From their humble beginnings with Lucy Terry’s earliest poem to Rita Dove’s Pulitzer Prize–winning verse and Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize–winning prose, African American letters have laid claim, either implicitly or explicitly, to the same Enlightenment values and ideals shaping the founding documents of the American Republic: freedom, equality, justice, and, above all, universal personhood. Indeed, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contexts, where letters and the literary tradition often served as the demarcation between human and animal, free and slave, subject and object, the very assertion of literary ability was the assertion of being, citizenship, and democratic inclusion.1 Thus a poor eighteenth-century black woman’s chronicle of her community in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and a contemporary black woman’s epic tale of slavery’s (and emancipation’s) trauma may serve as bookends to a tradition shaped by the African American struggle for full democratic access.
Sterling A. Brown, poet, essayist, literary and cultural critic, teacher, ethnographer, anthologist, and raconteur, is a pivotal figure in this two-hundred-year-plus tradition, a figure who culls from his literary and cultural past, from prosody, voice, and idiom, and reinvents them for his generation and those to follow him. A quintessential New Negro, Brown stood in the vanguard as his generation reassessed its literary heritage; indeed, Brown created a completely new artistic and poetic vocabulary, re-created the modes of conception and representation of the African American and blackness for a modern age, and, in keeping with the ongoing democratic struggle, asserted full and complex black representation in service to the New Negro claim to African American participation and citizenship.
On May 1, 1901, Sterling A. Brown, the last child and only boy, was born into the well-educated, middle-class Brown family of Washington, D.C. A former slave, his father, Sterling Nelson Brown, earned his B.A. from Fisk University in 1885, his B.D. from Oberlin Seminary College in 1888, his A.M. from Fisk in 1891, and an honorary D.D. from Howard University in 1906. He also served as pastor of Lincoln Temple Congregational Church while he taught in the School of Religion at Howard. Sterling A. Brown’s mother, Adelaide Allen, also a Fisk University graduate (B.A. 1891) and a patron of the arts, helped to create a household where education, culture, self-improvement, and service to racial uplift served as the defining values of his youth. In short, Brown’s parents—their determined rise from poverty to education and thus to professional standing and political influence—were children of Reconstruction in that they were able to take advantage of the educational opportunities newly accorded blacks. So, too, his parents witnessed the demise of Reconstruction, the nation’s reneging on the new constitutional guarantees of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. As a result, their professional and personal lives remained devoted to the struggle for full citizenship for African Americans. Of course, their struggle was not in isolation; theirs was a home that regularly hosted their better-known contemporaries—Frederick Douglass, Kelly Miller, John Mercer Langston, Alexander Crummell, and others—who were all deeply committed to racial uplift and political equality.
In a larger sense, the politics of Brown’s parents and that of their generation largely shaped the ethos and political strategies defining the New Negro Movement. The New Negro generation, born after Reconstruction through the turn of the century, inherited both the promise of civil rights legislation under Reconstruction and the systematic exclusion from these constitutional guarantees. Furthermore, this generation witnessed one of the most dramatic transformations in African American history and culture to date, as unprecedented numbers of blacks moved from South to North, from country to city, and from being share-croppers/tenant farmers to laborers/wage earners. As a result, the New Negro generation inherited the responsibilities of reconstructing the theoretical, cultural, and political contexts in which African American life and culture would be understood. Thus, a new sense of political self-awareness gave rise to institutions, political movements, and expressive arts all devoted to making palpable Reconstruction legislation. Organizations such as the NAACP, the Urban League, A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids, and even Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) reflected this new political self-awareness. This generation pursued, with renewed vigor, litigation challenging segregation, in particular the doctrine of “separate but equal,” upheld by the Supreme Court in 1896. This generation aggressively campaigned for federal antilynching legislation and for equality in education, affordable housing, fair treatment by law enforcement and the courts—in short, for equal opportunity and full citizenship.
