God's Trombones

"And God stepped out on space, and He looked around and said: I'm lonely, I'll make me a world." By the end of that poem the same God is kneeling in the dust like a mammy bending over her baby, toiling over a lump of clay with his own great hands. James Weldon Johnson had heard the old-time preachers thunder and whisper a congregation to its feet, and he set seven of their sermons down in free verse: Noah at the ark, the prodigal son among the swine, the crucifixion, the judgment day, and a funeral where God tells Death to ride his pale white horse down to Savannah and fetch Sister Caroline home.