Ho: my brother, Pass me not by so scornfully I’m doing this living of being black, Perhaps I bear your own life-pack, And heavy, heavy is the load That bends my body to the road.
But I have kept a smile for fate, I neither cry, nor cringe, nor hate, Intrepidly, I strive to bear This handicap: The planets wear The Maker’s imprint, and with mine I swing into their rhythmic line; I ask—only for destiny, Mine, not thine.
Where this text comes from
First published in The New Negro (1925), ed. Alain Locke. This date is uncertain. 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. [1]
Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.
Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/georgia-douglas-johnson_poetry, poetry.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).
Earlier sources (13)
This poem as JSON or plain text . Line anchors #L1–#L14.
Cite this poem
Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880?–1966).
“The Ordeal.” First published in The New Negro (1925), ed. Alain Locke.
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/georgia-douglas-johnson/the-ordeal/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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