Harlem Shadows

Claude McKay * Track #76 On Emily Dickinson

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Album Emily Dickinson

ALBUM

Claude McKay

2015

Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay

Release Date

Tue Jan 01 1918

Performed by

Claude McKay

About

In three stanzas, employing end rhyme, McKay writes sympathetically of the experience of black sex workers in a “degrading urban environment.” A seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance, McKay was born in Jamaica, and migrated to the US to study at the Tuskegee Institute in 1912. He describes the wo...

Harlem Shadows Annotated

I hear the halting footsteps of a lass
In Negro Harlem when the night lets fall
Its veil. I see the shapes of girls who pass
To bend and barter at desire's call.
Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet
Go prowling through the night from street to street!

Through the long night until the silver break
Of day the little gray feet know no rest;
Through the lone night until the last snow-flake
Has dropped from heaven upon the earth's white breast,
The dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet
Are trudging, thinly shod, from street to street.

Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way
Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace,
Has pushed the timid little feet of clay,
The sacred brown feet of my fallen race!
Ah, heart of me, the weary, weary feet
In Harlem wandering from street to street.

Harlem Shadows

Claude McKay * Track #76 On Emily Dickinson

Download "Harlem Shadows"

Album Emily Dickinson

Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay

Release Date

Performed by

About

Harlem Shadows Annotated

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When did Claude McKay release Harlem Shadows?

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