To my grandmother⁠ ⁠…...

Oracular. Redolent of fermenting syrup, Purple of the dusk, Deep-rooted cane....

Reading this book, I had the vision of a land, heretofore sunk in the mists of muteness, suddenly rising up into the eminence of song. Innumerable books have been written about the South; some good bo...

Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon, O cant you see it, O cant you see it, Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon … When the sun goes down. Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, eve...

Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon, O cant you see it, O cant you see it, Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon … When the sun goes down. Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, eve...

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done, And start their silent swinging, one by one. Black horse...

Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold, Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old, And cotton, scarce as any southern snow, Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow, Failed in its function...

Becky was the white woman who had two Negro sons. She’s dead; they’ve gone away. The pines whisper to Jesus. The Bible flaps its leaves with an aimless rustle on her mound. Becky had one Negro son. Wh...

Hair⁠— silver-gray, like streams of stars, Brows⁠— recurved canoes quivered by the ripples blown by pain, Her eyes⁠— mist of tears condensing on the flesh below And her channeled muscles are cluster g...

Come, brother, come. Lets lift it; Come now, hewit! roll away! Shackles fall upon the Judgment Day But lets not wait for it. God’s body’s got a soul, Bodies like to roll the soul, Cant blame God if we...

Wind is in the cane. Come along. Cane leaves swaying, rusty with talk, Scratching choruses above the guinea’s squawk, Wind is in the cane. Come along. Carma, in overalls, and strong as any man, stands...

Pour O pour that parting soul in song, O pour it in the sawdust glow of night, Into the velvet pine-smoke air to-night, And let the valley carry it along. And let the valley carry it along. O land and...

The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue The setting sun, too indolent to hold A lengthened tournament for flashing gold, Passively darkens for night’s barbecue, A feast of moon and men and barking hounds...

Face flowed into her eyes. Flowed in soft cream foam and plaintive ripples, in such a way that wherever your glance may momentarily have rested, it immediately thereafter wavered in the direction of h...

A spray of pine-needles, Dipped in western horizon gold, Fell onto a path. Dry moulds of cow-hoofs. In the forest. Rabbits knew not of their falling, Nor did the forest catch aflame....

Full moon rising on the waters of my heart, Lakes and moon and fires, Cloine tires, Holding her lips apart. Promises of slumber leaving shore to charm the moon, Miracle made vesper-keeps, Cloine sleep...

Nine. Esther’s hair falls in soft curls about her high-cheek-boned chalk-white face. Esther’s hair would be beautiful if there were more gloss to it. And if her face were not prematurely serious, one ...

Nine. Esther’s hair falls in soft curls about her high-cheek-boned chalk-white face. Esther’s hair would be beautiful if there were more gloss to it. And if her face were not prematurely serious, one ...

Sixteen. Esther begins to dream. The low evening sun sets the windows of McGregor’s notion shop aflame. Esther makes believe that they really are aflame. The town fire department rushes madly down the...

Esther is twenty-seven. Esther sells lard and snuff and flour to vague black faces that drift in her store to ask for them. Her eyes hardly see the people to whom she gives change. Her body is lean an...

African Guardian of Souls, Drunk with rum, Feasting on a strange cassava, Yielding to new words and a weak palabra Of a white-faced sardonic god⁠— Grins, cries Amen, Shouts hosanna....

Hair⁠—braided chestnut, coiled like a lyncher’s rope, Eyes⁠—fagots, Lips⁠—old scars, or the first red blisters, Breath⁠—the last sweet scent of cane, And her slim body, white as the ash of black flesh...

Up from the skeleton stone walls, up from the rotting floor boards and the solid hand-hewn beams of oak of the prewar cotton factory, dusk came. Up from the dusk the full moon came. Glowing like a fir...

Up from the skeleton stone walls, up from the rotting floor boards and the solid hand-hewn beams of oak of the prewar cotton factory, dusk came. Up from the dusk the full moon came. Glowing like a fir...

Up from the deep dusk of a cleared spot on the edge of the forest a mellow glow arose and spread fan-wise into the low-hanging heavens. And all around the air was heavy with the scent of boiling cane....

Bob Stone sauntered from his veranda out into the gloom of fir trees and magnolias. The clear white of his skin paled, and the flush of his cheeks turned purple. As if to balance this outer change, hi...

Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts, Bootleggers in silken shirts, Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs, Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks. Seventh Street is a bastard of Prohibition and the War....

Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts, Bootleggers in silken shirts, Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs, Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks. Seventh Street is a bastard of Prohibition and the War....

Rhobert wears a house, like a monstrous diver’s helmet, on his head. His legs are banty-bowed and shaky because as a child he had rickets. He is way down. Rods of the house like antennae of a dead thi...

