I gotta lov’ for Angela, I lov’ Carlotta, too. I no can marry both o’ dem, So w’at I gona do? O! Angela ees pretta girl, She gotta hair so black, so curl, An’ teeth so white as anytheeng. An’ O! she gotta voice to seeng, Dat mak’ your hearta feel eet must Jump up an’ dance or eet weell bust. An’ alla time she seeng, her eyes Dey smila like Italia’s skies, An’ makin’ flirtin’ looks at you— But dat ees all w’at she can do. Carlotta ees no gotta song, But she ees twice so big an’ strong As Angela, an’ she no look So beautiful—but she can cook. You oughta see her carry wood! I tal you w’at, eet do you good. When she ees be som’body’s wife She worka hard, you bat my life! She never gattin’ tired, too— But dat ees all w’at she can do. O! my! I weesh dat Angela Was strong for carry wood, Or else Carlotta gotta song An’ looka pretta good. I gotta lov’ for Angela, I lov’ Carlotta, too. I no can marry both o’ dem, So w’at I gona do? _Paul Laurence Dunbar_ Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in 1872 at Dayton, Ohio, the son of negro slaves. He was, before and after he began to write his interpretative verse, an elevator-boy. He tried newspaper work unsuccessfully and, in 1899, Dunbar was given a minor position in the Library of Congress at Washington, D. C. Although Dunbar wrote several volumes of short stories and two novels, he is most at home in his verse. And even here, his best work is not those straight, “literary English” pieces by which he set such store, but the racy rhymes written in negro dialect, alternately tender and mocking. Dunbar’s first collection, _Lyrics of Lowly Life_ (1896), contains many of his most characteristic poems. In an introduction, in which mention was made of the octoroon Dumas and the great Russian poet Pushkin, who was a mulatto, William Dean Howells wrote, “So far as I could remember, Paul Dunbar was the only man of pure African blood and of American civilization to feel the negro life æsthetically and express it lyrically.... His brilliant and unique achievement was to have studied the American negro objectively, and to have represented him as he found him—with humor, with sympathy, and yet with what the reader must instinctively feel to be entire truthfulness.”