SOURCE: "Nuance and the Novella: A Study of Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha," in Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers, Pergamon Press, 1985, pp. 127-41.

[In the following essay, Christian examines the social context and presentation of Maud Martha. According to Christian, Brooks's "emphasis on the black girl within the community is a prefiguring of black women's novels of the sixties and seventies, which looked at the relationship between the role of women in society and the racism that embattled the black community."]

Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks's only novel, appeared in 1953, the same year that Go Tell It On The Mountain, James Baldwin's first novel, was published. By that time, Brooks had already published two books of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and Annie Allen (1949), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. But although she was an established poet, Brooks's novel quietly went out of print while Baldwin's first publication was to become known as a major Afro-American novel. Brooks's novel, like Baldwin's, presents the development of a young urban black into an adult, albeit Brooks's major character is female and Baldwin's is male. Her understated rendition of a black American girl's development into womanhood did not arouse in the reading public the intense reaction that Baldwin's dramatic portrayal of the black male did. Yet Paule Marshall (whose novel, Browngirl, Brownstones (1959) is considered by many critics to be the forerunner of the Afro-American woman's literary explosion of the 1970s, would, in 1968, point to Maud Martha as the finest portrayal of an Afro-American woman in the novel, to date, and as a decided influence on her work. To Marshall, Brooks's contribution was a turning point in Afro-American fiction, for it presented for the first time a black woman not as a mammy, wench, mulatto, or downtrodden heroine, but as an ordinary human being in all the wonder of her complexity.

Why is it that Maud Martha never received some portion of the exposure that Baldwin's novel did, or why is it still, to this date, out of print, virtually unknown except to writers like Marshall and a small but growing number of black literary critics? Even within the context of Black Studies or Women's Studies, Brooks's novel is unknown or dismissed as "exquisite," but somehow not particularly worthy of comment. One could say, of course, that Maud Martha was not significant enough to receive such attention. However, comments such as Marshall's tend to nullify that argument. Or one could say that Brooks's accomplishment as a poet overshadowed, perhaps eclipsed, her only novel, although the novel shares so many of her poetic characteristics that one would think that it would attract a similar audience. I am inclined to believe that, ironically, the fate of the novel has precisely to do with its poetic qualities, with the compressed ritualized style that is its hallmark, and as importantly, with the period when it was published.

George Kent tells us in his essay "The Aesthetic Values in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks," that her pre-sixties poetry was published at a time when the small number of blacks reading poetry expected that it be "the expression of interest in the universal, but without the qualifications or unstated premises or doubts regarding Blacks' humanity." And that the larger white audience "reflected happiness when they could assure the reading public that the artistic construct transcended racial categories and racial protest … and yet paradoxically insisted upon the art construct's informative role, by asserting that the Black artist was telling us what it meant to be a Negro." These observations would, I believe, also apply to the anticipated reading audience of Maud Martha, a poetic novel of the 1950s without any of the sensationalism that characterized popular novels about blacks—a novel that would be considered art. But although Maud Martha certainly does have these perspectives, it provides another dimension, in that it focuses on a young black girl growing into womanhood without the employment of Afro-American female stereotypes found previously in the novel. While poetry was expected to transcend racial boundaries and aspire toward universality, the novel, by definition, dealt with a specific individual's interaction with her society. The type of interaction that even this small literate audience was used to in the "Negro Novel" was not at all present in Maud Martha.

In the novels written by black women in the first half of the century, most featured tragic or not so tragic mulattas, as in the Harlem Renaissance novels of Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset, or the oppressed and finally tragic heroine, as in protest novels like Ann Petry's The Street (1945). Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy (1949), the closest in time to Brooks's Maud Martha, focuses on a central protagonist who resembles the heroines of the Renaissance period, in that an almost histrionic investment in social mobility and decorum is her principal value. And even in that innovative novel of the 1930s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Zora Neale Hurston imbues her major character with an extraordinary life. However, Brooks's major character is neither an aspiring lady, the Major's wife, nor a necessarily beautiful and doomed heroic figure. She lives, like so many of us, an ordinary life, at least on the surface. An excerpt from the novel distinguishes its stance from its predecessors.

