Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000): Chicago’s Conscience -The Toast

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Chicago has many nicknames, some storied–The Windy City, the Second City, the City of Big Shoulders–and some new–Chi-raq, Chiberia. It is simultaneously one of the most culturally rich and racially segregated cities in the US, hometown to both our first black President and cops who torture and shoot black children on the street. You know this. We all know this. It’s in the national news nearly every day.

What I want you to do next time you read one of those news stories–after you’ve done whatever it is you do with your outrage and admiration for that city–is carve out a piece of your day to read the work of Chicago’s greatest poet, Gwendolyn Brooks.

***

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote one of the first poems I ever loved.

001dr Library of Congress

I first encountered that poem as a kid, flipping through an anthology, and it stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t know what any of it meant (except, maybe, what pool players were), but it stuck in my head like a song.

We real cool. We
left school.

You weren’t supposed to leave school, I knew that much, but it was hard to deny the sheer bravado of that first sentence: whoever was talking was, well, real cool. Mysterious, doomed, reckless, but also deeply alive. My white middle-class Rust Belt life was about as far from the “Seven at the Golden Shovel” as could be, but something about the relentless syncopation pulled me far, far into their world every time I read it.

Brooks was a remarkable poet in countless ways, but this ability to create a world on the page is perhaps the most singular. If she wrote fiction, we’d say she was brilliant at world-building–but the world she builds is the real one, the part that didn’t used to make it into the pages of literary magazines. Not just Chicago: Bronzeville. Not just glamorous light-skinned “maple banshees,” but “chocolate Mabbie.” Not just The Selected Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, elegantly compiled by Harper & Row, but a collected volume simply titled Blacks, published by Third World Press.

I was lucky enough to meet Gwendolyn Brooks once, just a few months before she died. Maybe this is just because my grandparents were also from Chicago, but she struck me as the most grandmotherly person I’d ever met. Later, when she read her poems on stage, “We Real Cool” came alive in the mouth of the woman who wrote it, and I saw the fierce intellect surface in that sweet old lady. In my own tiny, humbling way, I saw Brooks live out the contradictions that defined her career: the genius wrestling with the cultural politics into which she was born.

***

According to the standard literary history narratives about Brooks’s career, there is a distinct Before and After. The key event, in this story, is the 1967 Fisk University Black Writers’ Conference, one of the founding moments of the Black Arts movement. This was definitely a radicalizing experience for Brooks–it’s when she started publishing with black-owned small presses, for instance (a bold political move for someone as established as she was). Many people see a new kind of directness about race and poverty in Brooks’s post-1967 work, as she allied herself more explicitly with other black writers. But this version of Brooks’s poetic career has always troubled me, because it seems to suggest that Brooks was pandering to the white literary establishment before 1967. It also implies that she needed the urging of black men (Amiri Baraka, Haki R. Madhubuti, and others) to fully invest in writing about black life, which is simply untrue. In fact, Brooks wrote about not just black oppression but also intraracial colorism from her very first book. Personally, I read Brooks as always already radical; everyone else had to catch up with her.

Brooks was honored by the literary establishment from early on; she became the first African American author to win the Pulitzer (1950, for Annie Allen). She wrote fearlessly about poverty, abortion, discrimination, war, and desire. She had an incredible gift for empathy even for the most damaged people; I never stop being astonished by her poem “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon.,” which imagines the home life of the white woman whom Emmett Till supposedly whistled at–the alleged act that served as a “justification” for white men to lynch a black child. The title suggests a strong contrast between this white woman and Till’s mother, but the poem depicts a world in which both women are hostage to violent white masculinity.

…But there was a something about the matter of the Dark Villain.
He should have been older, perhaps.
The hacking down of a villain was more fun to think about
When his menace possessed undisputed breadth, undisputed height,
And a harsh kind of vice.
And best of all, when his history was cluttered
With the bones of many eaten knights and princesses.

The fun was disturbed, then all but nullified
When the Dark Villain was a blackish child
Of fourteen, with eyes still too young to be dirty,
And a mouth too young to have lost every reminder
Of its infant softness.

In Brooks’s voice, this woman realizes that her husband is a child-murderer, despite the stories her people tell themselves about the threats to fragile white womanhood. If the man she lives with can kill one child, what would stop him from killing another?

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.

To complement (and complicate) this terrifying poem, Brooks has a followup, “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” reminding us that the story of these two women can never be separated. She kisses her killed boy. / And she is sorry.

***

I could go on; Brooks’s career spanned five decades, including some of the most profound social changes the US has ever seen. You can see this in some of her lovely, spare tributes to writers and other public figures:

In the breath
Of the holocaust, he
Is helmsman, hatchet, headlight.
(from “Langston Hughes”)

Brooks was one of the great chroniclers of black American life in the twentieth century–which means she was one of the great chroniclers of America, period. For example, in her famous long poem, “In the Mecca,” she incorporates vernacular speech and modernist documentary poetics to depict the abduction and murder of a little girl in the projects. It’s daring, harrowing work, a more starkly political analysis of the many ways in which poverty and racism lead black Americans to “die soon.”

