Charles Reznikoff wrote at length in verse of the black experience in America. His longest poem, Testimony: The United States (1885-1915), Recitative, is divided up into sections according to geographical region and subject matter. Within these divisions, there is a repeating section entitled "Negroes," which is comprised of court testimony from cases involving blacks, rendered into verse patterns by the poet. These sections, taken as a whole, constitute the most substantial consideration given to black life by a white poet during the modernist period, and for once they let that life speak for itself, in the form of dispassionately reported depositions. One example shall have to serve:

Several white men went at night to the Negro's

house,

shot into it,

and set fire to his cotton on the gallery

his wife and children ran under the bed

and as the firing from guns and pistols went on

and the cotton blazed up, ran through a side door

into the woods.

The Negro himself, badly wounded, fled to the

house of a neighbor—

a white man--

and got inside.

He was followed,

and one of those who ran after him

put a shotgun against the white man's door

and shot a hole through it.

Justice, however, was not to be thwarted,

for five of the men who did this to the Negro

were tried:

for "unlawfully and maliciously

injuring and disfiguring"-

the white man's property.

Reznikoff allows the irony of America's racial injustices to foreground itself in these pieces, as in this one, which makes no comment on the fact that there were no charges for destroying a black man's property or for assaulting him and his family.