On the whole, she felt life was more comedy than tragedy…. The truth was, if you got a good Tragedy out of a lifetime, one good ripping tragedy, thorough, unridiculous, bottom-scraping, not the issue of human stupidity, you were doing, she thought, very well, you were doing well.

In its insistence on examining the supposed "trivia" that makes up the lives of most black women, their small tragedies and fears notwithstanding, Maud Martha ran counter to the tone of "the Negro Novel" that both blacks and whites would have expected in 1953. For Brooks replaced intense drama or pedestrian portrayal of character with a careful rendering of the rituals, the patterns of the ordinary life, where racism is experienced in sharp nibbles rather than screams and where making do is continually juxtaposed to small but significant dreams.

Brooks's portrayal of a black woman whose life is not characterized as "tragic" was perhaps due partly, to two overlapping trends in Afro-American life and thought of the 1950s. One was the integrationist thrust, which culminated in the Supreme Court Decision of 1954. Arthur P. Davis points out the complexity of this thrust in From the Dark Tower. On the one hand, black writers like Wright, Hughes, Himes, and Brooks had participated through their literature in the protest movement of the 1940s against racism and poverty, especially its manifestations in the urban ghetto. To some extent, the effect of the literature was the development of an apparent climate in the country out of which full integration could develop. Emphasis on the overall black protest movement of that period had been on securing equality through the law, thus the significance of the 1954 Supreme Court decision. On the other hand, "there was surface and token integration in many areas, but the everyday pattern of life for the overwhelming majority remained unchanged. In the meantime he [the Negro literary artist] had to live between two worlds and that for any artist is a disturbing experience.

In the 1940s, black writers like Richard Wright had presented the everyday pattern of life for the overwhelming majority of blacks in as dramatically tragic a form as possible in an attempt to affect the philosophical underpinnings of America toward its black native sons. One unwanted result of this dramatization was white America's tendency to stereotype blacks as creatures entirely determined by their oppression, a tendency that undermined blacks' humanity as much as the previous attitude that they were genetically inferior. Many black intellectuals' reaction to this "protest" stereotype was to emphasize those qualities blacks shared with all other human beings. Thus, the "expression of interest in the universal" could be seen in the major books of the 1950s published by already established writers: e.g., Wright's The Outsider (1953), in which he attempted to weave together the impact of racism on the black man with philosophical issues about the existential nature of all men, or Ann Petry's, The Narrows (1953), which is set not in the urban ghetto of The Street (1945), but in a small New England city and focuses on the relationship between a black man and his white mistress. Invisible Man (1952), perhaps the most influential Afro-American novel of the period, emphasizes this double-pronged approach among blacks, for Ralph Ellison consciously weaves together motifs of both Afro- and Euro-American culture as the foundation of the novel's structure. Afro-American writers, in other words, were trying out new settings, approaching new subjects. In general, these new approaches attempted to break the image of the black person as an essentially controlled and tragic individual, as well as to dramatize the variety of his or her experience. The political tone of integration and literary striving to portray black people's many-sided experiences went hand in hand.

One aspect of these strivings was a return to the chronicle of the black family that was apparent in some of the Renaissance novels of Jessie Fauset. But while her novels were entirely about the upper middle class, whose conventions supposedly mirrored those of their white counterparts, the novels of the 1950s featured lower middle-class folk set against the background of coherent, specifically black communities. Unlike the conventional novel of the 1920s or the protest novels of the 1930s and 1940s, the novel of the 1950s put more and more stress on the black community as community. Still there were novels like Himes's The Third Generation (1954), which traced the maturation of a black boy within a family that attempts to restrict his growth.

In fact many of the novels of the late 1940s and the 1950s put some portion of the blame for the conflicts of the main characters on the black wife and/or mother, who is depicted as a powerful embodiment of white middle-class values. Variations on this theme appear not only in Himes's Third Generation but in West's The Living is Easy and The Outsider, novels that precede the infamous Moynihan Report (1966). In the popular arena, the image of the aggressive, castrating black female who is bent on making the male tow the line was made popular through Sapphire, a major character in the Amos n' Andy radio programs of the late 1940s and 1950s.

