I gotta lov’ for Angela,
I lov’ Carlotta, too.
I no can marry both o’ dem,
So w’at I gona do?
O! Angela ees pretta girl,
She gotta hair so black, so curl,
An’ teeth so white as anytheeng.
An’ O! she gotta voice to seeng,
Dat mak’ your hearta feel eet must
Jump up an’ dance or eet weell bust.
An’ alla time she seeng, her eyes
Dey smila like Italia’s skies,
An’ makin’ flirtin’ looks at you—
But dat ees all w’at she can do.
Carlotta ees no gotta song,
But she ees twice so big an’ strong
As Angela, an’ she no look
So beautiful—but she can cook.
You oughta see her carry wood!
I tal you w’at, eet do you good.
When she ees be som’body’s wife
She worka hard, you bat my life!
She never gattin’ tired, too—
But dat ees all w’at she can do.
O! my! I weesh dat Angela
Was strong for carry wood,
Or else Carlotta gotta song
An’ looka pretta good.
I gotta lov’ for Angela,
I lov’ Carlotta, too.
I no can marry both o’ dem,
So w’at I gona do?
_Paul Laurence Dunbar_
Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in 1872 at Dayton, Ohio, the son of
negro slaves. He was, before and after he began to write his
interpretative verse, an elevator-boy. He tried newspaper work
unsuccessfully and, in 1899, Dunbar was given a minor position in
the Library of Congress at Washington, D. C.
Although Dunbar wrote several volumes of short stories and two
novels, he is most at home in his verse. And even here, his best
work is not those straight, “literary English” pieces by which he
set such store, but the racy rhymes written in negro dialect,
alternately tender and mocking. Dunbar’s first collection, _Lyrics
of Lowly Life_ (1896), contains many of his most characteristic
poems. In an introduction, in which mention was made of the octoroon
Dumas and the great Russian poet Pushkin, who was a mulatto, William
Dean Howells wrote, “So far as I could remember, Paul Dunbar was the
only man of pure African blood and of American civilization to feel
the negro life æsthetically and express it lyrically.... His
brilliant and unique achievement was to have studied the American
negro objectively, and to have represented him as he found him—with
humor, with sympathy, and yet with what the reader must
instinctively feel to be entire truthfulness.”
_Lyrics of the Hearthside_ (1899) and _Lyrics of Love and Laughter_
(1903) are two other volumes full of folk-stuff. And though the
final _Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow_ (1905) is less original, being
crowded with echoes of all kinds of poetry from the songs of Robert
Burns to the childhood rhymes of J. W. Riley, it contains a few of
Dunbar’s least-known but keenest interpretations.
Dunbar died in the city of his birth, Dayton, Ohio, February 10,
1906.