"Dreamer"
Slavery and the Church Resolved

This paradoxical capacity to exchange utility jackets of violence for religious robes, and back again, moves like a worm through the heart of English and Anglo-American history. And this paradox found within Newton's life is the theme of "Dreamer," Primus St. John's tremendous poem, which names and composes the major third of his most recent book of poetry.

St. John, a professor of English at Portland State University and an African-American, isn't interested in indicting or absolving Newton, but in understanding him, and through him the "reasoning of slavery" itself. St. John has drawn on Newton's frank personal letters and ship journals, and thought deeply about the meaning of this unique life. The reader can feel the roots of St. John's deep knowledge in "Dreamer," a long, complex poem sounding in clear language Newton's experiences and dreams.

Newton's mother, "devout as gunpowder / Seemingly clairvoyant," dies when he is seven. His father, a "master of ships, / Lively in the Mediterranean trade," sends him to sea at ten. He has a pious adolescence until 17 when he:

Falls in love,
Misses his ship,
A free thinker now,
Less of a thorn
In the side of God.
But the sea takes Newton back when, in standard practice of the time, he is kidnapped and pressed into service by the British Navy. St. John doesn't ridicule the rich ironies in Newton's life, he meditates on them because he knows that slavery isn't over, we are all still caught in its story right here.

How do we fit together
When we are not free?
What kind of animal are we?
How many heads do we have?
How many tails?
Newton deserts; is captured, flogged, and returned to duty; suddenly begins to sing; is traded to a European slave dealer in Sierra Leone where he himself is treated like a slave for a short time.

Here St. John pauses in the story, balancing the chronology with more dream interpretations, more relevant ancient wisdoms, and achieves strong dramatic tension. To St. John, Newton is a dreamer - not in the helium-filled 1960s sense of the term, but in the Hebraic sense, the Jungian sense - he listens to the dreams of his sleep and the dreams of his illuminations. Dreams, St. John says:

... are without reason,
without solution, without proof, the
unedited version of our love, our aspiration,
our hurt ...
And dream omens often foretell their opposite: "To find money in your dream is not fortunate at all." Newton chooses the dream of fortune and becomes a slaver; he sails captive Africans on the middle passage where a third of them will die. He marries, prospers, completes his:

... initiation
Into the ubiquitous life
Of sin.
For a life without sin
Is no life at all.
Newton finally leaves off slaving for a plush job in Liverpool. It is there he hears his call to the ministry and to the Abolitionist movement against the slave trade.

... John will
change his dreams, now, from the menstrual
dreams of the slaver to the menthol dreams
of the minister. Showing the devastating evil
we do, like a storm, is only a stepping
stone to something else.
St. John's "Dreamer" demands to be read with Robert Hayden's classic 1962 poem "Middle Passage" and Charles Johnson's 1990 novel of the same name. St. John has followed Hayden's poetic techniques in masterfully blending historical details of the slave trade with acute, contemporary perspectives on the fuller meanings of those facts. Hayden's poem depicts the horror the Africans were subjected to on their "voyage through death" and how they rebelled against it with "The deep immortal human wish, / the timeless will."

Though Seattle writer Charles Johnson's rousing novel about a free black making the bad choice of stowing away on a slave ship has the trappings of a historical novel set in the 1830s, I believe it's on the St. John's and Hayden's tack, projecting contemporary wisdom about black and white history in the person of Rutherford Calloun back into the time of the middle passage in order to understand it anew.

St. John also puts the tragedy of the middle passage and the enigma of John Newton into context with the other poems in Dreamer. In the section before the long poem, St. John trumps sterile, pompous academic history about Africans and their art with tender and three-dimensional poems imagined from individual Africans' points of view. In the final section of this satisfying book, St. John writes of the descendants of those uprooted Africans in contemporary Barbados, where his grandparents were from.

St. John's poetry has scaled a new height with Dreamer. The book's power is based, though, on the language and line breaks he honed in Skins on the Earth (1976) and the explorations of his heart and America's that he first accomplished in Love Is Not a Consolation; It Is a Light (1982).

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Contents on this page were published in the October/November, 1993 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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