“Dorothea Blankenship, a younger contemporary and friend of Harlem Renaissance poets like Langston Hughes and Georgia Douglas Johnson. When the Depression devastated the Harlem literary scene, she returned to her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, and worked as a schoolteacher. But in 1937, she moved to Paris, where she flourished as a translator and art critic. She joined the Resistance in 1942, and was killed in a shoot-out with Nazi soldiers in 1944 during an attempt to sabotage a German troop train. The lines below are from her 1927 book, ‘Nothing Left of the Harvest.'” Pencil sketch, digital paint.

“Sweet wine, terrible power,
Secret intelligence, a desirable place
To hide, in the hollow of the light.
Stay close to the body, stay masked
In the evening, tell people you’re dreaming,
Let no one know what you’ve become,
mysteriously transformed
into a mysterious state of eternity.”