AN AMERICAN LETTER: Letter from a Freedman to His Old Master
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Note: "I would rather stay here and starve - and die, if it come to that - than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness..." - from Jordon Anderson's letter to his ex-slave master. Though not a poem, we choose to include it here for the poetics of living and struggle that it powerfully exposes in its deadpan, satirical humour.

BIO/background:In 1825, at the approximate age of eight, Jordon Anderson was sold into slavery and lived as a servant of Colonel Patrick Henry Anderson and family for 39 years. In 1864, the Union Army camped out on the Anderson plantation and he and his wife, Amanda, were liberated. The couple eventually made it safely to Dayton, Ohio when, in July 1865, Jordan received a letter from his former owner, Colonel P.H. Anderson. The letter kindly asked Jordan to return to work on the plantation because it had fallen into disarray during the war. On August 7, 1865, Jordan dictated his response through his new boss, Valentine Winters, and it was published in the Cincinnati Commercial. The letter entitled “Letter from a Freedman to His Old Master” was not only hilarious, but it showed compassion, defiance and dignity. That year, the the letter would be republished in the New York Daily Tribune and Lydia Marie Child’s The Freedman’s Book.


Dayton, Ohio,

August 7, 1865


To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson,
Big Spring, Tennessee


Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jordon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve - and die, if it come to that - than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jordon Anderson

BESSIE HEAD: Unpublished Early Poems

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Note on the poems: The poems have been arranged in chronological order by date of composition - as far as has been possible to determine. They were all reproduced unchanged except for minor typographical and spelling errors, and their original layout has been reproduced as accurately as possible.

Source: English in Africa, Vol. 23, No. 1 (May, 1996), pp. 40-46  / Published by: Rhodes University Stable

Self Portrait

Idealist
And, low down,
Apathetic, Indifferent earth worm;
Plunging, leaping,
Flickering, wavering,
Stammering, hesitating,
Bold, reckless, impatient;
Static, placid,
Of no certain direction,
Of certain direction;
Isolated, like driftwood
On the tossing, heaving ocean -
Flung to the top of a high-sounding,
Dazzling wave,
Engulfed in the anonymous depths;
Oh contradiction!
THAT is I.

__________

TPB's notes:  [Handwritten; dated July 2nd '61; signed B. Head; B. Emery has been erased.] Published in English in Africa 23 No. 1 (May 1996) 

Mr. Nobody

All those unheard agonies slide into the ocean;
Only at some dark hour, the tide confesses;
The conflicts are exposed; flung out upon the beach
Like bleak, bloodless arms; Scattered bits of debris . . .
Can I not give protection to the dream?
Can I not feel the tenderness and the pain?
Why is the sound so harsh?
It is my laughter.
Forgive! Forgive! I am cruel.

Let me pick up these scattered skeletons of emptiness;
Let me clothe them in flesh and blood and life;
Let me bend and touch their cold bareness
With caressing fingers;
Let me pay for the debts; for the accounts
That were never settled;
The hours spent in working for to-morrow's meat
And to-morrow's respectability;
Let me close the tired eyes;
Let me look lingeringly at the worn-out shoes,
The straight, uninteresting mouth that smiled,
Only sometimes with foolish fancies in moments of feeling
That were like the deep flow of a flooded river . . .
Who was around to care?
You clutched at the kiss and did not care.
The hour was a silken dream.
The insurance man; the milk bill;
The grocery man; the politician -
All were forgotten.
The pompous speeches of pompous fools
Strutting the platform, flinging platitudes to the left
And platitudes to the right -
"You qualify for humanity - if you're a lover of humanity!"
"The masses must be organised to lead us - the intellectuals!"
"You good men and women before me -
Make provision for the future generation!"
Live this way. Think that way. And so on. And so on.
And, in the quiet hour of the night, you dared to dream;
You were moved by a vague anguish of spirit -
'Is this what I live for?' you asked dumbly . . .
You sighed. You smiled.
And, your head dropped in a silken moment to my breast;
And you did not care.
And I thought: 'To-morrow will see you
With the face of Mr Nobody.
To-morrow will see you sit through the day
Counting the useless pay sheets;
To-morrow your lips will pay lip service to the crowd;
To-morrow will claim you, and - To-morrow will not care!'
In shattering, cruel contempt - I laughed -
And then, there was only your face, blotted out
Against the black night,
And, the half-murmured protest
Of a stifled, silken dream . . .

Forgive me; forgive me;
And yet, are tears enough?
The bleak skeletons of the sea; the cold scattered pieces
Are warmed by my tears;
A piece here; another there;
I hold you in my hands.
The stretch of the beach is long.
I cannot collect all that is you.
The tide sweeps in. A foot. An arm. The lost keys.
An old brown button. A pocket book of phone numbers.
All this is you.
How shall I piece it together?
Your face. I cannot find your face.
I am weary with bending to find the pieces.
My feet are cold. My hands are stiff.
My body is drenched wet with sea water.
My eyes are blinded with salt tears.
Forgive, forgive . . .

