“Some of These Days”: Reclamation of Black Voices from Wheatley to Hughes

The stories of the Harlem Renaissance—roughly from 1910 to 1937—and those of its precursors trace a movement toward the resumption of national identity for Black Americans, as the promise of Reconstruction and repair remained unfulfilled fifty years after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Preceding Harlem, literary, scholarly, and cultural producers inaugurated a canon of public expression, even as Black authorship continually negotiated the problem of voice under surveillance within systems of oppression. Following the Great Migration (1910–40), population concentration in New York facilitated the Harlem Renaissance as a site of exchange and arrival for a long-deferred sense of cultural belonging. From the trailblazing poetics of Phillis Wheatley, who navigated the tension between public authorship and protection over a century-and-a-half earlier, to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s rondeau of protective performance and Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” in 1925, what had become most visible for the “New Negro” was that earlier strategies of masking had become apparently old (Locke 1, 3). The 153 years of expression between Wheatley and Hughes offer a temporal, emotive, and moral perspective on the distance Black voices traversed to redefine their relationship to the nation and to themselves.

Wheatley, regarded as a “genius in bondage” (Carretta), “became the first American [enslaved person], the first person of African descent, and only the third colonial American woman to have her work published.”¹ Wheatley moved through white patronage as a stunning exception to absolute suppression in the late eighteenth century. Her work engaged with Black race consciousness within neoclassical and Christian literary traditions, and elegiac, moral, political, and classical allusive modes of the eighteenth century. She employed those inherited forms to shape an early Black authorial voice under immense oppression and scrutiny. As the first Black author to publish a book in English, she inaugurated the canon through a body of work read as subversive. Wheatley was kidnapped from West Africa, at around the age of seven years old, and forced onto the Phillis. This ship arrived in Boston, MA, on July 11, 1761, where she was bought by Susanna and John Wheatley to work in the household. Allowed an education by her enslavers, Wheatley soon honed her talent for writing, eventually learned Latin and Greek, and published her first poem at the age of fourteen. By 1770, she had gained widespread acclaim in New England and England. Even so, the authenticity of her authorship was doubted by many around her, and she was compelled to collect the attestations of white Bostonians, including John Hancock. In 1773, she traveled to London, where Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published on September 1, and later received praise from George Washington, to whom she had written “To His Excellency, George Washington.”² She was emancipated in 1773 and married a free man in 1778. Before her death at age 31, Wheatley encountered further hardship, including poverty and the death of three children as infants. Moreover, although she had proved her authorship among Boston’s intellectual elite, no one would publish her second book.

Over the course of the nineteenth-century, but especially after Emancipation, the artistic record shifted from a mode for pure survival, as in Wheatley’s incongruent affect, toward a retrospective witness, as in Dunbar’s verse. Narrative accounts of fugitivity and freedom after 1865 chronicle a literary shift away from the dominance of enslavement over literary technique. In the meantime, however, the artists who followed Wheatley inhabited different, though still precarious, forms of freedom compared with Wheatley’s recorded beginnings under the confines of enslavement and later white patronage. Even as the constraints and oppression of her time shape her artistry, leading scholars finds discernible coded resistance in her framing and syntactic decisions (Richards; Shields).

After Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs uses her voice to engage, directly, with fugitive freedom. Jacobs escaped enslavement a decade before her legal freedom was transacted on her behalf in 1852 (Harriet Jacobs, Writer). Her early march into the canon, especially through the 1861 book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, signals a cascade of new voices before Harlem. From this sweep, I want to focus on the voice of the writer and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), who was raised in Maryland outside of slavery, where she became an organizer for change and a writer. She advocated for education and suffrage for Black women. Harper enters the canon from a relatively secure position, which allows her to widen the channel through which later generations in Harlem could expand. In her poem “The Slave Mother” (1854), she depicts an enslaved woman at the moment her enslaver takes possession of her child to sell. Harper’s poem is not an imagined abuse, nor does it raise a problem in isolation. The reality of family separation was far more ubiquitous than often realized now, as it was documented in song by an enslaved person whose name is unknown. “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” was also written sometime in the 1800s.

