The first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, in 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks was a rare artist whose work, all the while coherent and consistent, evolved with her political times. The dignity of the working-class characters in her early works is as vibrantly multidimensional as her later renderings during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Brooks always maintained relevance without sacrificing the tight form and technical genius of her verses, producing work that never merely mimicked the literary trends of her time but, rather, pushed their boundaries. With a career that lasted over 60 years, Brooks was one of the most significant poets of the twentieth century, providing the vital link between the New Negro poetics of Langston Hughes and the Black Aesthetic of Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka.
Like Robert Hayden and James Baldwin, Gwendolyn was a child of the Great Migration. Although born in Topeka, Kansas, she moved to Chicago with her family when she was but five weeks old. Her father, David Anderson Brooks, was a janitor; her mother, Keziah Wims, a schoolteacher whose inability to afford the tuition of medical school thwarted her ambition to go there. The family, though poor, was stable and loving. Gwendolyn grew up in the infamous kitchenettes of Chicago’s South Side, yet she also grew up in a household that encouraged her desire for something more. The Bronzeville that she knew was filled with men and women like her and her family – poor but dignified, hard-working yet overlooked in political debates over “the Negro” and urban poverty.
Chicago of the 1920s nonetheless provided the young Brooks with rich material for inspiration. She began writing poems about her neighborhood while still a child. At 13, her poem “Eventide” appeared in American Childhood Magazine. By 16, she had a portfolio of 75 published poems, many of which she submitted to newspapers and magazines; indeed, her work appeared regularly in The Chicago Defender. James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, who encouraged Brooks’s writing, introduced her to such modernists as e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. She attended Hyde Park, the leading predominantly white high school in the city, before transferring to the all-black Wendell Phillips and eventually the integrated Englewood High School.
By the time she married fellow Chicagoan Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr in 1939, Brooks was well known in the tight-knit circle of writers and artists of the burgeoning Chicago Renaissance. She joined the South Side Writers’ Club with authors like Theodore Ward, Fern Gayden, and Edward Bland. As a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Youth Council, she met John Johnson, future founding editor of Ebony and Jet magazines. She contributed to Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, founded and edited by Harriet Monroe, and participated in an all-African American writing workshop run by Chicago philanthropist Inez Cunningham Stark Boulton. In 1943 she won the Midwestern Writers’ Conference Poetry Award. Thus Brooks was a familiar name for African American readers by the time her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, was published by Harper & Row in 1945.
A Street in Bronzeville was a success. Critical acclaim, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a place on Mademoiselle magazine’s “Ten Young Women of the Year” list distinguished Brooks from her peers. A Street in Bronzeville appeared at a time when novels about “Negro life” were good business for the publishing industry, with Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ann Petry’s The Street (1945) appealing to all readers as dramas of African American urban life. Brooks’s publishers at Harper wanted their newest star to produce her own protest novel. Despite her initial excellence and fame in poetry, Brooks responded with a work of prose entitled The American Family Brown, in which Brooks promised to show that African Americans were “merely human beings, not exotics.” But Harper rejected the manuscript.
Brooks decided to return to her forte: she released her second book of poetry, Annie Allen (1949). Awarded in 1950 the Eunice Tietjens Prize (sponsored by the magazine Poetry) and the Pulitzer Prize for this book, Brooks prioritized the technical refinement of literature over the use of it as a vehicle of racial propaganda. In her Pulitzer acceptance speech she argued that “[t]he Negro poet’s most urgent duty, at present, is to polish his technique, his way of presenting his truths and his beauties, that these may be more insinuating, and, therefore, more overwhelming.” She then transformed the unpublished American Family Brown manuscript into the critically acclaimed Maud Martha (1953), a novel told in 34 vignettes.
In 1962, President Robert F. Kennedy invited Brooks to read at a poetry festival held at the Library of Congress. A teaching career decades in length followed at various northern, predominantly white, colleges – including Columbia College in Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Columbia University, Clay College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But after attending a writers’ conference at Fisk University in 1967, Brooks underwent a creative self-rediscovery that resulted in an iconic work of the new Black Arts Movement, In the Mecca (1968). Nominated for a National Book Award, In the Mecca inaugurated her time as an influential promoter of the Black Arts Movement, in effect backing off her earlier calls against art as propaganda, and now supporting the political radicalism of African American literature and culture.
