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

African American Review, Summer, 2002 by Lesley Wheeler

Johnson's "American color point of view" inflects her writing everywhere, whether she treats nature or describes the inhabitants of Harlem. "The Road," for instance, compares well with Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," like the more famous lyric invoking the history of her race through its central simile. "Poem" admires a "jazz prince" in a far more intimate voice: "Gee, brown boy, I loves you all over. / I'm glad I'm a jig." She goes on to invoke and dismantle stereotype through a reference to "tomtoms": "Listen to me, will you, what do I know / About tomtoms? But I like the word, sort of, / Don't you? It belongs to us." Portraits including "Cui Bono?" and "Widow with a Moral Obligation" anticipate Brooks's accomplishments in A Street in Bronzeville, and religious questions underlie some of the sharpest tensions in her published pieces.

While her publishing career ended with the line "I fear the barren drought of death" in "Let Me Sing My Song," Johnson in fact produced fine poems after her apparent retirement. Among them, the memorable "He's About 22. I'm 63." reflects with amusement on the speaker's unseemly attraction to a sexy young neighbor. "Time After Time," another recent piece, unexpectedly but unmistakably conjures the ghost of J. Alfred Prufock. However, Johnson's heroine, unlike T. S. Eliot's despairing young man, reasserts her desires triumphantly at the end of the poem:

Old woman
Gulp the joy!
Belch the pity!
Straddle the city!

Many readers will wish for more from Johnson, but such exuberant flashes defy the image of a young star prematurely fading into obscurity. Johnson clearly live and wrote with flair long after the literary industry turned its gaze elsewhere.

[c] 2002 Lesley wheeler