Poetry
God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
James Weldon Johnson · 1927
Opening lines
O Lord, we come this morning
Knee-bowed and body-bent
Before thy throne of grace.
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
An opening prayer, then seven sermons in verse: the Creation, the Prodigal Son, a funeral oration, the Ark, the Crucifixion, the Exodus and the Last Judgment. God, feeling lonely, sits down by a wide river and shapes man out of clay like a mother bending over her child. The prodigal son loses himself in the gambling dens and drinking houses of Babylon. In Savannah, Death rides down from Heaven on a white horse to fetch Sister Caroline, worn out, while the preacher comforts her kin. Gabriel blows the trumpet of the Judgment.
Context
The preface dates the idea of the book to a Sunday evening in Kansas City, in front of a visiting preacher, and says it wants to fix something of the old Black preacher, who is disappearing. Johnson chooses not to record the accent and to render the movement alone, the repetitions, the silences and the rises. The sermon on the Creation had appeared in a magazine before the book, which Aaron Douglas illustrated. Its author had given, fifteen years earlier, without signing it, a book that many read as a true account.
Who it is for
A prayer and seven sermons, which the preface says were made to be chanted rather than read. Translated into French by Claude Julien in 1960.
Prizes and reception
Harmon Foundation gold medal for 1927; a critical and popular success, regarded as the best of his poetic work.
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