234 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900Hot,” which reveals even in its title just how much Dunbar owed to other dialect
poets like Riley. “Dey is times in life when Nature / Seems to slip a cog an’ go, /”
“When De Co’n Pone’s Hot” begins, “Jes’ a-rattlin’ down creation, / Lak an’ ocean’s
overflow.” Like the Riley poem it clearly alludes to and imitates, it then goes on to
rehearse and celebrate the simple pleasures of life down on the family farm. The
poetry of Dunbar was popular precisely because, in it, the poet adopted a mask
shaped by white culture. In more conventional, formal pieces, as in the poem to
“Harriet Beecher Stowe” (1899), the mask simply involves him in adopting the
genteel idiom of that culture. In “When De Co’n Pone’s Hot” the situation is a little
more complicated, but the effect is the same. A close imitation of a white dialect
poem, it uses a kind of dialect that underwrites a stereotype of black people created
by whites; and it belongs to a tradition of minstrel literature devised by white writers.
An additional, piquant irony is that Dunbar never knew the Deep South that was the
setting for most of his poems. So, when he writes about “the master” sitting on his
“wide veranda white,” his “dreamy thoughts drowned / In the softly flowing sound”
of the black field hands returning from the cornfields, he is writing about some-
thing that for him is, in every sense, the result of a white mediation. This is the poet
assuming a regionalist mask with a vengeance.
Alexander Posey also wrote poetry that closely observed the poetic conventions of
the time. Within the limits of those conventions, however, he was able to pursue
themes that reflected his sense of his Native American heritage. His “Ode to Sequoya”
(1899), for example, is an elaborately formal, highly rhetorical poem, with no sense
of traditions other than those of white culture in its manner of expression. But what
the poem commemorates and celebrates is the inventor of the Cherokee syllabary:
“the people’s language,” as the poet puts it, which, even when “the last memorial”
of the tribe has been “swept away” from “this great continent,” ensures there will
remain a record of its “ancient lore.” Believing that English was an inadequate,
inappropriate language for poetry by a Native American, Posey gradually moved
away from con ventional verse. He first tried to write poems that caught the rhythms
and reflected the idioms of his native Creek. “Hotgun on the Death of Yadeka Harjo”
(1908) is an example. In it, the narrator Hotgun, whom Posey elsewhere described
as “a philos opher, carpenter, blacksmith, fiddler, clock-maker, worker in metals and
a maker of medicines,” recalls the passing away of a famous figure in the Creek
Nation, whom he personally knew. The trouble is, it sounds little different from
white dialect verse. “ ‘Well so’, Hotgun, he say, / ‘My ol’-time frien’, Yadeka Harjo, he /
Was died the other day.’ ” Perhaps for this reason, Posey gradually devoted less time
to poetry. Turning to journalism, he established the first daily newspaper published
by a Native American. And, as a substitute for editorials, he began writing the Fus
Fixico letters. In these, using the persona of Fus Fixico (Heartless Bird), a full-
blooded Creek, Posey commented on local life, customs, and politics: satirizing
those who profited from the policy of individual land allotment, say, or Native
American complicity in the greed and materialism of the times. “The Injin he sell
land and sell land, and the white man he give whiskey and give whiskey and put his
arm around the Injin’s neck,” we are told in letter number 44 (1904). This is dialectGGray_c03.indd 234ray_c 03 .indd 234 8 8/1/2011 7:54:18 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 18 AM