SECRET AND LOST

The poems that accompany the pictures on the following pages are all by Negroes, and all but one are by Americans. Yet Africa too moves in the depths of each; tender and ghostly, pantherlike, a mother bereaved. For every black American, as Claude McKay's poem suggests, makes peace--or else fails to make peace--with ancestors whose names, whose very tribes, were long since lost to consciousness . Henri Rousseau's pitch-black Snake Charmer reigns at Paris' Jeu de Paume. She makes immense cold phallic serpents writhe into the moonlight, sleepily. One may identify with her, or them, but either way one finds Rousseau's image pasted permanently to the back of one's brainpan. Those serpents keep on slithering through the jungle of one's own nerve endings, while that level flute pours silence drawn from striped pools. Gilbert Stuart's Flautist is a man cut off from that silence, from wife and children, village, home. He sits soulnaked, haltered in other men's finery. Stuart, the master ironist who gave us a grandmotherly George Washington, here portrays a burnt-cork-face minstrel in reverse. This is a handsome black musician masked, glassed, in a transparent nightmare of snow white. The score before him is withered moonlight. The snakes who wove a raft to carry him have fled away beneath the sea. He holds his flute still, as a drowning man clutches a straw. There could be no greater gulf than that which separates Stuart's Flautist from the Black King painted by Hieronymus Bosch. The King is Caspar, the Moorish monarch and one of the Three Magi. He dominates Bosch's Epiphany at the Prado Museum in Madrid. The other Magi kneel to adore Jesus. Caspar, by contrast, stands splendidly erect. He is waiting to offer a silver coffer of myrrh: burial ointment nestled in a symbolic world egg. Within himself, one feels, Caspar holds greater treasures than the one between his calm hands.

His nature is watchful, balanced. He may have been the first of the Magi to see the Star of Bethlehem. His beauty is ideal; the painter shaped him to inspire. Seen at some distance, Caspar looms like a tower of onyx robed in slashed summer clouds. Peer closer; he becomes a full-lipped flower bitten by the sun, bleeding pollen.

The black schoolgirl in Philip Evergood's painting There'll Be a Change in the Weather stands as straight as Caspar the King. She is wearing sneakers just like the other kids, so white, and a pretty school frock. But she is mocked. The children who should be her friends stick out their tongues. The beauty of the painting hurts. One al most expects the mothering earth to open and receive the girl, to save her from the hell of that schoolyard.

And then, a soft remark of Ralph Ellison's floats into mind:

"You know, the skins of those thin-legged little girls who faced the mob in Little Rock marked them as Negro, but the spirit which directed their feet is the old uni versal urge toward freedom."

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