Power & Passion
The Poems of Angelina Weld Grimké
The contributions and impact of African Americans on American culture are incalculable. (Hello jazz, blues, rock & roll, rhythm and blues, and on and on.) And since the heady days of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, African American visual and literary artists have justly been recognized as part of the engine of American culture.
As usual, though, it is largely the men who’ve garnered the most recognition, with scant few African American women noted in cultural texts. And, as usual again, Sapphic African American women and their art are rarely mentioned at all, with only few exceptions, usually among musicians and other showfolk, i.e. cabaret singer Gladys Bentley and comic Moms Mabley, profiled in this column in 2022.
But female novelists and poets, by the solitary nature of their work, are far less visible than the players, singers, comics, and other strutters upon the stage, and the literary output of African American women, buried under the double whammy of misogyny and racism, is too often neglected. This holds true even for those women who gained notice for their stories and poems during their lifetime, only to be ignored with the passage of time.
These days, though, the literary world is having a second look at the work of African American women writers, finding treasures and long-silenced lesbian voices. Among these is the work of the brilliant Angelina Weld Grimké.
Grimké’s background was atypical of the African American artists of the time. Born in Boston in 1880 to a former slave and mixed-race father who became a prominent attorney, and a white mother whose father was an active abolitionist, young Angelina’s early years were spent among political and intellectual elite. She attended excellent preparatory schools where she was afforded a first-rate education.
In those days, though, a biracial woman was not simply of two races but was considered Black, with Negro or Colored being the prevailing terms. Thus, her earliest poems were limited to publication in African American editions, such as the Colored American Magazine.
In time, though, and with the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, Grimké’s work was introduced to a wider audience. Prominent African American writers and tastemakers such as Countee Cullen and Alan Locke included Grimké’s poems in important anthologies.
While living in Washington, DC, Grimké wrote powerful anti-racist and anti-lynching articles for the W.E.B DuBois edited journal The Crisis, and a play, Rachel, addressing these same themes.
Politically and socially themed poems were not Grimké’s only output. Her Sapphic creative core expressed itself as early as 16 years of age, when Grimké declared her love for one Mary Burrill, writing, “I know you are too young now to become my wife, but I hope, darling, that in a few years you will come to me and be my love, my wife!”
As she matured, and her writing became more sophisticated beyond the plaintive longings of a teenage girl, and in poems gaining recognition today, are erotic love sonnets dedicated to various female lovers. In poems such as “A Mona Lisa,” “The Grass Fingers,” “El Beso,” “The Want of You,” and others, the eroticism is explicit but beautiful, lusty but graceful at the same time. A number of her unpublished poems are even more explicit in their longing for female passion, such as these lines:
If I might taste but once, just once,
The dew
Upon her lips
In 1930, after the death of her father, Grimké moved from Washington, DC to New York City, living there until her death in 1958. Largely withdrawing from social life, Grimké’s poems, too, receded into near obscurity until attitudes regarding the work of African Americans, women, and lesbians changed, and scholars were freer to evaluate Grimké’s work. The power, grace, longing, and passion in Grimké’s poems are now recognized as among the gems of American poetry. ▼
Ann Aptaker is the author of short stories and the Lambda & Goldie award winning Cantor Gold series. The latest in the series, Hunting Gold is available now; A Crime of Secrets will be released in July 2023.