{
 "id": "georgia-douglas-johnson/the-ordeal",
 "title": "The Ordeal",
 "ordinal": null,
 "subtitle": null,
 "poet": "Georgia Douglas Johnson",
 "poet_slug": "georgia-douglas-johnson",
 "language": "en",
 "book": "Poetry",
 "book_slug": null,
 "book_kind": "compilation",
 "sequence": null,
 "container": null,
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1925,
  "venue": "The New Negro (1925), ed. Alain Locke",
  "note": "Located in the scan on disk, printed under this title on page 146 in the “Negro Youth Speaks” section and signed “—Georgia Douglas Johnson.”; all fourteen lines agree with the corpus text. First located printing. The anthology reprints work that had appeared elsewhere, and its acknowledgements credit “The Brimmer Co.: for two Poems from ‘Bronze’” by Johnson, while only one of her four poems here — “To Samuel Coleridge-Taylor” — is in the 1922 Bronze scan on disk. An earlier printing of this poem is therefore possible and has not been located.",
  "uncertain": true,
  "sources": [
   "https://archive.org/details/newnegrointerpre00unse"
  ]
 },
 "source": {
  "kind": "standard-ebooks",
  "repo": "standardebooks/georgia-douglas-johnson_poetry",
  "file": "poetry.xhtml",
  "upstream": [
   "https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/georgia-douglas-johnson-the-heart-of-a-woman-full-text-1918",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/103153234",
   "https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/georgia-douglas-johnson-bronze-full-text-1922",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000781515",
   "https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/poems-by-georgia-douglas-johnson-in-the-new-negro-1925",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000340210",
   "https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/georgia-douglas-johnson-an-autumn-love-cycle-full-text-1928",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102777177",
   "https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/georgia-douglas-johnson-poems-published-in-the-crisis-1910-1926",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000502434",
   "https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/poems-published-in-the-messenger-magazine",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000056822",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000064962"
  ],
  "rights": "public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931)"
 },
 "verification": {
  "level": "structural-only",
  "last_checked": "2026-08-12"
 },
 "stats": {
  "n_lines": 14,
  "n_stanzas": 2,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 37,
  "max_indent": 0
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "Ho: my brother,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Pass me not by so scornfully",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I’m doing this living of being black,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Perhaps I bear your own life-pack,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And heavy, heavy is the load",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That bends my body to the road.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "But I have kept a smile for fate,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I neither cry, nor cringe, nor hate,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Intrepidly, I strive to bear",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "This handicap: The planets wear",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The Maker’s imprint, and with mine",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I swing into their rhythmic line;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I ask⁠—only for destiny,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Mine, not thine.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}