In her second book, Annie Allen, Brooks invented a form she called the “anniad” for her heroine, a “plain black girl” named Annie Allen whose interior life is richly detailed and deserving its own form; the name of course echoed the Iliad and the Aeneid. She won the Pulitzer Prize for the book, the first African-American to be so honored. J. Saunders Redding praised Annie Allen in Saturday Review of Literature but said, “I do not want to see Miss Brooks’s fine talents dribble away in the obscure and the too oblique.” This note would be sounded intermittently throughout her early career by those who were not responsive to her very particular sense of aesthetics as well as those who expected black literature to speak clearly and directly “to the people” and “their issues.” Her response in later years to those pressures would prove dramatic.
Brooks and Blakely’s second child, Nora, was born in 1951. Throughout the 1950s Brooks raised her children, reviewed books, worked at her poems, and wrote and published the novel Maud Martha. She cast the book as a novel in hopes it would earn her more money than the meager spoils that even a Pulitzer prize–winning poet could expect. Maud Martha was well reviewed when it appeared, but it wasn’t until the 1980s, with black feminist scholarly interest in teaching and writing about the book, that its extraordinariness became fully appreciated and the book found its place in larger conversations about the African-American novel and formal innovation.
In 1963 she accepted her first teaching job and also published her third collection of poems, The Bean Eaters. Many poems in that book were explicitly tied to social issues of the day (though no more so than her poems about World War II and the Bronzeville neighborhood), such as her two poems about Emmett Till, “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” and “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” and “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” which is set in the context of the violent battles for school desegregation. She also further honed the concise short lyric in poems such as “The Bean Eaters,” “Old Mary,” and her most famous poem, “We Real Cool”:
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
The poem’s brilliance lies in its economy and manipulation of space. By the end, the missing “we” that the poem’s pattern has led us to anticipate is a yawning chasm, the absence of the we, these young black boys, from the poem and from the earth once they have frittered their lives away. Brooks read the poem with a swift, whispery “we,” moving quickly past the word and using it metronomically to punctuate the rhythm of the poem. The poem’s bebop seduces, as the boys at the pool hall are seduced by the finger-popping siren song of the street, which may make you finger-pop but ultimately offers nothing that lasts.
“Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat” tells a small, explosive story of a white woman who is horrified to see her child kissed by the black maid. Brooks concentrates all the energy and focus of the poem on the single moment in which the white mother witnesses this kiss and experiences:
Heat at the hairline, heat between the bowels,
Examining seeming coarse unnatural scene,
She saw all things except herself serene:
Child, big black woman, pretty kitchen towels.
This is a scenario Brooks has explored in poems like “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters . . .”: the corrosive effects of racism on the children and white women who are a part of its system. She critiques ideologies of domestic order and white femininity that would have white women believe that the pedestals on which they’ve been placed are desirable and secure. That devastating line, “She saw all things except herself serene” is where Brooks puts the mirror to her character’s face and exposes the woman’s sense of superiority and order.
Most critics, and Brooks herself, divide her creative life into two parts. The dividing line was 1967, when at the Fisk writers’ conference—in the confrontational midst of vibrant young black writers who were envisioning a new social order and the role the arts should play in it—she had a revelation. “It frightens me to realize that if I had died before the age of fifty,” she wrote in her autobiography, “I would have died a ‘negro’ fraction.” She soon left the main stream publishing house Harper and Row and intensified her relationship and affiliation with young black poets such as Haki Madhubuti (formerly Don L. Lee), wearing her hair in what she called a “natural,” that most symbolic of hairstyles, the Afro. Further, the style of her work changed discernibly. The tight formal coil of her previous work loosened and the allusions and references were no longer as dense.
Her subject matter did not change—her subjects were still mostly black people who lived in the kitchenette apartments of Bronzeville. Brooks was always clear in her work about who black people were and what it meant to write about them. Her final collection for Harper and Row was In the Mecca, published in 1968. Brooks aficionados will notice one major omission from this collection, her great late 1960s epic “In the Mecca.” It is only length that prevented its inclusion here. Brooks tried to write this important poem for over thirty years—including a version in prose— after her brief stint working for a charlatan “spiritual adviser” named French who sold love and luck potions door to door in the Mecca apartment building in Chicago. The poem centers on the drama of a child named Pepita, who has gone missing in the warrens of the decrepit building. We meet the building’s residents who together form a portrait of a black community along the lines of A Street in Bronzeville. But in “In the Mecca” the community is in crisis and has fallen prey to its own problems. The child, who is a poet and the hope of her family and community, is found murdered under the bed of one of the building’s residents. The poem ends and so closes the first half of the book in an awful silence that asks, in 1968, what next? The poems included here from In the Mecca (from “Boy Breaking Glass” to “The Second Sermon on the Warpland”) serve as an answer to that question as the community reconstitutes itself and finds a philosophy (“Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind”) with which to move forward.
After In the Mecca, Brooks published only with black presses, from Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press to her own The David Company, ending with Madhubuti’s Third World Press. She continued to explore form and its challenges in her poems as she asked herself what it meant for her to be “an African poet.” The long poem “The Near-Johannesburg Boy,” written before the end of apartheid and with its powerful refrain “We shall flail in the Hot Time,” concludes without punctuation. Brooks said she did that “because there’s no punctuation in that situation.” She also coined the term and form “verse journalism” (as she had coined “sonnet-ballad” earlier) for the remarkable piece commissioned by Ebony magazine and published in August 1971, “In Montgomery,” which explored that seat of the civil rights movement in the words of its residents, after the whirl of that “hot time” was stilled. The poem was recently published in book form with other poems, some never before collected, in the posthumous book of the same name.