However, this political shift altered neither Brooks’s commitments to literary aesthetics and refined technique nor her belief that poetry must be both accessible and enjoyable for a wide audience. In Report from Part One, an autobiography she published in 1972, she declared that her primary intention was “to entertain, to illumine” the real-world, everyday lives of people, not necessarily to teach them. Her embrace of the Black Arts Movement thus did not alienate her from less radical, middle-class readers.
In the final decades of Brooks’s life, she continued to win prestigious honors and awards. In 1968, she was named Poet Laureate for the state of Illinois; in 1985, Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress; and, in 1994, Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was still living in Chicago’s South Side when she died of cancer in 2000, at the age of 83.
Bryant, Marsha. Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Ch. 3.
Debo, Annette. “Signifying Afrika: Gwendolyn Brooks’ Later Poetry.” Callaloo 29.1 (2006): 168–181.
Duncan, Bryan. “‘And I Doubt All’: Allegiance and Ambivalence in Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘Gay Chaps at the Bar’.” Journal of Modern Literature 34.1 (2010): 36–57.
Ford, Karen Jackson. “The Sonnets of Satin-Legs Brooks.” Contemporary Literature 48.3 (2007): 345–373.
Ford, Karen Jackson. “The Last Quatrain: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Ends of Ballads.” Twentieth Century Literature 56.3 (2010): 371–395.
Frazier, Valerie. “Domestic Epic Warfare in Maud Martha.” African American Review 39.1–2 (2005): 133–141.
Gayles, Gloria Wade, ed. Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003.
Gordon, Michelle Yvonne. “The Chicago Renaissance.” A Companion to African American Literature. Ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 271–285.
Hedley, Jane. I Made You to Find Me: The Coming of Age of the Woman Poet and the Politics of Poetic Address. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009. Ch. 4.
James, Jennifer C. A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Ch. 7.
Kukrechtová, Daniela. “The Death and Life of a Chicago Edifice: Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘In the Mecca’.” African American Review 43.2–3 (2009): 457–472.
Malewitz, Raymond. “‘My Newish Voice’: Rethinking Black Power in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Whirlwind.” Callaloo 29.2 (2006): 531–544.
McKibbin, Molly Littlewood. “Southern Patriarchy and the Figure of the White Woman in Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon’.” African American Review 44.4 (2011): 667–685.
Mickle, Mildred R., ed. Critical Insights: Gwendolyn Brooks. Pasadena, CA: Salem, 2010.
Walters, Tracey L. African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition: Black Women Writers from Wheatley to Morrison. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Ch. 3.
to David and Keziah Brooks
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.
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.
The School of Beauty’s a tavern now.
The Madam is underground.
Out at Lincoln, among the graves
Her own is early found.
Where the thickest, tallest monument
Cuts grandly into the air
The Madam lies, contentedly.
Her fortune, too, lies there,
Converted into cool hard steel
And right red velvet lining;
While over her tan impassivity
Shot silk is shining.
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.
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.
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 sat 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.
I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No. Despite
The bright hosannas, bright dear-Lords, and bright
Determined reverence of Sunday eyes.
Picture Jehovah striding through the hall
Of His importance, creatures running out
From servant-corners to acclaim, to shout
Appreciation of His merit’s glare.
But who walks with Him? – dares to take His arm,
To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear,
Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer,
Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool?
Perhaps – who knows? – He tires of looking down.
Those eyes are never lifted. Never straight.
Perhaps sometimes He tires of being great
In solitude. Without a hand to hold.
Maud went to college.
Sadie stayed at home.
Sadie scraped life
With a fine-tooth comb.
She didn’t leave a tangle in.
Her comb found every strand.
Sadie was one of the livingest chits
In all the land.
Sadie bore two babies
Under her maiden name.
Maud and Ma and Papa
Nearly died of shame.
When Sadie said her last so-long
Her girls struck out from home.
(Sadie had left as heritage
Her fine-tooth comb.)
Maud, who went to college,
Is a thin brown mouse.
She is living all alone
In this old house.
Now who could take you off to tiny life
In one room or in two rooms or in three
And cork you smartly, like the flask of wine
You are? Not any woman. Not a wife.
You’d let her twirl you, give her a good glee
Showing your leaping ruby to a friend.
Though twirling would be meek. Since not a cork
Could you allow, for being made so free.
A woman would be wise to think it well
If once a week you only rang the bell.
He was born in Alabama.
He was bred in Illinois.
He was nothing but a
Plain black boy.
Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot.
Nothing but a plain black boy.
Drive him past the Pool Hall.