What we have come to call the Harlem Renaissance is better understood in the context of the New Negro Movement; as the artistic wing of the movement, New Negro artists responded to the overarching aims of black equality and justice through a comprehensive address of the ways in which African Americans were represented in American popular and expressive culture. Challenging the racist caricature of minstrelsy, vaudeville, and plantation tradition dialect (as well as in popular advertising and the new technology of film), New Negro artists explored a fuller range, depth, and complexity in black being within art that sought to expand a vision of black humanity. To be sure, Brown disagreed strongly with the ways in which some of his contemporaries approached this larger project. In Brown’s opinion, for example, those who followed W. E. B. Du Bois’s prescription for art that focused on black middle-class life simply substituted one set of reductive poses for another. And those who evaded issues of racial inequity altogether—the romantic tradition—Brown dismissed as “escapist” or “derivative.” Brown even found fault with many in the smaller group of artists who explored and portrayed African American folk culture: James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes. Hughes’s portraits, in particular, failed to discover the full range of psychic and emotional complexity readily available in the black vernacular. About Hurston, Brown voiced serious reservations about the lack of stoicism and bitterness in her portrayals of the folk. Nevertheless, Brown unequivocally affirmed the goals of the movement while going his own way to achieve them.
With a distinct sense of New Negro intellectual and artistic rigor, Brown embarked upon a unique political and critical journey into the black vernacular, into the folk and rural South, and thus into the blues, work songs, hollers, ballads, folk sayings, and more. Brown firmly believed that folk speech was fully capable of expressing the complex, often contradictory responses to the profound conundrum of black life in America. Thus Brown wrote poetry and criticism, edited anthologies, lectured, and taught courses all in pursuit of the critical and artistic acuity commensurate to the relentlessly complex humanity he found at the heart of modern black life. Much of Brown’s keen awareness of the poetic possibilities inherent in folk forms resulted from the very best formal education available to a New Negro. In 1918, he graduated from the prestigious Dunbar High School, where he was taught by the likes of Jessie Fauset and Angelina W. Grimke, among others who had distinguished themselves as scholar-artists. He went on to attend Williams College (1918–1922), where he was elected in his junior year to Phi Beta Kappa, and he was the only student upon graduation to be awarded “Final Honors.” He graduated cum laude with an A.B. in English. And it was there that he began to read contemporary literature under the tutelage of the irascible George Dutton and to explore literature’s critical potential.
From 1922 to 1923, Brown studied for and earned his M.A. at Harvard University. While he was there, he continued to study modern American poets such as Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg, poets who expanded upon the Whitman tradition for the twentieth century, conceiving the universal in the particular and the ordinary, crafting local and common speech into poetic metaphor. So, too, they reconfigured form not simply as a medium of thematic design, but as the very embodiment of the democratic values inherent in the celebration of the common and often overlooked voice. Indeed, Brown often commented on the importance of the maverick Harvard professor Bliss Perry and his instruction in contemporary American literature. He taught American fiction, prose, and drama, emphasizing the authors’ critical reflections on material conditions and thus the ways in which everyday people struggle to live their lives.
After completing his formal education, Brown could have easily returned to Washington, D.C., and to Howard, where a job awaited him. Instead, he took the advice of his father and that of Carter G. Woodson and went South for yet another kind of education, one equally as informing. From 1923 to 1929, Brown taught at Virginia Seminary and College, Lincoln University in Missouri, and Fisk University successively. Using these schools as his base, Brown often went out into the surrounding counties, embracing African American folk culture, speech, and lore. He encountered Slim Greer, Mrs. Bibby, and Calvin “Big Boy” Davis, all of whom would become heroes in his mythmaking projects. On farms, in bars, and in juke joints, he interacted with the rural folk, an experience that afforded him an intimacy with patterns of speech, idiomatic expression, folkways, and, of course, the blues. Through such close contact, he became familiar not merely with form or gesture, but also with a certain philosophical approach to life encoded in the vernacular.
