It’s September 20th, and a tiny piece of real estate, marked Jena, La., has become a potential keg of emotional dynamite, which, despite the presence of ten- thousand, slow-moving marchers, who spilled over the town yesterday, has failed thus far to explode, not even with the power of a fire-cracker. What determined self-control was on display there for the nation, for the world to see and admire with baited breath. However, such a victory fell below most of TV’s talking heads.

As everyone knows by now, the sad, sad story began with the tree, that giant oak that had sheltered white students on the campus for years, and has since been cut down. Doesn’t matter. It’s still there. Will always be there, invisible, but present in memory of the hatred of a certain number of white students, determined to lock out the African-Americans from God’s free gift to all, the shade and gentle embrace of its branches.

When life becomes too complicated, hurting, confused, yearning people may turn to poetry, rather than the gun, to try to make sense of life in words and patterns of words. In so doing, they reveal their suffering humanity to us, inviting us ever so gingerly into their circle, not of the refreshing shade of an oak tree, perhaps, but of the blistering wind of unhampered hatred.

In his poignant poem, White Houses, African poet, Claude McKay, raged against being barred, not from the cool breezes of a tree, but from the clean houses of whites, on clean streets, with clean schools.

Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
but I possess the courage and the grace
to bear my anger proudly and unbent.
Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate
Against the potent poison of your hate.

While he may have kept his “heart inviolate,” in the Tropics of New York, we see a vulnerable McKay, longing for his Jamaican home:

My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;
A wave of longing through my body swept,
And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,
I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.

The last time I saw McKay down at the Shield School in Chicago, his shirt and jacket cuffs were frayed, his eyes were weary, but when reading poetry, they came alive, for he gave everything he had to his white students. He brought us into his world, sharing his pain. Naked he stood before us in what we would learn was to be his final year of life.

During this turmoil in Jena, I can’t help harking back to whom we consider the first acknowledged African-American poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar.

He was born in 1872 in Dayton, Ohio. His father had escaped slavery by fleeing to Canada, though he eventually joined the Union Army to fight for freedom. Dunbar’s mother was freed from slavery after the Civil War, but the nation was not freed from the spiritual ravages of that evil on its social conscience.

Paul’s father, Joshua Dunbar, married a young widow, Mrs. Matilda Murphy, who had worked in a cultured home, and had learned to read and write. The family settled down in Dayton, Ohio, where Matilda was able to teach Paul his first lessons in literacy. She encouraged him to write down his little poems from the age of six.

The boy grew up to be an excellent, well-mannered young man, who was extremely popular in his all-white high school, and was often elected to class offices. After school, he helped his mother with her laundry work, delivering the patrons’ bundles to their homes.

After graduation, he worked as an elevator boy, and eventually was able to sell his first books of poetry to people riding up and down in the office building.

Constantly, he had been encouraged by his teachers, literary giants, as well as heads of publication houses. Frequently, he gave readings of his poetry in the homes of the wealthy, and submitted his work to newspapers, first locally, then nationally.

According to Edward F. Arnold, Dunbar wrote the poem The Haunted Oak, quickly after hearing the story of an innocent black man, who had been hanged on an oak tree, from an old ex-slave who lived in the “Camp” on the grounds of Howard University . Dunbar refers to the guilty parties in the lynching: the local judge, doctor, and pastor.
The similarity between Dunbar’s oak that lost its leaves after the hanging, mirrors the oak cut down on the campus of Jena after years of discrimination, culminating in the hanging of three nooses on its branches. No one was murdered at Jena, but who can number the broken spirits left hanging day after day, year after year by a student body, 85 percent white, many of whom had never learned how to treat human beings of different colors. Perhaps, Jena can teach all of America what we should have learned in the high, bloody cost of the Civil War.

A noose of rope, a noose of fear, is still a noose that kills the human spirit. Here is the Haunted Oak, telling his story through the poet’s voice

THE HAUNTED OAK

Pray, why are you so bare, so bare,
Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?

My leaves were green as the best, I trow
And sap ran free in my veins,
But I saw in the moonlight dim and weird
A fruitless victim’s pains.

I bent me down to hear his sigh;
I shook with his gurgling moan,
And I trembled sore when they rode away,
And left him here alone.

They’d charged him with the old, old crime,
And set him fast in jail:
Oh, why does the dog howl all night long,
And why does the night wind wail?

He prayed his prayer and he swore his oath,
And he raised his hand to the sky;
But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear,
And the steady tread drew nigh.

Who is it rides by night, by night,
Over the moonlit road?
And what is the spur that keeps the pace,
What is the galling goad?

And now they beat at the prison door,
“Ho, Keeper, do not stay!
We are friends of him whom you hold within,
And we fain would take him away.”

“From those who ride fast on our heels
With mind to do him wrong;
They have no care for his innocence,
And the rope they bear is long.”

They have fooled the jailer with lying words,
They have fooled the man with lies;
The bolts unbar, the locks are drawn,
And the great door open flies.

Now they have taken him from the jail,
And hard and fast they ride,
And the leader laughs way down in his throat,
As they halt my trunk beside.

Oh, the judge, he wore a mask of black,
And the doctor one of white,
And the minister with his oldest son,
Was curiously bedight.

Oh, foolish man, why weep you now?
‘Tis but a little space,
And the time will come when these shall dread
The memory of your face.

I feel the rope against my bark,
And the weight of him in my groin,
I feel in the throe of his final woe
The touch of my own last pain.

And never more shall leaves come forth
On the bough that bears the ban;
I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead,
From the curse of a guiltless man.

And ever the judge rides by, rides by,
And goes to hunt the deer,
And ever another rides his soul
In the guise of a mortal fear.

And ever the man he rides me hard,
And never a night stays he;
For I feel his curse as a haunted bough,
on the trunk of a haunted tree.

Dunbar, were he here, would tell the students, who, even now, are tying nooses to the backs of their trucks, jeering at their African-American peers, that nooses can destroy the spirits of those who tie and display them, every bit as much as those whose common heritage of lynching strikes deadly fear in their minds and souls at the sight of a noose.

The taunters mark themselves as barbarians, unworthy to be called either Americans or Christians, or even human beings. If justice were served, they would spend two hours every afternoon cleaning up the trash on the school campus and on the streets of Jena, with their parents at their sides, throughout the school year.

Lord, enlighten our national path, soften our hearts, touch us with Your love that discriminates not between black or white, rich or poor, bright or challenged. In Your Divine mercy, forgive us for spiritually hanging our brothers and sisters with nooses of fear. May we not, like the Haunted Oak, find ourselves “dried and dead” through the evil perpetrated, friendships refused, and mercy withheld. Amen.

Bibliography: The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar: Dodd, Mead & Company

Biography: Paul Laurence Dunbar: Benjamin Brawley

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