The Broken Heart: Black Community in Langston Hughes' "Song for a Dark Girl"
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17 Exposé 2006-2007 Victoria Crutchfield The Broken Heart: Black Community in Langston Hughes’ “Song for a Dark Girl” Song for a Dark Girl Way Down South in Dixie (Break the heart of me) They hung my dark young lover To a cross roads tree. Way Down South in Dixie (Bruised body high in air) I asked the white Lord Jesus What was the use of prayer. Way Down South in Dixie (Break the heart of me) Love is a naked shadow On a gnarled and naked tree. —Langston Hughes, 1927 T he brevity of Langston Hughes’ “Song for a Dark Girl” gives it a charming illusion of simplicity. It is a scant twelve lines, quite short, of which several are repeated; the diction is straightforward, pictorial. There is little to suggest that this is anything but exactly what it appears to be: a powerful condemnation of lynching. But Hughes is doing more in this poem than elaborating on the truism that lynching is a terrible thing. Although “Song for a Dark Girl” does narrate events, its overwhelming effect is to set a scene rather than to tell a story, and while in the story it is clear who the wrongdoers are, the scene is more complex, hued with memories of the past and hopes for the future, less concerned with wrong and right than with circumstance and effect. The last two lines in particular adopt a descriptive rather than a narrative tone: “Love is a naked shadow/ on a gnarled and naked tree” (Hughes, 11-12). In a poem focused intently and concretely on the individual girl of the title and her “dark young lover” (3), these last two lines create a surprising tension by their jump from the specific to the general, the literal to the metaphoric—from “my lover” to “Love.” This leap in the last two lines from the individual to the universal invites the reader to consider the individuals in the poem in relation to their broader environment, and even though only one element of that environment makes an appearance in the text—the white lynchers, the unspecified “they” of the first stanza—the Black community must be considered as well. Hughes was just as demanding of the Black community in his work as he was of the White, if not more so. In his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” he dismantles and decries the Black drive toward
18 Exposé 2006-2007 assimilation. Whether he intended it or not, categorization—a racial label (Collected Poems, there are soft echoes of this paper in the poem, 104). The fact that the race of the “they” is published only one year later. There is no question unidentified reflects the assumptions of the that in “Song for a Dark Girl” Hughes condemns greater society for which “they” act: that to be White behavior; but one can also see where the White is the default, the norm, a state requiring problem of assimilation in the Black community no adjectival modification, while to be Black is contributes to the pain of the individual Black in some way an aberration and cannot go girl for whom he writes this song. Hughes unmentioned. That the speaker should adhere to suggests that assimilation, by forcing Blacks to this practice of only qualifying the “aberration” subordinate their individual experience to the suggests resignation to the White worldview. “universal” norms of White language This hint of resignation can also be felt in and religion, robs the Black commu- the thrice-repeated line “Way Down South in The fact that the nity of the strength to support Dixie” (1, 5 and 9) which establishes an ironic its own against the poison of comparison between this song and the traditional, race of the “they” is White violence. upbeat ditty “Dixie” whose pride in Dixieland The first stanza establishes the that refrain evokes: “I wish I was in Dixie. unidentified reflects the tension between the dominant Hooray! Hooray! /...Away, away, away down White worldview and the subjugated south in Dixie” (Emmett, 7, 10). “Song for a assumptions of the Black experience which struggles to Dark Girl,” by contrast, does not characterize express itself within the White Dixie with interjections of “hooray”—the greater society for world. The racial divide “Down analogous parenthetical expression in Hughes’ South in Dixie” is characterized by poem is “break the heart of me” (2 and 10), which “they” act: that the use of personal pronouns, which indicating a deep pain, not pride, associated pits the individual and solitary with Dixieland. This irony could be perceived as to be White is the speaker (“me” [2]) against an a tool for indicting Whites for hypocrisy, but unidentified “they” (3). This tension as such it is a double-edged sword. With this default, the norm, a could be read as a simple us/them reference to “Dixie” the speaker still uses White antagonism, the indication of a clear words to frame the Black experience, even if the state requiring no adjec- boundary between the good and the intent is to use their words against them, so that bad, but it does not operate that one feels the force of the dominant White tival modification, while way in the poem. There is no “us” culture just as much in this opposition to it as in combat with “them,” but only a anywhere else. Just as “they” are assumed