Drive him past the Show.
Blind within his casket,
But maybe he will know.
Down through Forty-seventh Street:
Underneath the L,
And Northwest Corner, Prairie,
That he loved so well.
Don’t forget the Dance Halls –
Warwick and Savoy,
Where he picked his women, where
He drank his liquid joy.
Born in Alabama.
Bred in Illinois.
He was nothing but a
Plain black boy.
Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot.
Nothing but a plain black boy.
Mrs. Coley’s three-flat brick
Isn’t here any more.
All done with seeing her fat little form
Burst out of the basement door;
And with seeing her African son-in-law
(Rightful heir to the throne)
With his great white strong cold squares of teeth
And his little eyes of stone;
And with seeing the squat fat daughter
Letting in the men
When majesty has gone for the day –
And letting them out again.
1945
From Annie Allen
Maxie and Andrew
Clogged and soft and sloppy eyes
Have lost the light that bites or terrifies.
There are no swans and swallows any more.
The people settled for chicken and shut the door.
But one by one
They got things done:
Watch for porches as you pass
And prim low fencing pinching in the grass.
Pleasant custards sit behind
The white Venetian blind.
Chicken, she chided early, should not wait
Under the cranberries in after-sermon state.
Who had been beaking about the yard of late.
Elite among the speckle-gray, wild white
On blundering mosaic in the night.
Or lovely baffle-brown. It was not right.
You could not hate the cannibal they wrote
Of, with the nostril bone-thrust, who could dote
On boiled or roasted fellow thigh and throat.
Nor hate the handsome tiger, call him devil
To man-feast, manifesting Sunday evil.
After the baths and bowel-work, he was dead.
Pillows no longer mattered, and getting fed
And anything that anybody said.
Whatever was his he never more strictly had,
Lying in long hesitation. Good or bad,
Hypothesis, traditional and fad.
She went in there to muse on being rid
Of relative beneath the coffin lid.
No one was by. She stuck her tongue out; slid.
Since for a week she must not play “Charmaine”
Or “Honey Bunch,” or “Singing in the Rain.”
Late Annie in her bower lay,
Though sun was up and spinning.
The blush-brown shoulder was so bare,
Blush-brown lip was winning.
Out then shrieked the mother-dear,
“Be I to fetch and carry?
Get a broom to whish the doors
Or get a man to marry.”
“Men there were and men there be
But never men so many
Chief enough to marry me,”
Thought the proud late Annie.
“Whom I raise my shades before
Must be gist and lacquer.
With melted opals for my milk,
Pearl-leaf for my cracker.”
The duck fats rot in the roasting pan,
And it’s over and over and all,
The fine fraught smiles, and spites that began
Before it was over and all.
The Thanksgiving praying’s away with the silk.
It’s over and over and all.
The broccoli, yams and the bead-buttermilk
Are dead with the hail in the hall,
All
Are dead with the hail in the hall.
The three yellow ’mums and the one white ’mum
Bear to such brusque burial
With pity for little encomium
Since it’s over and over and all.
Forgotten and stinking they stick in the can.
And the vase breath’s better and all, and all.
And so for the end of our life to a man,
Just over, just over and all.
“Do not be afraid of no,
Who has so far so very far to go”;
New caution to occur
To one whose inner scream set her to cede,
for softer lapping and smooth fur!
Whose esoteric need
Was merely to avoid the nettle, to not-bleed.
Stupid, like a street
That beats into a dead end and dies there,
with nothing left to reprimand or meet.
And like a candle fixed
Against dismay and countershine of mixed
Wild moon and sun. And like
A flying furniture, or bird with lattice wing; or gaunt thing,
a-stammer down a nightmare neon peopled with condor, hawk and shrike.
To say yes is to die
A lot or a little. The dead wear capably their wry
Enameled emblems. They smell.
But that and that they do not altogether yell is all that we know well.
It is brave to be involved,
To be not fearful to be unresolved.
Her new wish was to smile
When answers took no airships, walked a while.
But can see better there, and laughing there
Pity the giants wallowing on the plain.
Giants who bleat and chafe in their small grass,
Seldom to spread the palm; to spit; come clean.
Pygmies expand in cold impossible air,
Cry fie on giantshine, poor glory which
Pounds breast-bone punily, screeches, and has
Reached no Alps: or, knows no Alps to reach.
Think of sweet and chocolate,
Left to folly or to fate,
Whom the higher gods forgot,
Whom the lower gods berate;
Physical and underfed
Fancying on the featherbed
What was never and is not.
