James Weldon Johnson's The Creation

 

The Creation

(A Negro Sermon) 

And God stepped out on space,


And He looked around and said,

"I'm lonely—


I'll make me a world."
And far as the eye of God could see


Darkness covered everything,


Blacker than a hundred midnights


Down in a cypress swamp.

Then God smiled,


And the light broke,


And the darkness rolled up on one side,


And the light stood shining on the other,


And God said, "That's good!"

Then God reached out and took the light in his hands,


And God rolled the light around in his hands


Until He made the sun;


And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.


And the light that was left from making the sun


God gathered it up in a shining ball


And flung it against the darkness,


Spangling the night with the moon and stars.


Then down between


The darkness and the light


He hurled the world;


And God said, "That's good!"

 
Then God himself stepped down—


And the sun was on His right hand,


And the moon was on His left;


The stars were clustered about His head,


And the earth was under His feet.


And God walked, and where He trod


His footsteps hollowed the valleys out


And bulged the mountains up.

Then He stopped and looked and saw


That the earth was hot and barren.


So God stepped over to the edge of the world


And He spat out the seven seas—


He batted his eyes, and the lightnings flashed—


He clapped his hands, and the thunders rolled—


And the waters above the earth came down,


The cooling waters came down.

Then the green grass sprouted,


And the little red flowers blossomed,


The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,


And the oak spread out his arms,


The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,


And the rivers ran down to the sea;


And God smiled again,


And the rainbow appeared,


And curled itself around His shoulder.

Then God raised His arm and He waved his hand


Over the sea and over the land,


And He said, "Bring forth! Bring forth!"


And quicker than God could drop His hand,


Fishes and fowls


And beasts and birds


Swam the rivers and the seas,


Roamed the forests and the woods,


And split the air with their wings.


And God said, "That's good!"

 
Then God walked around,


And God looked around


On all that He had made.


He looked at His sun,


And He looked at his moon,


And He looked at his little stars;


He looked on His world


With all its living things,


And God said, "I'm lonely still."

Then God sat down—


On the side of a hill where He could think;


By a deep, wide river He sat down;


With His head in His hands,


God thought and thought,


Till He thought, "I'll make me a man!"

Up from the bed of the river


God scooped the clay;


And by the bank of the river


He kneeled Him down;


And there the great God Almighty


Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,


Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,


Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;


This great God,


Like a mammy bending over her baby,


Kneeled down in the dust


Toiling over a lump of clay


Till He shaped it in is His own image;
Then into it He blew the breath of life,


And man became a living soul.


Amen.      Amen.

 

-James Weldon Johnson

 

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an author, professor, and executive of the NAACP. This comes from his book of 1927 God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. That and the novel The Autobiography of an ex-Colored Man are generally considered Johnson's two major works.

 

I first read (or maybe heard) the poem in sixth grade. Mrs. Lydia Gaines was one my favourite teachers in grade school. But for the longest time all I remembered (and that not quite accurately) was "Blacker than a hundred midnights/In a cypress swamp".  

 

Jan Hilliard's Morgan's Castle (#readindies)

 "What a lot of ways there are to murder someone, she thought..."

Oh, what fun this one was! 

The sixteen-year-old Laura Dean had thought she might work at the local five-and-dime for the summer; there were supposed to be some college boys in town with summer jobs of their own. But her Aunt Amy has other plans, any local boy is bound to be heedless, and Laura's father Sidney is not to be trusted.

Aunt Amy's school friend Charlotte Morgan is writing a book about the Morgan family wine business and needs a secretary, she says; her daughter-in-law has recently died in a tragic accident and maybe she needs a new daughter-in-law, too. 

In fact there have been quite a few tragic accidents in recent memory at Morgan's Castle. And just how heroically well poor Charlotte Morgan has held up in the midst of all these *accidents*...it's no wonder everybody admires her so...

There's not a lot of mystery in this crime story--even if you managed to miss the word 'murderess' in the blurb on the cover--but there is a lot of humour. It's quite darkly funny, a bit Arsenic and Old Lace, though with more real suspense than that. You suspect somebody will be murdered during the book (and somebody is) but who will it be, and how will our murderess be stopped? That's assuming she is, of course.

There's also a fine romance budding, just not the one Aunt Amy and Charlotte Morgan have in mind. 

Jan Hilliard is a pseudonym for Hilda Kay Grant (1910-1996). She was born in Nova Scotia, but lived most of her adult life around Toronto. Morgan's Castle came out in 1964 and is set in the Niagara area. Her first novel won the Stephen Leacock Award for best humorous book of the year, and this one ought to have been in the running, too. The book was reissued last month by the Montreal-based independent Véhicule Press, as part of its Ricochet line of Canadian Noir reprints, edited by Brian Busby. 