Interestingly, this image, a variant of the old plantation mammy, became current at a time when sociology, one of the major image makers of blacks, paid little attention to the black family. As Billingsley points out in Black Families in White America (1966), sociology did not discover the black family until the 1930s and by the 1950s had virtually abandoned it. The academic view of the black family, the context within which most studies of black woman were initially conducted, was, during the 1940s and 1950s represented by Frazier's The Negro Family in the U.S. (1948) and Cayton and Drake's Black Metropolis (1948). Both studies emphasized the strength of the black mother, her coping with poverty, poor housing, and desertion, which, ironically, was interpreted by many to mean that she was more powerful than the black man and therefore too powerful. And though this attitude would not be fully developed or officially authorized until the Moynihan Report, one can in hindsight see the process by which this view gained currency during the 1950s.

But just as Brooks's Maud Martha is not a tragic figure, neither is she a domineering personality. As daughter and then as a mother, she exhibits little of the willfulness associated with Sapphire or even Cleo, the major character of The Living is Easy. Her strength is a quiet one, rooted in a keen sensitivity that both appreciates, and critiques her family and culture. Brooks's portrayal of an ordinary black girl who cherishes the rituals of her community even as she suffers from some of its mores both conformed to and deviated from the family chronicles of the 1940s and 1950s. Her emphasis on the black girl within the community is a prefiguring of black women's novels of the sixties and seventies, which looked at the relationship between the role of woman in society and the racism that embattled the black community.

Yet a description of Maud Martha as a work of such grand intentions would undercut its peculiar quality. In keeping with it smallness, more precisely its virtual dismissal of the grand or the heroic, Maud Martha is a short novel. Properly speaking, it should be called a novella, not only because of its length but more importantly, because of its intention. Brooks is not interested in recreating the broad sweep of a society, a totality of social interaction, but rather in painting a portrait in fine but indelible strokes of a Maud Martha. In an interview in 1969 with George Stavros, editor of Contemporary Literature, Brooks says of her process:

I had first written a few tiny stories and I felt that they would mesh, and I centered them and the others around one character. If there is a form I would say it was imposed at least in the beginning when I started with those segments or vignettes.

And Brooks goes on to agree with her interviewer when he says that "the unity of the novel is simply the central point of view of Maud Martha herself as she grows up."

Brooks's comments emphasize two points: the centrality of Maud Martha's inner life, for the novella is a revelation of her thoughts, and her reflections on her limited world. Unlike her predecessors, with the exception of Hurston's Janie Stark, Maud Martha is not just a creation of her external world; She helps to create her own world by transforming externals through her thoughts and imaginings. This is a quality seldom attributed to ordinary folk in previous black women's novels. And yet, in illuminating Maud Martha's specific individuality, Brooks must necessarily show her in relation to other people and her physical environment, the basis for the world she knows, imagines, even extends. The other point of emphasis in Brooks's description is her use of the word tiny and how diminution affects the form of this novella, the use of segments or vignettes. In all, the 170-page novella is divided into 34 chapters, many of which are three or four pages long, few longer than ten pages, "the small prose sections fitting together like a mosaic." This double emphasis of the novella is introduced in the first vignette, the "description of Maud Martha." Immediately we are in the midst of Maud Martha's images of fancy and her sense of her own ordinariness and diminutiveness.

What she liked was candy buttons, and books, and painted music (deep blue or delicate silver) and the west sky altering, viewed from the steps of the back porch; and dandelions….

dandelions were what she chiefly saw. Yellow jewels for everyday studding the patched green dress of her back yard. She liked their demure prettiness second to their everydayness; for in that latter quality she thought she saw a picture of herself, and it was comforting to find that what was common could also be a flower.

