Georgia Douglas Johnson Poetry

Johnson, Georgia D. "Georgia Douglas Johnson." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David L. Lewis. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 273-75. Print.

The third poem in this section, Black Woman, brought back something we read earlier in the semester, The Closing Door. The notion of not having children because the world is a bad place to live is not exclusive to blacks, but it has been brought up several times now in this anthology and is worth taking a deeper look at.

The theme of infanticide takes on an assumption of innocence for unborn children, which in turn denotes that any evil comes from the hand of man. To cut off a child’s life before it can encounter men is, in a way, saving it from the horrors of life, and I believe it is a bit immature. Life is difficult and, to put it bluntly, crappy, and to assume that your child needs to be protected from the nitty-gritty of living is naïve. I’m not arguing that the blacks didn’t have it bad in the early twentieth century, but I do have trouble believing that life was so utterly terrible for blacks that they would kill their children before giving them a chance. I suppose it is the result of hopelessness, but how can someone give up on change altogether?

The poem by Johnson was interesting because it takes on the situation of a pregnant woman who is ignoring her unborn baby’s movements. The woman begs the child to stop trying to be free from her womb because she cannot stand the thought of it coming into a hard life. She also begs, however, for the child to remain silent so she doesn’t have to turn a deaf ear to it – something that, ultimately, is saying that she wishes the child were not conceived. It is a bad position to be in; a kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario that, apparently, led to some mothers killing their children. Perhaps this can be used as a way of understanding just how terrible some people did have it – what would it take to bring someone today to consider infanticide based on social circumstances?