Harper’s “Slave Mother” is a ballad of ten quatrains, with a rhyme scheme of ABCB, such as rose/air/hear/despair (II. 1-4). Harper uses antiphony to contrast maternal righteousness with legal abuse; “He is not hers” (II. 17, 19, 21) is a triple anaphora that strikes a note of biological rectitude:

He is not hers, although she bore
For him a mother’s pains;
He is not hers, although her blood
Is coursing through his veins!
He is not hers, for cruel hands
May rudely tear apart
The only wreath of household love
That binds her breaking heart. (V-VI. 17-24)

Harper’s imagery conscribed affluent white readers to witness and then to accept responsibility. At the start of the poem, the speaker addresses the reader in the second-person, about the eponymous mother; “Heard you that shriek,” “Saw you those hands so sadly clasped—,” and “Saw you the sad, imploring eye” (I-III. 1, 6, 9). Harper pivots to the reader, “She is a mother, pale with fear,” an epiphonema that converts questions into a charge and a gut-punch that reverberates through the remaining stanzas (III. 14). Harper depicts the subject’s anguish in the seventh quatrain, “Their lives a streamlet blent in one— / Oh, Father! must they part?” perhaps in an appeal to readers, who would reflexively reject the idea that “He is not hers,” forces, namely mothers, to imagine their own children severed from their bond (V, VI, 17, 19, 21). Harper uses verbal irony here, which looks for relief—with self-conscious fecklessness—in two registers: God, in prayer, under duress, and to pro-slavery paternalism, thereby reversing the moral valence. “The link with [her] past that had given the individual African a sense of racial and cultural identity had been severed, or at best, seriously distorted. Thus, [some enslaved people] sang poignantly: Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child / A Long Way from Home” (Taylor 389). The difficult process of redeveloping personal identity is reflected in the first-person voice of this and other spirituals (Taylor). And while that voice differs between those who are enslaved, once-enslaved, and free, as it moves to the second-person possessive “you,” and “you alone,” which we see in Harper’s “Slave Mother,” the poetics create the effect of looking from the outside into American traditions of artistic expression, to reveal the various oppressions that white culture has produced.

By the late nineteenth century, this growing body of work by Black writers no longer operated as collateral for enslavers, nor was it tempered by the same kind of pressure Wheatley faced. Paul Laurence Dunbar may have appreciated writer James Whitcomb Riley’s help in publishing his first book (Schomburg Center), or his friendship with Orville Wright (Graf; Jarrett), but his work was largely influenced by spirituals, dialect speech, and oral histories from his mother, Matilda Burton Murphy Dunbar, who was enslaved for the first 21 years of her life (Scheyer; Cohen). He respected Frederick Douglass, who also admired Dunbar’s work. Douglass’s mentorship of Dunbar was one of the bonds that served as a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance and exemplified the emergent discourse of community and intracommunity sponsorship that distinguish modern Black life from the past (Daily Dunbar; Academy of American Poets).

Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” first appeared in Majors and Minors (1895) and was reprinted in Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896). The poem is a 15-line rondeau with a rhyme scheme that centers on the eyes/-ile sounds—e.g., ies/eyes/wise/crise/otherwise—versus the guile/smile/while/mile sounds. The dominant meter is iambic tetrameter, but Dunbar uses some substitutions. The opening clause, “We Wear the Mask that Grins and Lies” (emphasis added to indicate stresses) returns as a refrain at the end of stanzas two and three. The poem speaks in the first-person plural, “We wear the mask that grins and lies, / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes” (II. 102). Dunbar’s use of ‘we’ implies Black Americans, and the ‘world’ contains the proverbial white public (I. 6). The poem’s dialogic structure follows up on this dichotomy: we speak about what we do under the pressure of the world. In the first stanza, “This debt we pay to human guile” defines the mask as a compulsory payment for the imposed cost of living in a racist social order (I. 3). The fourth line in the first stanza, “With torn and bleeding hearts we smile” is an oxymoron condensing the violence that provokes self-preservation under Jim Crow.