As a prose piece, Maud Martha is a fusion of these two qualities, the sensitive and the ordinary, not only in its characterization of its protagonist, but also in the moments the writer chooses to include in her compressed rendition of an urban black woman's life. Yet these moments, as they form a whole, both look back to the novels of the 1940s and toward black women's novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Since the time period of Maud Martha is the thirties and the forties, it is not surprising that the impact of the Depression on black family life (e.g., in "home" and "at the Burns-Coopers") are some of the moments Brooks chooses to telescope. But there are also vignettes about a dark girl's feeling of being rejected by her own community ("low yellow" and "if you're light and have long hair"), a theme that Toni Morrison would use as the basis for her complex analyses of cultural mutilation in The Bluest Eye (1970). There are segments about the relationship between the rituals of a black culture and the development of character ("kitchenette folks" and "tradition and Maud Martha"), a structural technique that Paule Marshall would expand and refine in her novels. There are moments that are particularly female ("a birth," "Helen," "Mother comes to call"), themes that would become increasingly important to black women novelists of the seventies. And there are "universal" moments, in that human beings, whatever their race, sex, or class, muse about the meaning of existence and the degree of responsibility they must take to shape their own lives ("posts," "on 34th Street"), an underlying theme in Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970).

Maud Martha, then, is a work that both expresses the mores of a time passing and prefigures the preoccupations to come. Georg Lukas in his analysis of another novella, Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1953), points out that novellas often appear at the end of a historical period or at the beginning of a new period, that often they are "either in the phase of a not yet (noch nicht) in the artistically universal mastery of the given social world, or in the phase of the no longer (nichtmehr)." His analysis of the genre is one way of locating the elusive significance of this "exquisite" novella. For in its focus on a single character or situation rather than the totality of a society and in its economy of presentation, the novella may summarize the essentials of a period that has just ended and be an initial exploration into attitudes that are just forming. Though not consciously intending to write a novella, the writer may find that in trying to express the moment of transition from one mode of interpreting reality to another, the present cannot be expressed in the novels of the past, nor is the totality of the new reality understood enough to transform it.

I think that it is important to note that the period of the 1930s and 1940s had been written about in many black novels. Wright's Native Son (1941) is set in that period as is Petry's The Street (1945). What Brooks does is to present another version of black life of that time, as she may have experienced it, but also as she could interpret it through the integrationist thrust of the 1950s. Yet she also pointed to future emphases: the sense of the black community as community and the black reaction to impose white notions of beauty, cultural nationalist concepts of the 1960s; as well as the sensitivity and specificity of the black women's experience as woman, a pervasive theme of the seventies. In effect, the seeds of these themes were sowed in the thwarted expectations of the integrationist thrust. And though Brooks could hardly foresee the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, or the Women's Movement and their impact on American literature, her experience as she described it in Maud Martha was the outline of some of the reasons for the desires and goals of these movements. When Maud Martha's little daughter, Paulette, is rejected by a white Santa Claus and asks "why didn't Santa Claus like me?" and Maud Martha must try to explain why without saying why, we are witnessing one of the "trivial" but significant reasons for the 1960s black search for nationhood. When Helen, Maud Martha's sister, proclaims to her, "you'll never get a boyfriend, if you don't stop reading those books," we hear in Maud Martha's sighs the rumblings of the redefinition of woman that would be attempted in the 1970s. Perhaps, as Arthur P. Davis pointed out, because there was an apparent climate of change but little actual change, and the Negro artist of the 1950s was living between two worlds, Brooks's rendition of Maud Martha's life would have to look backward and forward.

Yet Brooks's overt intention in writing Maud Martha was not to reinterpret the past or prefigure the future. She tells us that she "wanted to give a picture of a girl growing up—a black girl growing up in Chicago, and of course much of it is wrenched from my own life and twisted." In Report from Part I she provides us with a partial list of some of those "twists," how she used her knowledge of her specific community and her perception of her own life and culled from it the essence of "a black girl growing up in Chicago." She also tells us that the first passage she wrote for the novella became the opening of the last chapter. That passage emphasizes Maud Martha's awareness of the bursting life within her and without her; the result of which is her whisper, "What, what am I to do with all of this life?" That question, which permeates the entire novella, is both its theme and nuance, both the question of all persons in all times and the question of that specific individual in that specific time. Life was drastically limited for an ordinary black girl in the Chicagos of the 1940s, as it was for most ordinary people. And yet, like most ordinary people, there is so much life in Maud Martha. Whispering the question emphasizes its ironic truth, for to most institutions, most authorized social processes, even most literature, neither Maud Martha nor her question is at all important.

