Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/118

96

So oft from out the verge afar The dear dreams throng and throng, Sometimes I think my soul a star, And life a pulsed song.

Born at Callao, Missouri, October 5, 1880, of a Kentucky mother and a Virginia father, Charles Bertram Johnson attended a one-room school “across the railroad track,” where—who can explain this?—he was “Introduced to Bacon, Shakespeare, and the art of rhyming." It reads like an old story. Some freak of a schoolmaster whose head is tilled with “useless” lore—poetry, tales, and “such stuff”—nurturing a child of genius into song. But it was Johnson’s mother who was the great influence in his life. She was an “adept at rhyming” and “she initiated me into the world of color and melody”—so writes our poet. It is always the mother. Then, by chance—but how marvelously chance comes to the aid of the predestined!—by chance, he learns of Dunbar and his poetry. The ambition to be a poet of his people like Dunbar possesses him. He knows the path to that goal is education. He therefore makes his way to a little college at Macon, Missouri, from which, after five years, he is graduated—without having received any help in the art of poetry, however. Two terms at a summer school and special instruction by correspondence seem to have aided