Two Pages from the Book of the Sea Islands
Page One
Shadows
There is deliberateness in all sea-island ways,
As alien to our days as stone wheels are.
The Islands cannot see the use of life
Which only lives for change.
There days are flat,
And all things must move slowly;
Even the seasons are conservative—
No sudden flaunting of wild colors in the fall,
Only a gradual fading of the green,
As if the earth turned slowly,
Or looked with one still face upon the sun
As Venus does—
Until the trees, the fields, the marshes,
All turn dun, dull Quaker-brown,
And a mild winter settles down,
And mosses are more gray.
All human souls are glasses which reflect
The aspects of the outer world;
See what terrible gods the huge Himalayas bred!
And the fierce Jewish Jaywah came
From the hot Syrian deserts
With his inhibitory decalogue.
The gods of little hills are always tame;
Here God is dull, where all things stay the same.
No change on these sea-islands!
The huge piled clouds range
White in the cobalt sky;
The moss hangs,
And the strong, tiring sea-winds blow—
While day on glistering day goes by.
The horses plow with hanging heads,
Slow, followed by a black-faced man,
Indifferent to the sun;
The old cotton bushes hang with whitened heads;
And there among the live-oak trees,
Peep the small whitewashed cabins,
Painted blue, perhaps, and scarlet-turbaned women,
Ample-hipped, with voices soft and warm
With the lean hounds and chocolate children swarm.
Day after day the ocean pumps
The awful valve-gates of his heart,
Diastole and systole through these estuaries;
The tides flow in long, gray, weed-streaked lines;
The salt water, like the planet’s lifeblood, goes
As if the earth were breathing with long-taken breaths
And we were very near her heart.
No wonder that these faces show a tired dismay,
Looking on burning suns, and scarcely blithe in May;
Spring’s coming is too fierce with life;
And summer is too long;
The stunted pine trees struggle with the sand
Till the eyes sicken with their dwarfing strife.
There are old women here among these island homes,
With dull brown eyes that look at something gray,
And tight silver hair, drawn back in lines,
Like the beach grass that’s always blown one way;
With such a melancholy in their faces
I know that they have lived long in these places.
The tides, the hooting owls, the daylight moons,
The leprous lights and shadows of the mosses,
The funereal woodlands of these coasts,
Draped like a perpetual hearse,
And memories of an old war’s ancient losses,
Dwell in their faces’ shadows like gray ghosts.
And worse—
The terror of the black man always near—
The drab level of the ricefields and the marsh
Lends them a mask of fear.
Page Two
Sunshine
This is a different page.
Do you suppose the sun here lavishes his heat
For nothing, in these islands by the sea?
No! The great green-mottled melons ripen in the fields,
Bleeding with scarlet, juicy pith deliriously;
And the exuberant yams grow golden, thick and sweet;
And white potatoes, in grave-rows,
With leaves as rough as cat tongues;
And pearly onions, and cabbages
With white flesh, sweet as chicken meat.
These the black boatmen bring to town
On barges, heaped with severed breasts of leaves,
Driven by put-put engines
Down the long canals, quavering with song,
With hail and chuckle to the docks along,
Seeing their dark faces down below
Reduplicated in the sunset glow,
While from the shore stretch out the quivering lines
Of the flat, palm-like, reflected pines
That inland lie like ranges of dark hills in lines.
And so to town—
Weaving odd baskets of sweet grass,
Lazily and slow,
To sell in the arcaded market,
Where men sold their fathers not so long ago.
For all their poverty,
These patient black men live
A life rich in warm colors of the fields,
Sunshine and hearty foods,
Delighted with the gifts that earth can give,
And old tales of Plateye and Bre’r Rabbit;
While the golden-velvet cornpone browns
Underneath the lid among hot ashes,
Where the groundnuts roast,
Round shadowy fires at nights,
With tales of graveyard ghost,
While eery spirituals ring,
And organ voices sing,
And sticks knock maddening rhythms on the floor
To shuffling youngsters “cutting” buck-and-wing;
Dogs bark;
And dog-eyed pickaninnies peek about the door.
Sundays, along the moss-draped roads,
The beribboned black folk go to church
By threes and twos, carrying their shoes,
With orange turbans, ginghams, rainbow hats;
Then bucks flaunt tiger-lily ties and watchet suits,
Smoking cob pipes and faintly sweet cheroots.
Wagons with oval wheels and kitchen chairs screech by,
Where Joseph-coated white-teethed maidens sit
Demurely,
While the old mule rolls back the ivory of his eye.
Soon from the whitewashed churches roll away
Among the live oak trees,
Rivers of melancholy harmonies,
Full of the sorrows of the centuries
The white man hears, but cannot feel.
But it is always Sunday on sea-islands.
Plantation bells, calling the pickers from the fields,
Are like old temple gongs;
And the wind tells monodies among the pines,
Playing upon their strings the ocean’s songs;
The ducks fly in long, trailing lines;
Skeows squonk and marsh-hens quank
Among the tidal flats and rushes rank on rank;
On island tufts the heron feeds its viscid young;
And the quick mocker catches
From lips of sons of slaves the eery snatches,
And trolls them as no lips have ever sung.
Oh! It is good to be here in the spring,
When water still stays solid in the North,
When the first jasmine rings its golden bells,
And the “wild wistaria” puts forth;
But most because the sea then changes tone;
Talking a whit less drear,
It gossips in a smoother monotone,
Whispering moon-scandal in the old earth’s ear.
H.A.