SELECTED OBJECTS

"Being a Negro woman is the world’s most exciting game of ‘Taboo:’ By hell there is nothing you can do that you want to do—and by heaven you are going to do it anyhow.

We do not climb into the jim crow galleries of scenario houses. We stay away and read. I read garden and seed catalogs, Browning, Houseman, Whitman, Saturday Evening Post, detective tales, Atlantic Monthly, American Mercury, Crisis, Opportunity, Vanity Fair, Hibbert’s Journal, oh anything …

I can cook delicious things to eat … We have a lovely home—one that money did not buy—it was born and evolved slowly out of our passionate poverty, stricken agony to own our home, happiness."

—Anne Spencer (March 1926)

"A Lover Muses"

“Day-torch, Flame-flower, cool-hot Beauty,
I cannot see - I cannot hear your flutety
Voice lure your loving swain,
But I know one other to whom you are
in beauty born in vain:
Hair like the setting sun, Her eyes a
rising star,
Motions gracious as reeds by Babylon,
bar all your competing;
Hands like, how like, brown lilies sweet,
Cloth of gold were fair enough to touch her feet…
Ah, how the senses flood at my repeating,
As once in her fire-lit heart I
felt the furies beating, beating”

—Anne Spencer (n.d.)

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not many things I know nor do,
But one:
This my poor heart,
So vacant and so frank
can love you
can [laud?] you
and dispossess
itself of content
and of strength"

—Anne Spencer (n.d.)