This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance. - book review

African American Review, Summer, 2002 by Lesley Wheeler

Verner D. Mitchell, ed. This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2000. 135 pp. $24.95.

"You have so many years for writing, so few for love," Helene Johnson advised her cousin Dorothy West in a 1931 letter, recommending romance over literary aspirations. "Once you had your baby, you'd have your whole future free & ready for your career." Any actual mother of a young child, struggling to create literature and perhaps pursue paying work as well, would swiftly challenge Johnson's optimism. In fact, Johnson, who was admired in 1931 as one of the most gifted poets of the Harlem Renaissance, married two years after penning that counsel, found a venue for the last poem published in her lifetime in 1935, and turned most of her energy and attention from then on to marriage, motherhood, and making a living as a correspondent for Consumer's Union.

American poetry lost sorely in that transaction, as This Waiting for Love, Verner D. Mitchell's excellent new edition of Helene Johnson's poems, demonstrates. Johnson's notoriously abbreviated literary career followed an auspicious childhood in Boston and Martha's Vineyard. However, her only daughter, Abigail McGrath, contests the idea that Johnson and her better-known cousin West were raised as Boston Brahmins: "By the time I came along, we were shabby gentility at best," McGrath reminisces in the afterward to this book. According to her, Johnson's extended family formed "a kibbutz, a commune," pitching in to secure educational advantages for their shared children: One aunt took care of the children, including Johnson and West, "while the other [mothers] went to work as maids." Johnson began winning literary prizes in 1925, at nineteen years of age. She and West met Zora Neale Hurston in 1926, when they received recognition at Opportunity's Second Annual Literary Awards Dinner; they moved to New York City to gether in a matter of months, eventually subletting Hurston's apartment. Johnson published thirty-four poems in a range of forms and voices, receiving considerable acclaim for her accomplishments as one of the finest and most promising figures of the Harlem Renaissance, before fading from the literary scene. Although certain of Johnson's poems have recurred in anthologies, many of the periodicals that once featured her work are now rare, and therefore a good portion of her poems had not been reprinted until now. Johnson's resistance to publicity, too, kept her talent in the shadows. As Cheryl Wall notes in a lively foreward, "It was only in the 1970s that scholars discovered her married name."

Mitchell gathers this small sheaf of poems in chronological order, appending useful notes about their publication histories and clarifying a few terms and allusions. The republished poetry alone merits a grateful welcome: This work projects humor and energy far outsizing Johnson's status as a marginal figure. In addition, Mitchell includes thirteen never-before-published poems Johnson composed through the early 1980s (she died in 1995). Other materials frame these works: Mitchell's introduction synthesizes information about the poet's background and reception history, noting her poetic and personal connections not only to Hurston and West but to other Renaissance writers, to Whitman and Hughes, whose sensual free verse hers often resembles, and to Robert Frost, who helped judge the 1926 Opportunity contest. Several pages of photographs following the poems may constitute a superfluous pleasure, but Mitchell's chronology of Johnson's life is invaluable, and the sample of correspondence exchanged among Johnson, West, Hurston, and others provides some interesting details and great lines from Johnson ("Here I come with my American color point of view," she wrote to West in 1932). McGrath's afterward, finally, produces a vivid and moving portrait of the mother who succeeded and perhaps replaced the poet, teaching her only child to draw paper dolls with complete genitalia and to understand the privilege of standing-room tickets at the opera, where one could "move around to the music" unconfined by the nuisance of a seat.

The poems, likewise, testify that Helene Johnson lived intensely, taking particular joy in physical experience. "Fulfillment," one of the earliest pieces, animates the landscape with erotic longing, metaphorically blending literary production with a series of encounters with nature:

To climb a hill that hungers for the sky,
 To dig my hands wrist deep in pregnant earth,
To watch a young bird, veering, learn to fly,
 To give a still, stark poem shining birth.

Despite its insistence on joy, though, this opening stanza contains the word stillbirth, the two syllables divided by that "stark poem shining," expressing an ambivalence in the embarking poet, or "young bird," about her chosen career. Violence and death also accompany maternal images in "Mother" and "A Southern Road"; Johnson characterizes the road in the latter poem as a "yolk colored tongue" in a "pregnant" landscape that eventually delivers a lynching in silhouette.