What is ever and is not.
Pretty tatters blue and red,
Buxom berries beyond rot,
Western clouds and quarter-stars,
Fairy-sweet of old guitars
Littering the little head
Light upon the featherbed.
Think of ripe and rompabout,
All her harvest buttoned in,
All her ornaments untried;
Waiting for the paladin
Prosperous and ocean-eyed
Who shall rub her secrets out
And behold the hinted bride.
Watching for the paladin
Which no woman ever had,
Paradisaical and sad
With a dimple in his chin
And the mountains in the mind;
Ruralist and rather bad,
Cosmopolitan and kind.
Think of thaumaturgic1 lass
Looking in her looking-glass
At the unembroidered brown,
Printing bastard roses there;
Then emotionally aware
Of the black and boisterous hair,
Taming all that anger down.
And a man of tan engages
For the springtime of her pride,
Eats the green by easy stages,
Nibbles at the root beneath
With intimidating teeth.
But no ravishment enrages.
No dominion is defied.
Narrow master master-calls;
And the godhead glitters now
Cavalierly on his brow.
What a hot theopathy2
Roisters through her, gnaws the walls,
And consumes her where she falls
In her gilt humility.
How he postures at his height;
Unfamiliar, to be sure,
With celestial furniture.
Contemplating by cloud-light
His bejewelled diadem;
As for jewels, counting them,
Trying if the pomp be pure.
In the beam his track diffuses
Down her dusted demi-gloom
Like a nun of crimson ruses
She advances. Sovereign
Leaves the heaven she put him in
For the path his pocket chooses;
Leads her to a lowly room.
Which she makes a chapel of.
Where she genuflects to love.
All the prayerbooks in her eyes
Open soft as sacrifice
Or the dolour of a dove.
Tender candles ray by ray
Warm and gratify the gray.
Silver flowers fill the eves
Of the metamorphosis.
And her set excess believes
Incorruptibly that no
Silver has to gape or go,
Deviate to underglow,
Sicken off to hit-or-miss.
Doomer, though, crescendo-comes
Prophesying hecatombs.3
Surrealist and cynical.
Garrulous and guttural.
Spits upon the silver leaves.
Denigrates the dainty eves
Dear dexterity achieves.
Names him. Tames him. Takes him off.
Throws to columns row on row.
Where he makes the rifles cough,
Stutter. Where the reveille
Is staccato majesty.
Then to marches. Then to know
The hunched hells across the sea.
Vaunting hands are now devoid.
Hieroglyphics of her eyes
Blink upon a paradise
Paralyzed and paranoid.
But idea and body too
Clamor “Skirmishes can do.
Then he will come back to you.”
Less than ruggedly he kindles
Pallors into broken fire.
Hies him home, the bumps and brindles
Of his rummage of desire
Tosses to her lap entire.
Hearing still such eerie stutter.
Caring not if candles gutter.
Tan man twitches: for for long
Life was little as a sand,
Little as an inch of song,
Little as the aching hand
That would fashion mountains, such
Little as a drop from grand
When a heart decides “Too much!” –
Yet there was a drama, drought
Scarleted about the brim
Not with blood alone for him,
Flood, with blossom in between
Retch and wheeling and cold shout,
Suffocation, with a green
Moist sweet breath for mezzanine.
Hometown hums with stoppages.
Now the doughty meanings die
As costumery from streets.
And this white and greater chess
Baffles tan man. Gone the heats
That observe the funny fly
Till the stickum4 stops the cry.
With his helmet’s final doff
Soldier lifts his power off.
Soldier bare and chilly then
Wants his power back again.
No confection languider
Before quick-feast quick-famish Men
Than the candy crowns-that-were.
Hunts a further fervor now.
Shudders for his impotence.
Chases root and vehemence,
Chases stilts and straps to vie
With recession of the sky.
Stiffens: yellows: wonders how
Woman fits for recompense.
Not that woman! (Not that room!
Not that dusted demi-gloom!)
Nothing limpid, nothing meek.
But a gorgeous and gold shriek
With her tongue tucked in her cheek
Hissing gauzes in her gaze,
Coiling oil upon her ways.
Gets a maple banshee. Gets
A sleek slit-eyed gypsy moan.
Oh those violent vinaigrettes!
Oh bad honey that can hone
Oilily the bluntest stone!
Oh mad bacchanalian lass
That his random passion has!
