Notes from the Abyss

MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (March 25, 2022) — How does one love a country that does not love them? This is a question that many immigrants and descendants of immigrants must answer for themselves when living in new lands full of earlier arrivals hostile to later arrivals. For example, why would people from Latin America come to and stay in a nation where a soon-to-be-elected president announces his campaign with these lines:

The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.

… When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people (Phillips 2017).

Still, immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American and Caribbean countries seek to come to the United States, no matter what obstacles we earlier immigrants to America try to throw in their way.

There are some descendants of earlier arrivals that many whose folks came later—including the soon-to-be-elected president—continue to look down upon, even though their earlier arrivals didn’t choose to come in the first place. Those people are African Americans, the descendants of chattel that made much of white America’s wealth possible: the stately plantation homes of the American South, the spires of Georgetown University, the gothic mansions of Boston or Providence—they were built from wealth derived from slave labor or the trade in slaves. Most African Americans prior to turn of the twentieth century were deprived the benefits of education—even after slavery was abolished—and were viewed as inferior beings, even by those normally as astutely observant as Thomas Jefferson:

But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration … In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry.—Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry (Jefferson 1787, 233-234).

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Jefferson’s assertion may or may not have been forefront on the minds of the protagonists of the Harlem Renaissance, but the eruption of enduring work they produced proved him wrong. Not that any of it was enough to earn them appreciable respect among the white majority in their lifetimes. Given all they were forced to contend with—ridicule, discrimination, segregation, murder—the members of the Harlem Renaissance by and large loved this nation. The irony of their persecution by yet love for America will be examined in selected work by Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen.

McKay (2014), in his poem “America,” opens with the irony:

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! (1-4)

Instead, he draws strength from the land, despite the adversity, “Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, / Giving me strength erect against her hate” (5-6).

The final lines of “America,” however, express doubt about whether the harvest of strength will be permanent:

Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand. (11-14)

On one hand, he may foresee the upcoming troubles of the Civil Rights Movement, with the violence of the Bull Connors, the intransigence of the George Wallaces, and the murderous ambitions of the James Earl Rays. He may foresee the rollbacks of progress this nation has made toward equality, such as in the form of recent Supreme Court decisions like Shelby County v. Holder. He may also foresee the inevitable decline of empires—a decline that seems all too evident today following the ravages of Donald Trump, his acolytes and would-be successors.

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Hughes (2014) is much more optimistic in “I, Too.” He begins by taking note of the discrimination African Americans face, but—ironically—he draws strength from the adversity:

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong. (1-7)

The first stanza calls to mind the apocryphal story about Catherine the Great and the Potemkin villages. According to the story, Catherine went on a trip to Crimea to survey the conditions endured by peasants. Rather than allow her to see the truth, her chief minister, Grigory Potempkin, created fake villages full of happy peasants to cover up the abundant evidence of poverty and oppression. As stories go, it is a good one, though evidence suggests it is not true.

Nevertheless, White America went to great lengths to delude itself and con outsiders into thinking that life was great for African Americans. Such cons are still going on with increasing efforts to spread the old lies to new students. But Hughes’ image, however allegorical, is very much true, as African Americans—even when they were allowed to order food, for example from restaurants—were forced to go to the back door or sit in the back of the bus.

Hughes foresees the changes to come. As if he knew one day African American students would crash Woolworth lunch counters, he predicts:

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then. (8-14)

At least part of his vision has been achieved. Few people will tell African Americans to hide in the kitchen or order from the back door. But too many refuse to see them as beautiful, much less feel ashamed. Instead, in far too many places (like Virginia today), there seems to be a concerted effort to make African Americans feel ashamed for accurately pointing out the injustices they’ve faced in the past and continue to face today. Nevertheless, African Americans have made progress.

To echo the old Virginia Slims ad, African Americans have “come a long way, baby.” Interracial relationships—once a cause for murder if an African American male was involved—are commonplace. African Americans are routinely elected homecoming kings and queens at majority white secondary schools. African American performing artists and models grace the nation’s magazine covers, tabloid news programs and social media feeds. But, despite the widespread admiration, it will, as of the time this is written, take an act of Congress—literally—before African Americans won’t be discriminated against for wearing their hair naturally. African Americans may be seen as beautiful, but they still need to either get a process or keep their hair cropped short before being accepted as fellow professionals.

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McKay and Hughes strike me as more modern poets. They wrote in a style that Jefferson would struggle to understand. Cullen’s “The Shroud of Color” (2014) would be much more digestible by Jefferson. Jefferson might have even been forced to walk back his dismissal of African American poets such as Phyllis Wheatley (or Whatley as he called her) had he seen more work like Cullen’s. Nevertheless, Jefferson would have struggled to empathize with the “I” of the Cullen’s poem. “The Shroud of Color” begins with a lament of the burden of being born Black.

“Lord, being dark,” I said, “I cannot bear
The further touch of earth, the scented air;
Lord, being dark, forewilled to that despair
My color shrouds me in, I am as dirt
Beneath my brother’s heel … (1-5).

As the poem unfolds, the speaker expresses his desire for death to escape his misery. His death wish is not that of the captured African on the Middle Passage choosing death over bondage. The speaker’s death wish stems from his feelings of worthlessness—feelings repeatedly reinforced by the oppression he endures. But as his spirit reaches its nadir, he experiences an epiphany:

The cries of all dark people near or far
Were billowed over me, a mighty surge
Of suffering in which my puny grief must merge
And lose itself; I had no further claim to urge
For death … (176-180)

As his will to live returns, he feels the joy of life return. Future hardships may loom in the future, but he has rediscovered the strength he needs to face them:

Right glad I was to stoop to what I once had spurned,
Glad even unto tears; I laughed aloud; I turned
Upon my back, and thought the tears of joy would run,
My sight was clear; I looked and saw the rising sun (196-199).

