and this poem by edna margaret johnson is called "a white girl's prayer." and let me read it first, and then i will just say a couple things about why the whole book leads off with it. i'm not going to read every line, i'll just read enough for you to get the idea. edna margaret johnson was a white woman. i writhe in self-contempt, o god. my nordic flesh is but a curse. o god of life, remove this curse. the cords of shame are strangling me. remorse is mine. i would atone for white superiority, sheer carnal pride of my own race. tonight on bended knees i pray, free me from my despised flesh and make me yellow, bronze or black. and i start the book with that poem not because it's the best poem written, you know, in the late 1920s, but because this longing for blackness is a really important part of what's happening in white culture at this moment. langston hughes called it the vogue, the harlem vogue, the vogue for things black. and it was certainly connected to the primitivist movement, the idea that white culture was depleted and air rid and washed out and