An' the stars began to fall
A standing figure looks up while about twenty white stars fall through black beams that cross the page. Aaron Douglas drew it for The New Negro, the anthology Alain Locke edited in 1925, where it is printed at page 198 and captioned with a line from a spiritual. The plate faces the first page of Alain Locke's essay on the spirituals.
- 1925
- Drawing printed as a full-page plate in a book; no physical original is catalogued
About Aaron Douglas
What the drawing shows
Black shapes on white paper, with no grey anywhere. A figure stands near the centre, drawn only to the shoulders, the head in hard profile facing right with the eye cut out as a thin white slit and a white notch at the jaw. A blocky collar sits below the head, and the body continues into a mass of black that fills the lower middle of the plate. A jagged white crack runs straight down through that mass.
Long narrow beams radiate outward and downward from behind the head, drawn as tapering black bars with white channels inside them. White five-pointed stars are set along the channels, each with a thin white tail running back the way it came. Counting the whole plate, there are about twenty stars.
Two wide black wedges lie across the upper right, apart from the rest. The upper one carries two stars, the lower one six, all of them falling to the right.
Two more figures are down among the beams. One lies at the lower right, the head in profile facing left with a white eye and a raised limb bent above it. A second, smaller head with a white eye slit is at the lower centre, below a bare leg and foot that stand on one of the beams. In the upper left corner a heavy angular mass ends in a hooked curl, with a zigzag dropping away from it.
Two spellings of the same title
The plate itself is captioned "An' the stars began to fall." — the contracted form, with the full stop inside the quotation marks. The book's own list of illustrations spells it "And the Stars began to Fall" and gives the page as 198. The atlas uses the caption on the plate.
The line is from a spiritual, and the plate is placed to be read as one. It is printed on the leaf facing page 199, where Alain Locke's essay The Negro Spirituals begins under a band of Aaron Douglas's own ornament. The companion plate, "Roll, Jordan, Roll", is two leaves earlier at page 196.
Wikimedia Commons holds a photograph of the same plate under the title used on the page, filed as a scan of The New Negro at page 198 and tagged public domain in the United States. The reproduction published here is cropped instead from the Internet Archive's flat scan of the first edition, which is the cleaner image of the two.
The book it belongs to
The New Negro: An Interpretation was published in New York by Albert and Charles Boni in 1925, edited by Alain Locke, a philosopher teaching at Howard University. It collects essays, fiction, poetry and drama from more than thirty contributors and is generally treated as the book that announced the Harlem Renaissance to the country.
Aaron Douglas was not its main illustrator. The list of illustrations credits the cover design, the book decorations and the portraits to Winold Reiss, the German-born artist who had begun teaching him that year, and gives Aaron Douglas eight titled plates. Alain Locke states the arrangement in his own essay, and names the younger man in the same paragraph.
“But the work of young artists like Archibald Motley, Otto Farrill, Albert Smith, John Urquhart, Samuel Blount, and especially that of Charles Keene and Aaron Douglas shows the promising beginning of an art movement instead of just the cropping out of isolated talent.”
The book's note on contributors credits him with ten decorative designs in all. It gives his birth year as 1898, where the Kansas Historical Society records 26 May 1899. It also says he was then engaged in art work in New York City, with drawings published in Opportunity, Vanity Fair and the Theatre Arts Monthly.
Drawn six years before Paris
Aaron Douglas moved to Harlem in June 1925, and the Kansas Historical Society records the intention he brought with him: to pursue an art career ultimately in Paris. The New Negro appeared the same year. He did not reach the city until 1931, when he spent about a year enrolled at the Académie Scandinave, a private art school there.
The drawing therefore predates the trip by six years, and nothing in it touches France. It matters to the Paris story only as evidence of what he could already do before he went.
Close reading
Reading the work, detail by detail
Everything on the plate points down. Start with the two wedges of falling stars in the upper right, then the standing head at the centre, then the beams that carry stars to the lower left, then the two figures lying among them, and finish on the printed caption.
1.The wedges of falling stars
Two wedges, eight stars between them, all falling to the right. Each star has a single straight tail cut out of the black behind it, so the direction of travel is fixed. The wedges do not touch anything else on the plate; they hang in white paper on three sides.
2.The standing figure's head
One figure, and the only one on the plate drawn upright. The head faces right, against the direction the stars are falling. A small point stands up from the crown. Two beams pass directly behind the skull, each carrying a white star, so the head is read against light on both sides.
