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Black poet's works reflected fire, love, strength

by Roger Martin

Kansas-born Frank Marshall Davis was 6 feet 1 the day he graduated high school -- but, according to his memoir, he felt 1 foot 6.

It wasn't family who made him feel small. Davis' mother and grandmother were positive influences, says John Edgar Tidwell, associate professor of English at the University of Kansas.

It wasn't his church. And it wasn't the Arkansas City library, through which Davis read his way with that greed peculiar to minds that are hungry both for knowledge and repose.

No, his sense of shriveled stature came from aspects of life other than home, church and library.

Perhaps part of the shriveling came at age 5, when he was "personally selected for a lynching."

Davis wrote, "Both daily papers must have carried another Southern social note about this popular pastime of that era, and a couple of third-graders ... decided to stage their own junior necktie party."

The white boys jumped him in a vacant lot, held him down, slipped a rope over his head. Only a white man's sudden appearance stopped any further tightening of the noose.

Eventually, Davis would go off to Kansas State College -- today Kansas State University -- for a couple of years. A freshman English teacher gave him and his classmates the option of writing an essay or a poem and, says Tidwell, "Davis sought the easy way out." He wrote a poem. The teacher liked it and after class asked him whether he had more. He said yes, then dashed off to the library to write them.

Tidwell has just edited a collection of Davis' poems, titled "Black Moods: Collected Poems." In it, he tackles a charge that Davis is capable only of bitterness and bombast in his poetry. Tidwell points to poems of love, satire and social engagement.

The trouble is, Davis is unforgettable when he's fierce. In the first poem in "I Am the American Negro," published in 1937, Davis warns readers what's to come:

Fairy words ... a Pollyana mind
Do not roam these pages.
Inside
There are coarse victuals
A couch of rough boards
Companions who seldom smile
Yet it is the soul's abode
Of a Negro dreamer
For being black
In my America
Is no rendezvous
With Venus ...

The poem "Giles Johnson, Ph.D." also is tart, but with a comic twist:

Giles Johnson
had four college degrees
knew the whyfore of this
the wherefore of that
could orate in Latin
or cuss in Greek
and having learned such things
he died of starvation
because he wouldn't teach
and he couldn't porter.

Davis was not hard-edged in person. He masked his feelings behind a poker face.

Tidwell says, "People often didn't know what Davis was thinking by looking at his facial expressions or listening to his tone of voice."

Not when it came to personal matters, anyway. When it came to his journalism, it was a different story. Davis brought the Atlanta World, a black newspaper, from twice-a-week publication to success as a daily.

He edited news releases and wrote columns for the Associated Negro Press in Chicago. Between 1946 and 1948, he helped establish a labor newspaper in Chicago. He gave political speeches.

Then, in 1948, after three years of political activities and FBI monitoring, he moved to Hawaii with his wife, Helen Canfield, a socialite he crossed racial lines to marry. There they had five children, Davis first becoming a father at age 44.

A few lines from a poem titled "To Helen" indicate his softer side:

I shall make you part of me,
My darling,
Fundamental as heart
Primary as mind
And to you I shall become
As the blood in your veins
So that neither you nor I
Could survive
The mutilation of leaving.

They divorced after 24 years. Near the end of his life, Davis would write words about his memories of love:

When you are gone
I talk low with ghosts
And none of us
Has very much to say

Davis lived long enough to be celebrated by some of the radical black poets of the 1970s. That pleased him even though his ideal -- a completely integrated America -- was not theirs. The blues of Frank Marshall Davis were not the blues of self-pity or mourning, says Tidwell, but of tempered strength.

I was a weaver of jagged words
A warbler of garbled tunes
A singer of savage songs
I was bitter
Yes
Bitter and sorely sad
For when I wrote
I dipped my pen
In the crazy heart
Of mad America