A Black Man Talks of Reaping

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Poetry

I have sown beside all waters in my day.

I planted deep, within my heart the fear

that wind or fowl would take the grain away.

I planted safe against this stark, lean year.

I scattered seed enough to plant the land

in rows from Canada to Mexico

but for my reaping only what the hand

can hold at once is all that I can show.

Yet what I sowed and what the orchard yields

my brother's sons are gathering stalk and root;

small wonder then my children glean in fields

they have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit.

(Arna Bontemps, "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" from American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume 2. Copyright © 1926 by Arna Bontemps)

Summary

This poetry tells about the bitterness of racism in America.

Author

Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, but moved to Los Angeles at age three with his family. He took a teaching job in the Harlem section of New York City after graduating from Pacific Union College in 1923, where he became part of a community of African-American literary artists and scholars whose groundbreaking work was beginning to attract notice. Here Bontemps received The Crisis and Opportunity poetry awards, as well as newspapers devoted to the dawning "renaissance," and began his lifelong friendship with Hughes.

He married Alberta Johnson in 1926, who would bear him six children, and he accepted a position at Oakwood Junior College in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1931, as the Depression worsened. Bontemps published his first book, God Sends Sunday, also in that year, a novel about a St. Louis jockey. In 1946, when he was named Head Librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, more permanent and gratifying jobs came, where he oversaw the expansion of one of the largest archives of African-American cultural content, while writing books on everything from slave rebellions to the famous Jubilee singers of the college.

Racism Issue

Bontemps represented the lives and hardships of African Americans in his novels and poetry, a theme that can be seen in his poem "A Black Man Talks of Reaping." He uses the metaphor of farming in this poem to express the bitterness felt by blacks in a racist America. The message of the poem is that while white Americans reap, or harvest, the rewards, black Americans have labored long and hard just to look on.

Reference

  1. Bontempts, Arna. 1926. A Black Man Talks of Reaping. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved January 1 2021.