II: Big Sea
Poetry is Practical
The widespread publicity resulting from the Vachel Lindsay incident was certainly good for my poetic career, but it was not good for my job, because from then on, very often the head waiter would call me to come and stand before some table whose curious guests wished to see what a Negro bus boy poet looked like. I felt self-conscious and embarrassed, so when pay day came, I quit.
I went home, went to bed, and stayed in bed ten days. I was not sick, just tired of working. My mother said she was tired of working, too, and I could either get up from there and go back to work, or I would not eat! But I was really tired, so I stayed right on in bed and rested and read—and got hungry. My mother refused to feed me on the food she prepared for my little brother when she got home from work. And I didn’t blame her, if she didn’t want to feed me.
One day a young Howard student named Edward Lovette came by the house to show me something that he had written. I had never met him before, but I told him that I was hungry, so he invited me to come with him to a restaurant and have lunch. Every day for several days the same student came by and bought me a meal, although he didn’t have much money. I will never forget him, because I needed those meals.
While in Washington I won my first poetry prize. Opportunity magazine, the official publication of the National Urban League, held its first literary contest. In succeeding years, two others were held with funds given by Casper Holstein, a wealthy West Indian numbers banker who did good things with his money, such as educating boys and girls at colleges in the South, building decent apartment houses in Harlem, and backing literary contests to encourage colored writers. Mr. Holstein, no doubt, would have been snubbed in polite Washington society, Negro or white, but there he was doing decent and helpful things that it hadn’t occurred to lots of others to do. Certainly he was a great help to poor poets.
I sent several poems to the first contest. And then, as an afterthought, I sent “The Weary Blues,” the poem I had written three winters before up the Hudson and whose ending I had never been able to get quite right. But I thought perhaps it was as right now as it would ever be. It was a poem about a working man who sang the blues all night and then went to bed and slept like a rock. That was all. And it included the first blues verse I’d ever heard way back in Lawrence, Kansas, when I was a kid.
I got de weary blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got de weary blues
And can’t be satisfied.
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.
That was my lucky poem—because it won the first prize.
The prizes were to be awarded at a banquet in New York. The poetry prize was forty dollars. I spent it going after it. But it was a good banquet, where I met Clement Wood and again saw James Weldon Johnson, who, with Witter Bynner and John Farrar, were the poetry judges. Also I met Zora Hurston and Eric Walr