The poems that accompany the pictures on the following pages are all by Negroes, and all but one are by Americans. Yet Africa too moves in the depths of each; tender and ghostly, pantherlike, a mother bereaved. For every black American, as Claude McKay's poem suggests, makes peaceor else fails to make peacewith ancestors whose names, whose very tribes, were long since lost to consciousness . Henri Rousseau's pitch-black Snake Charmer reigns at Paris' Jeu de Paume. She makes immense cold phallic serpents writhe into the moonlight, sleepily. One may identify with her, or...
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