Think of sweet and chocolate
Minus passing-magistrate,
Minus passing-lofty light,
Minus passing-stars for night,
Sirocco wafts and tra la la,
Minus symbol, cinema
Mirages, all things suave and bright.
Seeks for solaces in snow
In the crusted wintertime.
Icy jewels glint and glow.
Half-blue shadows slanting grow
Over blue and silver rime.
And the crunching in the crust
Chills her nicely, as it must.
Seeks for solaces in green
In the green and fluting spring.
Bubbles apple-green, shrill wine,
Hyacinthine devils sing
In the upper air, unseen
Pucks and cupids make a fine
Fume of fondness and sunshine.
Runs to summer gourmet fare.
Heavy and inert the heat,
Braided round by ropes of scent
With a hypnotist intent.
Think of chocolate and sweet
Wanting richly not to care
That summer hoots at solitaire.
Runs to parks. November leaves
All gone papery and brown
Poise upon the queasy stalks
And perturb the respectable walks.
Glances grayly and perceives
This November her true town:
All’s a falling falling down.
Spins, and stretches out to friends.
Cries “I am bedecked with love!”
Cries “I am philanthropist!
Take such rubies as ye list.
Suit to any bonny ends.
Sheathe, expose: but never shove.
Prune, curb, mute: but put above.”
Sends down flirting bijouterie.
“Come, oh populace, to me!”
It winks only, and in that light
Are the copies of all her bright
Copies. Glass begets glass, No
Populace goes as they go
Who can need it but at night.
Twists to Plato, Aeschylus,
Seneca and Mimnermus,
Pliny, Dionysius …
Who remove from remarkable hosts
Of agonized and friendly ghosts,
Lean and laugh at one who looks
To find kisses pressed in books.
Tests forbidden taffeta.
Meteors encircle her.
Little lady who lost her twill,
Little lady who lost her fur
Shivers in her thin hurrah,
Pirouettes to pleasant shrill
Appoggiatura5 with a skill.
But the culprit magics fade.
Stoical the retrograde.
And no music plays at all
In the inner, hasty hall
Which compulsion cut from shade.
Frees her lover. Drops her hands.
Shorn and taciturn she stands.
Petals at her breast and knee …
“Then incline to children-dear!
Pull the halt magnificence near,
Sniff the perfumes, ribbonize
Gay bouquet most satinly;
Hoard it, for a planned surprise
When the desert terrifies.”
Perfumes fly before the gust,
Colors shrivel in the dust,
And the petal velvet shies,
When the desert terrifies:
Howls, revolves, and countercharms:
Shakes its great and gritty arms:
And perplexes with odd eyes.
Hence from scenic bacchanal,
Preshrunk and droll prodigal!
Smallness that you had to spend,
Spent. Wench, whiskey and tail-end
Of your overseas disease
Rot and rout you by degrees.
– Close your fables and fatigues;
Kill that fanged flamingo foam
And the fictive gold that mocks;
Shut your rhetorics in a box;
Pack compunction and go home.
Skeleton, settle, down in bed.
Slide a bone beneath Her head,
Kiss Her eyes so rash and red.
Pursing lips for new good-byeing
Now she folds his rust and cough
In the pity old and staunch.
She remarks his feathers off;
Feathers for such tipsy flying
As this scarcely may re-launch
That is dolesome and is dying.
He leaves bouncy sprouts to store
Caramel dolls a little while,
Then forget him, larger doll
Who would hardly ever loll,
Who would hardly ever smile,
Or bring dill pickles, or core
Fruit, or put salve on a sore.
Leaves his mistress to dismiss
Memories of his kick and kiss,
Grant her lips another smear,
Adjust the posies at her ear,
Quaff an extra pint of beer,
Cross her legs upon the stool,
Slit her eyes and find her fool.
Leaves his devotee to bear
Weight of passing by his chair
And his tavern. Telephone
Hoists her stomach to the air.
Who is starch or who is stone
Washes coffee-cups and hair,
Sweeps, determines what to wear.
In the indignant dark there ride
Roughnesses and spiny things
On infallible hundred heels.
And a bodiless bee stings.
Cyclone concentration reels.
Harried sods dilate, divide,
Suck her sorrowfully inside.
Think of tweaked and twenty-four.
Fuchsias gone or gripped or gray,
All hay-colored that was green.
Soft aesthetic looted lean.