to be to be Black is in some lonely “me,” which makes the fact white without being named so, Emmett’s song that the word “they” is plural stand does not suggest that it expresses only one way an aberration and out at least as much as the fact that group’s experience of Dixieland. Thus the it is third person. The absence of an relationship between White and Black established cannot go unmentioned. antecedent indicates that “they” are by the first stanza is one of antagonism and vio- acting not as individuals or even as lence, but laced with a subtler victimization: the a particular faction but en masse, in poison of coerced assimilation, which forces the this case as the agents of White society at large. Black community to adopt the supposedly univer- Today we would be unlikely to use “they” in sal language of Whites, despite its biases against reference to a lynch mob without first defining them and its ignorance of Black experience. them as such; the speaker’s use of “they” implies In the second stanza Hughes and the speaker an understanding of lynching as a part of turn to religion. Religion can be the bond of a mainstream society, not the action of a particular particular individual to a community, and the subgroup requiring specification. In fact “they” bond of a particular community to a concept of are not even identified as White; only their universal truth; but Hughes suggests that “Way victims—the “Dark Girl” of the title and her Down South in Dixie” those are the bonds of “dark young lover” (3)—are qualified with Black subjugation, a reinforcement of the ten- racial identifiers. Hughes changed the “dark sion established in the first stanza. Here we find young lover” to a “black young lover” in a later the only use of the word “white”—a two-fold printing of the poem, further emphasizing that epithet when applied to Jesus, since it can also the adjective is less a description than a mean “spiritually pure,” “innocent.” In this
19 Exposé 2006-2007 Kara Walker, Do You Like Creme in Your Coffee and Chocolate in Your Milk? 1997, water color, colored pencil, graphite on paper, 8-3/16 x 11- 5/8.” Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Justin Smith Purchase Fund, 1998. case it is a mockery of that usage, however. of what prayers or actions would be useful. Left By labeling Jesus a “white Lord,” the speaker unresolved, her conflict with the only religion identifies him with the slaveholders of old as she can think to turn to illustrates how accepting well as with continuing oppression. In addition, White religion—embracing the “white Lord”— the use of the racial qualifier here reminds the leaves her, antithetical to the purpose of reader that Christianity came to the Black com- religion, helpless and alone. munity through White oppression; it betrays the The inability of Blacks to replace the “white White pretense that theirs is the god of all, theirs Lord Jesus” with a god of their own is subtly the truly universal religion. The speaker’s implicated as a part of the speaker’s sorrow questioning of this “white Lord” (“I asked the through a suggestion that the martyrs among white Lord Jesus/ What was the use of prayer” their own community might be more worthy of [7-8]) reveals that she is aware of the futility of their reverence. The lynch victim is presented as their relationship, but provides no indication an alternate Christ figure “hung...to a cross
20 Exposé 2006-2007 roads tree” (3-4). The use of the word “cross” insistence on the youth of both (she could have (4), especially separated from “roads” instead of been a woman; he need not have been “young”) as a compound noun, casts the “dark young makes their loneliness particularly pitiful. Since lover” (3) in that role, and the placement of one fundamental purpose of community is to those words at the same point in the stanza and raise and support its own, by the very fact of its in the rhythm of the line as the “white Lord absence in the poem we might read this as an Jesus” of the second stanza draws an analogy elegy for the community as well. The individual between them. However, this image of a Black elegy becomes universal. Christ is not developed; like the “bruised body We return, then, to “Love is a naked shadow/ high in air” (6) to which no one has yet given On a gnarled and naked tree” (11-12), and the burial, it is left hanging, un-revered and leap from the individual to the universal these impotent. There is no indication in the poem of two lines effect. What might “love” be in this the type of communal mourning that succeeded context? On the most literal level the love the Jesus’ death, no hint of the type of reception speaker refers to is her lover, who has been hung that could make this victim a martyr or a god naked from a bare, gnarled tree, and whose (his “bruised body” is emphasized rather than body casts a shadow. Moving away from the his spirit). The suggestion of a Black Christ is literal we can read the “shadow” as representing less an answer to the speaker’s frustration her lover’s “dark” body, and also as his stunted with the “white Lord” than it is an intensification life, like a shadow in its transience and its of it. impotence. “Love” could also be taken to mean It is the profound sense of the speaker’s