Brooks’s self-commentary was always pithy and vivid. In an interview conducted by Professor Joanne Gabbin, who created the Furious Flower Poetry Festival at James Madison University to commemorate Brooks’s work specifically and African-American poetry in general, Brooks made these assessments: “I am ‘an organic’ Chicagoan.” “The Black experience is any experience that a Black person has.” “I want to report; I want to record. I go inside myself, bring out what I feel, put it on paper, look at it, pull out all of the clichés. I will work hard in that way.” “I don’t like the term African American. It is very excluding. I like to think of Blacks as family. . . . As a people, we are not of one accord on what we should be called. Some people say it doesn’t matter, ‘call me anything.’ I think that is a pitiful decision.”
Brook
s titled her collected poems Blacks. She continually strove to articulate an unambiguous race pride in a woman’s voice that was true to the complex and contradictory poetic details of black people’s lives. She was not hyperbolical; she wrote of mighty heroes and those with feet of clay. In her very celebratoriness she practiced a kind of sober love for community. In In the Mecca, for example, she described “blackness stern and blunt and beautiful, / organ-rich blackness telling a terrible story.” She makes her readers think emotionally and philosophically about what it is to be black and therefore human, to struggle through blackness to struggle against and within one’s community. She made public her own struggle for racial self-acceptance in her autobiography, and she was a pioneer in her presentation of the intimate perspectives of young black protagonists whose ideas often ran counter to any expected communal doctrine.
In December 2000, Brooks died at 83. Her loved ones at her bedside said that she died literally pen in hand. On the day of her funeral, Chicago saw a snowstorm wilder and fiercer than any in years. Nonetheless, people came from all over to celebrate that great life, soul, and artistic accomplishment. There was a sense of an era coming to a close. Brooks’s work moved with the times, but her early poems remained indelible. In the 1940s her remarkable voice burst on the scene, and she was an acclaimed poet for the entire second half of the twentieth century, taking us from the age of the Harlem Renaissance through twenty years past the Black Arts and Black Power movements. She was a central figure in the equally potent parallel movements in Chicago, the late years of the Chicago renaissance in the early 1940s and then the Chicago Black Arts movement, which in a sense was institutionalized with the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University and the creative writing MFA there (only the second at a predominately black university), which uses writers of Africa and the African Diaspora as its core.
The late jazz-folk singer Oscar Brown, Jr., with whom Brooks worked in community arts in the early 1960s in Chicago, sang a song called “Elegy,” which is Brooks’s “of DeWitt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery” set to music. The poem invokes the spiritual “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” but as Brown sang it, he invoked no tonal remnant of the original. The poem refuses to “carry me home.” Perhaps there is no heaven for DeWitt Williams, no heaven for so many “plain” black boys and girls, those whom Brooks “loved so well” in her poems. The repetition of “sweet” in the line “sweet sweet chariot” resists the full match of the spiritual reference and emphasizes instead the sweet life DeWitt and so many like him loved and which in part took him down: sweet women, sweet wine, “liquid joy.” And yet, true sweetness, too, which Brooks knew and understood and respected because she knew and respected the people she wrote about. She wrote truly great poems whose technical achievements are still guiding many poets. The taut strength of her lines, her formal rigor combined with subtle invention, her syntactical originality, all hold up over the years. At the end of all of this work, its sense of intimacy is most striking. She wrote poems about people she loved who lived in a place she loved and knew. Those necessary American songs had not been sung before Gwendolyn Brooks and now they have.
Elizabeth Alexander
2005
FROM
A STREET IN BRONZEVILLE | 1945
FROM A Street in Bronzeville
kitchenette building
We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”
But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms
Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?
We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.
the mother
Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?—
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.
hunchback girl: she thinks of heaven
My Father, it is surely a blue place
And straight. Right. Regular. Where I shall find
No need for scholarly nonchalance or looks
A little to the left or guards upon the
Heart to halt love that runs without crookedness
Along its crooked corridors. My Father,
It is a planned place surely. Out of coils,
Unscrewed, released, no more to be marvelous,
I shall walk straightly through most proper halls
Proper myself, princess of properness.
a song in the front yard
I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose.
I want to go in the back yard now
And maybe down the alley,
To where the charity children play.
I want a good time today.
They do some wonderful things.
They have some wonderful fun.
My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine
How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine.
My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae
Will grow up to be a bad woman.
That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late
(On account of last winter he sold our back gate.)
But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do.
And I’d like to be a bad woman, too,
And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace
And strut down the streets with paint on my face.
the ballad of chocolate Mabbie
It was Mabbie without the grammar school gates.
And Mabbie was all of seven.
And Mabbie was cut from a chocolate bar.
And Mabbie thought life was heaven.
The grammar school gates were the pearly gates,
For Willie Boone went to school.
When she sa
t by him in history class
Was only her eyes were cool.
It was Mabbie without the grammar school gates
Waiting for Willie Boone.
Half hour after the closing bell!
He would surely be coming soon.
Oh, warm is the waiting for joys, my dears!
And it cannot be too long.
Oh, pity the little poor chocolate lips
That carry the bubble of song!
Out came the saucily bold Willie Boone.
It was woe for our Mabbie now.
He wore like a jewel a lemon-hued lynx
With sand-waves loving her brow.
It was Mabbie alone by the grammar school gates.
Yet chocolate companions had she:
Mabbie on Mabbie with hush in the heart.
Mabbie on Mabbie to be.
the preacher: ruminates behind the sermon
I think it must be lonely to be God.
The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks Page 2