Countee Cullen vs. Uncle Jim

On white folks being white.

This is a miserable week coming, and I don’t know that I have much to add to that…so I thought I’d write about poetry, for those of you who might like to read about something not Trump.

Specifically, I wanted to write about this poem by Countee Cullen, one of the less read figures of the Harlem Renaissance. This is from his second book, Copper Sun, published in 1922. And while no orange name shall escape my lips, the poem is in fact about the persistence of racism.

Uncle Jim

“White folks is white,” says uncle Jim;
“A platitude,” I sneer;
And then I tell him so is milk,
And the froth upon his beer.

His heart walled up with bitterness,
He smokes his pungent pipe,
And nods at me as if to say,
“Young fool, you’ll soon be ripe!”

I have a friend who eats his heart
Always with grief of mine,
Who drinks my joy as tipplers drain
Deep goblets filled with wine.

I wonder why here at his side,
Face-in-the-grass with him,
My mind should stray the Grecian urn
To muse on uncle Jim.

Unlike his contemporaries Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, Cullen wrote about racism and race only occasionally. Given that, his tone here is a little unclear. One interesting analysis online argues that Uncle Jim is a kind of Uncle Tom figure, who is trying to convince the “young fool” that white people are superior, and that he should embrace submissiveness.

I think that’s backwards though. Uncle Jim is not arguing for submission; he’s arguing for segregation. Jim is telling the narrator that “White folks is white,” and that the narrator, as a Black man, should stay away from them, not because they are superior, but because white people are dangerous and untrustworthy. Jim’s heart is “walled up with bitterness” because he’s lived as a Black man in the US for his whole life (quite possibly since slavery times) and he has experienced white hatred, white violence, white cruelty, and the ineradicable antipathy of white people to Black advancement.

The narrator, in contrast, sees Jim’s pessimism as a “platitude” and a moral and intellectual error. Whiteness isn’t an ontological truth; it’s just the color of milk and beer foam. The narrator refuses to let it define him or circumscribe his friendships.

The narrator embraces integration in part through the form and content of the poem itself. Except for the hint of dialect in Uncle Jim’s speech (“White folks is white,” rather than “are white”), the poem is deliberately framed as part of the white English romantic poetry traditions. The stanzas are all abab ballad stanzas, with a regular iambic rhythm (four feet per line alternating with three feet per line.) Imagery, like “goblets full of wine” and “Grecian urn” also reference a highbrow, elevated English past.

The ”Grecian urn” also is a nod to Keats, of course, and lying side by side in the grass with a male friend inevitably calls to mind the male-admiring, grassy Whitman. Cullen was, like Whitman, gay, and the (presumably white) friend he’s talking about may well be a lover.

The narrator, then, juxtaposes Uncle Jim’s blackness with a white poetic tradition which includes the possibility of integrated friendship, and integrated (homosexual) love.

This isn’t the only time Cullen makes this contrast. It’s also at the core of his most famous poem, “Yet I Do Marvel:

Yet I Do Marvel

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,

And did He stoop to quibble could tell why

The little buried mole continues blind,

Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,

Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus

Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare

If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus

To struggle up a never-ending stair.

Inscrutable His ways are, and immune

To catechism by a mind too strewn

With petty cares to slightly understand

What awful brain compels His awful hand.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:

To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Again, the poem here is a very traditional sonnet, bristling with classical references not to mention with an apparently sincere Christian faith. The verse is meant to demonstrate mastery of a white idiom and a white history even as Cullen feels a distance from it—or at least he expresses an awareness that others will see a distance

“Uncle Jim,” by externalizing the tension of “Yet I Do Marvel” in an interlocutor, heightens it and clarifies it. Cullen feels strongly attracted to the romantic English verse tradition (he’s written a number of tributes to Keats), and to his white friend who symbolizes that tradition. Yet even in the middle of his tryst, and in the middle of his poem, he finds that his mind “stray[s] the Grecian urn/To muse on uncle Jim.” Blackness, whiteness, and racism continue to trouble him and his poetry. He wants to write about Grecian urns, but God (or something) bids him sing about Uncle Jim.

I think it’s probably clear at this point why Cullen is not much read or studied. Keats was old hat already by 1922, and no one these days is especially interested in reverent reiterations of Romantic verse.

More, Cullen’s ambivalence about Black poetry—his feeling that there is something incongruous about a Black poet, or some disjunction between Black identity and the writing of poetry—is out of step with contemporary sentiments, to put it mildly. Langston Hughes still seems modern and relevant because he made poetry out of Black vernacular speech and Black musical forms like blues and jazz. For Hughes there was no split between his identity as a Black person and as a poet. Black poetry, he insisted, was not a contradiction at all, but a joy, an innovation, and a triumph. Black poets should express their “dark-skinned selves without fear or shame” he famously said—a position that served as inspiration, in one way or another, for everyone from Amiri Baraka to Lucille Clifton to Rita Dove to Claudia Rankine.

I can’t argue that Cullen is a better or more insightful poet than any of those writers, and I think his ambivalent identification of poetry with whiteness was a dead end (and not just for Black poets.) At the same time, there is something powerful about the (half-disavowed) bitterness in “Uncle Jim,” and the poem’s sinking, conflicted realization that respectability, skill, reading, and even love can’t banish racism. There isn’t a contradiction between being a Black person and being a poet, but white people have put a lot of effort into insisting that there is, and that insistence affects poetry—or at least, it affected Cullen’s. That’s why Uncle Jim gets the last bitter word. And, unfortunately, not just in the poem.