Formally, Dunbar’s rondeau is itself a kind of mask. He employs a European form that produces dissonance, as in Wheatley’s best-known poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1768). Ostensibly, it softens her abduction into “brought,” a political accommodation and just one cost she paid to enter the record at all. Like Wheatley’s lyric, Dunbar’s serves a message that rhetorically obscures the violence of the imagery, thereby complicating its meaning. In the poem, Dunbar describes the effect of the mask on verbal communication. For example, the first stanza of the poem characterizes the approach to communication, “And mouth with myriad subtleties” (I. 5). Dunbar’s use of “mouth” can be understood as a deliberate choice of verb—to suggest performative speech without revealing interior truth—or as a noun. Similarly, “myriad subtleties” relates to code-switching, indirection, and careful impression management as survival strategies. The second stanza asks the rhetorical question, “Why should the world be overwise, / In counting all our tears and sighs?” (II. 6-7). To be “overwise” here means seeing what the world sees, and what it would rather not. Dunbar exercises tight control in the response, “Nay, let them only see us, while / We wear the mask” (II. 8-9). For Dunbar’s community, we can surmise, it was not enough to suffer the mask; one had to administer personal visibility ad hoc. That control, however, was defensive and did not yet grasp the creative liberty or risk that would be present in Hughes’s work. What W. E. B. Du Bois later deemed “double consciousness,” the learned instinct to see oneself through the white gaze, is precisely the position Dunbar describes. The “Mask” is the external self that satisfies “the world”; however, behind it is a second self that Dunbar describes as a “torn and bleeding” interior. His plural “we” anticipates Du Bois’s scholarship on Black subjectivity in The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

To get a better sense for why earlier Black writers, particularly, adopted a literary technique of masking, we can return to Wheatley. After all, she modeled it in her adapted Virgilian and Horatian forms for at least two reasons. The first is political camouflage, unlike Dunbar, who is by degrees able to speak with more transparency. The second is as a mode of conveyance to demonstrate the breadth of her education and her agility within those frames. Wheatley lacked a cohort of influence and the same literary agency Black writers claimed in Harlem. Wheatley deftly reappropriated eighteenth-century forms, considered the height of sophistication at the time, deliberately, in part to counter accusations of intellectual inferiority. But like Wheatley’s sophisticated concealment of meaning, Dunbar’s mask employs a French poetic form with a breezy rhythm, juxtaposed with the sorrowful content. Additionally, he delegates truth and confession to the imagined justice of Christ, belying the appeal to society for political redress. The effect is read in the second stanza, “We smile, but O great Christ, our cries / To thee from tortured souls arise” (II. 110-11). Dunbar adds real stakes to the reverence as the appeal continues, “We sing, but oh the clay is vile / Beneath our feet, and long the mile” (II. 12-13). The juxtaposition in the last two lines, “let the world dream otherwise, / We wear the mask!” captures the disconnect between the world’s fantasy that all is well and that the mask is sincere, and Dunbar’s grim knowledge of his and his community’s ongoing need to dissemble (II. 12-15). His act of naming the pain is a form of resistance to it. “We Wear the Mask” is written in the nadir of post-Reconstruction race relations. He lived in a society that condoned lynching and disenfranchisement, among those who perpetrated both, and witnessed the rise of Jim Crow laws, but the poem neither recaptures antebellum-era testimonials nor does it retreat from a connection to the past. The poem refuses closure because the social condition imposed remains unresolved in 1895.