Too late.
The tide moves out.
The tide grasps you to the ocean.
The sun rises. The morning is bleak and cold.
Too late.
The sea now holds your destiny.
The waves pattern your blind groping in the dark.
The lapping ebb-tide waves whisper tormentingly:
What did he live for?
What were his hopes?
What did he live for - Mr Nobody?

__________

TPB's notes: [Typescript; dated July 19th/20th '61; signed Bessie Emery (typed); "Emery" erased and "Head" handwritten in.] Published in English in Africa 23 No. 1 (May 1996)

Geranium Summer

The winter is gone.
I'm living a dream of hot green summer.
The days are blue bubbles,
Pink bubbles, yellow bubbles
Of exploding laughter.
The nights are yellow moons
And warm sombre moods . . . and . . .
A dark sea-bed of mysterious stars . . .
You don't know how alive I feel
In this geranium summer!

__________

TPB's notes: [Handwritten; undated; signed B. Head.] Published in English in Africa 23 No. 1 (May 1996)

Where the Wind Don't Blow

My home is someplace
Where the wind don't blow;
My heart rests someplace
Where the wind don't blow;
Strange place this,
Funny place this,
All black and dark and quiet -
And the wind don't blow.

Come, come see my home!
It's anyplace where nobody gives orders;
It's any moment of surprise:
Two dark eyes smile wide open: astonished,
And something gentle, you don't know what,
Caresses your cheek;
It's a park in winter
And a thin old man
Cramped on a park bench;
It's a cold blue sky
And dry autumn leaves
Falling, falling;
It's lonely my home
And the wind don't blow.

My home is someplace
Far in the distance
A point on the bleak horizon;
My home is a swagger and a shrug -
You know:
When you get a smack in the face
And the pain don't hurt: You are the master.

My home is a glass of wine;
The slow curling smoke of a cigarette;
All the new to-morrows;
The deep groan of laughter
When you defy fools and fate
And go your own way: Ride high
On the tide of your own thoughts, desires:
And, looking back you grin at those behind;
You're far ahead, flying, flying
In someplace
Where the wind don't blow.

Don't enter
If you don't like my home!
Please don't look!
It's a cage, timid as the eyes
Of a trapped beast;
Quivering, defenseless -
How can my home be this way?
Most priceless, defenseless;
Most valuable, valueless;
Most welcome, forbidding;
Tread softly -
The walls breathe peace;
Deep dark black peace -
And the wind don't blow.

__________

TPB's notes: [Handwritten; undated; signed Bessie Head.] Published in English in Africa 23 No. 1 (May 1996)

Untitled Now

The cold winter evening sky sparkles with glass-green stars. The sky is a clear wide curving expanse - only its edges are blurred in the glow of the setting sun.
A cold hazy mist rises from the earth. The earth is a vast space
of brown grass - grass and more grass, sweeping out towards the horizon.
The expanse of cold blue sky and the expanse of hard brown earth are brooding in the cold evening gaze.
The intensity of the stillness; the depth, the limitless space and
silence, draws the mind with an irresistable spell. You feel it
growing inside you. Your mind arranges itself in smooth curves and circles; centres and concentrates itself in a dark stillness; and, in this
stillness, absorbs itself into a deep peace disappear, shadows and images and impressions are slowly swallowed up in this movementless, shadowless ocean; this eternity. The moment itself is like an eternity. You feel warm tears on your hands but they are only the expression of an immense love and tenderness that rise UP from inside you; a flood of all embracing warmth. You feel that this love, this tenderness is so great that it could clothe the loneliness and bleakness of the earth. You feel it is
so powerful that you could compare it to the force that thrusts out the delicate green shoots from their hard casing of dry bark at springtime. You feel it is everything life is, yet, you cannot know if this tenderness reaches OUT beyond you. It is so self-contained. The love is so self-contained. How can you give expression to it?
You look for some ways to express it. You are standing in a bus queue. A woman walks up and stands next to you. An ordinary woman with her mind distracted by cooking and children and debts.
She smiles at you in a distracted way too. You smile back. Her
eyebrows are beautiful. They are like two black wings. She starts to
speak and her voice is like a dream. Her ordinary words move you to an extreme tenderness
"Cold day to-day," she says, "aren't we strange? When we are
young, we want to be old; when it is cold we want it to be hot; when we are unmarried we want to be married but then, as soon as we are
married we want to be single. What will ever satisfy us? Human nature is remarkable."
She smiles to herself for a moment, then the bus arrives and her mind is immediately distracted and splintered. She fusses with the parcels, the groceries. She searches hastily and anxiously for the bus fare. You watch her every movement with wonder - the work-rough hands; the quick frowns; the eyebrows that are like the wings of a bird. This woman becomes a part of the love reaching OUT from you.
The love absorbs you. It follows you wherever you may go. It
becomes a part of the patterns, the silhouettes, the shadows, the
smiles, the agonies of life. It flows with the humming rhythm of
machines at work and hands and eyes and feet. It flies up against the
high rain-washed wind-swept mountains and rests like a bird in the dark crevices and mountain waterfalls. It wanders all round into
mysterious and beautiful places, secret and dark corners and accommodates itself. The whole world is its home. The love is free
and limitless. Independent. It walks with a firm step. It shrugs its shoulders at the moon and tries to grasp the stars. It flies in a straight arrow before you. It cries out like the wild lonely seagulls. It has the sharp eye of the hawk whose wings spread out and blot out the sun. Oh, this love is many things! It is like small barefoot dreams tip-toeing into the mind of a sleeping child; wistful and beautiful. It is like to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow. Each day you wake the love is new and new and new. Each day the love is a surprise.
It seems you think of nothing but this love. It seems you are just like a tramp walking on some road to nowhere and you just don't care about anything. You have a small bundle. You light a fire. You sleep under the stars and you are a no-good, lowdown tramp with the whole world as your home. And, come to-morrow and you'll be on the road again - the no-good brother of life - the companion of the stars and the moon and the wind and the sun and the sky and the earth and the distant horizon.