3.The beams at the lower left
Five stars in this crop, each at the end of its own white channel. The channels are cut so narrow that the star reads as the widest point of the line, which is how the plate shows stars moving rather than sitting. All five travel downward and to the left.
4.The figure lying at the right
Two figures in one view. The one at the right is down on the ground, the head in profile facing left with the arm folded above it. At the left a single bare leg ends in a foot planted flat on one of the beams, which is all that shows of the second. White paper opens between them as a wide triangle.
5.The head at the lower centre
One figure, the smallest of the three, and the lowest on the plate. Only the head and one shoulder are legible; the rest is absorbed into the black mass around it. The beams that carried stars down the middle of the design end just above it, so no light reaches this corner.
6.The printed caption
The caption is set in italic type with the quotation marks and the full stop inside them, and it is the plate's own title. The book's list of illustrations spells the same title "And the Stars began to Fall". Above it the black of the design stops in an uneven step rather than a ruled line.
Timeline
1925
Aaron Douglas moves to Harlem in June, intending an art career ultimately in Paris, and begins studying with Winold Reiss.
1925
The New Negro: An Interpretation is published in New York by Albert and Charles Boni. The plate is printed at page 198, facing the opening of Alain Locke's essay The Negro Spirituals.
1931
Reaches Paris and spends about a year at the Académie Scandinave.
2021
The drawing enters the public domain in the United States on 1 January, ninety-five years after publication. It stays in copyright in France until the end of 2049.
Where to see it
A viewing location has not yet been listed for this work.
Frequently asked questions
What is An' the stars began to fall by Aaron Douglas?
A full-page black-and-white drawing printed at page 198 of The New Negro, the anthology Alain Locke edited in 1925. A standing figure in hard profile looks up while about twenty white stars fall through tapering black beams, with two more figures lying among them at the bottom of the plate.
Why are there two spellings of the title?
Because the book disagrees with itself. The caption printed under the plate reads "An' the stars began to fall.", and the book's list of illustrations spells the same title "And the Stars began to Fall". The atlas uses the caption on the plate, which is the form Wikimedia Commons also uses for its scan.
Where can you see An' the stars began to fall?
In the book. The New Negro was published by Albert and Charles Boni in New York in 1925, and the Internet Archive's scan of the first edition carries the plate. Wikimedia Commons also holds a photograph of the same page. No museum record consulted names an original drawing of it.
Is An' the stars began to fall in the public domain?
In the United States, yes, since 1 January 2021, when the ninety-five-year term for works published in 1925 ran out. It remains in copyright in France and the rest of the European Union, where Aaron Douglas died in 1979 and the term runs to the end of 2049. Wikimedia Commons hosts a scan of the plate under its United States public-domain tag.
Who illustrated The New Negro?
Winold Reiss did most of it. The book's list of illustrations credits him with the cover design, the book decorations and every portrait and type sketch, and Alain Locke writes that Winold Reiss supplied the main illustrative material for the volume. Aaron Douglas contributed eight titled plates and, by the contributors' note, ten decorative designs in all.
What does the drawing have to do with Paris?
Nothing directly. Aaron Douglas drew it in 1925, six years before he reached Paris, and its subject is a line from a spiritual. Its Paris interest is negative evidence: the flat profiles, the slit eye and the bands of drawn light were already his before he studied at the Académie Scandinave in 1931.
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References
The sources below include collection records, catalogues, scholarly research, and primary materials that informed this page. They document An' the stars began to fall, its making, and its place in cultural history.
1The New Negro: An Interpretation
EssaysAlbert and Charles Boni, New York, 1925Used forThe first edition, scanned by the Internet Archive: the plate and its caption, the book's list of the eight Aaron Douglas plates, the note on contributors, and Alain Locke's sentence naming him.
2Douglas, Aaron
WebsiteKansas Historical Society, KansapediaUsed forThe Kansas Historical Society, for the birth date of 26 May 1899, the move to Harlem in June 1925 with Paris as the goal, and the Paris year of 1931.
3Aaron Douglas
WebsiteAmistad Research Center, Tulane UniversityUsed forThe archive that records the Académie Scandinave enrolment.
4World Changing Faculty: Alain LeRoy Locke
WebsiteHoward UniversityUsed forHoward University on Alain Locke, its philosophy professor and the anthology's editor.
5The New Negro Movement — NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom
WebsiteLibrary of CongressUsed forThe Library of Congress on the New Negro movement the anthology named.
These references provide the documented foundation for this work's history and interpretation. Claim-level citations remain attached to the specific claims they support.
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