Gallery of Harlem Portraits
Melvin B Tolson
Edited with an
afterword by Robert M. Farnsworth
University of
Missouri Press
Columbia, MO 1979
Copyright © 1979
by The Curators of the University of Missouri
276 pages,
softbound, no price given
Review by Zvi A.
Sesling
Melvin B. Tolson
was an interesting man who was born in 1898 in Mississippi and died sixty-eight
years later in Dallas, TX. A black man,
he was a poet first and other things second. He is the author of several poetry
books, but his masterpiece is considered Gallery
of Harlem Portraits. Its more than
two hundred pages of poetic portraits of those living in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s,
though by the titles (often the names of his subjects) one cannot tell if the
people are real, or just the title is made up. Nonetheless it is a fascinating
read of Harlem lives.
With language
born of Langston Hughes, French surrealists, blues singers and the imaging of
white poets, Tolson produces numerous memorable lines. Here is part of the poem
Augustus Lence as an example.
When a man is down
He’s all alone.
When a man is down
He’s all alone,
Like a homeless dawg
Without A bone
Augustus sat on
the stoop in the November night.
Oblong patterns
of yellow radiance
Shaped themselves
Along the naked
ugliness of tenements.
A block away,
A homing elevated
train
Stabbed the
Harlem night
With blades of
light and sound.
When you’s got de blues
‘Tain’t no use to pray.
When you’s got de blues
‘Taint no use to pray.
Takes a brown-skin gal
To chase de blues away.
In the first stanza
or two of every poem the reader is quick to understand where Tolson is
headed. In Duke Huggins we are treated to:
Duke Huggins was
master of the Subway,
A gambling den
housed in the sheltering shadows
Of a chambered
basement on Upper Lenox Avenue.
He was a bronze
colossus of a man
With restless
gray eyes
Whose hollow
chest was framed by enormous shoulders
Bowed from
sitting over gaming tables
Through long,
tightening hours.
Or there is the
man of the cloth who Tolson describes:
The Reverend
Isaiah Cloud preached a doctrine
That wormed its
way under the skins of churchgoers.
Like an expert
sharpshooter,
He hit tirelessly
the bull’s-eye of their egotisms.
He never preached
in pleasing generalities,
But discoursed on
specific private sins and social corruptions
That left no
hearer with that lofty hypocrisy
“I thank God that
I am not like other men!”
Tolson’s Gallery of Harlem Portraits is
interesting from a number of angles. First, the “bios” of the individuals.
Second, the poetry. Third, from an historical view of the people who roamed and
lived in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s and finally, for those interested black
literature, blues poetry and some history when blacks were Negroes and life was
different, this book is where to begin.
_______________________________________
Zvi A. Sesling
Reviewer, Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene
Author, King of the Jungle (Ibbetson Street,
2010)
Author, Across
Stones of Bad Dreams (Cervena Barva, 2011)
Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review
Editor, Bagel
Bards Anthologies #7 and #8.
Publisher, Muddy River Books
This sampling by Tolson hit a chord in me. Thanks for bring this poet and his lyrical poems forward here.
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