Chapter 4c: Black Motherhood in an Era of Systemic Racism, 1920-1929
The topic of motherhood is a classic one in African American poetry, in poems by both men and women. However, in many poems by women in this collection there are sentiments that are very different from the idealized images of protective, nurturing motherhood that often circulate (stereotypically) around Black women in American culture. Many of these stereotypical images come from a history where Black women were often hired as “Mammies” (nurse-maids) by white families – and placed in the role of surrogate mothers to white children, while also struggling at times to raise their own children.
Outside of that stereotypical image, the account of motherhood in poetry by African American women is quite complex – and sometimes shockingly provocative.
During the peak of the abolitionist movement in the 1850s, Frances E.W. Harper wrote several poems dramatizing the plight of the enslaved mother – poems like “The Slave Mother” (1854) and “The Slave Mother: a Tale of the Ohio” (1857). The first of those two reflected on the trauma of separation – what might it feel like to be separated from one’s child because of a business transaction? “The Slave Mother: a Tale of the Ohio” is a poem that involves a mother who escapes with her family across the Ohio river to a ‘free’ state, only to be recaptured. Rather than allow her child to be re-enslaved, she commits infanticide – this is a poem that tells the story of a real-life woman named Margaret Garner (this horrific story was also the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved).
By the early 20th century, African American poetry about motherhood had of course shifted to reflect the change in the times. But there is nevertheless a fundamental ambivalence in quite a lot of the poetry about motherhood written even in the 1920s.
In some ways not enough had really changed. Carrie Williams Clifford, who perhaps more than anyone else carried the torch of Frances E.W. Harper’s racial justice oriented poetry into the 20th century, published a poem in 1922 called “Little Mother (Upon the Lynching of Mary Turner)” that is based on the real-life lynching of a pregnant woman named Mary Turner in Georgia in 1918. Mary Turner’s husband had been lynched by a mob; when she spoke out against the men who killed her husband, she herself was targeted.
The fact that even sixty years after emancipation Black folks remeind subject to such horrific racialized violence underlines why the style and method of someone like Frances E.W. Harper might still be necessary. Even at the peak of the Harlem Renaissance, as younger writers were experimenting with new forms and new language around desire and eroticism, the threat of violence was persistent – and a more traditional kind of protest poetry still had a place.
Here, we’ll look more closely at a pair of poems dealing with the motherhood theme by Georgia Douglas Johnson. These are not exactly protest poems, but they are not modernist poems either; they are reflective and very personal accounts from a writer who was the mother of two young boys as she wrote – with a husband (Henry Lincoln Johnson) whose government posting was rescinded due to opposition by racist southern politicians in 1921.
Though she is not very well-known today, Johnson was one of the best-known African American poets and playwrights of the 1910s, publishing dozens of poems in magazines like The Crisis and Opportunity, and three books of poetry during her peak years, The Heart of a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), and An Autumn Love Cycle (1928). Bronze in particular received quite a bit of attention, and in its engagement with transformative aesthetics around race and identity, it became an important text in the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson’s one-act plays were also often published in African American magazines; her plays Blue Blood (1926) and Plumes (1927) appeared in Opportunity during the peak period of the Harlem Renaissance. (All that said, we should note that Georgia Douglas Johnson, who was born in 1880, was more than twenty years older than writers like Helene Johnson or Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and the younger writers might have seen her style of writing as a little conservative for their tastes.)
Here is a poem that was published under two different titles, first as “Motherhood” and then as “Black Woman.”
Georgia Douglas Johnson, “Black Woman” / “Motherhood” (1922)
Don't knock on my door, little child,
I cannot let you in;
You know not what a world this is
Of cruelty and sin.
Wait in the still eternity
Until I come to you.
The world is cruel, cruel, child,
I cannot let you through.
Don't knock at my heart, little one,
I cannot bear the pain
Of turning deaf ears to your call,
Time and time again.
You do not know the monster men
Inhabiting the earth,
Be still, be still, my precious child,
I cannot give you birth.
The sentiment here is reflective and thoughtful, and the sentiment is painful. The speaker seems to see no viable path forward for her child in a world of “cruelty and sin.” She does not mention racism in the poem, though if we understand the best title of the poem to be “Black Woman,” the racialized meaning of the poem is quite clear: she does not want her son to be forced to endure a world dominated by “monster men” who will endanger and oppress her child.
Another Johnson poem that expresses a sentiment that is somewhat similar to “Black Woman” is “Maternity”.
And yet another to consider is "My Little One," which was published in The Crisis with a photo of a young Black child in 1916.
To close, let's look at a poem about motherhood by Johnson that goes in a slightly different direction:
Georgia Douglas Johnson, “Shall I Say ‘My Son, You Are Branded’?” (1919)
Shall I say, “My son, you’re branded in this country’s pageantry,
By strange subtleties you’re tethered, and no forum sets you free?”
Shall I mark the young lights fading through your soul-enchannelled eye,
As the dusky pall of shadows screen the highway of your sky?
Or shall I, with love prophetic, bid you dauntlessly arise.
Spurn the handicap that clogs you, taking what the world denies,
Bid you storm the sullen fortress wrought by prejudice and wrong
With a faith that shall not falter, in your heart and on your tongue!
Here, the first stanza seems to be marked by the same pessimism we saw in “Black Woman” / “Motherhood.” The child is going to have to learn that he is “branded” by racialization and minoritization, that he is not really “free” – and that his prospects are going to be fundamentally constrained by those realities.
However, the second stanza takes a more forward-looking and hopeful tone, reminiscent of the “Uplift” poetry we have discussed in earlier chapters. Rather than succumb to pessimism, here the mother who is the narrator of the poem might invite her child to “dauntlessly arise / Spurn the handicap that clogs you, taking what the world denies.” She imagines a child who might, going forward, fight for their rights and refuse to be marginalized or overlooked.