During this period, Brown wrote some of his most successful poetry and critical essays. Thus began his long and influential literary career. His first essay, “Roland Hayes,” appeared in and won an award from Opportunity in 1925 for its poignant examination of the baritone’s virtuosity, particularly his interpretation of Negro spirituals. This initial success was quickly followed by the publication of an experimental, provocative poetry in Opportunity, Crisis, Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927), V. F. Calverton’s Anthology of Negro American Literature (1927), Benjamin A. Botkin’s Folk Say (Vol. 2, 1931), and the second edition of James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry (1931). For a young and unknown poet, being published in the leading black journals and anthologies of the day constituted considerable success in and of itself. But more important, these poems—including “Odyssey of Big Boy,” “Challenge,” “When de Saints Go Ma’ching Home,” and “Long Gone”—dramatically inaugurated a new approach to the poetic representation of folk speech and forms. Perhaps the force of Brown’s innovation is best expressed through the conflicted position his famous editors found themselves in. James Weldon Johnson had introduced in his 1922 edition of The Book of American Negro Poetry the claim of dialect poetry’s bankruptcy; that given its manipulation in the overtly racist plantation tradition, it could now render only humor or pathos. Yet by 1931, in the second edition, he featured Brown’s deft use of dialect, and the following year he wrote in his preface to Brown’s first book, Southern Road (1932), what amounted to a most eloquent retraction, finally conceding the complexity of black life delivered in dialect:
[Brown] began writing just after the Negro poets had generally discarded conventionalized dialect, with its minstrel traditions of Negro life (traditions that had but slight relation, often no relation at all to actual Negro life) with its artificial and false sentiment, its exaggerated geniality and optimism. He infused his poetry with genuine characteristic flavor by adopting as his medium the common, racy, living speech of the Negro in certain phases of real life. . . . [H]e has made more than mere transcriptions of folk poetry, and he has done more than bring to it mere artistry; he has deepened its meanings and multiplied its implications. He has actually absorbed the spirit of his material and made it his own; and without diluting its primitive frankness and raciness, truly re-expressed it with artistry and magnified power.2
Echoing Johnson’s earlier reservations about dialect, Cullen introduced in Caroling Dusk the importance of standard English and free verse for young poets; yet he featured perhaps Brown’s most forceful illustration, in “Odyssey of Big Boy,” of idiom, language, and folk form’s ability to defy racist caricature and to deliver a fully realized black persona.
Following quickly on the heels of these earlier successes, Southern Road reassembled many of the previously published poems and presented a corpus of new poems to create a collection that caught the critical eye of Alain Locke, who wrote, “Gauging the main objective of Negro poetry as the poetic portrayal of Negro folk-life true in both letter and spirit to the idiom of the folk’s own way of feeling and thinking, we may say that here [in Southern Road] for the first time is the much-desired and long-awaited acme attained or brought within actual reach.”3 So, too, the highly influential critic Louis Untermeyer reviewed the volume with cautious enthusiasm, noting, “The book [ Southern Road] is not only suffused with extreme color, the deep suffering and high laughter of workers in cabins and cotton fields, of gangs and gutters, but it vibrates with less obvious glow—the glow which, however variously it may be defined, is immediately perceived and ultimately recognized as poetry.”4
Riding the success of Southern Road, Brown approached several publishers about a second volume, No Hiding Place, but was rejected for reasons that remain unclear. He would not publish another collection of poetry until 1975 when Broadside Press brought out The Last Ride of Wild Bill and Eleven Narrative Poems; No Hiding Place did not appear until 1980, in The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown. Despite the long publishing hiatus, Brown continued to write poetry throughout the 1930s, and he pursued his larger cultural project through research and critical writing. Indeed, the late ’30s and early ’40s were equally if not more productive than the previous period, producing two volumes of literary criticism, an anthology, numerous essays and reviews, and contributions to major studies. For example, in 1937, Brown wrote two highly influential volumes addressing the representation of African Americans in American literature: The Negro in American Fiction and Negro Poetry and Drama. Augmenting the earlier work of William Stanley Braithwaite,5 Benjamin Griffith Brawley,6 and Brown’s own essay “Negro Character As Seen by White Authors” (1933), the first volume examines the historical types used to define (and ultimately limit) African American literary representation. The Negro in American Fiction is the first book-length study of black stereotypes and their ideological import from a black perspective, laying the foundation for Ralph Ellison’s reflections in Shadow and Act (1964), Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1992), and the larger critical tradition addressing black representation in American popular culture. The second volume, one of the earliest African American literary histories, defines a tradition of African American poetry and drama, helping to make possible the flourishing of literary histories by the ensuing generation of black literary critics.
