ON SUNDAY AFTERNOONS IN St. Louis, particularly when forsythia, honeysuckle and dogwood blossoms were ebulliently infusing the air with scents so different from those of hatred, hunger, heartbreak and forlorn ennui, my mother would inevitably jump into “Strong Men”:
They dragged you from homeland,
They chained you in coffles,
They huddled you spoon-fashion in filthy hatches,
They sold you to give a few gentlemen ease.
They broke you in like oxen,
They scourged you,
They branded you,
They made your women breeders,
They swelled your numbers with bastards …
They taught you the religion they disgraced.
You sang:
Keep a-inchin’ along
Lak a po’ inch worm …
You sang:
Bye and bye
I’m gonna lay down dis heaby load …
You sang:
Walk togedder, chillen
Dontcha git weary. …
The strong men keep a-comin’ on
The strong men git stronger.
They point with pride to the roads you built for them,
They ride in comfort over the rails you laid for them.
They put hammers in your hands
And said—Drive so much before sundown.
You sang:
Ain’t no hammah
In dis lan’,
Strikes lak mine, bebby,
Strikes lak mine.
They cooped you in their kitchens,
They penned you in their factories,
They gave you the jobs that they were too good for,
They tried to guarantee happiness to themselves
By shunting dirt and misery to you.
You sang:
Me an ’muh baby gonna shine, shine
Me an ’muh baby gonna shine.
The strong men keep a-comin’ on
The strong men git stronger …
They bought off some of your leaders
You stumbled, as blind men will …
They coaxed you, unwontedly soft-voiced. …
You followed a way.
Then laughed as usual.
— from “Strong Men”
No number of bars of Dvořák from my violin, my brother’s Frederick Douglass or my sister’s Dunbar or the baby’s forced phonetic reconstruction of Baker’s “La Vie en Rose” compared in stamina or passion with my mother, Ellie’s, passionate encounters with Sterling Brown, graced unobtrusively with my father on bongo drums.
Why am I returning to the experiences of a prepubescent Negro child on the banks of the Mississippi, luckily way upriver from Mississippi? This is, as I imagine Jefferson Davis or Thomas Jefferson would say, a matter of honor and authenticity, bloodlines and legitimacy.
While Dvořák (with his New World Symphony), Douglass, Dunbar and Baker remain icons in American culture, falling off the lips of the tenuous day, quasars of the Mothership, Sterling Brown is unique: an honorable craftsman whose handling of the voices and feelings, perceptions of our people could only be questioned by the spirits, the ancestors and the collective unconscious of what Henry Dumas called African pageantry.
I found me a cranny of perpetual dusk.
There for the grateful sense was pungent musk
Of rotting leaves, and moss, mingled with scents
Of heavy clusters freighting foxgrape vines.
The sun was barred except at close of day
When he could weakly etch in changing lines
A filigree upon the silver trunks
Of maple and of poplar. There were oaks
Their black bark fungus-spotted, and there lay
An old wormeaten segment of gray fence
Tumbling in consonant long forgot decay.
Motionless the place save when a little wind
Rippled the leaves, and soundless too it was
Save for a stream nearly inaudible,
That made a short stay in closewoven grass
Then in elusive whispers bade farewell.
—from “Arc of Sons”
Dvořák reaped his soul from ours, Douglass turned his back in disgust on us, Dunbar resented our language, which created the very foundations of his genius. He even persuaded his wife, Alice Dunbar Nelson, to be ashamed that his sonnets were not the “Talk of the Town.” And La Bakaire made up almost as many versions of herself as Brown has characters, women like Clareel, even Frankie.
FRANKIE AND JOHNNY
Oh Frankie and Johnny were lovers
Oh Lordy how they did love!
—Old Ballad
Frankie was a halfwit, Johnny was a nigger,
Frankie liked to pain poor creatures as a little ’un,
Kept a crazy love of torment when she got bigger,
Johnny had to slave it and never had much fun.
Frankie liked to pull wings off of living butterflies,
Frankie liked to cut long angleworms in half,
Frankie liked to whip curs and listen to their drawn out cries,
Frankie liked to shy stones at the brindle calf.
Frankie took her pappy’s lunch week-days to the sawmill,
Her pappy, red-faced cracker, with a cracker’s thirst,
Beat her skinny body and reviled the hateful imbecile,
She screamed at every blow he struck, but tittered when he curst.
Frankie had to cut through Johnny’s field of sugar corn
Used to wave at Johnny, who didn’t ’pay no min—
Had had to work like fifty from the day that he was born,
And wan’t no cracker hussy gonna put his work behind—
But everyday Frankie swung along the cornfield lane,
And one day Johnny helped her partly through the wood,
Once he had dropped his plow lines, he dropped them many times again—
Though his mother didn’t know it, else she’d have whipped him good.
