, 14; racial stereotypes in, 123; scholarship on, 3; subjectivity in, 10–11. See also imagism “Mona Lisa, A” (Grimké), 5, 45–47 “Mood” (Cowdery), 206 “Mood, A” (Grimké), 22, 29–31, 97–98 “Moon Tonight” (Bennett), 104, 105, 145, 240n40, 243n106 M Street School (later Dunbar High School), 1, 54, 56, 61, 82 “My Father’s Story”(Bennett), 119, 123–124 “My Lilies at Dusk” (Grimké), 66–67 “My Shrine” (Grimké), 8, 41–42, 232n38 “My Star”(Grimké), 43 [My sweetheart walks down laughing ways] (Grimké), 44, 55 NAACP, 86, 91 “Nameless” (Cowdery), 173 Nation (magazine), 156 nature imagery, 7, 9; in Bennett’s work, 101, 148–150; in Cowdery’s work, 161–162, 165–166, 167–168, 170–171, 173–174, 175, 194–195, 204, 213; in Grimké’s work, 30, 45–46, 47, 48–51, 66–67, 70, 94–95; pastoral settings, 12–13 “Naughty Nan” (Grimké), 38–39 “Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, The” (Hughes), 156 Negro Genius, The (Brawley), 198, 199 Negro Poets and Their Poems (Kerlin), 84 Nelson, Cary, 32

Index  T  267 New American Poetry: and Bennett, 113; and Grimké, 32, 37, 45; and racial activism, 18; and sentimentality, 15–16; and subjectivity, 10–11 New Negro, The (Locke), 98 New Negro movement, 18; and black womanhood, 14–15; and Grimké’s style, 37; and Hughes, 156–157; and lyric verse, 16–17; women’s poetry of linked to contemporary use of the erotic, 218–219 New Woman movement, 18, 35 “New Year’s Eve—1938” (Bennett), 147 New York Amsterdam News, 132, 145, 150, 196 New York Times, 114 night: in Bennett’s poetry, 101–102, 135; in Cowdery’s poetry, 171, 173–174, 194–195, 207; in Grimké’s poetry, 29, 31; twilight moments, 35–36. See also twilight Nightwoman figure, 9, 101–102, 135. See also Aphrodite image “Nocturne” (Bennett), 99, 109, 135 Norwood, Annie Hicks, 114–115 “Nostalgia” (Bennett), 117 “Nostalgia” (Cowdery), 215–216 nostalgia/homesickness: in Bennett’s writing, 116–117 “Of the Earth” (Cowdery), 161–162, 163, 169 Opportunity (magazine): Bennett’s publications in, 98, 99, 105, 109, 170, 227n2; Bennett’s work for, 23, 99, 100, 115; Cowdery’s publications in, 25, 170, 196, 227n2; Grimké’s publications in, 70, 84, 178, 227n2; Hughes in, 156; Johnson in, 167, 245n18 Palms (magazine), 98, 104, 125 Paris, Bennett in, 23, 99–100, 116–117 “Parting at Morning” (Browning), 138 “Pastorale” (Cowdery), 200, 213 pastoral settings. See nature imagery “Peace” (Bennett), 137 Pelham, Louise, 183 Penn Relays of 1929, 191–192 Perry, Mark, 73, 74–75, 81, 91–92, 236n105 Philadelphia: lack of black bohemian scene in, 192–194, 209–210; racism in, 19, 187–188; social atmosphere of black professional class in, 185–188, 189–192 Philadelphia Independent, 196, 207, 208, 209, 250n134 Philadelphia Negro, The (Du Bois), 186 Philadelphia Tribune, 189–190, 200, 202, 203, 249n133 Pittsburgh Courier: Bennett in, 105, 114–115, 119; Cowdery in, 189, 191, 197, 199, 202