__________

TPB's notes: [Typescript; undated; original title - "When I Am Thinking of You" - erased and "Untitled Now," handwritten in; signed "Bess. E."; the "E" has been erased and "Head" written in.] Published in English in Africa 23 No. 1 (May 1996)

Bessie Head: Unpublished Early Poems
Source: English in Africa, Vol. 23, No. 1 (May, 1996), pp. 40-46
Published by: Rhodes University Stable

WALT WHITMAN: AMERICA, and himself
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WALT WHITMAN
I Hear America Singing

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe
and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off
work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the
deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing
as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the
morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at
work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young
fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.


WALT WHITMAN
America

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.


WALT WHITMAN
Song of Myself, III

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and
increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of
life.
To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is
so.
Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well
entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery here we stand.
Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not
my soul.
Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.
Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they
discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.
Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty
and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be
less familiar than the rest.
I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing;
As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the
night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread.
Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house
with their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my
eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is
ahead?

__________

TPB's notes: Whitman’s self-published Leaves of Grass and published his own enthusiastic review of it. His stylistic innovation and openness regarding sex did not bring him much regard among his peers. Upon publishing Leaves of Grass, Whitman was subsequently fired from his job with the Department of the Interior. Leaves of Grass was however favorably received in England, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne among the British writers who celebrated his work. Today, Walt Whitman is regarded as "America’s most significant nineteenth century poet" and is described as "America’s world poet—a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare."

John Keats' Negative Capability

Sunday [21 Dec. 1817] Hampstead Sunday

MY DEAR BROTHERS,

I must crave your pardon for not having written ere this.

I saw Kean return to the public in 'Richard III.', and finely he did it, and, at the request of Reynolds, I went to criticize his Luke in Riches. The critique is in to-day's 'Champion', which I send you, with the Examiner, in which you will find very proper lamentation on the obsoletion of Christmas Gambols and pastimes: but it was mixed up with so much egotism of that drivelling nature that pleasure is entirely lost. Hone, the publisher's trial, you must find very amusing; and, as Englishmen, very encouraging-his Not Guilty is a thing, which not to have been, would have dulled still more Liberty's Emblazoning-Lord Ellenborough has been paid in his own coin- Wooler and Hone have done us an essential service-I have had two very pleasant evenings with Dilke, yesterday and to-day, and am at this moment just come from him, and feel in the humour to go on with this, began in the morning, and from which he came to fetch me. I spent Friday evening with Wells, and went next morning to see Death on the Pale Horse. It is a wonderful picture, when West's age is considered; But there is nothing to be intense upon; no woman one feels mad to kiss, no face swelling into reality-The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth. Examine 'King Lear', and you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness-The picture is larger than 'Christ rejected'.

I dined with Haydon the Sunday after you left, and bad a very pleasant day, I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith, and met his two Brothers, with Hill and King ston, and one Du Bois. They only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment-These men say things which make one start, without making one feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their eating and drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter-They talked of Kean and his low company -Would I were with that Company instead of yours, said I to mvself! I know such like acquaintance will never do for me and yet I am going to Reynolds on Wednesday. Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime.

I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Sbelley's poem is out, and there are words about its being obiected to as much as "Queen Mab" was. Poor Shelley, I think he has his Quota of good qualities, in sooth la!!
Write soon to your most sincere friend and affectionate Brother   

John [Keats]