…rueing the jerk?

…for a good many people none of this would require introduction, explanation or even repetition but in 2007 a film was released that retold – in a heavily fictionalized account that (among other things) substituted Harvard for what was in truth USC as the climactic set of oratorical opponents standing between the debate team of Wiley College and the vindication of the truth they spoke.

That film was called The Great Debaters and indeed took its name from an article penned a good many years earlier by one Tony Scherman and published in a magazine by the name of American Legacy.

Whilst the film deals principally with the narrative arcs of the members of that debate team the part played by Denzel Washington is that of Melvin B Tolson, a man credited with being one of the foremost poets of an age that produced the Harlem Renaissance.

The Unknown Soldier
BY MELVIN B. TOLSON

I was a minuteman at Concord Bridge,
I was a frigate-gunner on Lake Erie,
I was a mortarman at Stony Ridge,
I fought at San Juan Hill and Château Thierry,
I braved Corregidor and the Arctic Sea:
The index finger brings democracy.

These States bred freedom in and in my bone—
Old as the new testament of Plymouth Bay.
When the Founding Fathers laid the Cornerstone
And rued the thirteen clocks that would not say
The hour on the hour, I nerved myself with them
Under the noose in the hand of the tyrant’s whim.

I’ve seen the alien ships of destiny
Plow the sea mountains between the hemispheres.
I’ve seen the Gulf Stream of our history
Littered with derelicts of corsair careers.
I’ve heard the watchman cry, “The bars! The bars!”
When midnight held the funeral of stars.

I saw horizontal States grow vertical,
From Plymouth Harbor to the Golden Gate,
Till wedged against skyscapes empyreal
Their glories elbowed the decrees of fate.
These States bred freedom in and in my bone:
I hymn their virtues and their sins atone.

The tares and wheat grow in the self-same field,
The rose and thorn companion on the bush,
The gold and gravel cuddle in the yield,
The oil and grit and dirt together gush.
The Gordian knot to be or not to be
Snares not the free.

My faith props the tomorrows, for I know
The roots of liberty, tough-fibered, feed
On the blood of tyrants and martyrs; the judas blow
Tortures the branches till they twist and bleed;
And yet no Caesar, vitamined on loot,
Can liberty uproot!

I am the Unknown Soldier: I open doors
To the Rights of Man, letters incarnadine.
These shrines of freedom are mine as well as yours;
These ashes of freemen yours as well as mine.
My troubled ghost shall haunt These States, nor cease
Till the global war becomes a global peace.

Melvin Tolson, “The Unknown Soldier” from Harlem Gallery and Other Poems by Melvin B. Tolson (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1999)
Source: “Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems by Melvin B. Tolson (University Press of Virginia, 1999)

The Dictionary of the Wolf
BY MELVIN B. TOLSON

“We all declare for liberty,” Lincoln said.
“We use the word and mean all sorts of things:
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.
Rifle the basket that thy neighbor brings.”

The grizzled axman squinted at Honest Abe,
The six feet four of him, gaunt, sad of face,
The hands to split a log or cradle a babe,
The cracked palm hat, the homespun of his race.

“The wolf tears at the sheep’s throat: and the sheep
Extols the shepherd for cudgeling tyranny;
The wolf, convulsed with indignation deep,
Accuses the shepherd of murdering liberty.

“But the dictionary of the wolf is writ
In words the rats of time chew bit by bit.”

Melvin Tolson, “The Dictionary of the Wolf” from Harlem Gallery and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1999)
Source: “Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson (University Press of Virginia, 1999)

…it can be tempting, particularly when it seems that truth and progress have little to no standing at the highest reaches of government, to wonder what good it does to merely say a thing…or what it matters to win the argument.

Melvin Tolson wrote eloquently & passionately but he also worked (in some cases at no small risk to himself) to unite sharecroppers in an effort to unionize across the racial divide (at a time when lynchings were still very much a regular occurrence) whilst pursuing a career as a professor – under whose tutelage the debate team whose exploits form the basis of that film remained undefeated for some ten years or so.

…the youngest member of that team being one James Farmer Jr – who would go on to co-found the Committee of Racial Equality, which went on to be the Congress of Racial Equality also known as CORE – a man himself held to be one of the luminaries of the Civil Rights movement.

…so if they were still alive today, I can’t help but wonder what answer they would give to the question posed in the final lines of this one?

A Song for Myself
BY MELVIN B. TOLSON
I judge
My soul
Eagle
Nor mole:
A man
Is what
He saves
From rot.

The corn
Will fat
A hog
Or rat:
Are these
Dry bones
A hut’s
Or throne’s?

Who filled
The moat
‘Twixt sheep
And goat?
Let Death,
The twin
Of Life,
Slip in?

Prophets
Arise
Mask-hid,
Unwise,
Divide
The earth
By class
And birth.

Caesars
Without,
The People
Shall rout:
Caesars
Within,
Crush flat
As tin.

Who makes
A noose
Envies
The goose.
Who digs
A pit
Dices
For it.

Shall tears
Be shed
For those
Whose bread
Is thieved
Headlong?
Tears right
No wrong.

Prophets
Shall teach
The meek
To reach.
Leave not
To God
The boot
And rod.

The straight
Lines curve?
Failure
Of nerve?
Blind-spots
Assail?
Times have
Their Braille.

If hue
Of skin
Trademark
A sin,
Blame not
The make
For God’s
Mistake.

Since flesh
And bone
Turn dust
And stone,
With life
So brief,
Why add
To grief?

I sift
The chaff
From wheat
And laugh
No curse
Can stop
The tick
Of clock.

Those who
Wall in
Themselves
And grin
Commit
Incest
And spawn
A pest.

What’s writ
In vice
Is writ
In ice.
The truth
Is not
Of fruits
That rot.

A sponge,
The mind
Soaks in
The kind
Of stuff
That fate’s
Milieu
Dictates.

Jesus,
Mozart,
Shakespeare,
Descartes,
Lenin,
Chladni,
Have lodged
With me.

I snatch
From hooks
The meat
Of books.
I seek
Frontiers,
Not worlds
On biers.

The snake
Entoils
The pig
With coils.
The pig’s
Skewed wail
Does not
Prevail.

Old men
Grow worse
With prayer
Or curse:
Their staffs
Thwack youth
Starved thin
For truth.

Today
The Few
Yield poets
Their due;
Tomorrow
The Mass
Judgement
Shall pass.

I harbor
One fear
If death
Crouch near:
Does my
Creed span
The Gulf
Of Man?

And when
I go
In calm
Or blow
From mice
And men,
Selah!
What…then?

Melvin Tolson, “A Song for Myself” from Harlem Gallery and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1999)
Source: “Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson (University Press of Virginia, 1999)

…& I wonder too what Tolson might have made of the likes of these?