I discovered Gwendolyn Brooks when she won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Chicago’s newspapers applauded her. She was a Chicagoan, a woman, and the first African American thus honored.
Recently I dug out the Tribune’s story, which brought back a memory of the confusion it triggered. “Genius among colored people, when discovered, has never gone unrecognized,” Roscoe Simmons, a journalist, activist and the nephew of Booker T. Washington, wrote in the Tribune.
If so, how come my English teacher at Lane Technical High School said nary a word about Brooks? I had to check out a library copy of “A Street in Bronzeville,” a collection of her poetry. The strength of her visual imagery matched scenes framed by the windshield of a truck I drove, after the school day.
As a florist’s delivery boy, I was transfixed by the well-worn buildings and lives stunted by poverty I passed en route to Bronzeville‘s hospitals and funeral parlors.
Brooks wrote in “of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery”:
“Drive 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 up his women, where
He drank his liquid joy.”
Until the later part of her career, Brooks didn’t write with the hectoring pen of a reformer. She was animated by sympathy for life’s also-rans. Especial those who knew they were.
In a poem subtitled “The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel,” she wrote:
“We real cool. We
Left school. We.
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin.
We jazz June. We
Die soon.”
Well past her childhood, Brooks witnessed poverty’s corrosion of ambition and hope. When a Sun-Times reporter called with the news that she’d won a Pulitzer, the lights in her flat were turned off. The electricity bill hadn’t been paid.
Her father’s wedding gift to her mother was a bookcase for a set of “The Harvard Classics.” He wanted their children to read Western Civilization’s works of literature and philosophy.
His dream was to go to medical school. But David Anderson Brooks dropped out after one year to support his wife, and then Gwendolyn and her brother. With some combination of self-fulfillment and wanting to set an example for his children, her father continued to read medical books, and offer advice to the sick and injured with whom he came in contact.
Though a janitor for McKinley Music Co., “He could spread the American flag in wide loud clean magic across the front of our house on the Fourth of July and Decoration Day,” Brooks recalled in “Report from Part One,” the first volume of her autobiography.
Her mother was proud of the poems Gwendolyn started writing when she was 6. “You’re going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar,” her mother would say, comparing Gwendolyn to a Black poet who gained widespread recognition in the late 19th century.
She had her daughter show her poems to Langston Hughes when the poet and journalist read his own at the church the Brooks family attended. “She’s the one who sent you all those wonderful poems,” Gwendolyn’s mother told James Weldon Johnson, who wrote the lyrics for “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” afterward dubbed the “Negro National Anthem,” during Johnson’s visit to another Chicago church.
“I get so many of them!” he said, indicating Gwendolyn’s poems were a mixed blessing to him. “Keep writing! Some day you’ll get a book published!”
In 1943, she sent her poems to the publisher Alfred Knopf. They were rejected, but she got a letter from an editor who said she liked the “Negro” poems. When she had more, Gwendolyn should send them. Instead, she culled from those sent to Knopf, and sent to Harper and Brothers 19 Negro Poems, including “the rites for Cousin Vit.”
“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.”
It was the first of a series of experiences that led her to write: “It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro fraction …”
African Americans’ experiences and expectations — indeed, their collective noun — were rapidly changing, denying Brooks a holistic sense of herself. Her parents were “colored.” She had been “Black.” Some rejected that as echoing segregation, others hadn’t “for where they ask is “Negroland,” Brooks noted.
“I — who have ‘gone the gamut’ from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new black sun—am qualified to enter the kindergarten of the new consciousness.”
Militancy had replaced integration as a goal, not just by Blacks. She had heard Barack Amamu scream, “Up against a wall!” in a room filled with such fervor that a thirtyish white man scream back, “Yeah, yeah, kill ’em!”
“He was calling for his own execution!” Brooks incredulously reported.
Brooks noted her own subscription to a long-dead white poet’s advice, or what she took it to be. She wrote that Walt Whitman’s aesthetic marching orders were: “Vivify the contemporary fact. I Iike to vivify the universal fact, when it occurs to me.”
Her poem “Riot” is about a Protestant minister who enjoys the good life. He drives a Jaguar and loves the kidney pie at Maxim’s, but forgets Martin Luther King’s teaching: “A riot is the voice of the unheard.”
“Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty
(not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka)
and they were coming toward him in rough ranks.
In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud.
And not detainable. And not discreet.”
The wisdom distilled in those lines, Brook personally handed over to a younger generation.
She had benefited from a South Side poetry workshop created by Inez Cunningham Stark, a wealthy and socialite prominent white woman who loved poetry. “She, socially acceptable, wealthy, a protected member of the Gold Coast, where her black friends were sent to the rear by royal elevator boys, was going to instruct a class of Negro would-be poets, in the very buckle of the Black Belt,” Brooks recalled.
Brooks did similarly when she achieved fame and financial stability. She conducted workshops and awarded prizes for students’ poetry at Cornell and Burnside elementary schools, Hirsch and Marshall high schools.
“I get a more exciting response from the elementary schools,” she recalled to an interviewer. Further up the educational ladder, the inverse occurred. “But you and I know that many a Dr. Puffanblow writes a duller piece than does Susie Butterball, the high school sophomore.”
She died in 2000 as she lived, surrounded by quatrains and ballads.
“On the afternoon that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks was dying, a few family members and friends, including Brooks’ longtime publisher, protege and spiritual son, Haki Madhubuti, gathered around her bedside in Hyde Park. They read to her and recited poetry,” the Tribune reported.
“And just before Brooks took her final breath, her daughter placed a pen in her hand.”
