“To Breathe the Impulse of My Heart”

Michigan Poet: Charles Henry Shoeman

May 8, 2023

On March 7, 1902, a celebrated young poet left Ann Arbor for England after giving a “farewell entertainment” at Newberry Hall.[1]

Or did he?

It’s uncertain whether Charles Henry Shoeman ever made it from the banks of the Huron to the banks of the Thames.[2] What is known for certain is that Shoeman’s book, A Dream and Other Poems (1899), made an impact on his city and beyond.

Born in May 1876 in Goshen, Indiana, the grandson of an enslaved man, Shoeman appears in the Ann Arbor City Directory for the first time in 1898 along with his father, Charles J. (both identified as “barbers”). By 1900, the United States Census lists six members of the Shoeman household, including Charles, Sr.; his wife, Epsie; sister-in-law, Sabonia Lewis (dressmaker); a second son, Lewis H. (“at school”); and boarder Oscar W. Baker (“law student–college”).[3] This was a literate family. Not only was the entire household able to read and write (literacy among American Blacks was thought to be around 54 percent in 1900), the advanced erudition of Shoeman’s poetry is unmistakable.[4]

The sharpest image we have of the poet, literally and figuratively, comes not from the historical record but from his collection of poetry, published when he was twenty-five by Ann Arbor bookseller and publisher George Wahr. The slim, handsome volume contains forty-six poems, a preface, and formal photograph of the author. In the preface, Shoeman writes:

This book is presented with all the hope that I suppose is natural to an effort of its kind. I also feel that no apology is necessary and only trust that I may be given the consideration that any one under similar circumstances would expect…. [W]ith whatever spirit my few lines are read, curiosity or hope, I trust that I may interest those who are curious and satisfy those who are hopeful.[5]

Shoeman acknowledged that not all of his poems will “harmonize with the opinions of some localities,” but expressed a hope that “some hearts will beat in accord with the sentiments of the first efforts of my sincerity,” and that his poems “advanced a single idea that may benefit some brothers who have been even less fortunate than myself.”[6]

The years 1899 to 1902 seem to have been good for the young writer. In 1900, A Dream went into a second edition and was favorably reviewed by the Detroit News-Tribune.[7] The Detroit INFORMER provided a copy to every new subscriber, speaking enthusiastically of Shoeman as “the youngest Afro-American writer in Michigan.”[8] In 1901, he was invited to speak in Detroit at the Michigan State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs and his work drew praise in an American Journal of Sociology article covering the event.[9]

For a modern reader, Shoeman’s poems can feel problematic: some seem imitative, others are written in a heavy southern dialect. As for them being imitative, Paul Sporn, professor emeritus of English at Wayne State University, argues that “the strategy of imitation is not profoundly understood if it is viewed as surrender and compliance.” Rather, Sporn writes, it “challenged the unscientific and racist concept of innate inferiority, forcing the dominant culture into a corner, where hegemony either applied its own standards of acceptance without discrimination or acted in exposed hypocrisy.”[10] To understand how poets of the period used dialect, University of California–Irvine historian Dickson D. Bruce explains:

When black writers wrote in dialect, they took the form out of the hands of whites and made it their own...The negative connotations of dialect literature were undermined, because it was hard to view it as a weapon of racism in the hands of black writers. Indeed… a literary device used to deny creativity and intelligence in blacks was now used creatively by black people themselves.[11]

By 1906, the Ann Arbor City Directory listed Shoeman’s occupation as “lecturer”; by 1908, “photographer.” By 1909, he disappears from the directory, along with the rest of his family and the family business. One year later, the 1910 U.S. Census puts him almost 250 miles northwest of Ann Arbor in Crystal Lake Township, Benzie County: his declared occupation, photographer.

What compelled the poet to move, without his family, so far north? Was he attracted to opportunities at nearby Benzonia Academy, which had been offering integrated college preparatory education since its founding in 1858? I am only able to speculate. At this writing, I’ve not been able to find any information about his life beyond this census. No death date or location. No further publications. Like the identity of “Leona” —to whom A Dream is dedicated—there is still much to be discovered about this important Michigan poet who struggled against the violent race prejudice of his time. His poem “Doubt”—probably written at the height of his literary fame—describes how he also struggled internally, as all poets do, with the brave act of putting his life into verse and his verse into the world.

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Will later years’ more careful song,
Teach me the lesson, I was wrong
To heed a voice to make a start,
To breath the impulse of my heart,
That youthful song was weak and wrong?

I may regret, because so young,
That from this heart I’ve meekly sung;
I may regret with bitter tears
This impulse of my early years—
I may regret, I may regret.

‘Tis hard to think ‘tis all in vain
That precious time was idly slain;
That I was born for other things,
And not the song that in me rings.
How bitter yet I may regret.

Newberry Hall, Ann Arbor, circa 1900. Image: U of M digital collections.

[1] “Poet Shoeman will give a farewell entertainment at Newberry Hall on March 7 and that night he leaves for England.” Notice in the “Local Brevities” column in the Ann Arbor Argus-Democrat, 21 Feb. 1902.

[2] Ann Arbor News, 8 Feb. 1970. His name disappears from the Ann Arbor City Directory in 1903 and reappears in 1905.

[3] Bay City Times, 9 Feb. 2012. Oscar Baker graduated from the University of Michigan Law Department in 1902, joined the state’s first integrated law firm in Bay City, and became the first African American president of a county bar association.

[4] Center for Education Statistics. (https://nces.ed.gov).

[5] Charles Henry Shoeman, A Dream and Other Poems (Ann Arbor; George Wahr, 1899).

[6] Ibid

[7] Paul Sporn, Against Itself: The Federal Theater and Writers’ Projects in the Midwest (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995).

[8] “To New Subscribers! For $1.50 we offer a year’s subscription to the INFORMER and a copy of Henry Shoeman’s book of poems, “A Dream,” and other stories [sic]. Do not fail to get a copy of this book, which is from the pen of the youngest Afro-American writer in Michigan.” Detroit Informer, 13 Jan 1900.

[9] Mary Taylor Blauvelt, “The Race Problem as Discussed by Women,” American Journal of Sociology 6, no. 5 (March 1901.

[10] Sporn, Against Itself.

[11] Dickson Bruce, Jr., Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition 1877-1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989)