By 1926, Hughes’s The Weary Blues formalizes a split between inner and outer consciousness a la Du Bois. Both Dunbar and Hughes articulate the psychological cost of racial performance and model an outlet of artistry to cope with suppressed pain. However, Hughes carries Dunbar’s internalized pain and transforms it into a performed Blues lament and a more public, authored voice. Earlier writers built the archive under the extreme constraints of enslavement and its aftermath, with few examples, role models, or peers. By the time Hughes was writing, however, the expeditious spread of cultural influence that was converging in Harlem reached a national scale and became visible as a shared canon and a site of international regard. Wheatley’s neoclassical forms smuggled knowledge of the horrific realities of bondage and truth about spiritual equality into packages that were publishable—but that white patrons could also see as proof positive of indoctrination and their righteousness. Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” brings light to the subject of protective performance, and Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” recasts that performance in “The Jester,” where it is no longer clear that the speaker is the poet; he openly declares “In one hand / I hold tragedy / And in the other / Comedy” (1-4), and names them “Masks for the soul” (5). Hughes transforms Dunbar’s collective “we” into a solitary figure who repurposes pain into a spectacle. Here, the clown’s protective stance and imagery for others publicize the toll such a performance takes on a person.

Du Bois cautioned that life resembling the conditions of the “Old Negro” continued for many, which raised tension with optimism for the community at large; as Alain Locke suggested, “we may be witnessing a resurgence of a race; with our eyes focused on the Harlem scene, we may dramatically glimpse the New Negro” (“Harlem” 3). The very inequality that persisted outside Harlem’s center made clear that the relative prosperity, like the rhetoric of the “New Negro,” did not arise from a single, homogeneous trajectory of race work and was not limited to New York. Hughes’s “Mother to Son” returns to the maternal figure, central to Jacobs and Harper, by letting the mother speak to her child, who remains beside her in a free yet still precarious interior. The mother explains:

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair,
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare. (Hughes 2-7)

The catalogue of damage echoes Harper’s image of “cruel hands” tearing apart the only “wreath of household love / That binds her breaking heart” and Jacobs’s memory of the mother whose seven children were taken and sold away under slavery (“The Slave Mother” 23-24). By contrast, Hughes reunites the eternal mother and child. Familiar reminders of family—such as “Don’t you turn back. / Don’t you set down on the steps”, delivered by the mother figure in the poem—signal first-hand care (“Mother to Son” 14-15). Her very presence shifts parentage back to the family, but the poem retains the hardship inherited from the legacy of slavery. The poem conveys that Harlem’s literary power lies in the shared experience of force, the learned practice of coping, and the turning of trauma into counsel, and counsel into forward momentum.

Meanwhile, the echoes of slavery were manifesting and codifying new injustices that were thrust onto free American citizens. Discrimination, prejudice, limited access or outright bans, suspicion, absent legal protections, and isolation persisted and were levied on Black Americans now within institutions that codified and sustained the effects of the era of slavery. Written by an unknown enslaved person, a version of the song “God’s Going to Set This World on Fire” was first published and performed for a wider audience during Reconstruction by the Hampton Institute in 1877 (Lindsey; Fenner). Another spiritual, known as “I’m Gonna Eat at the Welcome Table” or “Some of These Days,” entered the canon by the 1920s and was referenced as such in 1984 by Alice Walker in her short story titled “The Welcome Table.” Many of the same lyrics appear in all three versions. The song is working on multiple fronts. On the surface, the repeated call-and-response lyric, “I’m gonna eat at the welcome table some of these days. Hallelujah!” suggests hope of integration and of claiming the rightful place of equals at the dinner table with the nation (“Some of These Days”). But as the song progresses to the second verse, “God’s gonna set this world on fire,” and the third, “I’m gonna walk and talk with Jesus,” the spiritual divulges another meaning, that these hopes will be realized only in heaven; the enslaved songwriter might thus have held no hope of ever doing them in their lifetime.

