in her monthly OPPORTUNITY column, “The
Ebony Flute,” shared the prospective editor’s hope
for the journal. Hayes envisioned the journal as
one that would “contrast other Negro magazines”
and “have no chip on its shoulder, but will attempt
to win friends by giving the Negro writer opportu-
nity for development and by presenting work of
distinction.”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the com-
poser and pianist Zenobia Powell Perry incorpo-
rated five of Hayes’s poems into a work entitled
“Threnody song cycle for soprano and piano.” In
addition, she composed a violin and piano piece
based on Hayes’s poem “Benediction.”
Hayes eventually worked with mentally dis-
abled persons as part of his job with the New Jersey
Employment Service.
Bibliography
Bennett, Gwendolyn. “The Ebony Flute.” Opportunity
(September 1926): 292–293.
Hayford, Gladys May Casely(1904–1950)
A Ghanaian poet who made her literary debut in
THEATLANTICMONTHLYbefore seeing her works
appear in leading Harlem Renaissance–era journals
such as THEMESSENGERand OPPORTUNITY.Her
father was Joseph Casely Hayford, a Fanti (a black
African ethnic group), editor, lawyer, and promi-
nent pan-Africanist. Her mother was Adelaide
Smith Casely Hayford, a Sierra Leone native,
writer, influential educator, and president of the
Sierra Leone branch of MARCUSGARVEY’s UNI-
VERSAL NEGRO IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION.
Gladys Hayford’s education included years at a
Welsh college in Colywyn Bay. She and her
mother had traveled to the United Kingdom in
order to obtain medical care. During Gladys’s
treatment for a birth defect, she learned English
and pursued studies in the British college system.
She later taught in the Girls’ Vocational School in
Sierra Leone that her mother, a graduate of the
Hersey Ladies College in the United Kingdom
and the Stuttgart Conservatory in Germany, had
founded in 1923. Gladys Hayford died in 1950 at
the age of 46 from cholera.
Gladys Hayford was convinced that she was
destined to write and to do so in ways that bene-
fited her homeland and the peoples of Africa. The
author’s statement that appeared in COUNTEE
CULLEN’s CAROLINGDUSKwith her poems noted
that by age 12, she “had the firm conviction that
[she] was meant to write for Africa.” She believed
that in order to combat the evils of colonialism
and oppression, it was vital to “imbue our own
people with the idea of their own beauty, superior-
ity, and individuality, with a love and admiration
for our own country, which has been systematically
suppressed.” Hayford’s poems revealed her skill for
fashioning revisionist work that transposed tradi-
tional Western themes or images into celebratory
African contexts. One of the best examples of this
occurs in “Nativity,” a poem that appeared first in
Opportunityin January 1927 and was republished
later that year in Caroling Dusk.The poem is filled
with images that recall the biblical nativity scene
with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Yet, here, the “Infant
born” is one “Wrapped in blue lappah that His
mother dyed” and he is “Layed on his father’s
home-tanned deer-skin hide.” Instead of angels
that herald the birth, “black bards burst their
bonds and sang” and “All the black babies who
from earth had fled, / Peeped through the clouds—
then gathered round His head, / Telling of things a
baby needs to do, / When first he opens his eyes on
wonders new.” The poem ends with a touching
scene that reinforces the matrilineal traditions of
Africa. Hayford imagines that in this nativity, “All
the black women brought their love so wise, / And
kissed the motherhood into [the infant’s] mother’s
eyes.”
The poems that Hayford published in Ameri-
can journals provided rich glimpses of African
landscapes and peoples. “Rainy Season Love
Song,” which was highly suggestive of the love
poems in the biblical Song of Solomon, featured a
young woman named Frangepani, after a tropical
tree with gorgeous flowers that often grow in Y-
shaped clusters. Hayford’s romantic heroine is at
one with a powerful natural world. She emerges
“[o]ut of the tense awed darkness... / Whilst the
blades of Heaven flash around her, and the roll of
thunder drums.” This African woman with a
“dusky throat” is one with whom “lightning’s in
love.” Her lover can only wonder if “there’s thun-
der hidden in the innermost parts of [her] soul.”
Other works, like “The Palm Wine Seller,” wereHayford, Gladys May Casely 227