From 1938 to 1940, Brown also worked with Gunnar Myrdal on what would become the seminal study of American race relations: An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (1944). The Swedish sociologist had been selected by the Carnegie Corporation to conduct a comprehensive study on the ongoing disparity between black and white achievement in American economic and social life. He admittedly knew little about African American life and culture and thus relied heavily on Ralph Bunche and Brown not only to provide pertinent information but to write major sections of the study.7 For his part, Brown took Myrdal to Harlem jazz clubs, exposed him to the blues, and more generally explained to him the intricacies of African American folk culture. Brown also wrote a summarizing memorandum and an essay in conjunction with the study: “The Negro in American Culture” and “Count Us In,” which he also envisioned as the anchor to an extended collection of essays about the black South.
During the same period, Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee compiled the unprecedented anthology The Negro Caravan (1941), a revolutionary assemblage of representative elements from across the vast array of African American expressive cultural forms. Not simply literary in a narrow sense, the anthology collected folk songs, spirituals, hollers, blues, and more created by unknown bards, along with poems, plays, and prose by noted literary figures. The most eclectic and representative anthology to date, Negro Caravan served as the model for Cavalcade (1971), Chant of Saints (1979), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1995, revised 2004), and Call and Response (1998)—all of which insist upon the interrelatedness of folk forms and literary art. The collection also responded directly to The American Caravan (first published in 1927), the annual anthology that professed to represent contemporary American literature yet excluded black authors.
From 1936 through 1940, Brown also served as national editor of Negro affairs for the Federal Writers’ Project. Fighting for a serious address of African American culture in the tourist guides to Southern states that the Federal Writers’ Project produced, Brown edited the editions of the guides to ensure the use of appropriate images to represent African Americans. He also wrote “The Negro in Washington” for that mammoth tome Washington: City and Capital (1937) and advised the Virginia project that wrote The Negro in Virginia (1940).
As if he didn’t have enough work, Brown continued to write columns in the leading popular and academic black journals, perhaps most notably his regular reviews of contemporary literature and film in Opportunity. The final punctuation on this dauntingly prolific period came when Brown wrote and assembled much of the material that would go into A Negro Looks at the South. To be sure, Brown remained productive after World War II, as his papers in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University well attest. Brown lectured and gave readings at colleges and universities across the country, continued to write scholarly essays, and ultimately inspired a generation of Howard-based writers and radicals who would animate the Black Power and Black Arts movements. After retiring from Howard in 1969, Brown highlighted the latter years of his public life with lectures and readings that helped to launch the recovery project of which this volume is a part. In 1973, Brown returned to his undergraduate alma mater and delivered a legendary address that was recorded as “A Son’s Return: Oh Didn’t He Ramble” and later revised for publication in Chant of Saints. And in 1980, the year that his collected poems were published, he gave a reading at the Library of Congress in which he reassessed his long career.