loss, more than just the object of her love, but the tie of course, that the reader feels most keenly, of affection itself; in this way “naked” could rather than the nuances of social understanding also mean “barren,” thus a barren relationship revealed by the words that create it. For above stunted by her lover’s premature death. A all this poem is an elegy—but for whom? The “gnarled and naked tree,” also barren, is poem shares its focus between the lynch victim furthermore perverse—it no longer fills its natu- and his mourner: while he is the ral role of putting forth fruit and leaves, and it literal subject of the elegy, in fact is literally twisted. Thus, if we read the tree as a So we have moved it is she “for” whom the poem is traditional symbol of life we can interpret the written. Indeed, “Song for a Dark lines to mean that the speaker experienced love through these three Girl” is an elegy for the girl as well, as a brief and barren episode in a perverse and since she is almost as completely barren life. But the line reads “Love,” not “my stanzas from a false destroyed by the murder she love,” and so while all these readings are describes as its direct victim is. The evoked, there is also a less personal meaning White universality being repeated line “break the heart of intended. “Love” often stands in for Jesus, his me” (2 and 10), while emphasizing love for his flock and theirs for him; or “love” imposed on the Black the individual rather than commu- could be all romantic love, and that would be nal character of her pain, expresses painful enough; but there is no reason for us to minority to a single much more than romantic heart- stop there, for in light of the repression of break. While “my heart” is a com- community pointed to in the first two stanzas Black body being mon expression long established as there is reason for us to continue to broaden the referring to the seat of emotional meaning of this word to include all love: familial suggested as a truly attachment, its inversion to “the love, communal love, love of the neighbor, love heart of me” suggests “the very core of the self, even the concept of love. These lines universal representative of my being.” are so heart-shatteringly sad because the impli- But though the speaker’s pain is cation is that in the South, in the eyes of the of human suffering. individual, her very loneliness, speaker, all of this, everything that can be called emphasized by the contrast between “love,” is reduced to “a naked shadow/ on a the “They” of the first stanza and the “I” (7) of gnarled and naked tree”—barren, perverse, the second, suggests a failure on the part of her and brief. community akin to a death. There is no “we” in And it would be a mistake to forget, in this poem, nor any reference to family—there is culling from the poem so much meaning for the only the girl and her murdered lover. Hughes’ Black community, that the White community is,
21 Exposé 2006-2007 after all, equally (if not more) present in the Works Cited poem, and equally implicated in these last lines. Emmett, Daniel Decatur. “Dixie.” 6 March 2006. The word is “Love,” not “our love.” The Black 14 October 2006. . representative not only of Black but of universal Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston suffering—including the suffering of a society Hughes. New York: Vintage, 1995. which like Sartre’s anti-Semite represses its own Hughes, Langston. “Song for a Dark Girl.” Double- humanity in denying the humanity of others. So Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology. we have moved through these three stanzas Ed. Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey. New from a false White universality being imposed Brunswick: 2001, Rutgers University Press. 469. on the Black minority to a single Black body Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial being suggested as a truly universal representative Mountain.” Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology. Ed. Venetria K. Patton of human suffering. and Maureen Honey. New Brunswick: 2001, As well as being an acute commentary on Rutgers University Press. 40-44. American race relations, Hughes’ suggestion in this poem is a lesson on poetry: what makes a poem true and powerful is not when it is blandly (and falsely) universal, telling us all over again things we already knew about love, life, death; but when it describes an individual situation with subtlety and insight, as “Song for a Dark Girl” does. Hughes saw it as within the power of this kind of poetry to combat the assimilation pointed to in “Song for a Dark Girl” and dealt with explicitly in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” He argued in the latter work that it was the duty of the Black artist to create works that celebrated the particularity of Black experience rather than trying to identify their voices with the White worldview that devalued them. These works would help free Black individuals and the Black community from the mental prison that worldview imposed. If there is hope in “Song for a Dark Girl,” it is this hope that the Black community might soon embrace the Black Christ offered by the poem, and in so doing, embrace and free itself.
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