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February 18, 2024

The Octoroon

Georgia Douglas Johnson

One drop of midnight in the dawn of life’s pulsating stream
Marks her an alien from her kind, a shade amid its gleam.
Forevermore her step she bends, insular, strange, apart—
And none can read the riddle of her strangely warring heart.
The stormy current of her blood beats like a mighty sea
Against the man-wrought iron bars of her captivity.
For refuge, succor, peace, and rest, she seeks that humble fold
Whose every breath is kindliness, whose hearts are purest gold.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 18, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“The Octoroon” is anthologized in Negro Poets and their Poems, edited by Robert T. Kerlin (Associated Publishers Inc., 1923), and is included in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s second poetry collection, Bronze: A Book of Verse (B. J. Brimmer Company, 1922). On August 4, 1922, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote the foreword for Bronze and said of Johnson’s poetry: “Her word is simple, sometimes trite, but it is singularly sincere and true, and as a revelation of the soul struggle of the women of a race it is invaluable.” In “Rediscovering the Harlem Renaissance: Georgia Douglas Johnson, ‘The New Negro Poet,’” professor of English Erlene Stetson praises Johnson’s book and affirms that the poems in Bronze, such as “[The] Octoroon,” “while thematically interesting in their subject of the mulatto as an angle of vision/a perspective for being observer of the races, are much more vigorous as a musical exegesis: embracing a fusion of style (counterpoint) and theme (the mulatto) into the full coherence of a cadenza.”

Georgia Douglas Johnson, born in Atlanta on September 10, 1880, was a poet and has been regarded as the foremost female poet of the Harlem Renaissance. She is the author of The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems (The Cornhill Company, 1918), Bronze: A Book of Verse (B. J. Brimmer Company, 1922), and An Autumn Love Cycle (Harold Vinal, 1928). She was awarded an honorary doctorate by Atlanta University in 1965. Johnson died in 1966.

Bronze: A Book of Verse
(B. J. Brimmer Company, 1922)

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Thanks to Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Jeffers’s curatorial approach and find out more about our Guest Editors for the year.

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"The Octoroon" by Georgia Douglas Johnson

The Octoroon

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