“Poem” (Bennett), 133–134 “Poem” (Cowdery), 194 “Poem . . . for a Lover” (Cowdery), 180 “Poet’s Query (Ennui)” (Cowdery), 214–215 “Prayer, A” (Cowdery), 18, 162–164 “Prayer, A” (Dunbar-Nelson), 163–164 “Purgation” (Bennett), 109, 145 “Quatrain [I]” (Bennett), 99, 104, 106 “Quatrain [II]” (Bennett), 149 “Quiescence” (Bennett), 152–153 race activism, 4, 5; in Cowdery’s work, 155, 159–161, 162–163; in Grimké’s work, 83, 86–87; and racial uplift poetry, 18–19 Rachel (Grimké), 3, 18, 81, 83–84, 92, 238n151 racial liminality, 36, 103, 127 racial uplift poetry: in Bennett’s work, 100– 101; in Cowdery’s work, 161; in DunbarNelson’s work, 164; emerging from experiences of racism, 18–19; and lyric verse, 16–17; and New Negro movement, 14–15 racism: experienced by Bennett, 19–20, 120, 127, 230n48; experienced by Cowdery, 20, 188; experienced by Grimké, 19; in Philadelphia, 19, 187–188 Randolph, Ruth, 103, 134 Raye, Lee, 157, 181–182 Reading Eagle, 150, 152 “Regret” (Grimké), 49 “Rest” (Grimké), 71–72 “Resurrection” (Cowdery), 204–205 Riley, Cyril A.: Cowdery’s marriage to, 200, 248n103; and Cowdery’s suicide, 207–208; as member of black professional class, 202–203; second marriage of, 210, 249n133 Roberts, Brian Russell, 80–81 Robeson, Paul, 99, 110 “Rosabel” (Grimké), 59 Roses, Lorraine, 103, 134 Ross, Melvin, 182–183 same-sex desire: in Cowdery’s work, 176–180; and fluidity of sexuality, 34–35, 35–36; in Grimké’s romantic life, 52–60; in Grimké’s work, 10, 33, 37–44, 58–59; in New York social circles, 183, 184–185; and Victorian culture of romantic friendship, 52–54, 63–64. See also bisexuality Sanders, Mark A., 17 Sapphic modernism, 22, 34–35 Savage, Augusta, 140, 145, 146, 243n106, 243n113 Schomburg Center: archival research at, 4; Bennett’s estate donated to, 217–218 Scott, Laine A., 87

268  T  Index “Secret” (Bennett), 112, 144 segregation: in Bennett’s life, 19, 120; in Cowdery’s life, 20, 188, 192; in Grimké’s life, 19, 36, 71, 102. See also race activism; racism sentimentalism: and pastoral settings, 12–13; and women poets, 15–16 sexuality. See erotic, the; same-sex desire Shange, Ntozake, 218, 219 “Shattered Mirror” (Cowdery), 211–212 slavery, 91–92 Slowe, Lucy Diggs, 57, 233–234n66 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 54 “Some Hands Are Lovelier” (Cowdery), 174–175 “Song [I]” (Bennett), 18, 100 “Song [II]” (Bennett), 12–13, 104–105, 112 song/music: in Bennett’s poems, 100–101, 108–109, 112, 125–126, 142; in Cowdery’s poems, 165–166, 169; Grimké’s crush on her music teacher, 59–60 “Sonnet [I]” (Bennett), 109–110 [So you strolled along the terrace] (Grimké), 64–65 speakers, gendered readings of, 33, 35, 185 Spencer, Anne, 4, 16, 220 spirituality: in Cowdery’s work, 168–170, 204–205; in Dunbar-Nelson’s work, 164, 166; and the erotic, 9–10; spiritual bond between separated loved ones, 77. See also Aphrodite image spring: in Bennett’s poetry, 100, 102, 104; in Cowdery’s poetry, 170–171; in Grimké’s poetry, 47, 78; spring of 1927, 1–2; spring of 1932, 220–221; as symbol of rebirth, 1 “Spring Poem in Winter” (Cowdery), 1 Stacy, Alice, 58 Stanley, M. C., 74, 79–80, 236n103 Stanley, Sarah: Angelina’s relationship with, 22–23, 77–78; Archibald’s relationship with, 73–76, 236n107, 236n109; death of, 79–80; portrait of, 74 “Street Lamps in Early Spring” (Bennett), 1, 8–9, 102, 136, 141 Stubbs, Carolyn Amonitti, 74, 236n102 Stubbs, Marion Turner, 189, 192, 197, 202 subjectivity, centering of in modernism, 10–11 suicide: of Bennett’s father, 114–115; Cowdery’s, 207–209, 210, 215; of Grimké’s mother, 79 Temple, Rosabelle, 59–60, 234n73 “Tenebris” (Grimké), 18, 87 Thacker, Andrew, 17 [The sun is shining, I see a robin] (Grimké), 78

