“De Good Book Says”
Wilmer Jennings, De Good Book Says (1931)
De Good Book Says is the title of the 1931 two-tone linocut by the painter and graphic artist Wilbur Jennings. The spare lines of the gallery at upper right suggest organ pipes; a preacher in a tailcoat is arched in mid-gesture at right; an oversized Bible rests on the pulpit just beneath the preacher’s head in profile. A woman at left bows toward the book, as the bodies of other worshippers trace roughly concentric arcs around the pulpit. And at the epicenter of the scene, the preacher’s open mouth, poised just above the open book — the Word, made manifest in body and soul; neither read nor written, but spoken, chanted, sung, danced, felt.
“The Awakening of Ethiopia”
Meta Warwick Fuller, The Awakening of Ethiopia (1921)
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”
The image is Meta Warwick Fuller’s sculpture, The Awakening of Ethiopia (1921). A woman in funereal swaddling turns with uplifted head. The lower part of her body is mummified; the bands on her upper body and torso, however, have begun to fall away. The woman bears a neme, the headdress of ancient Egyptian royalty. These features, of course, suggest Egypt. Yet together with the title of the sculpture, the work signifies the biblical oracle that mentions both Egypt and Ethiopia in poetic parallelism: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (Psalm 68:31), a verse that would come to be the most widely quoted scripture in all of African-American literature. The emergent woman of Fuller’s sculpture is, in the words of Du Bois, is the personification of “a mighty Negro past.” Writhing free “to escape both death and isolation,” she is at once “Ethiopia the shadowy” and “Egypt the Sphinx.”
“Preacher”
Charles White, Preacher (1940)
The image is Charles White’s painting, Preacher. The imposing figure suggests the anonymous preacher who peremptorily holds forth at a church gathering in W.E.B. Du Bois’ essay, “Of the Coming of John.”
He seized the Bible with his rough, huge hands; twice he raised it inarticulate, and then fairly burst into words, with rude and awful eloquence. He quivered, swayed, and bent; then rose aloft in perfect majesty, till the people moaned and wept, wailed and shouted, and a wild shrieking arose from the corners where all the pent–up feeling of the hour gathered itself and rushed into the air.
Dwarfed by the gargantuan preacher, cradled between his enormous fingers, is the Book of Slavery’s Children.