Crouching low, behind a screen,
Pock-marked eye-light, and the sore
Eaglets of old pride and prey.
Think of almost thoroughly
Derelict and dim and done.
Stroking swallows from the sweat.
Fingering faint violet.
Hugging old and Sunday sun.
Kissing in her kitchenette
The minuets of memory.
THE ANNIAD
1 thaumaturgic pertaining to the performance of miracles or magic.
2 theopathy the capacity for religious worship.
3 hecatombs extraordinary slaughter.
4 stickum a sticky substance.
5 Appoggiatura an ornamental musical note that precedes and blends into a main note.
People who have no children can be hard:1
Attain a mail of ice and insolence:
Need not pause in the fire, and in no sense
Hesitate in the hurricane to guard.
And when wide world is bitten and bewarred
They perish purely, waving their spirits hence
Without a trace of grace or of offense
To laugh or fail, diffident, wonder-starred.
While through a throttling dark we others hear
The little lifting helplessness, the queer
Whimper-whine; whose unridiculous
Lost softness softly makes a trap for us.
And makes a curse. And makes a sugar of
The malocclusions, the inconditions of love.
What shall I give my children? who are poor,2
Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
No velvet and no velvety velour;
But who have begged me for a brisk contour,
Crying that they are quasi, contraband
Because unfinished, graven by a hand
Less than angelic, admirable or sure.
My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device.
But I lack access to my proper stone.
And plenitude of plan shall not suffice
Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone
To ratify my little halves who bear
Across an autumn freezing everywhere.
And shall I prime my children, pray, to pray?3
Mites, come invade most frugal vestibules
Spectered with crusts of penitents’ renewals
And all hysterics arrogant for a day.
Instruct yourselves here is no devil to pay.
Children, confine your lights in jellied rules;
Resemble graves; be metaphysical mules;
Learn Lord will not distort nor leave the fray.
Behind the scurryings of your neat motif
I shall wait, if you wish: revise the psalm
If that should frighten you: sew up belief
If that should tear: turn, singularly calm
At forehead and at fingers rather wise,
Holding the bandage ready for your eyes.
First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string4
With feathery sorcery; muzzle the note
With hurting love; the music that they wrote
Bewitch, bewilder. Qualify to sing
Threadwise. Devise no salt, no hempen thing
For the dear instrument to bear. Devote
The bow to silks and honey. Be remote
A while from malice and from murdering.
But first to arms, to armor. Carry hate
In front of you and harmony behind.
Be deaf to music and to beauty blind.
Win war. Rise bloody, maybe not too late
For having first to civilize a space
Wherein to play your violin with grace.
When my dears die, the festival-colored brightness5
That is their motion and mild repartee
Enchanted, a macabre mockery
Charming the rainbow radiance into tightness
And into a remarkable politeness
That is not kind and does not want to be,
May not they in the crisp encounter see
Something to recognize and read as rightness?
I say they may, so granitely discreet,
The little crooked questionings inbound,
Concede themselves on most familiar ground,
Cold an old predicament of the breath:
Adroit, the shapely prefaces complete,
Accept the university of death.
Life for my child is simple, and is good.
He knows his wish. Yes, but that is not all.
Because I know mine too.
And we both want joy of undeep and unabiding things,
Like kicking over a chair or throwing blocks out of a window
Or tipping over an icebox pan
Or snatching down curtains or fingering an electric outlet
Or a journey or a friend or an illegal kiss.
No. There is more to it than that.
It is that he has never been afraid.
Rather, he reaches out and lo the chair falls with a beautiful crash,
And the blocks fall, down on the people’s heads,
And the water comes slooshing sloppily out across the floor.
And so forth.
Not that success, for him, is sure, infallible.
But never has he been afraid to reach.
His lesions are legion.
But reaching is his rule.
Sweet Sally took a cardboard box,
And in went pigeon poor.
Whom she had starved to death but not
For lack of love, be sure.
The wind it harped as twenty men.
The wind it harped like hate.
It whipped our light-eyed little girl,
It made her wince and wait.
It screeched a hundred elegies
As it punished her light eyes
(Though only kindness covered these)
And it made her eyebrows rise.
“Now bury your bird,” the wind it bawled,
“And bury him down and down
Who had to put his trust in one
So light-eyed and so brown.
“So light-eyed and so villainous,
Who whooped and who could hum
But could not find the time to toss
Confederate his crumb.”
She has taken her passive pigeon poor,
She has buried him down and down.