Brian kindly supplied me with a copy of the book, and I am very glad he did.

February is #readindies month, hosted by Kaggsy at Bookish Ramblings. 

 

It also fits the My Reader's Block challenge: 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1964). Damsel in Distress.
 

van de Wetering's Hard Rain

 "It was a regular Dutch summer with heavy rain and fog."

There's corruption in the Amsterdam police force!

 

Martin IJsbreker is dead and it's ruled a suicide; a second bullet was spotted but somehow lost in the investigation. Three junkies died of a heroin overdose in a houseboat across the canal from IJsbreker's house on the same day, and those are ruled accidental death. You don't believe any of that, of course.

 

And neither did Grijpstra and de Gier. They go to their boss, the unnamed Commisaris, and he authorizes reopening the case. But soon the Commisaris is facing an investigation for financial misdeeds; Grijpstra and de Gier are nearly killed in an auto accident, and are then suspended because they were purportedly at fault. (The stop sign had been covered up.)

 

There's not actually much mystery. The bad guys corrupting the police force are big time drug runners; their leader is a childhood schoolmate of the Commisaris (and distinctly not a friend). The story is who can be trusted and who not, and how they're going to do down the bad guys. And it's a pretty good one! That's partly because there's more of the Commisaris in this, and I generally find him the most entertaining character in the series. We even learn his first name: Jan.

 

Janwillem van de Wetering wrote fourteen novels and two volumes of stories about the Amsterdam police detectives, and this, from 1986, is the 11th. 

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Silver Age (1986). Body of Water. 

Fakhraddin Gorgani's Vis and Ramin (tr. by Dick Davis)

And may there be no love at all unless

It's like this love, and brings such happiness.

How fortunate the lover whose sweet fate

It is to live in such a favoured state--

Truly, this is the way that love should be,

Good fortune, followed by simplicity!

How many days I've loved and never seen

A joy like that of Vis and her Ramin... 

Vis and Ramin is a poetic romance written by Fakhraddin Gorgani in Persian around 1050 CE, commissioned by the commander of Isfahan. It's the earliest surviving version of a story that takes place at some point in Persia under the Parthian empire (247 BCE - 220 CE).

King Mobad is the ruler of all Persia; he meets Shahru, wife of Qaren, a minor king and mother of two sons. She's beautiful and he woos her, but she says, my lord, I'm married with two boys, this is inappropriate. But if ever I were to have a daughter, I promise her to you.

Vis was that daughter. 

Years later and Vis is now of marriageable age and at least as beautiful as her mother. Shahru ignores her promise (or maybe thinks it doesn't matter anymore) and Vis is married off to her brother Viru. 

The introduction assures us that sibling marriage was fairly common among Parthian royal families (as it was in Pharaonic Egypt for that matter). At any rate, the story doesn't treat it as icky as it is for us, or would be to the Muslim Gorgani for that matter.

But King Mobad hasn't forgotten that promise. Before the marriage with Viru is even consummated, he's launched a war against Qaren. Qaren is killed. Vis was happy enough to be pledged to Viru, but she has no interest in that 'old man' and writes to him:

And if Viru weren't mine, this doesn't mean

I'd love you or consent to be your queen.

You killed my father, he's in heaven now;

My self, my being, are from him so how

Could you become my husband or my friend? 

Vis tells her mother off for promising her away even before she was born. Viru manages a successful counterattack for a while, but it can't last: in the end she's married to Mobad. She's sent off to Marv, Mobad's capital.

She brings her nurse. Who happens to know a magic spell or two. And when Vis is no more impressed with Mobad upon seeing him, the nurse whips up a spell that makes Mobad impotent, and Vis' second marriage is also never consummated. 

Though well-done the nurse is a fairly stock figure in this sort of romance--Davis in his introduction mentions the nurse from Romeo and Juliet--and she's out to get Vis interested in and involved with somebody:

You've never truly slept with any man.

You've had no joy of men, you've never known

A man whom you could really call your own...

What use is beauty if it doesn't bless

Your life with pleasure and love's happiness?

You're innocent, you're in the dark about it,

You don't know how forlorn life is without it.

You'll have to decide just what it is.

 

Who's available? Turns out Mobad has a very much younger (and very much better-looking) brother named Ramin and he happens to have fallen in love with Vis as soon as he's seen her:

Half of my body burns, half of it freezes.

