Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/85

Rh door that is acquiring wealth and culture and is expressing in art and literature the spirit of an aspiring people—how ignorant of their real life, their very thoughts, their completely human joys and griefs. One of their poets was cognizant of this unhappy ignorance—the source of so much harshness of treatment—when he wrote:

My people laugh and sing And dance to death— None imagining The heartbreak under breath. —Charles Bertram Johnson.

Nothing weighs more heavily upon the soul of this race to-day than this everywhere self-betraying crass ignorance, made the more grievous to endure by the vain boast accompanying it, that “I know the Negro better than he knows himself.” This poetry in every line of it is a convincing contradiction of this insulting arrogancy. Essential identity, that is the message of these poets.

This kinship of souls and essential oneness of human nature, which Shylock, speaking for a similarly oppressed and outrageously treated people, pressed home upon the Christian merchants of Venice, finds typical expression in the following lines:

We travel a common road, Brother,— We walk and we talk much the same; We breathe the same sweet air of heaven— Strive alike for fortune and fame;