In a sense, then, the conflict of the novella is contained in its subject—that such a person as Maud Martha is seldom seen as imbued with importance. Thus, the question that permeates the entire novella is based not so much on the usual "character in a conflict" motif, but in the gradual unraveling of the life that is in Maud Martha, this ordinary, unheroic girl. The novella does not have intense dramatic rises and falls, so much as it presents a typical life as not at all typical in the flat meaning of the word. Concurrently, the novella is the embodiment of the idea that a slice of anybody's life has elements of wonder and farce, wry irony and joy. No fire and brimstone need fly. But since the hero or heroine, the exceptional person, has been extolled in most societies, Brooks's orientation is in itself a challenge to a venerated "universal" idea. In framing her intention as she did and in carrying it through in her "tiny" novel, Brooks articulated the value of the invisible Many. The social and literary black movements of the 1960s and 1970s would emerge precisely because these Many would insist on the value of their "little" lives and would ask the question: "What, what am I to do with all of this life?"

(2)

That Maud Martha is partially based on Brooks's own experience as a young black girl growing up in the Chicago of the 1930s and 1940s contributes to the authenticity one feels while reading the novel. In other words, Maud Martha is not merely a response to the social images of blacks that were current in the 1950s, but it is also a manifestation of Brooks's own philosophy about the relationship between life and aesthetics. She distinguishes a memoir from an autobiographical novel by calling the former "a 'factual' account," while the latter is "nuanceful, allowing." As is true of many novellas, Maud Martha, is economical in its presentation, but there are many styles of economic writing. What characterizes this novella is not only its precision, but its nuance, and how these stylistic elements are organic to its underlying theme: the wonderfulness of a Maud Martha.

As a poet, Brooks is known for her precision of language, for the care with which she chooses every word and that "concentration, that crush" in her work. It is not surprising, then, that Maud Martha also shares this characteristic. Brooks says of the poet's unique relationship to language that:

the poet deals in words with which everyone is familiar. We all handle words. And I think the poet, if he wants to speak to anyone is constrained to do something with these words so that they will "mean something," will be something that a reader may touch.

Her emphasis on the word as being, not as abstraction, but as sensory and concrete, underlines her choice of words in her novella as well as her poetry. Maud Martha is a compression of images from which the prose radiates. So that in the chapter "spring landscape: detail," Brooks's description of Maud Martha's school is concrete, sensory:

The school looked solid. Brownish-red brick, dirty cream stone trim. Massive chimney, candid, serious.

Most of Brooks's adjectives are certainly concrete. But look at how they move to the words, candid, serious, words that are usually abstract but have now become concrete, something you can touch in this spring landscape. And when her description of the solid school is contrasted with the school children whom she describes as "bits of pink, of blue, white, yellow, green, purple, black carried by jerky little stems of brown or yellow or brownblack," who blow into the schoolyard, Brooks shows us more than the color or line of this landscape. She evokes the touch, the feel of a configuration of attitudes represented by the solid dullness of the school, as opposed to the vibrant playfulness of the children. Hence the words that the reader may touch moves him/her toward the nuances he/she cannot touch. The precision and the nuance work hand in hand.

Not only can one touch Brooks's words, one can hear them. Rhythm and sound are not as important to the quality of prose as they are to poetry. But even though Maud Martha is written in the form of prose narrative, Brooks employs many of the techniques she uses in her poetry. The pacing of words through her adroit use of juxtaposition, the alternation of short and longer units, the creation of emphasis through alliteration and imagery, the selection of specific sounds to evoke a certain quality—all these elements are characteristic of the prose of Maud Martha and contribute to its quality of nuance. Maud Martha's assessment of her first beau is typical of Brooks's use of rhythm and sound to advance the prose narrative:

For Russell lacked—What? He was—nice. He was fun to go about with. He was decorated inside and out. He did things, said things with a flourish. That was what he was. He was a flourish. He was a dazzling, long and sleepily swishing flourish.