One of Brooks’s signature poetic moves is to reverse the pseudo-anthropological gaze of many well-meaning white Americans during the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. The most important word in the title “In the Mecca” is, I think, in. In the hands of a less brilliant writer, such a poem could easily turn into poverty porn, but Brooks’s work is never exploitative. In fact, she sometimes writes of the desire white Americans have to go “slumming” in Bronzeville (and, by extension, in her work, as her debut was titled A Street in Bronzeville):

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.
(from “I love those little booths at Benvenuti’s”)

In the volume Annie Allen, that poem is followed by one that reverses this pilgrimage. While the white Chicagoans venture to the South Side to see the “dusky folk,” the speaker and her friends drive through what Brooks calls “Beverly Hills, Chicago,” and try to maintain compassion in the face of the appalling wealth gap:

…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.
(from “Beverly Hills, Chicago”)

I think of Brooks’s work as a direct ancestor of Claudia Rankine’s incredible poetry and prose about mourning as “the condition of black life.” The end of the above poem beautifully embodies this constant, submerged bereavement:

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.

In other words: Black Lives Matter. Black writing matters. Go read Gwendolyn Brooks; she’s been waiting for you.


Laura Passin is a writer, professor, and feminist at large. She holds a PhD from Northwestern and an MFA from the University of Oregon. Her writing has recently appeared in Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, Adrienne: A Poetry Journal of Queer Women, The Archipelago, and Best New Poets 2013. She also writes a quasi-regular newsletter about feminism, poetry, and pop culture called Postcards from a One-Woman Army. Laura lives in Portland with too many cats.

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diaryofamadeditor's avatar

diaryofamadeditor · 472 weeks ago

Brooks is a treasure. I read a lot of contemporary work so indebted to her that manages to be a little unconscious of her impact on their language. I talk about Brooks as a revolutionary all the time, and it's great to see her on The Toast (because of course she's on The Toast).
Oh my god, I cannot wait to read this in depth later. I love Brooks and her poetry. She is wildly excellent. I love her sonnets so much, too.
Years ago, I tutored a boy one summer who was having trouble reading. He was the only black boy in the tutoring center, and he was a little older and taller than the other kids, and those things together made him very self-conscious. He told me in a matter-of-fact way one day, "I think reading is too hard for me because I'm black, and black people aren't smart," and my heart broke into a zillion infuriated pieces. (WHO told him this, I will fight somebody, who should I fight.)

His file said he went to Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School, but when I asked him about her, he hadn't realized she was a real person. I printed out a bunch of stuff about her for him, and he LOVED "We Real Cool." He could read all the words in it, for one thing, and he ran around telling everybody about this smart black lady and showing off the picture of her he was carrying in his pocket.

Black writing matters SO MUCH. If he hadn't known the writer was black like him, I don't think he would've powered through.
1 reply · active 472 weeks ago
Thank you SO much for this! I have taught Brooks's poems to college students (imperfectly; I'm a historian and not a literature scholar), including several of those quoted here. They are such powerhouses. I was about to write that they sneak up quietly and punch you in the gut, but they aren't violent like that; I need a better metaphor.
I haven't read much of Brooks' work, but what's excerpted here articulates a lot of my feelings about Chicago, which are deeply affectionate and conflicted at the same time.

After I left, my middle school was rebuilt and renamed after Brooks, but the marquee on the new building misspelled it "Gwendloyn Brooks" and it was infuriating to drive by every day.
1 reply · active 472 weeks ago
I just left Chicago after nearly a decade of living there, and I have such a love-hate relationship with it as a city.
I kind of wish we could just thumbs up entire posts, because I don't have anything intelligent to say, but I loved this.
I love this so much and I love Gwendolyn Brooks so much.
I totally agree with this: "Personally, I read Brooks as always already radical; everyone else had to catch up with her." Simultaneously, I think it's super cool that she was so supportive of writers like Madhubuti, and that she saw them as influencing her and not taking a hierarchical stance even as she easily could have: she was the major writer when they met her. Surely she's the godmother of the Black Arts Movement.
Sarah Green's avatar

Sarah Green · 471 weeks ago

"If she wrote fiction, we’d say she was brilliant at world-building"- Brooks did write fiction. She has a lovely novella called MAUD MARTHA.
2 replies · active 471 weeks ago
So true--Maude Martha is stellar!
Yes, I should have mentioned this in the post! Thanks for bringing it up.
Late to the party, but I loved this, and I want to read more both by Brooks and by you.
نجدد ترحابنا بكم في العاب بنات التي تعتبر من افضل الالعاب على الاطلاق وعندها جمهور كبير جدا وهي بدورها تتضمن التلبيس والمكياج وكذلك الطبخ وتلعبها البنات بكترة واصبحت مشهورة جدا في السنين الاخيرة مما جعل مواقع الالعاب تصبح كتيرة وهناك كتير منها مشهورة متل فرايف و كيزي ومواقع اخرى كما ان هناك ايضا موقع جميل عربي يقدم تشكيلة من العاب بنات مميزة ومتجددة يوميا هذا النوع بدوره يشمل اصناف كتيرة سنتعرف عليها الان ومن بينها العاب الطبخ الدي يملك معجبين كتر جدا ويعتبر هو الاول تم يليه العاب التلبيس وهذا الآخر ممتع ويحبه الكتير لان التلبيس تعشقه البنات اكتر من الاولاد وهذا امر بديهي ومعروف وبعده بالتتابع يوجد العاب المكياج او الميك اب نوع جميل ومحبوب عند الصغار والكبار ويبقى في الاخير نوع قص الشعر وهو الاقل اهتماما
............

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