My friend Robert bought himself a motorcycle for Christmas. He takes it out as often as he can, mostly on short trips. But he has hooked up with an ad-hoc group of cyclists who just love to ride. They’ve taken trips together – all total strangers. It’s much like being at auctions. To start, we’re all strangers, but as we bump into each other at the same auctions, we become compatriots very fast. Sharing tips or new auction houses or our last best bargain.
Robert brought his baby over recently for me to see. It was beautiful, a dark color that looked black to me, but that he said was deep gray – a charcoal gray perhaps. I can see why he’s enthralled. It must be liberating out on the open road, no metal shield to obstruct the view – just you and the wind. He loves it for the same reasons that it scares me to death (no metal shield and glass windows to protect you, crazy drivers who ignore you).
He’s saving the space on the gas tank for a special poem he came across about a brown girl, a poem that exalts the beauty of black women. I asked him about the poem. He emailed the poet’s name to me: Gwendolyn Bennett. The poem is called “To a Dark Girl.”
Curious, I Googled her and learned that not only was she a poet, but a black artist, short story writer, essayist. Now, I’m really intrigued. I’d found another black artist – female, at that – who lived during the Harlem Renaissance. I had never heard of her. How could this be? Had she been overlooked?
According to a website with content compiled by the University of Illinois, “although she never collected her published poetry into a volume nor produced a collection of short stories, Gwendolyn Bennett was recognized as a versatile artist and significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance.” Her poetry was included in several major anthologies at that time, though.
Here’s the poem: 
I love you for your brownness,
And the rounded darkness of your breast;
I love you for the breaking sadness in your voice
And shadows where your wayward eyelids rest.
Something of old forgotten queens
Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk,
And something of the shackled slave
Sobs in the rhythm of your talk.
Oh, little brown girl, born for sorrow’s mate,
Keep all you have of queenliness,
Forgetting that you once were slave,
And let your full lips laugh at Fate!
Don’t you just love it? I can see why Robert was moved by it. It says what we as black women forget sometimes about ourselves. And what men like Robert want us to remember.
According to my Google search, Bennett moved with her second husband in the late 1960s to Kutztown, PA, and they opened an antiques shop. Now, I really do feel connected to her – antiques, auctions. She’s my latest “find,” and I’ll be on the lookout for both her art and writings.
You never know when or where you’ll find something special. What have you “found” lately?
