Stars in Alabama

 

Stars in Alabama

By Jessie Redmon Fauset

 

In Alabama 

Stars hang down so low, 

So low, they purge the soul 

With their infinity. 

Beneath their holy glance 

Essential good 

Rises to mingle with them 

In that skiey sea.

 

At noon 

Within the sandy cotton-field 

Beyond the clay, red road 

Bordered with green, 

A Negro lad and lass 

Cling hand in hand, 

And passion, hot-eyed, hot-lipped, 

Lurks unseen.

 

But in the evening 

When the skies lean down, 

He’s but a wistful boy, 

A saintly maiden she, 

For Alabama stars 

Hang down so low, 

So low, they purge the soul 

With their infinity.

 

 

About the Poem

 

“Stars in Alabama” appears in The Crisis, vol. 35, no. 1 (January 1928). In Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer(The Whitston Publishing Company, 1981), literary biographer Carolyn Wedin Sylvander writes, “‘Stars in Alabama,’ in The Crisis in January 1928, contrasts in three stanzas the passionate heat of noon cotton-fields with the pure holiness of the Alabama night. [. . .] The first lines are again repeated as evening returns. Fauset has moved through this poem from personal feeling to a quietly effective comment on passion and its context.” In “The Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance,” published in The Harlem Renaissance (Chelsea House Publishers, 2004), Maureen Honey, former professor of English and director of women’s studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, remarks, “While poets looked to natural settings in general for space in which to savor the abandonment of confining roles, night was sought most frequently as it was a time when the objectifying gaze was covered by sleep and the freedom to be at one with the darkness could be safely enjoyed.” 

 

 

About the Poet

 

Jessie Redmon Fauset was born on April 27, 1882, in Camden County, New Jersey. She grew up in Philadelphia and attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls. She received a scholarship to study at Cornell University, where she was likely the first Black female student, and she graduated with a BA in classical languages in 1905. After college, she worked as a teacher in Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

 

In 1912, Fauset began to write for the NAACP’s official magazine, The Crisis, which was cofounded and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois. After several years contributing poems, essays, and reviews to The Crisis, Fauset became the journal’s literary editor in 1919, moving to New York City for the position.

 

In her role as literary editor, Fauset introduced then-unknown writers, including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Anne Spencer, to a national audience. In his memoir The Big Sea, Hughes writes, “Jessie Fauset at The Crisis, Charles Johnson at Opportunity, and Alain Locke in Washington were the three people who midwifed the so-called New Negro literature into being. Kind and critical—but not too critical for the young—they nursed us along until our books were born.”

 

Along with her poetry and short fiction in The Crisis, Fauset published several novels known for their portrayal of middle-class African American life, including There Is Confusion (Boni and Liveright, 1924) and Plum Bun (Matthews & Marrot, 1928). She also edited The Brownies’ Book, a periodical for African American children, from 1920 to 1921.

 

Fauset left The Crisis in 1926 to teach French at a high school in the Bronx. She married Herbert Harris, a businessman, in 1929, and they lived together in New Jersey until his death in 1958. Fauset then returned to Philadelphia, where she lived until her death on April 30, 1961.