Has God created, and can heaven show,

An angel made like me from fire and snow?

Fire does not melt my snow, and who has seen

Snow coexist with fire, as in Ramin?

Ramin approaches the nurse to see what can be done and pretty soon Vis and Ramin are finding ways to meet in private.

 

Mobad is a king; he has responsibilities and has to leave town occasionally. Mobad goes hunting and Ramin falls ill; Mobad goes to war against the Romans, and Ramin, a prominent member of court and an important warrior in his own right, falls ill. Eventually Mobad catches on--a bit after everyone else in the kingdom--and leaves Vis behind in a locked castle on a mountain top with a guard outside the door. He comes back to discover that the well-guarded Vis has been enjoying herself with Ramin. Mobad is aghast. All these restraints and guards are like a belt:

A pretty belt's of no significance

Unless it's holding up some kind of pants!

Buckle your belt as tight as you can make it,

But with no pants to wear you're still stark naked!

The story quite often proceeds by speeches and similes; though it has a different tone and subject matter, think of something like the Iliad. Where the Iliad might compare its warriors to lions or boars, Vis and Ramin compares the lovers to cypresses or moonlight. The art is generally in the details of the comparison. About two thirds through Ramin and Vis break up, both half deciding this is the wiser course, each convinced by an adviser of dubious value--the nurse for Vis, a 'philosopher' for Ramin--but that doesn't last long, and pretty soon they're working their way back together. But it takes a hundred pages first of letters, then in-person speeches, full of recriminations and lament, self-justification and imprecations, and not much event. But it reads well in place, with lots of fun rhetorical flourishes.

But I am still the lover whom you knew

Whose like has never yet been seen by you;

My brightness has not dimmed, my musky hair

Has not turned camphor white yet with despair,

My clustering curls are still as black and tight,

My shining pearl-like teeth as strong and white,

My silver breasts as firm and opulent,

My cypress stature has not yet been bent.

My face was once the moon, it's now the sun

Admired throughout the world, by everyone!...

I never saw a man who didn't prize me,

So why should you reject me and despise me? 

Actually, in typing that out, it rather reminds me of The Song of Solomon.

 

The translation, by Dick Davis, is done in heroic couplets. He writes in the introduction that the original Persian is in couplets, and that the line length is close to that of iambic pentameter. The rhymes are mostly quite tame, and so don't draw attention to themselves, but he is capable of more extravagant rhymes, as in the comic outburst of Mobad quoted above. (significance/some kind of pants!) I'd earlier read Davis' translation Faces of Love, of three Shirazi poets, and quite liked it. This is different, and by design less showy at times, but still a lot of fun.

 

Given all that buildup I was prepared for a tragic ending. The story is compared to Tristan and Yseult, and is sometimes considered a source for it, and I thought it could very well end with them dying in each other's arms in some foreign country. But it doesn't. Vis and Ramin live long and happy lives and produce two sons. (Though it does end less well for some of the other characters.)  How they get to their happiness, I'll leave as an exercise for readers...😉But it does mean it's a suitably seasonable book for a post, except I hadn't quite finished it yesterday.

This is a post about Ramin and Vis,

The ancient Persian epic, blogged by Reese,

A romance written in ten thousand lines,

With love and danger for your Valentine's.

A book off my Classics Club list. 

 

 

 

Jean Toomer (#poetry)

November Cotton Flower

Boll-weevil's coming, and the winter's cold,

Made cotton stalks look rusty, seasons old,

And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,

Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,

Failed in its function as the autumn rake;

Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take

All water from the streams; dead birds were found

In wells a hundred feet below the ground--

Such was the season when the flower bloomed.

Old folks were startled and it soon assumed

Significance. Superstition saw

Something it had never seen before:

Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,

Beauty so sudden for that time of year.

 

-Jean Toomer

 

This is from Jean Toomer's novel Cane of 1923; it's written in a mix of poetry and prose. This poem is in heroic couplets, but it is fourteen lines and can be viewed as a sonnet, though the turn comes after the ninth line. Brown eyes, as with Chuck Berry's 'Brown Eyed Handsome Man', stand in for brown skin, and loving without a trace of fear would probably be considered a rare enough moment for Blacks in rural Georgia (where the novel is set) at the time.

 

Poking around for pictures of cotton fields, I discovered that Marion Brown, the alto saxophonist, titled his album of 1979 'November Cotton Flower' and I have to assume he was thinking of this Jean Toomer poem. The title track from the album:

 

 

H. R. F. Keating's Inspector Ghote Draws a Line

     "'Threats to my life, Doctor? And how old am I? Eighty-two years of age. No, it is Allah himself who threatens my life now.'

