Helene Johnson Poetry

Johnson, Helene. "Helene Johnson." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David L. Lewis. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 276-78. Print.

Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem once again addresses the issues of blacks disagreeing with the major players of the Harlem Renaissance, in this case a bit hypocritically. Helene Johnson accuses the talented tenth of aspiring to be white and failing due to their hatred for whites while using prose and language fitted to the tenth. Perhaps she was filled with self-hate, but I’m going to wager that she was simply blind to her own position in society.

Johnson would have fit well with people like Garvey, but perhaps not for the same reasons. Garvey was interested in abandoning America, and I could see a side of Johnson that would agree. However, Johnson seems more interested in forgoing the efforts by many blacks to be white and simply be black. The problems this mind-set encourages are fairly obvious, particularly if she was interested in racial equality (which I don’t actually see any evidence for in this selection of her poetry), but also a bit more realistic than Garvey’s. Perhaps she would fit in more with the likes of writers like Walter White, who assume black identity without the anger and resentment towards whites. Obviously it is possible, but it does seem that many black activists of the time period were dead-set on the race issue and how to correct it. I’ve already discussed this in my other posts, so I won’t elaborate much further than to say that the Harlem Renaissance was misguided in its focus on racial equality and would have been far more successful if it had been about the art, not the politics. I believe that Helene Johnson recognized this, as did Zora Neale Hurston – which is probably why I enjoyed her works more than any of the others in this anthology.