Aptly appraising a life and a career instrumental in shaping our contemporary understanding of African American literature and culture, Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton view Brown as the central architect in the creation of a wholly new way of representing African American life and culture:
Brown strove to show that rural southern blacks in particular . . . had in fact developed a system of active strategies of encompassing the harsh economic and social situation in which they found themselves. . . . [He] distilled the rhythms of black speech and song, merging them with English form and rhetoric to create a wholly invented language that, as such, takes us both through and beyond history into myth, beyond the apparent face of things into the commonality of human hopes and ambitions hidden by social forms.8
Thus A Negro Looks at the South renders, in often lyrical prose, portraits of black lives about the heroic business of self-assertion, self-expression, and self-possession.
In 1938, Jonathan Daniels, a North Carolina journalist, published A Southerner Discovers the South, a book-length narrative and travelogue tracing his firsthand experiences in which he confronts and embraces both the beauty and the horror of Southern life. Driving a “well-behaved” Plymouth, he toured from Virginia to Arkansas and as far down as New Orleans to collect feelings, observations, and impressions that would enable him to understand the many changes occurring in the South. To Sterling A. Brown, Daniels’s book represented more than a record of travel; it presented the South trying to free itself from the restrictions of its past. In part, Daniels’s book disabused readers of the notion of a highly sentimentalized, undifferentiated region by presenting the South with a greater sense of complexity and variety, and therefore as a composite portrait. Brown saw Daniels’s work as going much further than previous studies of the South, such as I’ll Take My Stand (1930), in investigating the successes and the failures of a deeply racialized part of the country. Nevertheless, for Brown, Daniels’s approach to black life remained underdeveloped. As he said, Daniels’s “chats with Negroes are too few.”
During the late ’30s and early ’40s, an exhaustively productive period for Brown, he never lost sight of the fact that he wanted to address the shortcomings of Daniels’s study more directly. Fortuitously, Brown discovered a way. At the 1942 American Literature Symposium sponsored by the English Department at the University of Oklahoma, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Rosenwald Foundation, he met Rosenwald’s executive director, Edwin Embree. Through his presentation on “The Negro in American Literature” and in subsequent informal discussions with Embree and others, Brown created a strong presence and offered conclusive evidence of his thorough knowledge of African American literary and cultural life. Persuaded by Brown’s command of the subject, Embree encouraged Brown to apply for funding, in part to collect material for a book about the black South.
Brown taught during summer sessions at Atlanta University from 1933 to 1937, and thus he had informally established Atlanta as his base of operation for his investigation and collection of materials of Southern black life. In 1942, prior to returning to Atlanta for another summer session, Brown responded to Embree’s encouragement with an official letter of application to the Rosenwald Foundation, requesting funding that would allow him to remain in the South through the end of the year. On April 17, 1942, Brown received an official notification of a $1,500 grant to pursue his research. Brown’s response to this award was to go “from Arlington to Alexandria [Louisiana],” from the Eastern seaboard throughout the Deep South in an effort to document the variety of blacks’ experiences. In an era during which folklorists, literary historians, creative writers, and cultural critics were consumed with issues of the folk, common people, and, more polemically, the proletariat, Brown was drawn into this national conversation by persisting in his fundamental need to rescue the representation of black people from the clutches of racial stereotyping. A Negro Looks at the South, a racial portrait composed of disparate black voices, represents his most sustained effort in prose to invest black people with dignity, grace, and courage—qualities denied them by a history of misrepresentation.
Of the many artful deployments used to correct such misrepresentation, one that bears particular relevance for A Negro Looks at the South is the way in which Brown constructs the artist as witness and chronicler. As a collection, Southern Road ably makes the Southern road into a metaphoric avenue crossing the geographic landscape and affording the poet entry into the lives of its many black inhabitants. Traveling across the milieu, the poet witnesses the strife of life on the chain gang, the hard luck of floods and boll weevils, and the celebration of the lives of Ma Rainey’s blues people and the unnamed creators of spirituals. In short, he captures a range of richly textured experiences. He astutely chronicles the response to hardship—the wit, the stoicism, the determination—as revealed through blues, spirituals, work songs, ballads, and idiomatic aphorisms.