For a long while she was nothing more to me than one of those skirted beings whom boys at a certain age disdain to play with. Just how I came to love her, timidly, and with secret blushes, I do not kn...

Within this black hive to-night There swarm a million bees; Bees passing in and out the moon, Bees escaping out the moon, Bees returning through the moon, Silver bees intently buzzing, Silver honey dr...

Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads, Great, hollow, bell-like flowers, Rumbling in the wind, Stretching clappers to strike our ears⁠ ⁠… Full-lipped flowers Bitten by the sun Bleeding rain Drip...

Life of nigger alleys, of pool rooms and restaurants and near-beer saloons soaks into the walls of Howard Theater and sets them throbbing jazz songs. Black-skinned, they dance and shout above the tick...

whisper of yellow globes gleaming on lamp-posts that sway like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog and let your breath be moist against me like bright beads on yellow globes telephone the power-house t...

Her soul is like a little thrust-tailed dog that follows her, whimpering. She is large enough, I know, to find a warm spot for it. But each night when she comes home and closes the big outside storm d...

Houses are shy girls whose eyes shine reticently upon the dusk body of the street. Upon the gleaming limbs and asphalt torso of a dreaming nigger. Shake your curled wool-blossoms, nigger. Open your li...

Houses are shy girls whose eyes shine reticently upon the dusk body of the street. Upon the gleaming limbs and asphalt torso of a dreaming nigger. Shake your curled wool-blossoms, nigger. Open your li...

People come in slowly⁠ ⁠… mutter, laughs, flutter, whishadwash, “I’ve changed my work-clothes⁠—”⁠ ⁠… and fill vacant seats of Lincoln Theater. Muriel, leading Bernice who is a cross between a washerwo...

My body is opaque to the soul. Driven of the spirit, long have I sought to temper it unto the spirit’s longing, But my mind, too, is opaque to the soul. A closed lid is my soul’s flesh-eye. O Spirits ...

I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown. All my oats are cradled. But I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind them. And I hunger. I crack a grain between my teeth. I do not taste it. I have been...

On the school gymnasium floor, young men and women are drilling. They are going to be teachers, and go out into the world⁠ ⁠… thud, thud⁠ ⁠… and give precision to the movements of sick people who all ...

On the school gymnasium floor, young men and women are drilling. They are going to be teachers, and go out into the world⁠ ⁠… thud, thud⁠ ⁠… and give precision to the movements of sick people who all ...

Paul is in his room of two windows. Outside, the South-Side L track cuts them in two. Bona is one window. One window, Paul. Hurtling Loop-jammed L trains throw them in swift shadow. Paul goes to his. ...

Art has on his patent-leather pumps and fancy vest. A loose fall coat is swung across his arm. His face has been massaged, and over a close shave, powdered. It is a healthy pink the blue of evening ti...

Crimson Gardens. Hurrah! So one feels. People⁠ ⁠… University of Chicago students, members of the stock exchange, a large Negro in crimson uniform who guards the door⁠ ⁠… had watched them enter. Had le...

Ralph Kabnis, propped in his bed, tries to read. To read himself to sleep. An oil lamp on a chair near his elbow burns unsteadily. The cabin room is spaced fantastically about it. Whitewashed hearth a...

Ralph Kabnis, propped in his bed, tries to read. To read himself to sleep. An oil lamp on a chair near his elbow burns unsteadily. The cabin room is spaced fantastically about it. Whitewashed hearth a...

Ralph Kabnis, propped in his bed, tries to read. To read himself to sleep. An oil lamp on a chair near his elbow burns unsteadily. The cabin room is spaced fantastically about it. Whitewashed hearth a...

The parlor of Fred Halsey’s home. There is a seediness about it. It seems as though the fittings have given a frugal service to at least seven generations of middle-class shop-owners. An open grate bu...

A splotchy figure drives forward along the cane- and corn-stalk hemmed-in road. A scarecrow replica of Kabnis, awkwardly animate. Fantastically plastered with red Georgia mud. It skirts the big house ...

A month has passed. Halsey’s workshop. It is an old building just off the main street of Sempter. The walls to within a few feet of the ground are of an age-worn cement mixture. On the outside they ar...

Night, soft belly of a pregnant Negress, throbs evenly against the torso of the South. Night throbs a womb-song to the South. Cane- and cotton-fields, pine forests, cypress swamps, sawmills, and facto...

The cellar swims in a pale phosphorescence. The table, the chairs, the figure of the old man are amoeba-like shadows which move about and float in it. In the corner under the steps, close to the floor...