Mar 21, 2013 - Sale 2308

Sale 2308 - Lot 373

Unsold
Estimate: $ 3,500 - $ 5,000
(LITERATURE AND POETRY.) JOHNSON, GEORGIA DOUGLAS. Bronze. 101 pages. Small, squarish 8vo, original white cloth-backed printed brown paper-covered boards with printed brown paper label up the spine; top edge silver; binding slightly skewed. Boston: Brimmer, 1922

Additional Details

first edition, warmly inscribed to african-american journalist and politician roscoe conkling simmons:"Dec. 27-'22. To Mr. Roscoe C. Simmons shall we not dedicate this page to this day which we record happy + signal. Read page 15 from the Heart of a Woman & thank every God for your exclusion. Sincerely! Georgia Douglas Johnson." The poem to which Johnson alludes is titled "Repulse," and opens "Nobody cares when I am glad/ I beat upon their hearts in glee/ 'Drink, drink joy's brimming cup with me/ all echoless, my ecstasy---Nobody cares when I am glad." Georgia Douglas Johnson (circa 1880-1966), nee Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp was born in Atlanta, and received a degree in music from Oberlin. For many years Johnson led a quiet life as the wife of Lincoln "Link" Johnson, a prominent Washington D.C. attorney, who truly believed "a woman's place is in the home." There, she was able to host a literary salon, the only one of its kind in the nation's capital. She published her first book of poetry, "Heart of a Woman" at the age of 41, which was well-received but criticized for not addressing race. At the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance she published the present collection almost as a response. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in the Foreword to this little volume: "Those who know what it means to be a colored woman in 1922---and know it not so much in fact as in feeling, apprehension, unrest and delicate yet stern thought---must read Georgia Douglas Johnson's 'Bronze.'"