He never shall sally to Sally
Nor soil any roofs of the town.
She has sprinkled nail polish on dead dandelions.
And children have gathered around
Funeral for him whose epitaph
Is “Pigeon – Under the ground.”
A light and diplomatic bird
Is lenient in my window tree.
A quick dilemma of the leaves
Discloses twist and tact to me.
Who strangles his extremest need
For pity of my imminence
On utmost ache and lacquered cold
Is prosperous in proper sense:
He can abash his barmecides;1
The fantoccini2 of his range
Pass over. Vast and secular
And apt and admirably strange.
Augmented by incorrigible
Conviction of his symmetry,
He can afford his sine die.3
He can afford to pity me
Whose hours at best are wheats or beiges
Lashed with riot-red and black.
Tabasco at the lapping wave.
Search-light in the secret crack.
Oh open, apostolic height!
And tell my humbug how to start
Bird balance, bleach: make miniature
Valhalla of my heart.
Carried her unprotesting out the door.
Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can’t hold her,
That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her,
The lid’s contrition nor the bolts before.
Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise,
She rises in the sunshine. There she goes,
Back to the bars she knew and the repose
In love-rooms and the things in people’s eyes.
Too vital and too squeaking. Must emerge.
Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss,
Slops the bad wine across her shantung,4 talks
Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks
In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge
Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.
They get to Benvenuti’s. There are booths
To hide in while observing tropical truths
About this – dusky folk, so clamorous!
So colorfully incorrect,
So amorous,
So flatly brave!
Boothed-in, one can detect,
Dissect.
One knows and scarcely knows what to expect.
What antics, knives, what lurching dirt; what ditty –
Dirty, rich, carmine, hot, not bottled up,
Straining in sexual soprano, cut
And praying in the bass, partial, unpretty.
They sit, sup,
(Whose friends, if not themselves, arrange
To rent in Venice “a very large cabana,
Small palace,” and eat mostly what is strange.)
They sit, they settle; presently are met
By the light heat, the lazy upward whine
And lazy croaky downward drawl of “Tanya.”
And their interiors sweat.
They lean back in the half-light, stab their stares
At: walls, panels of imitation oak
With would-be marbly look; linoleum squares
Of dusty rose and brown with little white splashes,
White curls; a vendor tidily encased;
Young yellow waiter moving with straight haste.
Old oaken waiter, lolling and amused;
Some paper napkins in a water glass;
Table, initialed, rubbed, as a desk in school.
They stare. They tire. They feel refused,
Feel overwhelmed by subtle treasons!
Nobody here will take the part of jester.
The absolute stutters, and the rationale
Stoops off in astonishment.
But not gaily
And not with their consent.
They play “They All Say I’m The Biggest Fool”
And “Voo Me On The Vot Nay” and “New Lester
Leaps In” and “For Sentimental Reasons.”
But how shall they tell people they have been
Out Bronzeville way? For all the nickels in
Have not bought savagery or defined a “folk.”
The colored people will not “clown.”
The colored people arrive, sit firmly down,
Eat their Express Spaghetti, their T-bone steak,
Handling their steel and crockery with no clatter,
Laugh punily, rise, go firmly out of the door.
“and the people live till they have white hair”
The dry brown coughing beneath their feet,
(Only a while, for the handyman is on his way)
These people walk their golden gardens.
We say ourselves fortunate to be driving by today.
That we may look at them, in their gardens where
The summer ripeness rots. But not raggedly.
Even the leaves fall down in lovelier patterns here.
And the refuse, the refuse is a neat brilliancy.
When they flow sweetly into their houses
With softness and slowness touched by that everlasting gold,
We know what they go to. To tea. But that does not mean
They will throw some little black dots into some water and add sugar and the
juice of the cheapest lemons that are sold,
While downstairs that woman’s vague phonograph bleats, “Knock me a kiss.”
And the living all to be made again in the sweatingest physical manner
Tomorrow. … Not that anybody is saying that these people have no trouble.
Merely that it is trouble with a gold-flecked beautiful banner.
Nobody is saying that these people do not ultimately cease to be. And
Sometimes their passings are even more painful than ours.
It is just that so often they live till their hair is white.
They make excellent corpses, among the expensive flowers. …
Nobody is furious. Nobody hates these people.
At least, nobody driving by in this car.
It is only natural, however, that it should occur to us
How much more fortunate they are than we are.
It is only natural that we should look and look
At their wood and brick and stone
And think, while a breath of pine blows,
How different these are from our own.
