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NEGRO FOLK RHYMES |
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ply," "Let's Marry—Courtship," "Shoo! Shoo!" "When I Go to Marry," and many others.
"Call" and "sponse" even runs, at least in one case, between whole Rhymes. "I Wouldn't Marry a Black Girl" as a "call" has for its "sponse": "I Wouldn't Marry a Yellow or a White Negro Girl." The Rhyme "I'd Rather Be a Negro Than a Poor White Man" is a "sponse" to an imaginary "call" that the Negro is inferior by nature.
After some consideration, as compiler of the Negro Rhymes, I thought I ought to say something of their rhyming system, but before doing this I want to consider for a little the general structure of a stanza in Negro Rhymes.
Of course there is no lawT, but the number of lines in a stanza of English poetry is commonly a multiple of two. The large majority of Negro Rhymes follows this same rule, but, even in case of these, the lines are so unsymmetrical that they make but the faintest approach to the commonly accepted standards. Then there are Rhymes with stanzas of three lines and there are those wTith five, six, and seven lines. This is because the imaginary music measure is the unit of measurement instead of feet, and the stanzas are all right so long as they run in consonance with the laws governing music measures
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