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 takeAll water from the streams; dead birds were foundIn wells a hundred feet below the ground--Such was the season when the flower bloomed.Old folks were startled and it soon assumedSignificance. Superstition sawSomething 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:
Wow. Makes me want to read the rest of the book.
ReplyDeleteIt's been a while since I last read the whole book, but it's a good one.
DeleteGorgeous.
ReplyDeleteIsn't it?
Delete