Recall for a moment De Witt Williams, as he visits in death the haunts of a youth that, after Brooks's treatment cannot remain ill-spent.  There is no small freight of literariness in the parody of the interstate journey of Lincoln's bier recorded in Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" and the skewed identification effected by the substitution of "Nothing but a plain black boy" for "Coming for tocarry me home" of the spiritual's second line. 

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Lindberg, Kathryne V.  "Whose  Canon ? Gwendolyn  Books : Founder at the Center of the 'Margins.'"   Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers.  Ed. Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano.  Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996.  283-311.