James Weldon Johnson
2 books
- Johnson moves between Lift Every Voice and Sing and the sermon-poems of God's Trombones, where The Creation turns a Black preacher's cadence into verse. Formal skill and pulpit fire at once; the spoken power survives on the page.
- You get a sly, unsettling voice as the unnamed narrator moves from a lynching he witnesses to life as a pianist and a man who can pass as white. The book is brief and clear-eyed, but its calmness makes the narrator’s compromises linger uncomfortably.