The Octoroon
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.
“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
Georgia Douglas Johnson was born in Atlanta on September 10, 1880, and was raised in Rome, Georgia, and Atlanta. Johnson attended Atlanta University Normal School and studied music at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. She initially aspired to become a composer.