Southern Mansion By Arna Bontemps

Books by Arna Bontemps

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Southern Mansion

Poplars are standing there still as death

and ghosts of dead men

meet their ladies walking

two by two beneath the shade

and standing on the marble steps.

There is a sound of music echoing

through the open door

and in the field there is

another sound tinkling in the cotton:

chains of bondsmen dragging on the ground

The years go back with an iron clank,

a hand is on the gate,

a dry leaf trembles on the wall.

Ghosts are walking.

They have broken roses down

and poplars stand there still as death.

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The Day-Breakers

We are not come towage a strife

With swords upon this hill.

It is not wise to waste the life

Against a stubborn will.

Yet would we die as some have done,

Beating a way for the rising sun

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Golgotha Is a Mountain

Golgotha is a mountain, a purple mound

Almost out of sight.

One night they hanged two thieves there,

And another man.

Some women wept heavily that night;

Their tears are flowing still. They have made a river;

Once it covered me.

Then the people went away and left Golgotha

Deserted.

Oh, I've seen many mountains:

Pale purple mounting melting in the evening mists and

blurring on the borders of the sky.

I climbed old Shasta and chilled my hands in its summer

snows.

I rested in the shadow of Popocatepetl and it whispered to me

of death.

And I've seen other mountains rising from the wistful moors

like the breasts of a slender maiden.

Who knows the mystery of mountains!

Some of them are awful, others are just lonely.

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Anyplace But Here / Arna Wendell Bontemps : A Bibliography

Robert E Fleming. James Weldon Johnson and Arna Wendell Bontemps: A reference guide. G. K. Hall, 1978

Kirkland C. Jones. Man from Louisiana; A Biography of Arna Wendell Bontemps.. Greenwood Press, 1992.

Sterling Brown "Arna Bontemps: Co-worker, Comrade." Black World 22:11 (September 1973): 92-98.

Wikipedia-Wendell_Bontemps

Arna Wendell Bontemps (1902-1973) -- born in Alexandria, Louisiana, the son of Creole parents -- was one of the more prolific writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He was the author of over 25 books of poetry, history, biography, fiction and anthologies. Bontemps was a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Bontemps served as head librarian at Fisk University from 1969 to 1972. He was also curator of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale University. In 1923, Bontemps received his B.A. from Pacific Union College in Angwin. In 1924, his poetry appeared in Crisis magazine, the NACCP periodical edited by Dr. W.E.B. DuBois.

In 1926 Golgotha Is a Mountain won the Alexander Pushkin Award and in 1927 Nocturne at Bethesda achieved first honors in the Crisis poetry contest. Personals, a collection of poetry was published in 1963.

Bontemps then turned to prose. In the decade of the thirties, he wrote three acclaimed novels God Sends Sunday (1931); Black Thunder (1936); and Drums at Dusk (1939). Frustrated in his ability to reach his own generation Bontemps to literature for children and young graders. In 1937 he published the Sad-Faced Boy; and others for young audience included We Have Tomorrow (1945) Slappy Hopper (1946) and Story of the Negro (1948).

Bontemps was involved in the publication of at least three anthologies: Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers (1941); with Langston Hughes, The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949 (1949); and Bontemps, American Negro Poetry (1963 & 1974 rev.). Bontemps was gracious enough to include Christian's poems in all his anthologies.

Bontemps' beautiful short story "A Summer Tragedy" is found often in anthologies. It is indeed a treat. His poems "A Black Man Thinks of Reaping," "Southern Mansion," and "Nocturne at Bethesda" are often anthologized. But such poems as "My Heart Has Known Its Winter" and "Day Breakers" are also found in anthologies.

Early in his career Bontemps had wanted to get a Ph.D. in English but with his marriage in 1926 and the coming of six children he had to work. He taught for awhile at an Alabama junior college. With the coming of the Depression he worked for the Illinois WPA and supervised and assisted in the writing of a history of the Negro in Illinois. In 1943 he completed a degree in library science and served as librarian at Fisk University and developed an archive of African American cultural materials that is a major resource for study in this field.