“Thin Laughter” (Bennett), 135 This Mad Ideal (Dell), 123 “Thou Art So Far, So Far” (Grimké), 10, 43–44 “Three Angels” (Grimké), 71 “Threnody for Spain” (Bennett), 137 “Time” (Cowdery), 179 “To a Dark Girl” (Bennett), 6, 103, 141, 239n19, 248n95 “To an Aloof Lady” (Bennett), 11, 135–136 “To Keep the Memory of Charlotte Forten Grimké” (Grimké), 84–85 “Tokens” (Bennett), 98–99 Tolles, Emma, 77, 79 “Totality” (Cowdery), 168–170 “To Usward” (Bennett), 99, 101 “Train Monotony” (Bennett), 23, 98, 100, 106–107, 110, 238n1 “Trilogy, A” (Grimké), 6–7 Turner, Marion (Marion Turner Stubbs), 189, 192, 197, 202 [’Twas twilight time when Alice came] (Grimké), 58–59 twilight: and Aphrodite, 9, 43; in Bennett’s poems, 103–104, 117; in Cowdery’s poems, 163, 178–179; and Grimké’s mother’s suicide, 79; in Grimké’s poems, 30, 35–36, 43, 45, 47–48, 48–51, 58, 68, 94, 178–179; and racial liminality, 36; and same-sex desires, 35–36. See also night [Twilight is like a gray mantle] (Bennett), 104 twilight moments, 35–36 “Under the Days” (Grimké), 70 “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (Lorde), 218 “Violets Narritive, The” (Grimké), 71 visual art: Bennett’s work in, 23, 105, 138–139 Vose, Marie, 60 Walker, Margaret, 220 Wall, Cheryl A., 3, 102, 227n5 Walrond, Eric, 99 “Want” (Cowdery), 194–195 “Want of You, The” (Grimké), 48–49 Washington, D.C.: racism in, 19 Waters, Ethel, 146 Weary Blues, The (Hughes), 156 Webber, Harry B., 196, 200, 209–210, 220–221 Webber, Judith Lynn: birth of, 196, 248n88; burial plot of, 249n131; and her mother’s death, 209; in Jack and Jill Club, 202; move to West Philadelphia, 203; portrait of, 201

Index  T  269 “Wedding Day” (Bennett), 98–99 Weld, Angelina Grimké, 19, 87, 91, 237n137 Welfare Council of New York, 106, 128, 129 We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems (Cowdery): bohemian sensibilities of, 26; “Insatiate,” 176–178; “Lines to a Sophisticate,” 175–176, 177, 178; “Love Song for Summer,” 175; moody poems in, 203–204, 206–207; “Pastorale,” 200, 213; “Poem . . . for a Lover,” 180; publication of, 2, 24, 198; public reception of, 2, 199, 209; “Some Hands Are Lovelier,” 174–175; “Totality,” 168–170; “Wind Blows,” 170–171 Well of Loneliness, The (Hall), 185 West, Dorothy, 196, 199, 220 Weston, Nancy, 83–84, 91 [What can I give My happy dark-haired mother] (Grimké), 78 Wheeler, Laura, 110

“Where Phyllis Sleeps” (Grimké), 68 whiteness. See black and white, images of Wilks, Jennifer, 17 Wilson, Alice J., 201, 203, 210 Wilson, Charles B., 186, 187, 210 Wilson, Mary Valentine, 186, 201, 203, 209, 244n2 “Wind” (Bennett), 170 “Wind Blows, The” (Cowdery), 170–171 “Winter Twilight, A” (Grimké), 49–50 WPA (Works Progress Administration), 151, 243n113 “You” (Grimké), 39–40 Young, Patricia, 78 “Young Voice Cries, The” (Cowdery), 9, 10, 164–165, 166, 167 “Your Lips” (Bennett), 143 “Your Songs” (Bennett), 108–109

A bout the Author

Maureen Honey is a professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she specializes in American women’s literature, the Harlem Renaissance, women in World War II, and popular culture. She has taught several graduate seminars on women of the Harlem Renaissance and American women writers of the early twentieth century. Honey is the editor of Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (2nd ed. 2006); Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II (1999); and Breaking the Ties that Bind: Popular Stories of the New Woman, 1915–1930 (1992); and co-editor with Venetria Patton, of Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology (2001) and with Jean Lee Cole of Madame Butterfly by John Luther Long and A Japanese Nightingale by Onoto Watanna: Two Orientalist Texts (2002). Her critical monograph Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II (1984) is considered to be a definitive text on images of women during the 1940s.