LITR 4332 American Minority Literature 2013 Student Midterm Samples midterm assignment #2. Long essay

Tom Higginbotham

Colors, Colors, Ev'rywhere, But Not a Drop of Ink

on From the Dark Tower by Countee Cullen

            Having spent a good deal of my (admittedly short) life studying traditional literature, not an insignificant amount of time studying film literature, and just now applying what I know to game literature, I have, and am becoming evermore familiar with the multiplicity of uses for color in art and the abovesaid forms. While I am familiar with most of the shorthand between color and meaning, Countee Cullen's From the Dark Tower has kept me from forgetting that my perceptions and understanding of color are and have developed from an exclusively White, American background, a fact I like to believe that Cullen was anticipating and relying on, not only to surprise the expectations of his White audience, but to build up the hearts of his Black audience.
            The title itself, From the Dark Tower is, to borrow a word from the bit of my brain that just makes words up without checking with anyone first, anti-evocative. That is, it alludes to almost nothing in the poem which a conventional understanding of color and symbolism could prepare you for. Dark Tower evokes more scenes from The Lord of the Rings, Edgar Allan Poe, and an oft-divisive Jim Henson film than anything approaching the African minority and it seems to almost count on that. It opens with near mythological allusions, “we shall not always plant while others reap/ The golden increment of bursting fruit,” which, in addition to continuing the distraction of the reader from the subject matter also confirms to the reader that yes, normal conventions of color do apply, the evil is no doubt oncoming. The reader goes along with this proposed imagery of the unnamed, subjugated and bullied people for another eight or so lines until the poem finally gets to the turn; “The night whose sable breast relieves the stark/ White stars is no less lovely being dark.” This is, considering the size and scope of the poem, a major departure from the expected, the reader (read, myself) having very likely placed the titular “Dark Tower” in the same box as the “lesser men [that] hold their brothers cheap.” Instead the darkness is precisely the opposite; growing flowers, bearing many burdens, and relieving the sky from stark white stars.
            From the perspective of a White reader, it's not hard to see how jarring this small, relatively simple poem could be on a chromatic operating procedure. Common convention of western culture held that White was clean, pure, ordered, illuminating, and good while black was dirty, tainted, chaotic, obscuring, and generally not-so-good which is a fantastic convention if you are also White but maybe not quite so fantastic if your complexion is closer to the other end of the scale. It's easy to forget that white is also harsh, burning, oppressive, and needling while black is cool, calm, soft, and comforting. It's a bit of an eye-opener, all told, that there are groups and people who could routinely interpret colors in completely different ways and that the interpretations I had been supplied with could, in some ways, obfuscate my understanding of these peoples and their own artistic works.

            On the other hand, the reading from the perspective of a African American audience experiences many of the same mechanics, though likely resulting in a starkly different mood. They, being the they of somewhere between about 1925 and 1946, were also the “We” as in “We shall not always plant while others reap.” While I, as a White reader, was content to ponder on my preconceived notions of assignment of color to meaning, the first half of the poem has something specifically for the Black reader on their second reading, the meaning having been drastically changed since the turn. The poem becomes about encouragement, inspiration, consolation in the fact that situations will improve for the Black communities of America, that all they had to do was hold on, endure, and keep planting their flowers and, most importantly I think, that their race was not a negative attribute, but merely a contrast.

            As a brief aside, I'd like to point out the nature of the poem's, any my own, organizational structure. So far, my analysis has focused the “White reading” on the latter half of the poem and the “Black reading” on the former and it occurred to me at some point that this might come off as somewhat segregational. Quite apart from being an accidental artifact of my own biases, I believe this to be a conscious decision by Cullen in the construction of the poem. This poem comes from a time when, while technically free, African Americans were still heavily discriminated against, Jim Crow laws in full effect. From the Dark Tower provides two distinct messages, one of  uplifting if read from the perspective of an African American of the time and one which challenges the color perceptions of White readers. It seems extremely telling of Cullen's intent that, because of this binary structure in his poem, the work doesn't reach its full potential without both sets of eyes on it. In order to fully appreciate From the Dark Tower, one needs to be able to marry the two perspectives, something which the convenience of historical hindsight allows me to do alone.

            I haven't used the words “color code” in this essay once, despite that being exactly what the essay is about, and that is for a reason. To call it a code implies codification, permanence, and unified acceptance and if there is one thing that From the Dark Tower would seek to remind its readers, it is that such perceptions of color are entirely fluid. As recently as less than a hundred years ago, pink was a boy's color. We can't seem to decide if red represents salvation or damnation. Countee Cullen seemed to understand this and used not only his individual messages but the entire structure of the poem itself to bring together two divided races of humanity to see the fluidity of their similarities, rather than rigid differences.