Cullen’s closing optimism is echoed in the closing paragraph of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Mountaintop” speech that he gave in Memphis, Tennessee, the night before he was murdered by James Earl Ray:

… We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land (King 2018).

It can be debated whether or not African Americans have reached the promised land yet. Conditions have certainly gotten better, but there is still a way to go.

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“How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (Hurston 2014) is a kind of mini-memoir of Hurston’s growing realization that she was judged to be different merely because of the color of her skin. Growing up in the segregated town of Eatonville, Florida, years before the massacre of African Americans in Rosewood, a town on Florida’s Gulf Coast, Hurston did not see herself as terribly different from the whites who passed through her town. That changed as an adolescent when she was sent away to a boarding school in Jacksonville. “It seemed that I had suffered a sea change,” (1041) she wrote. “I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl.”

Unlike the narrator of Cullen’s “The Shroud of Color,” Hurston was not at all burdened by the realization:

… I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife (1041).

Hurston is not oblivious to discrimination. She writes that, when she feels it, she is more astonished than angry. In any event, it is the discriminator’s loss. “How can they deny themselves the pleasure of my company?,” (1042) she asks.

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Hurston’s question is a good one. Those who would discriminate against people such as “Zora from Orange County” do so at their own peril. As Booker T. Washington wrote, “Degrade the Negro, hold him in peonage, ignorance, or any other form of slavery and the great mass of the people in the community will be held down with him. It is not possible for one man to hold another man down in the ditch without staying down there with him.” (Washington 1909, 124)

One of the ironies of the Lost Cause Myth of the Civil War is that those who insist Confederate soldiers were fighting for states’ rights or against Northern aggression or whatever, the reality was that they were fighting for a system that impoverished the majority of them. They never realized that if wealthy planters did not have to pay for slave labor, they wouldn’t have to pay white laborers fair wages for their work either. Poor whites remained poor. When poor white men went to test  the “glory” of Southern arms, their families more often than not got even more impoverished than they were before the Civil War began.[1] The South may have won the propaganda war afterward—especially after the demise of Reconstruction—but much of the South was left a wasteland, and little of that wastage could be blamed on the efforts of William Tecumseh Sherman and similarly minded Northern generals.

Jim Crow, while effective in its goal of disenfranchising and terrorizing African Americans, perpetuated a legacy of corrupt, violent governments that cowed even the white population into obeisance. Furthermore, the poverty of African American communities hampered the economic growth of the white communities. The disparity of educational outcomes in separate but unequal schools ensured an undereducated workforce that was not terribly attractive to entrepreneurs in a modern, technological economy.

Martin Luther King Jr., in an article in The Gospel Messenger in 1958, transformed a century-old aphorism into what is arguably its pithiest incarnation, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” (14). At the moment, unfortunately, the bending seems to be touch-and-go. The rise of Trumpism has empowered those who would re-impose injustice upon the less fortunate while letting the excessively fortunate, like Trump, get away with shooting anyone in the middle of Fifth Avenue—or worse, overthrowing the legitimately elected government of the United States of America. They celebrate an economic system which, as King wrote later in his Gospel Messenger essay, “takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes” (15). They doom themselves to further loss of wealth and power of the very kind they were protesting when they embraced the former president.

That is arguably the greatest irony of America’s legacy of slavery, segregation, and continued discrimination. The masses of whites working to stifle African American (and other minority) progress have unintentionally—and arguably disastrously—stifled their own. They embody a phenomenon the late President Lyndon Baines Johnson noted to his young press secretary, Bill Moyers. “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” Johnson said. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you” (Moyers 1988).

Whether or not White America realizes its folly, African Americans—and other people of color—all have significant sweat and blood equity in this nation that seems to despise and abuse them. As the work of the Harlem Renaissance writers discussed above shows, those people of color are here to stay.

Editors Note: This piece was originally written for an African American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College and submitted on March 25, 2022. Unfortunately, it seems all too relevant since Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025.

References

Cullen, Countee. 2014. “The Shroud of Color.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 1349-1354. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Hughes, Langston. 2014. “I, Too.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 1308. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Hurston, Zora Neale. 2014. “How it Feels to Be Colored Me.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 1040-1042. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Jefferson, Thomas. 1787. Notes on the State of Virginia. London: John Stockdale.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. 1958. “Out of the Long Night.” The Gospel Messenger, Feb. 8, 3-4, 13-15.

—. 2018. Here is the speech Martin Luther King Jr. gave the night before he died. CNN. Accessed March 10, 2022.

McKay, Claude. 2014. “America.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 1006. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Moyers, Bill D. 1988. “What a real president was like.” The Washington Post, Nov. 13. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1988/11/13/what-a-real-president-was-like/d483c1be-d0da-43b7-bde6-04e10106ff6c/?utm_term=.bacafc2e3795.

Phillips, Amber. 2017. “‘They’re rapists.’ President Trump’s campaign launch speech two years later, annotated.” The Washington Post, June 16. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/06/16/theyre-rapists-presidents-trump-campaign-launch-speech-two-years-later-annotated/.

Washington, Booker T. 1909. The Story of the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery. 2 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company.

[1] Evidence for the poverty on the Southern home front can be found in numerous letters from the time, such as in those between one of this writer’s Confederate ancestors and his family.