Trombones

Big, muscular black men; big Negroes with rhythm in their shoulders; strong, dark prophets of the Lord leaning far out from the warning places; holy fire in their eyes, holy rhythm in their sway, holy words rolling out from their mouths of wisdom; softly now, then louder, getting deep when they roar of the Fiery Furnace; thundering the Lord and his works on Sinai; now softly again, slower, crooning how the Lord was in his good works at little Jerusalem; sobbing how the humbler Lord was broken and crucified by the white soldiers; and then blaring it out, then trumpeting brass-throated, with a belt-hitch, handslap, foot-stamp and double shuffle, timed to the march of the saints of the Lord on that terrible Judgment Day. . . . The oldtime Negro inspirational preachers, what were they but God's slide trombones?* So conceives James Weldon Johnson, poet and social worker among his fellow Negroes. He has let his memory doze back for the main themes of sermons he heard as a little boy. His intellectual faculty has played over the themes, spun them into folk poems without specious aid of dialect or ungrammatical rhetoric.

There are seven sermons and a prayer, all of a powerful simplicity. But one sermon stands by itself, making the rambling accounts of Creation and the Fall and the Flood seem almost conversational. It is a funeral sermon, and one of the really great poems of U. S. literature. It tells how God, one morning, had a tall, bright angel cry out like a clap of thunder:

Call Death!--Call Death!

And "pale as a sheet in the moonlight" Death came up the golden street on his fastest horse with noiseless hoofs.

And God said: Go down, Death, go down

Go down to Savannah, Georgia,

Down in Yamacraw,

And find Sister Caroline.

She's borne the burden and heat of the day,

She's labored long in my vineyard,

And she's tired--

She's weary--

Go down, Death, and bring her to me. . . .

So without a word Death went down, leaving the lightning flash, and carried Sister Caroline back to God. And now

Weep not--weep not,

She is not dead;

She's resting in the bosom of Jesus.

The Author. James Weldon Johnson is a 55-year-old product of Jacksonville, Fla. He attended Atlanta, Columbia and Howard Universities, taught school a while, then entered the musical comedy business in Manhattan. He served for six years as a U. S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. He became executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. For his richly racial poetry, plus his diplomacy and public service, he was given the 1925 Spingarn Medal (for "noblest achievement").

Aaron Douglas, race futurist, contributes striking illustrations to Trombones-black figures in planes of primeval shade.

*GOD's TROMBONES--James Weldon Johnson--Viking Press ($2.50).