     'Nevertheless, sir, the issuing of a threat to a person's life is a criminal offence.'"

It's the 1970s and Sir Asif Ibrahim is a former judge receiving death threats. He's long since retired, and is living in a falling down house a bullock's cart ride away from some place in India that's already nowhere. Sir Asif would just as soon live--or die--with no fuss. But his cousin is a member of parliament and the daughter who lives with him is worried. So Inspector Ghote is sent to see what he can do. He can expect no assistance from Sir Asif.

The threats reference the Madurai Conspiracy Case. Forty years earlier, just before the British finally quit India, a group planned to assassinate the governor of Madras but failed. Nevertheless, Sir Asif convicted and issued the death penalty for the conspirators. The death threats reference that ancient case.

 

There are servants in the house, but the main suspects are four: that daughter, still living at home; an itinerant Buddhist mystic who comes and goes; an American left-wing Catholic priest, foisted on the judge by a different cousin; and a local journalist who publishes the judge's musings, and is in love with the daughter. Remember that the house is remote. No one else could drop off those notes.

 

Is one of these four connected somehow to the Madurai Conspiracy Case? Or is that ancient case just a cover for some other motive? Or is it not even one of the four obvious suspects? And does Ghote save the judge in the end? Well, I'm not going to tell you any of that...😉 I will only note that the book does violate at least two of S. S. Van Dine's rules for writing mysteries...  

 

Despite those violations I found this pretty entertaining (though not amazing). Once upon a time I read Keating's list of the hundred best mysteries and like any serious reader of books approaching such a list I gobbled it down, while at the same time quibbling at the margins--The Green Ripper is the best Travis McGee book? How can you say that when it's actually the worst! etc., etc.--but this is the first of his mysteries I've read. If you've read him, how does it rank? 

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Silver Age (1979). Spooky House or Mansion.

And the winner is... (Classics Club Spin #43)

 ...number 2!

 

That's George Gissing's New Grub Street for me. I've read Charles Dickens: A Critical Study and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft by him before and liked them both, especially Henry Ryecroft. (Wonderful and underread.) This is supposed to be his masterpiece. 'Trials and tribulations in the lives of literary hacks' says the back of the book.

Have you read it? Did you spin and did you get something good? 

A Dream Deferred (#poetry)

Advice

Folks, I'm telling you,

birthing is hard

and dying is mean--

so get yourself

a little loving

in between.

 

-Langston Hughes

 

Testimonial

 

If I just had a piano,

if I just had a organ,

if I just had a drum,

how I could praise my Lord!

 

But I don't need no piano

  neither organ

  nor drum

for to praise my Lord!

 

-Langston Hughes

 

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

 

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

 

Or does it explode?

-Langston Hughes

 

I feel like Langston Hughes has been in the air lately. A couple of my regular poetry sources have featured him.

 

Hughes (1901-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and moved to New York City in 1921 for college. (Columbia.) He became an important writer in the Harlem Renaissance. These three poems all come from his volume Montage of a Dream Deferred of 1951, which represents voices heard around Harlem in one 24-hour period. The last one quoted is probably the best known poem of the book. It supplied Lorraine Hansbury the title for her hit play, as well as the title for a poem I've previously quoted on the blog. 

Classics Club Spin #43

 

Once again it's time for a new Classics Club spin. The rules are here but that's old news & the fun is showing off a list of books, so...straight to that!

1.) Willa Cather/Sapphira and the Slave Girl

2.) George Gissing/New Grub Street

3.) Nella Larsen/Passing

4.) Sinclair Lewis/Elmer Gantry

5.) Jack London/The Iron Heel

6.) Jack London/Martin Eden

7.) Harry Mark Petrakis/A Dream of Kings

8.) Edgar Wallace/The Four Just Men

9.) Eudora Welty/Delta Wedding

10.) Mikhail Bulgakov/Heart of a Dog

11.) Simone de Beauvoir/The Mandarins

12.) Joachim Machado de Assis/Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

13.) Benito Perez Galdos/That Bringas Woman

14.) Robert Walser/Jakob von Gunten

15.) John Ruskin/Unto This Last

16.) R. L. Stevenson/An Inland Voyage

17.) Apollonius Rhodius/The Argonautica

18.) Luis Vaz de Camões/The Lusiads

19.) Nezami Ganjavi/Layli and Majnun

20.) Gotthold Lessing/Nathan The Wise

 

These are all from my current Classics Club list. Which look good to you?