Frankie and Johnny were lovers; oh Lordy how they did love!
But one day Frankie’s pappy by a big log laid him low,
To find out what his crazy Frankie had been speaking of;
He found that what his gal had muttered was exactly so.
Frankie, she was spindly limbed with corn silk on her crazy head,
Johnny was a nigger, who never had much fun—
They swung up Johnny on a tree, and filled his swinging hide with lead,
And Frankie yowled hilariously when the thing was done.
There are literary architectural reconstructions of Shakespeare’s England, Dante’s hell and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. While Dickens’s London and de Maupassant’s terrifying yet elegant Paris can be identified, even visited. But to know the worlds of Sterling Brown, I only have to walk a few miles in the South Side of Chicago, the lonely roads outside Allendale, South Carolina, and the byzantine worlds of black ten-year-olds in Red Hook, and Sterling Brown manifests the essence, not maquettes of a people.
THE NEW CONGO
(With no apologies to Vachel Lindsay)
Suave big jigs in a conference room,
Big job jigs, with their jobs unstable,
Sweated and fumed and trembled ’round the table
Trembled ’round the table
Sat around as gloomy as the watchers of a tomb
Tapped upon the table
Boom, Boom, Boom.
With their soft pigs’ knuckles and their fingers and their thumbs
In a holy sweat that their time had come
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom.
How can I go back to being a bum.
Then I had religion, then I had a vision
I could not turn from their anguish in derision.
Then I saw the Uncle Tom, creeping through the black
Cutting through the bigwoods with his trousers slack
With hinges on his knees, and with putty up his back.
Then along the line from the big wig jigs Then I heard the plaint of the money-lust song.
And the cry for status yodeled loud and long
And a line of argument loud and wrong
And “Bucks” screamed the trombones and the flutes of the spokesmen
“Bucks” screamed the newly made Ph.D. Doctors
Utilize the sure-fire goofie dust powder
Garner the shekels
Encompass mazuma
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, booma.
Bing.
Tremolo, mendicant implorations
From the mouths of Uncle Toms
To the great foundations.
“Jack is a good thing
A goddamn good thing
The only bad thing
Is there ain’t enough.
Boom, fool the whitefolks
Boom, gyp the jigaboos
Boom, get the prestige
Strut your stuff.”
Listen to the cry of the Negro mass
Down to its uppers, down on its ass.
Hear how the big jigs fool ’em still
With their services paid from the white man’s till.
Listen to the cunning exhortations
Wafted to the ears of the big foundations
Blown to the big white boss paymasters
Faint hints of far-reaching grim disasters.
“Be careful what you do
Or your Mumbo-jumbo stuff for Sambo
And all of the other
Bilge for Sambo
Your Mumbo-Jumbo will get away from you.
Your Bimbo-Sambo will revolt from you.
Better let Uncle Tombo see it through,
A little long green at this time will do. … ”
Not unlike Guillén Leon, and Aimé Césaire, even Luis Palos Matos and Julia de Bargus, Brown was committed to humanity in spite of its denigration of such as evidenced in “Side by Side”:
VII. MOB
A nigger killed a white man in the neighborhood
The nigger was shot up and then hung out
For the blood to dry, a black sponge dripping red.
John, you were in the mob, and what did it get you?
The killed man is just as dead as the lynched,
And both busted hell wide, wide open,
And side by side, Lord, side by side.
So Brown recognized the Africanization of our hemisphere long before we as a people, or a nation recognized him. Brown paid homage to the heroes Nat Turner, Crispus Attucks McKoy, in the same breath as Garvey & Du Bois.
I sing of a hero,
Unsung, unrecorded,
Known by the name
Of Crispus Attucks McKoy.
Born, bred in Boston,
Cousin of Trotter,
Godson of Du Bois.
No monastic hairshirt
Stung flesh more bitterly
Than the white coat
In which he was arrayed;
But what was his agony
On entering the drawing-room
To hear a white woman
Say slowly, “One spade.”
—from “Crispus Attucks McKoy”
This lack of self-consciousness, this visceral and aesthetic commitment to the lilt of our tongues, the swing of our hips and the brilliance of our minds and improvisational acuity is particular to Sterling Brown for his generation. He was bothered not so much by who he was, or who we were, but that we could not see him, we could not hear: I offer a quote from Sterling Brown’s own “Honey Mah Love”:
We who have fretted our tired brains with fears
That time shall frustrate all our chosen dreams
We are rebuked by Banjo Sam’s gay strains,
Oh Time may be less vicious than he seems;
And Troubles may grow weaker through the years—
Nearly as weak as those Sam told us of,—
Sam, strumming melodies to his honey love;
Sam, flouting Trouble in his inky lane.
Oh, I doan mess wid’ trouble. …
As noted in Neruda’s memoirs, the coal miners reciting his poems to him would also have made Sterling Brown’s heart sing.