Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/241

Rh have so used it. Genius here as elsewhere will direct the born poet and instruct him when to use dialect and when the language that centuries of tradition have refined and standardized and encrusted with poetic associations. There is a world of poetic wealth in the strangely naïve heart of the rough-schooled Negro for which the smooth-worn, disconsonanted language of the cabin and the field is beautifully appropriate. There is also another world of poetic wealth in the Negro of culture for which only the language of culture is adequate. To such we must say: “All things are yours.”

While, as remarked, many Negro verse-writers have used dialect occasionally, in the ways indicated, Waverley Turner Carmichael has made it practically his one instrument of expression in his little book entitled From the Heart of a Folk. A representative piece is the following:

MAMMY’S BABY SCARED

Hush now, mammy’s baby scaid, Don’ it cry, eat yo’ bread; Nothin’ ain’t goin’ bother you, Does’, it bothers mammy too. Mammy ain’t goin’ left it ’lone W’ile de chulen all are gone; Hush, now, don’ it cry no mo’e, Ain’t goin’ lay it on de flo’.