Self-reference was uncommon in Black poetry before Harlem. In this respect, Wheatley is an exception. However, as more literary voices entered the discourse, collective nouns such as “we,” “our,” and “my” became more common. This is seen in the poetry of Dunbar, as discussed, as well as in that of Claude McKay and James Weldon Johnson. The least frequently used, “I,” emerged in Countee Cullen’s “Yet do I marvel at its name” (1925) and Hughes’s “I, Too,” in the same year. The shift to personal, individual expression from a collective suggests that 60 years of growing Black scholarship and artistic reconciliation of slavery had allowed for a counterhegemonic subjectivity to gain literary expression. “I, Too,” (1925) moves from naming the damage to revising the concept of national belonging. The speaker asserts, “I Too, sing America. / I am the darker brother,” and follows with “They send me to eat in the kitchen / When company comes (1-4).” Now, instead of concluding with longing, Hughes bets, “Tomorrow, / I’ll be at the table / When company comes” (8-10). The kitchen is a recurring image of how Black labor is relegated to back spaces. The “table” is similar to the “Welcome Table” of the spiritual that imagines equality “some of these days” in a heavenly future. However, Hughes’s conception of “tomorrow” is as a welcome table that will come sooner than heaven, as read in “I’m Gonna Eat at the Welcome Table.” When the speaker in “I, Too” assumes there will be a moment of revelation and shame for white onlookers upon seeing Black beauty, they assert a future certainty that earlier writers sought to argue into recognition. The poem condenses a long record of exclusion into a first-person speech that protects hope with statements of will. The speaker presents the truth as if they know they are being watched from the outside but refuses to decenter themself.

Hughes’s poetry echoes early Black voices like those of Wheatley and Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897). Hughes’s vernacular vignettes and analepsis modernize a shared equipoise of pain and pride. According to James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), “nothing would do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art”. Wheatley was not the first or last whose achievements would be tampered with, tempered by force, or destroyed by structural facets of systemic racism. It was more than a century after Wheatley’s life that the thickening archive in Harlem was increasing national awareness and responsibility for Black cultural value within American institutions. Wheatley’s was a solitary campaign by comparison to the community of leadership she inspired. In Harlem, a self-possessed community could see an artistic lineage in contiguous view. And, by degrees, the literary canon began to reflect the nation. Thus, while negotiating the enduring legacies of slavery, many Black writers relied on the relay of literary form and power, crystallized by cumulative labor, circulated and passed down, eventually to Hughes himself (Carretta).

Following the two generations after Emancipation, Johnson made clear that, while Black citizens were not fully recognized as Americans, their communities’ work enriched the American literary canon. As a scholar of African American literature, a thought leader, a Civil Rights activist, and an influential writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson wrote the preface for The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). Johnson contextualizes the achievements of “Negro” poets, explaining that, despite limitations, “the poets between Phillis Wheatley and Dunbar must be considered more in the light of what they attempted than of what they accomplished” (Gates 434). Johnson said that “it is this side of prophecy to declare that the undeniable creative genius of the Negro is destined to make a distinctive and valuable contribution to American poetry” (Gates 443). This formulation reaffirms what I have argued throughout the present essay: as Black authors developed a narrative authority that attended to the interplay of historical past and urgent present, they made space for literary expressions of individualism alongside a retained sense of collective consciousness, as well. In other words, the canon of Black expression, from Wheatley to Harlem, captures the efforts of Black Americans coping with the ember cast of bondage, as cultural representation in storytelling, transmission, and resistance carried the burden of remaking—community and individual identity, alike.

Footnotes

1. Sheridan, “Phillis Wheatley: Her Life, Poetry, and Legacy,” National Portrait Gallery, n.d., https://npg.si.edu/blog/phillis-wheatley-her-life-poetry-and-legacy. ↩︎
2. “President George Washington’s Memorial Service.” US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives, n.d., https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1700s/President-George-Washington-s-Memorial-Service/ ↩︎