CANAAN, DINAH (b. 1846), poet, born at New Carthage (q.v.) in the second year of the city, where she lives and teaches in the present year; author of the "Hymns of the Charter" (1878); and, in the settled judgment of the present writer, who has weighed the word and will stand to it, the first poet her people have given the Commonwealth. Her father, freed by the Reunion, took at his freedom the name of the land that was promised, came to New Carthage with the founding families of 1844, and followed the mason's trade there until his death. Her mother had been sold twice before her twentieth year — a fact this article sets down because the daughter's poetry never has. The poet was thus of the first generation of her line born free, and born in a town where freedom was the common condition and not the exception; the reader of the Hymns will find that circumstance is not incidental to them.
She learned her letters in the town's first school, from masters of whom more than one had learned their own in secret and under penalties; her earliest verses were printed, while she was still a girl, in the New Carthage Courant, from the printing-office of Cyrus Freeman (q.v.); and since 1872 she has taught letters in the Freedmen's College (q.v.), where two generations of the teachers now keeping the common schools of Carolina and the Indies had their English under her hand. The present writer, her colleague through the whole of that time, is aware that a Provost's testimony to his own faculty may be discounted, and offers the roll of her pupils as evidence of the sort that needs no character.
The "Hymns of the Charter" were printed at New Carthage in 1878, at the press Freeman founded, in the year after his death: three-and-thirty hymns in the plain metres of the psalm-books, made to be sung. Their matter is the Charter (q.v.) of 1858 — what it promised, to whom, and before what Witness; their music the congregations supplied out of the inheritance treated under MUSIC OF THE FREEDMEN, THE (q.v.), so that the collection stands where the psalmody (q.v.) of the Profession and the sorrow-songs of the plantation meet, and is claimed with justice by both. The best known of them is sung to a refrain of two lines:
Write me my name in the Book of the Free, Where no man writeth after Thee.
The couplet asks of Heaven what the Charter had already, in the letter of it, promised of earth. It was written in the year the provincial registration statutes were new; it has been sung every year since to a larger application; and the congregations of the lowcountry, who between the courthouse roll and the Book of her refrain have long since concluded which is the durable register, have never needed the point explained to them.
Her hymns are sung in the freedmen congregations of two provinces and in no few others; they are sung, which is the whole ambition of a hymn, by thousands who could not tell the maker's name; and wherever the Charter's text has been pared by the statutes described elsewhere in this Encyclopaedia, her lines have kept its promise current among the very people the paring was meant to discourage. Of verse later than the Hymns she has printed little; asked once by the present writer when a second collection might be looked for, she answered that the first had not yet been answered. A poet is measured at last by what her people can do with her. By that measure this article set her stature in its first sentence, deliberately; and the writer, who has taught beside her for nearly forty years, is content that the Commonwealth's settled judgment, whenever it arrives at her, will find nothing here to take back. (J. E. C.)