Whereas Southern Road uses this particular construction of the artist poetically, A Negro Looks at the South reconceives this strategy for prose. Again, the artist, via trains, buses, and cars, traverses the Southern landscape in an effort to collect and recollect the diversity of Southern black life. Gathering these experiences required the artist to be, at times, subtle and cautious and, at others, less concerned about how he was perceived. Often he used an active process in which he overheard conversations, let knowledgeable people instruct him, observed the performance of stories and jokes, and allowed himself to be guided to particularly poignant places; he generally recorded these in three-by-five-inch spiral-bound notebooks. At other times, the process was rather passive: he read historical literature and guidebooks for background and context. As seen in many of these texts, the process of recollection is represented as stories embedded or framed within stories or as stories reconstructed from memory.
Brown worked steadily on this book for more than three years, constantly reworking the order and structure of the collection as he continually revised individual pieces. Pulling from a relatively disparate set of published and unpublished essays, sketches, and reportage, we have organized the collection around six points of view by which Brown observed black life in the South. Readers of “By Way of Autobiography” will find an implicit methodological statement about how Brown himself embarked upon the path of collecting these narratives. In revealing this information, he unwittingly tells us much about the life he lived but did not construct more formally in a longer memoir or autobiography.
“Jim Crow Journal” frames a discussion of the discrepancy between constitutional promise and national practice. That is, it records the view of what life is like when the law is used to deny people their constitutional rights as citizens. It also illustrates their response to this denial. With its historical focus, “Gone with the Wind” emphasizes the past and its effects on the present, as the section observes dimensions of the Old and New South, both black and white. “Academic Retreat” testifies to the significance of education for African American people and to the tenacity with which they pursued equality. Shifting the focus to the fine and performing arts, “Pursuit of Happiness” celebrates artists and their art forms as viable responses to the cruelty of racial segregation. In the final section, “Men of War” reminds the reader of the global politics necessarily affecting black life, as soldiers and civilians confront the paradox of struggling for democratic freedoms while working in a context in which those freedoms are actively denied.
We have framed this material with a prologue and an epilogue that articulate more broadly the central concerns of the collection. The first piece in the prologue, “South on the Move,” responds directly to Daniels’s A Southerner Discovers the South, offering an analysis of its strengths and shortcomings. Furthermore, this book review implicitly offers a methodology that Brown will modify for his own study. “Out of Their Mouths,” the second piece in the prologue, responds to the question, “How do you feel about Negroes in the war?” In plural voices, it offers disparate perspectives on the war effort. Multiple and necessarily distinct, these voices challenge the assumption of black homogeneity and simplicity. Moreover, the piece serves as the first implementation of Brown’s own approach to collecting and representing the material of black lives in prose. Completing the frame for the collection, the epilogue consists of Brown’s seminal essay, “Count Us In,” which answers the question, “What does the Negro want?” The answer, of course, is: “We want equality, and we want it now!” It’s appropriate that the collection end with this piece as it makes overt the political implications of the preceding pieces. This broad polemic claims full political and civic participation for African Americans, indeed the fundamental human rights afforded a group finally accorded all the privileges of citizenship.
A Negro Looks at the South not only plays on the example Daniels provides; it also responds to a long tradition of African American writing about race in a Southern context. This tradition has employed a number of strategies to this end, some of which may include recurring themes of family, work, play, education, travel, and politics. Often, writers conceptualize their persona’s experience of the South in terms of patterns: immersion and emersion, awakening and self-realization, or exile and flight. Though each text does not employ all of these patterns and themes, the tradition is largely defined by the construction of the South as paradox or conundrum. At once the site of family and community yet also the place of oppression, both the location of one’s origin and the cause of one’s alienation—in short, both home and hostile territory—the South is presented in this tradition as a deeply conflicted place, both physically and psychically. In one sense, it is the essential tension itself, the impossibility of reconciling oppositions, that drives many of these texts and thus the tradition as whole.
