Arna Bontemps (1902–1973)

Before reading this novel that was first published in the 1950s, I read a biographical sketch about the Jubilee Singers in We Sing America, a children's book written by Marion Cuthbert in the 1930s.

That book as a whole, and the Jubilee Singers sketch in particular, whet my appetite for Chariot in the Sky.

I found this novel to be quite inspiring, yes. But I was already expecting it to be. And in this and that chapter, when I came across songs that I knew, I slowed down my reading and sang show more along with the characters. That wasn't exactly unexpected either.

However, at no point before I started this book was I expecting to weep. Not only to get teary-eyed, but to actually weep. History you already know just hits you harder sometimes.

That is, I've known for a long time about past laws in America that prohibited teaching enslaved people to read. Also, yes, I've loved books ever since I was a little girl, and because reading and writing are my life, I like to think that I don't take them for granted.

Well, during my reading of this novel, I felt it when teenage Caleb began to teach himself to read while he was still enslaved. When the one beginner's book he'd borrowed became the major focus of his life, I understood. Then, soon after the Civil War, during Caleb's journey as a young man, my eyes fell on one of the novel's illustrations: a depiction of formerly enslaved people, young and old, gathered in a makeshift classroom, "learning their letters."

At the sight of that image inspired by history, an image of the newly emancipated determined that they would read, I broke down. Had to set the novel aside for a few minutes, I was weeping so hard.

And one of my favorite parts of the book came later, in a conversation: "General O. O. Howard, of the Freedmen's Bureau, told us recently how he had visited one such school and asked the young folk what message they'd like him to carry to their friends in the North. One little fellow stood up in the back and said, 'General, tell them we are rising.'"

That's what my reading experience here was like. Watching the story of a people, collectively on the rise.

My. Goodness.

Now, in general, the unfolding/flow of the plot and the character development could have been somewhat better. There's also a minor romantic theme that isn't developed well enough for its twist at the end not to feel like too abrupt and big of a switch-up.

Nevertheless, as I finished the novel (and immediately went to look up a little more about the real Jubilee Singers who appear in it), I must say—my very soul was singing.

Note:
• a few scenes include serious violence show less

This book gets 5 stars for its priceless historical value alone but there is in fact even much more to it. Nothing else in American/African-American history and literature comes even close to this volume because to date it represents the only comprehensive collected correspondence between two giants of African-American literature. That by itself is notable but possibly even more so is the span of time, as indicated in the title, covered. Bontemps and Hughes were both stars of the Harlem show more Renaissance but these collected letters only begin there and take readers through the writers' first-hand experiences of, and reports on, the Great Depression, life during World War II, and the thunderous rumblings of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.

They also contain the kind of shared literary intimacies and insights you hope to find in such books. For example, Hughes writes the following to Bontemps on Feb 18, 1953: "If you'll tell me what Dick Wright's book is like (since I haven't it) I'll tell you about James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain which I've just finished: If it were written by Zora Hurston with her feeling for the folk idiom, it would probably be a quite wonderful book. Baldwin over-writes and over-poeticizes in images way over the heads of the folks supposedly thinking them--although it might be as the people would think if they could think that way..."

Whether or not you agree with Hughes' or Bontemps' assessments in such instances, the thrill comes from getting their uncensored straight-from-the-gut responses. This is the case whether they are dealing with literature, politics, race relations, mutual acquaintances, the development of various cultural movements, or their everyday struggles to survive and thrive as literary artists. Their voices as presented through these letters are beautifully undiluted but powerfully informed, and therefore an invaluable treasure for anyone who appreciates the idea of literary camaraderie, loves the Harlem Renaissance, or simply enjoys checking out writers at their unscripted best.

by Aberjhani show less

An adequate look at the 100 years after the American Civil War. Written in 1961 this work is a little dated. Bontemps was somewhat dismissive of MLK but laudatory of Ralph Bunche. The last 50 years have reversed that.

He spent a great deal of time on the DuBois-Washington controversy. He gets beyond the surface of the controversy between the two. He also notes how the views of each changed over the years, especially noting BTW's realization that segregation was unacceptable near the end of show more his life. Bontemps had previously criticized BTW for giving the SCOTUS the notion about separate-but-equal doctrine that found expression in the 1896 Plessy decision. BTW had ostensibly endorse separate-but-equal the previous year with his so-call Atlanta Compromise.

Bontemps also explored (much more briefly) the Harlem Renaissance (of which he was a part). It would have been nice to see a more lengthy examination of the renaissance. Also missing from the discussion on the 1920s was a discussion (or even mention) of Marcus Garvey. Granted, Garvey was not an American, but he was a profound figure.

Bontemps seems somewhat contemptuous MLK and Thurgood Marshall. Written on the eve of the explosion of the civil rights movement (after Brown, Montgomery, and Little Rock, but before sit-ins, freedom rides, the March on Washington, and freedom summer), the modern reader gains an insight into the thinking of African Americans in the early 1960s.

