Here we are mid-winter, ensconced in ice and snow and soul chilling cold. It is tomato soup and grilled cheese time. It is hearty beef stew time. It is time to hibernate and hope for spring and the freedom that comes with warmth and the flowing of new life.

Oh, it is all of that, and then I turn on the news, and I’m caught up in the darkness. And then I remembered Pauli Murray’s poem Dark Testament, and its meditations on hope and freedom. Here’s a sample:

Dark Testament. Pauli Murray.

In memory of Stephen Vincent Benét.

Freedom is a dream

Haunting as amber wine

Or worlds remembered out of time.

Not Eden’s gate, but freedom

Lures us down a trail of skulls

Where men forever crush the dreamers—

Never the dream.

VERSE 8

Hope is a crushed stalk

Between clenched fingers

Hope is a bird’s wing

Broken by a stone.

Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty —

A word whispered with the wind,

A dream of forty acres and a mule,

A cabin of one’s own and a moment to rest,

A name and place for one’s children

And children’s children at last . . .

Hope is a song in a weary throat.

Give me a song of hope

And a world where I can sing it.

Give me a song of faith

And a people to believe in it.

Give me a song of kindliness

And a country where I can live it.

Give me a song of hope and love

And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.

Now, by all means, head over to your local independently owned bookstore and find a copy of Pauli Murray’s book: Dark Testament: and Other Poems.

I first came to know Pauli Murray through her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt. In an essay published in 1952, Mrs. Roosevelt described Pauli Murray as, “One of my finest young friends is a charming woman lawyer . . . who has been quite a firebrand at times, but of whom I am very fond.” The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice describes her as:

A twentieth-century human rights activist, legal scholar, feminist, poet, author, Episcopal priest, labor organizer, multiracial Black, LGBTQ+ person from Durham, NC, who lived one of the most remarkable lives of the 20th century. S/he was the first Black person to earn a JSD (Doctor of the Science of Law) degree from Yale Law School, a founder of the National Organization for Women and the first Black person perceived as a woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. 

If you want to know more about her life and her friendship with Mrs. Roosevelt, I highly recommend The Firebrand and the First Lady, by Patricia Bell-Scott.