It’s just a simple little book from the early 1940s, about two hundred pages of verse illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings of Black Americans, men and women, mostly boys and girls, asleep, awake, happy, lonely, carefree, thoughtful. In my early days of teaching, it was one of the anthologies that I read from frequently, one of the few available at the time collecting poems from African Americans that would appeal to young readers. I cherished the book, but I didn’t own it. Each time I had to check it out of the library. Finally, a librarian who had heard me quote from it many times, was gracious enough to send me a copy that was being weeded from her collection. After all, by that time, the late 1980s, it did appear somewhat dated—its illustrations maybe a bit too cartoonish, its contents a bit too quaint and probably not often enough militant. But it’s a book that I still cherish: Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers,edited by Arna Bontemps, with drawings by Henrietta Bruce Sharon.

For me, I think it had been a wake-up call, an introduction to people like myself whom I had not had the privilege of knowing, an introduction to poets who had been mostly names, if that. Appropriately, the first thematic section is called “Waking Up.” The first two poems present James Weldon Johnson, one of those names we all knew well, in two of his contrasting styles:

An angel, robed in spotless white,
Bent down and kissed the sleeping Night.
Night woke to blush; the sprite was gone.
Men saw the blush and called it Dawn.
“Dawn”

’Lias! ’Lias! Bless de Lawd!
Don’ you know de day’s erbroad?
Ef you don’ git up, you scamp,
Dey’ll be trouble in dis camp.
T’ink I gwine to let you sleep
W’ile I meks yo’ boa’d an’ keep?
Dat’s a putty howdy-do—
Don’ you hyeah me, ’Lias—you?
from “In the Morning”

Neither of these was ever one of the selections that I read aloud, and they do not represent (I think) the richness and the abundant diversity of most of the poems in the collection. The first one is a modish imitation of conventional white poets; the second, an example of Johnson’s ebonics, perhaps authentic, but sounding to the unpracticed ear almost Uncle Remus-like. My choice from this section would have been Langston Hughes:

We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame.

Yesterday
A night-gone thing,
A sun-down name.

And dawn-today
Broad arch above the road we came.

We march!
from “Youth”

Simple, universal yet quietly particular, realistic yet hopeful, traditional in its form yet modern too. The not-too-subtle rhyme of “march” with a word within the preceding line is just right: an early hint of activism reflecting a “night-gone” past from which his generation was to emerge. “All experience,” after all, “is an arch / Where through gleams that untraveled world . . . .”

What did a young white teacher in the 1950s, having grown up in the racist South, have to bring to such an anthology? Well, the Negro spiritual, of course: “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “The Gospel Train” (“Get on board, little chillun, / Get on board, little chillun, / Get on board, little chillun, / There’s room for many a mo’”), songs like “John Henry” and “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” and the title poem, “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers” (“Golden slippers I’m gwinter wear, / To walk de golden streets”).

What did this young teacher find here? Oh, a treasure chest. Poems now well known, still treasured: Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Mother to Son,” “Dreams” (“Hold fast to dreams / For if dreams die / Life is a broken winged bird / That cannot fly”); Countee Cullen, “Incident: Baltimore” (“Now I was eight and very small, / And he was no whit bigger, / And so I smiled, but he poked out / His tongue, and called me 'Nigge'r’”) and “For a Lady I Know” (“She even thinks that up in heaven / Her class lies late and snores / While poor black cherubs rise at seven / To do celestial chores”), “For a Poet” (“I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth, / And laid them away in a box of gold...”); Claude McKay; Fenton Johnson; Sterling A. Brown; Mary Effie Lee Newsome; William Stanley Braithwaite, and the list goes on.

But perhaps more important for me then, and for my students, were poems unlike both of these types: simple, everyday experiences that we all might share. I can’t resist quoting just a few stanzas that spoke especially to me and to my rural Tennessee background:

It makes me hungry just to smell
The nice hot sassafras tea,
And that’s one thing I really like
That they say’s good for me.
from “Sassafras Tea”
Mary Effie Lee Newsome

This lovely flower fell to seed;
Work gently sun and rain;
She held it as her dying creed
That she would grow again.
“For My Grandmother”
Countee Cullen

When walking through the woods,
So many times I think I’ve found a four-leaf clover
But like a dream—I stoop to find the dream is over—
It’s a three.
from “Four-Leaf Clover”
Wesley Curtright

Easy on your drums,
Easy wind and rain,
And softer on your horns,
She will not dance again.
from “Dark Girl”
Arna Bontemps

When Susanna Jones wears red
A queen from some time-dead Egyptian night
Walks once again.
from “When She Wears Red”
Langston Hughes

For Time’s deft fingers scroll my brow
With fell relentless art—
I’m folding up my little dreams
Tonight, within my heart!
from “My Little Dreams”
Georgia Douglas Johnson

Would that all poetry anthologies for young reader (and for their adult counterparts, too!) had such appealing poems organized around such universal, yet appealing topics: "Clothes Lines and Water Pails," "Rain, Flood and Big Water," "Dressed Up," and "Folks" (jes folks -- one of favorites: I can hear my own "folks" talkin' in them even today).

My pilgrimage is through,
But life is calling you!
Fare high and far, my son,
A new day has begun,
The star-ways must be won!