While Bontemps is a good writer, he is not (nor did he claim to be) a historian, he had no footnotes. The extensive use of quotes would have been enhanced with sourcing. The bibliography is nice, but a bit dated. show less

It’s just a simple little book from the early 1940s, about two hundred pages of verse illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings of Black Americans, men and women, mostly boys and girls, asleep, awake, happy, lonely, carefree, thoughtful. In my early days of teaching, it was one of the anthologies that I read from frequently, one of the few available at the time collecting poems from African Americans that would appeal to young readers. I cherished the book, but I didn’t own it. Each time I show more had to check it out of the library. Finally, a librarian who had heard me quote from it many times, was gracious enough to send me a copy that was being weeded from her collection. After all, by that time, the late 1980s, it did appear somewhat dated—its illustrations maybe a bit too cartoonish, its contents a bit too quaint and probably not often enough militant. But it’s a book that I still cherish: Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers,edited by Arna Bontemps, with drawings by Henrietta Bruce Sharon.

For me, I think it had been a wake-up call, an introduction to people like myself whom I had not had the privilege of knowing, an introduction to poets who had been mostly names, if that. Appropriately, the first thematic section is called “Waking Up.” The first two poems present James Weldon Johnson, one of those names we all knew well, in two of his contrasting styles:

An angel, robed in spotless white,
Bent down and kissed the sleeping Night.
Night woke to blush; the sprite was gone.
Men saw the blush and called it Dawn.
“Dawn”

’Lias! ’Lias! Bless de Lawd!
Don’ you know de day’s erbroad?
Ef you don’ git up, you scamp,
Dey’ll be trouble in dis camp.
T’ink I gwine to let you sleep
W’ile I meks yo’ boa’d an’ keep?
Dat’s a putty howdy-do—
Don’ you hyeah me, ’Lias—you?
from “In the Morning”

Neither of these was ever one of the selections that I read aloud, and they do not represent (I think) the richness and the abundant diversity of most of the poems in the collection. The first one is a modish imitation of conventional white poets; the second, an example of Johnson’s ebonics, perhaps authentic, but sounding to the unpracticed ear almost Uncle Remus-like. My choice from this section would have been Langston Hughes:

We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame.

Yesterday
A night-gone thing,
A sun-down name.

And dawn-today
Broad arch above the road we came.

We march!
from “Youth”

Simple, universal yet quietly particular, realistic yet hopeful, traditional in its form yet modern too. The not-too-subtle rhyme of “march” with a word within the preceding line is just right: an early hint of activism reflecting a “night-gone” past from which his generation was to emerge. “All experience,” after all, “is an arch / Where through gleams that untraveled world . . . .”

What did a young white teacher in the 1950s, having grown up in the racist South, have to bring to such an anthology? Well, the Negro spiritual, of course: “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “The Gospel Train” (“Get on board, little chillun, / Get on board, little chillun, / Get on board, little chillun, / There’s room for many a mo’”), songs like “John Henry” and “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” and the title poem, “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers” (“Golden slippers I’m gwinter wear, / To walk de golden streets”).

What did this young teacher find here? Oh, a treasure chest. Poems now well known, still treasured: Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Mother to Son,” “Dreams” (“Hold fast to dreams / For if dreams die / Life is a broken winged bird / That cannot fly”); Countee Cullen, “Incident: Baltimore” (“Now I was eight and very small, / And he was no whit bigger, / And so I smiled, but he poked out / His tongue, and called me 'Nigge'r’”) and “For a Lady I Know” (“She even thinks that up in heaven / Her class lies late and snores / While poor black cherubs rise at seven / To do celestial chores”), “For a Poet” (“I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth, / And laid them away in a box of gold...”); Claude McKay; Fenton Johnson; Sterling A. Brown; Mary Effie Lee Newsome; William Stanley Braithwaite, and the list goes on.

But perhaps more important for me then, and for my students, were poems unlike both of these types: simple, everyday experiences that we all might share. I can’t resist quoting just a few stanzas that spoke especially to me and to my rural Tennessee background:

It makes me hungry just to smell
The nice hot sassafras tea,
And that’s one thing I really like
That they say’s good for me.
from “Sassafras Tea”
Mary Effie Lee Newsome

This lovely flower fell to seed;
Work gently sun and rain;
She held it as her dying creed
That she would grow again.
“For My Grandmother”
Countee Cullen

When walking through the woods,
So many times I think I’ve found a four-leaf clover
But like a dream—I stoop to find the dream is over—
It’s a three.
from “Four-Leaf Clover”
Wesley Curtright

Easy on your drums,
Easy wind and rain,
And softer on your horns,
She will not dance again.
from “Dark Girl”
Arna Bontemps

When Susanna Jones wears red
A queen from some time-dead Egyptian night
Walks once again.
from “When She Wears Red”
Langston Hughes

For Time’s deft fingers scroll my brow
With fell relentless art—
I’m folding up my little dreams
Tonight, within my heart!
from “My Little Dreams”
Georgia Douglas Johnson

Would that all poetry anthologies for young reader (and for their adult counterparts, too!) had such appealing poems organized around such universal, yet appealing topics: "Clothes Lines and Water Pails," "Rain, Flood and Big Water," "Dressed Up," and "Folks" (jes folks -- one of favorites: I can hear my own "folks" talkin' in them even today).

My pilgrimage is through,
But life is calling you!
Fare high and far, my son,
A new day has begun,
The star-ways must be won! show less