We do not want them to have less.
But it is only natural that we should think we have not enough.
We drive on, we drive on.
When we speak to each other our voices are a little gruff.
And if sun comes
How shall we greet him?
Shall we not dread him,
Shall we not fear him
After so lengthy a
Session with shade?
Though we have wept for him,
Though we have prayed
All through the night-years –
What if we wake one shimmering morning to
Hear the fierce hammering
Of his firm knuckles
Hard on the door?
Shall we not shudder? –
Shall we not flee
Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter
Of the familiar
Propitious haze?
Sweet is it, sweet is it
To sleep in the coolness
Of snug unawareness.
The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes.
One wants a Teller in a time like this.
One’s not a man, one’s not a woman grown.
To bear enormous business all alone.
One cannot walk this winding street with pride,
Straight-shouldered, tranquil-eyed,
Knowing one knows for sure the way back home.
One wonders if one has a home.
One is not certain if or why or how.
One wants a Teller now: –
Put on your rubbers and you won’t catch cold.
Here’s hell, there’s heaven. Go to Sunday School.
Be patient, time brings all good things – (and cool
Strong balm to calm the burning at the brain?) –
Behold, Love’s true, and triumphs, and God’s actual.
People protest in sprawling lightless ways
Against their deceivers, they are never meek –
Conceive their furies, and abort them early;
Are hurt, and shout, weep without form, are surly;
Or laugh, but save their censures and their damns.
And ever complex, ever taut, intense,
You hear man crying up to Any one –
“Be my reviver; be my influence,
My reinstated stimulus, my loyal.
Enable me to give my golds goldly,
To win.
To
Take out a skulk, to put a fortitude in.
Give me my life again, whose right is quite
The charm of porcelain, the vigor of stone.”
And he will follow many a cloven foot.
Men of careful turns, haters of forks in the road,
The strain at the eye, that puzzlement, that awe –
Grant me that I am human, that I hurt,
That I can cry.
Not that I now ask alms, in shame gone hollow,
Nor cringe outside the loud and sumptuous gate.
Admit me to our mutual estate.
Open my rooms, let in the light and air.
Reserve my service at the human feast.
And let the joy continue. Do not hoard silence
For the moment when I enter, tardily,
To enjoy my height among you. And to love you
No more as a woman loves a drunken mate,
Restraining full caress and good My Dear,
Even pity for the heaviness and the need –
Fearing sudden fire out of the uncaring mouth,
Boiling in the slack eyes, and the traditional blow.
Next, the indifference formal, deep and slow.
Comes in your graceful glider and benign,
To smile upon me bigly; now desires
Me easy, easy; claims the days are softer
Than they were; murmurs reflectively “Remember
When cruelty, metal, public, uncomplex,
Trampled you obviously and every hour. …”
(Now cruelty flaunts diplomas, is elite,
Delicate, has polish, knows how to be discreet):
Requests my patience, wills me to be calm,
Brings me a chair, but the one with broken straw,
Whispers “My friend, no thing is without flaw.
If prejudice is native – and it is – you
Will find it ineradicable – not to
Be juggled, not to be altered at all,
But left unvexed at its place in the properness
Of things, even to be given (with grudging) honor.
What
We are to hope is that intelligence
Can sugar up our prejudice with politeness.
Politeness will take care of what needs caring.
For the line is there.
And has a meaning. So our fathers said –
And they were wise – we think – At any rate,
They were older than ourselves. And the report is
What’s old is wise. At any rate, the line is
Long and electric. Lean beyond and nod.
Be sprightly. Wave. Extend your hand and teeth.
But never forget it stretches there beneath.”
The toys are all grotesque
And not for lovely hands; are dangerous,
Serrate in open and artful places. Rise.
Let us combine. There are no magics or elves
Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must
Wizard a track through our own screaming weed.
1949
Gwendolyn Brooks, “A Street in Bronzeville,” from Selected Poems. New York: Perennial Classics, 1999. Used by permission of Brooks Permissions.Gwendolyn Brooks, “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,” “The Anniad,” “The Womanhood,” from Selected Poems. New York: Perennial Classics, 1999. Used by permission of Brooks Permissions.
THE WOOMANHOOD
1 barmecides illusory benefits.
2 fantoccini a show in which strings manipulate puppets.
3 sine die (Latin) without day, or indefinitely.
4 shantung a silk fabric originating from Shandong, a coastal province in China.