Caroling Dusk

My maternal grandfather, John Scruggs, was largely self-educated. A child of former slaves, it was not known if he ever actually went to school or who might have taught him to read, but in the foyer of his house was a china cabinet filled with books he had collected—some of them as partial payment from people for whom he’d done carpentry. My mother, a voracious reader, had read all of them as a girl.

A large format, beautifully illustrated English first edition of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote was so big it completely covered my lap. Its blue cover was embossed with gold and silver stamping. I never actually completely read it but marveled at its illustrations. Later Don Quixote would be my first Broadway musical. Tragically, this first edition, together with a Civil War rifle, was pawned by my Aunt Virginia for a paltry sum that she used to “play the numbers,” an illegal lottery.

My siblings and I grew up with our mother reading to us and weaving into her daily interactions with us dramatized quotes from literature, movies, and on occasion, the comics. For example, I remember once, when something was none of my business, she let me know in a Slavic accent by saying, “That is a secret known only to myself . . . and the King of Lower Slobbovia . . . and he’s gone missing!” Later I learned Lower Slobbovia was from Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner.”

The author’s mother

One Halloween, she recited Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” in the dark of our bedroom from memory. We didn’t understand the poem’s actual meaning, but her dramatic rendition had us squealing, “Stop, Mommy, stop!”

Six plus decades later, she has recently passed on, yet together we once recited from Act 5, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death….”

I can only speak for myself, but these and other moments like them will forever be among my fondest memories of home.

There was a period when she would take us to the library saying, “Pick out a book and read.” At that time, in the Metuchen Public Library was a single shelf labeled “American Negro Literature.” Its width was a little bit wider than a standard dresser drawer. I still find it suspect that even then, in the early nineteen sixties, the width and breadth of American Negro literature were just short of filling such a narrow little shelf. Nevertheless, on that shelf was a collection of poetry titled Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets. The book was edited by Countee Cullen, who also wrote the foreword. In it, I first read Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and numerous others, some still largely unknown today.

I found it wonderful! It was published in 1927, amid The Harlem Renaissance, and according to its library card, I was the only person to have taken it out in many decades. I have no idea of the number of times I must have taken it out, but I probably held the town record for any one person consecutively borrowing a single book. Years later, the book was long out of print; I couldn’t find a copy anywhere.

A favorite poem from the book is by Cullen himself, titled “Incident.” I would recite it often and post it now on social media every year during Black History Month:

INCIDENT
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, ‘Nigger.’

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.”

For years I had hoped to discover a copy of it somewhere like the Strand bookstore, a garage sale, a thrift shop, a stoop sale, etc., until finally, I stopped looking.

* * *

My wife, Meg, and I had a friend, Bill, who lived near The Promenade at the far end of Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights—just around the corner from where W. H. Auden had briefly lived on Pierrepont Lane. We’d often visit Bill, and while also enjoying his view of the harbor, we’d spend hours playing cards. One day, while I was visiting by myself, on his table, looking back at me, was a tattered copy of Caroling Dusk! He had bought it that day at a stoop sale in the neighborhood for a dollar. Enthusiastically, I told him my story. Given its condition, I didn’t dare ever borrow it, but sometimes when visiting, I would sit by myself on his couch and reread old favorites.

Less than a decade later, AIDS descended on New York’s gay community like the dreaded black plague, and our dear friend was among its victims. Some months after sitting shiva for Bill, I received a package in the mail. The return address was Shaker Heights in Cleveland. I’d completely forgotten Bill had grown up there. It was from his sister. Just inside the front cover of the book was a plain white notecard with a beautifully handwritten one-line message, “Bill wanted you to have this.”

The combined memories of our friend Bill and my personal history with Caroling Dusk caused me to sink into my chair and weep.

The book was finally reprinted in 1993 by Citadel Press. I now own a tattered, original 1927 edition and the paperback reprint.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash