The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks

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The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks Page 7

by Elizabeth Alexander (ed)


  A thing or two. To show that snappy-eyed mother,

  That sassy, Northern, brown-black—

  Nothing could stop Mississippi.

  He knew that. Big Fella

  Knew that.

  And, what was so good, Mississippi knew that.

  Nothing and nothing could stop Mississippi.

  They could send in their petitions, and scar

  Their newspapers with bleeding headlines. Their governors

  Could appeal to Washington. . . .

  “What I want,” the older baby said, “is ’lasses on my jam.”

  Whereupon the younger baby

  Picked up the molasses pitcher and threw

  The molasses in his brother’s face. Instantly

  The Fine Prince leaned across the table and slapped

  The small and smiling criminal.

  She did not speak. When the Hand

  Came down and away, and she could look at her child,

  At her baby-child,

  She could think only of blood.

  Surely her baby’s cheek

  Had disappeared, and in its place, surely,

  Hung a heaviness, a lengthening red, a red that had no end.

  She shook her head. It was not true, of course.

  It was not true at all. The

  Child’s face was as always, the

  Color of the paste in her paste-jar.

  She left the table, to the tune of the children’s lamentations, which were shriller

  Than ever. She

  Looked out of a window. She said not a word. That

  Was one of the new Somethings—

  The fear,

  Tying her as with iron.

  Suddenly she felt his hands upon her. He had followed her

  To the window. The children were whimpering now.

  Such bits of tots. And she, their mother,

  Could not protect them. She looked at her shoulders, still

  Gripped in the claim of his hands. She tried, but could not resist the idea

  That a red ooze was seeping, spreading darkly, thickly, slowly,

  Over her white shoulders, her own shoulders,

  And over all of Earth and Mars.

  He whispered something to her, did the Fine Prince, something

  About love, something about love and night and intention.

  She heard no hoof-beat of the horse and saw no flash of the shining steel.

  He pulled her face around to meet

  His, and there it was, close close,

  For the first time in all those days and nights.

  His mouth, wet and red,

  So very, very, very red,

  Closed over hers.

  Then a sickness heaved within her. The courtroom Coca-Cola,

  The courtroom beer and hate and sweat and drone,

  Pushed like a wall against her. She wanted to bear it.

  But his mouth would not go away and neither would the

  Decapitated exclamation points in that Other Woman’s eyes.

  She did not scream.

  She stood there.

  But a hatred for him burst into glorious flower,

  And its perfume enclasped them—big,

  Bigger than all magnolias.

  The last bleak news of the ballad.

  The rest of the rugged music.

  The last quatrain.

  The Last Quatrain of the

  Ballad of Emmett Till

  After the Murder,

  After the Burial

  Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing;

  the tint of pulled taffy.

  She sits in a red room,

  drinking black coffee.

  She kisses her killed boy.

  And she is sorry.

  Chaos in windy grays

  through a red prairie.

  The Chicago Defender Sends

  a Man to Little Rock

  Fall, 1957

  In Little Rock the people bear

  Babes, and comb and part their hair

  And watch the want ads, put repair

  To roof and latch. While wheat toast burns

  A woman waters multiferns.

  Time upholds or overturns

  The many, tight, and small concerns.

  In Little Rock the people sing

  Sunday hymns like anything,

  Through Sunday pomp and polishing.

  And after testament and tunes,

  Some soften Sunday afternoons

  With lemon tea and Lorna Doones.

  I forecast

  And I believe

  Come Christmas Little Rock will cleave

  To Christmas tree and trifle, weave,

  From laugh and tinsel, texture fast.

  In Little Rock is baseball; Barcarolle.

  That hotness in July . . . the uniformed figures raw and implacable

  And not intellectual,

  Batting the hotness or clawing the suffering dust.

  The Open Air Concert, on the special twilight green . . .

  When Beethoven is brutal or whispers to lady-like air.

  Blanket-sitters are solemn, as Johann troubles to lean

  To tell them what to mean. . . .

  There is love, too, in Little Rock. Soft women softly

  Opening themselves in kindness,

  Or, pitying one’s blindness,

  Awaiting one’s pleasure

  In azure

  Glory with anguished rose at the root. . . .

  To wash away old semi-discomfitures.

  They re-teach purple and unsullen blue.

  The wispy soils go. And uncertain

  Half-havings have they clarified to sures.

  In Little Rock they know

  Not answering the telephone is a way of rejecting life,

  That it is our business to be bothered, is our business

  To cherish bores or boredom, be polite

  To lies and love and many-faceted fuzziness.

  I scratch my head, massage the hate-I-had.

  I blink across my prim and pencilled pad.

  The saga I was sent for is not down.

  Because there is a puzzle in this town.

  The biggest News I do not dare

  Telegraph to the Editor’s chair:

  “They are like people everywhere.”

  The angry Editor would reply

  In hundred harryings of Why.

  And true, they are hurling spittle, rock,

  Garbage and fruit in Little Rock.

  And I saw coiling storm a-writhe

  On bright madonnas. And a scythe

  Of men harassing brownish girls.

  (The bows and barrettes in the curls

  And braids declined away from joy.)

  I saw a bleeding brownish boy. . . .

  The lariat lynch-wish I deplored.

  The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.

  The Lovers of the Poor

  arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League

  Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting

  In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag

  Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting

  Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,

  The pink paint on the innocence of fear;

  Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall.

  Cutting with knives served by their softest care,

  Served by their love, so barbarously fair.

  Whose mothers taught: You’d better not be cruel!

  You had better not throw stones upon the wrens!

  Herein they kiss and coddle and assault

  Anew and dearly in the innocence

  With which they baffle nature. Who are full,

  Sleek, tender-clad, fit, fiftyish, a-glow, all

  Sweetly abortive, hinting at fat fruit,

  Judge it high time that fiftyish fingers felt

  Beneath the lovelier planes of enterprise.

  To resurrect
. To moisten with milky chill.

  To be a random hitching post or plush.

  To be, for wet eyes, random and handy hem.

  Their guild is giving money to the poor.

  The worthy poor. The very very worthy

  And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?

  Perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim

  Nor—passionate. In truth, what they could wish

  Is—something less than derelict or dull.

  Not staunch enough to stab, though, gaze for gaze!

  God shield them sharply from the beggar-bold!

  The noxious needy ones whose battle’s bald

  Nonetheless for being voiceless, hits one down.

  But it’s all so bad! and entirely too much for them.

  The stench; the urine, cabbage, and dead beans,

  Dead porridges of assorted dusty grains,

  The old smoke, heavy diapers, and, they’re told,

  Something called chitterlings. The darkness. Drawn

  Darkness, or dirty light. The soil that stirs.

  The soil that looks the soil of centuries.

  And for that matter the general oldness. Old

  Wood. Old marble. Old tile. Old old old.

  Not homekind Oldness! Not Lake Forest, Glencoe.

  Nothing is sturdy, nothing is majestic,

  There is no quiet drama, no rubbed glaze, no

  Unkillable infirmity of such

  A tasteful turn as lately they have left,

  Glencoe, Lake Forest, and to which their cars

  Must presently restore them. When they’re done

  With dullards and distortions of this fistic

  Patience of the poor and put-upon.

  They’ve never seen such a make-do-ness as

  Newspaper rugs before! In this, this “flat,”

  Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich

  Rugs of the morning (tattered! the bespattered . . .),

  Readies to spread clean rugs for afternoon.

  Here is a scene for you. The Ladies look,

  In horror, behind a substantial citizeness

  Whose trains clank out across her swollen heart.

  Who, arms akimbo, almost fills a door.

  All tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor

  And tortured thereover, potato peelings, soft-

  Eyed kitten, hunched-up, haggard, to-be-hurt.

  Their League is allotting largesse to the Lost.

  But to put their clean, their pretty money, to put

  Their money collected from delicate rose-fingers

  Tipped with their hundred flawless rose-nails seems . . .

  They own Spode, Lowestoft, candelabra,

  Mantels, and hostess gowns, and sunburst clocks,

  Turtle soup, Chippendale, red satin “hangings,”

  Aubussons and Hattie Carnegie. They Winter

  In Palm Beach; cross the Water in June; attend,

  When suitable, the nice Art Institute;

  Buy the right books in the best bindings; saunter

  On Michigan, Easter mornings, in sun or wind.

  Oh Squalor! This sick four-story hulk, this fibre

  With fissures everywhere! Why, what are bringings

  Of loathe-love largesse? What shall peril hungers

  So old old, what shall flatter the desolate?

  Tin can, blocked fire escape and chitterling

  And swaggering seeking youth and the puzzled wreckage

  Of the middle passage, and urine and stale shames

  And, again, the porridges of the underslung

  And children children children. Heavens! That

  Was a rat, surely, off there, in the shadows? Long

  And long-tailed? Gray? The Ladies from the Ladies’

  Betterment League agree it will be better

  To achieve the outer air that rights and steadies,

  To hie to a house that does not holler, to ring

  Bells elsetime, better presently to cater

  To no more Possibilities, to get

  Away. Perhaps the money can be posted.

  Perhaps they two may choose another Slum!

  Some serious sooty half-unhappy home!—

  Where loathe-love likelier may be invested.

  Keeping their scented bodies in the center

  Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,

  They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,

  Are off at what they manage of a canter,

  And, resuming all the clues of what they were,

  Try to avoid inhaling the laden air.

  The Crazy Woman

  I shall not sing a May song.

  A May song should be gay.

  I’ll wait until November

  And sing a song of gray.

  I’ll wait until November.

  That is the time for me.

  I’ll go out in the frosty dark

  And sing most terribly.

  And all the little people

  Will stare at me and say,

  “That is the Crazy Woman

  Who would not sing in May.”

  A Lovely Love

  Lillian’s

  Let it be alleys. Let it be a hall

  Whose janitor javelins epithet and thought

  To cheapen hyacinth darkness that we sought

  And played we found, rot, make the petals fall.

  Let it be stairways, and a splintery box

  Where you have thrown me, scraped me with your kiss,

  Have honed me, have released me after this

  Cavern kindness, smiled away our shocks.

  That is the birthright of our lovely love

  In swaddling clothes. Not like that Other one.

  Not lit by any fondling star above.

  Not found by any wise men, either. Run.

  People are coming. They must not catch us here

  Definitionless in this strict atmosphere.

  Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat

  Hires out to Mrs. Miles

  I

  They had never had one in the house before.

  The strangeness of it all. Like unleashing

  A lion, really. Poised

  To pounce. A puma. A panther. A black

  Bear.

  There it stood in the door,

  Under a red hat that was rash, but refreshing—

  In a tasteless way, of course—across the dull dare,

  The semi-assault of that extraordinary blackness.

  The slackness

  Of that light pink mouth told little. The eyes told of heavy care. . . .

  But that was neither here nor there,

  And nothing to a wage-paying mistress as should

  Be getting her due whether life had been good

  For her slave, or bad.

  There it stood

  In the door. They had never had

  One in the house before.

  But the Irishwoman had left!

  A message had come.

  Something about a murder at home.

  A daughter’s husband—“berserk,” that was the phrase:

  The dear man had “gone berserk”

  And short work—

  With a hammer—had been made

  Of this daughter and her nights and days.

  The Irishwoman (underpaid,

  Mrs. Miles remembered with smiles),

  Who was a perfect jewel, a red-faced trump,

  A good old sort, a baker

  Of rum cake, a maker

  Of Mustard, would never return.

  Mrs. Miles had begged the bewitched woman

  To finish, at least, the biscuit blending,

  To tarry till the curry was done,

  To show some concern

  For the burning soup, to attend to the tending

  Of the tossed salad. “Inhuman,”

  Patsy Houlihan had called Mrs. Miles.

  “Inhuman.” And “a fool.”


  And “a cool

  One.”

  The Alert Agency had leafed through its files—

  On short notice could offer

  Only this dusky duffer

  That now made its way to her kitchen and sat on her kitchen stool.

  II

  Her creamy child kissed by the black maid! square on the mouth!

  World yelled, world writhed, world turned to light and rolled

  Into her kitchen, nearly knocked her down.

  Quotations, of course, from baby books were great

  Ready armor; (but her animal distress

  Wore, too and under, a subtler metal dress,

  Inheritance of approximately hate).

  Say baby shrieked to see his finger bleed,

  Wished human humoring—there was a kind

  Of unintimate love, a love more of the mind

  To order the nebulousness of that need.

  —This was the way to put it, this the relief.

  This sprayed a honey upon marvelous grime.

  This told it possible to postpone the reef.

  Fashioned a huggable darling out of crime.

  Made monster personable in personal sight

  By cracking mirrors down the personal night.

  Disgust crawled through her as she chased the theme.

  She, quite supposing purity despoiled,

  Committed to sourness, disordered, soiled,

  Went in to pry the ordure from the cream.

  Cooing, “Come.” (Come out of the cannibal wilderness,

  Dirt, dark, into the sun and bloomful air.

  Return to freshness of your right world, wear

  Sweetness again. Be done with beast, duress.)

  Child with continuing cling issued his No in final fire,

  Kissed back the colored maid,

  Not wise enough to freeze or be afraid.

  Conscious of kindness, easy creature bond.

  Love had been handy and rapid to respond.

  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.

  Bessie of Bronzeville Visits Mary and Norman at a Beach-house in New Buffalo

 

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