Beginning with David Walker, and including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and William Wells Brown, nineteenth-century African American writers have used their personal experiences of the South in order to critique American politics, to appraise the success and limitations of African American culture, and to construct a personal identity capable of controlling (or at least rationalizing) the harrowing dissonance between “certain inalienable rights” and Southern (ostensibly American) political practices. Needless to say, this critical tradition moves aggressively into the twentieth century, sustained by Brown’s immediate predecessors including W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and his own father, the Rev. Sterling Nelson Brown. Du Bois’s chapters on eastern Tennessee and Dougherty County, Georgia, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), clearly inform Brown’s personal accounts of rural Virginia and Louisiana. So, too, Johnson’s early sections in his autobiography Along This Way (1933) and Rev. Brown’s My Own Life Story (1924) produce echoes in “What Could Freddie Say?” a critical look at education in the South. Equally important, Brown would have been acutely aware of J. Saunders Redding’s rendering of black life in the South in No Day of Triumph (1942). Similar to Brown’s project, Redding’s text overflowed with vibrant black voices; yet where his portrayal emphasized the debilitating effects of Southern racism (and thus held out little hope for triumph), Brown would strive to capture both the harsh realities of white supremacy and the heroic responses on the part of blacks living and thriving in the South.
But just as these earlier figures inform Brown’s immersion into African American culture in the South, Brown’s essays anticipate Ralph Ellison’s work on Southern black music, particularly Ellison’s highly personal address of blues and jazz, and his praise of performers such as Jimmy Rushing and Charlie Christian. Most obviously, Brown’s meticulous attention to the specificity of the local looks forward to Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place (1971), a rambling tour of legendary sites on the mythic Southern landscape; more recently to Anthony Walton’s Mississippi (1996) and Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s From the Mississippi Delta (1997), looking poignantly at the state made metaphoric for the entire South; and Deborah McDowell’s Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin (1998) and Trudier Harris’s Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South (2003), continuing the tradition by exploring the compelling contradictions of the South through childhood memories.
Finally, A Negro Looks at the South serves as a crucial study that lends a voice to the voiceless and represents an emergent effort in oral history, a field that has recently begun exploring systematically the psychological truths of black life. Against Jonathan Daniels’s appreciative but limited discussion, Brown’s collection delivers a much greater variety of black voices and experiences and thus a more complex portrait of black life in the South. In so doing, Brown illustrates the Lakota tradition of “fierce listening,” that is, listening with purpose, commitment, and responsibility—a responsibility to convey the story to the next generation. This personal investment in the lives of ordinary black people reveals a participation in what latter-day scholars have more formally conceived as oral history. Like them, Brown asked a number of questions that sought not just to elicit information. Rather, his probing enables us to understand the more crucial issues at stake in the stories he presents: how they work, what they do, and what they reveal about the storytellers. A Negro Looks at the South, therefore, provides fresh perspectives on the old problem of racial representation and anticipates the engaging work now being undertaken by a new generation of oral historians.
1. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Literary Theory and the Black Tradition,” in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 25.
2. James Weldon Johnson, “Introduction to the First Edition,” in Sterling A. Brown, The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, ed. Michael S. Harper (Chicago: TriQuarterly Press, 1989), 16–17.
3. Alain Locke, “Sterling Brown: The New Negro Folk-Poet,” in Negro: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard. 1935. Edited and abridged by Hugh Ford (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), 88.
4. Louis Untermeyer, “New Light from an Old Mine,” Opportunity 10 (August 1932): 250–251.
5. William Stanley Braithwaite, “The Negro in American Literature,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), 29–44.
6. Benjamin Griffith Brawley, “The Negro in American Fiction,” in Anthology of American Negro Literature, ed. V. F. Calverton (New York: Modern Library, 1929), 237–247.
7. Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 131–132.
8. Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton, “Introduction,” The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (New York: Vintage, 2000), xxix.