The emphasis in this two-page chapter is on Maud Martha's recognition of her first beau's grand superficiality, a quality that is not enough to absorb her, though it had vanquished so many others. So that the passage quoted above is not just a description of Russell, but a process of insight for Maud Martha as well as for the reader from which we learn much about her character by feeling her reaction to Russell. Brooks gives us the nuance of Maud Martha's insight as well as the factual through her choice of words, imagery, and sounds. The dashes indicate reflection, the slowing of the pace, as Maud Martha begins her assessment. "He was fun to go about with" is followed by equally short sentences that use repetition to create a gradual quickening of pace—He was, he did things, said things, he was—until the pace slows down to the moment of recognition "That was what he was." Finally, various elements of language, repetition, imagery, alliteration, assonance, combine in the long sentence that summarizes his essence: "He was a dazzling, long and sleepily swishing flourish," in which the z's, s's, l's and i's evoke Russell as much as the meaning of the words themselves.

Because of her careful use of these poetic devices, Brooks is able to compress the prose narrative, drawing fine outlines of mood, emotions, thought, and events without having to fill in many details. By eliminating the nonessential fact, by creating nuance, we touch, see, and hear the whole much in the same way a few deft lines by an accomplished artist can suggest the entire human body. Abstraction of form is only possible because we recognize, know, what is being suggested. But even more than recognizing the mood, emotion, event, we can concentrate on its essence, without the distraction of superfluous details that can sometimes obscure rather than reveal. And because of Brooks's distillation, our experience is more focused, more intense.

But poetic devices are not enough to make a novella. The form, by definition, involves some kind of narrative, some reflection of external as well as internal reality, some development of character, as well as a structure that shows the organic relationship between these elements. So while Brooks employed poetic devices to advantage in Maud Martha, she also had to utilize the techniques of fiction. Yet the line between her poetic and prose techniques is not a hard one, for her creation of nuance is especially critical to the overall design of the novella. Not only does each vignette evoke the essence of a specific mood, emotion, thought or event, it contributes to a composition that suggests the essence of Maud Martha's character and the pattern that is her life. Brooks's poetic sensitivity is especially apparent in the novella's structure, for she usually selects only those moments that accomplish two things: reinforce the outline of a pattern that is repeated in many other lives and is being reenacted here, while paradoxically focusing on Maud Martha's individuality. The effect is that of a ritual performed for time immemorial by different actors, who can vary the pattern only slightly—the actor this time being an ordinary girl from Chicago. The tension between these two elements, a pattern that seems prescribed and Maud Martha's transformation of it, moves the narrative.

The pattern of Maud Martha's life is presented in extremely short, condensed chapters, thirty-four in all, which are loosely divided into six phases. While Brooks's creation of nuance suggests Maud Martha's inner life, the chapter divisions are the external structure of the novel. These divisions are stages in the universal process of becoming an adult and therefore an outline of societal configurations of custom, culture, and historical forces which help to shape that individual. Thus the phases of early childhood and school, adolescence, courtship, work, marriage, the beginning of a family, the impact of the Depression of the 1930s and the war in the 1940s are a general outline of life for a young American girl growing up in the 1930s and 1940s. The moments Brooks selects to focus on in these divisions, however, are to a large extent a reflection of her view of that external reality. In concretizing the universal outline, she stresses both the rituals of a black family and community. She outlines the individuality of the girl-woman Maud Martha while emphasizing the impact of the particular concept of beauty, as well as the societal limits of being a woman, upheld by her community, on her personality. She focuses on the ordinary tone of Maud Martha's life while stressing the complexity of her inner character. Because we know, in general, the universal concept of growing up, because we know, in general, about family life and community, because we know, in general, the way that girls and women should be, she can evoke these configurations through nuance while emphasizing the uniqueness of Maud Martha's character and context. Thus, the "racial element is organic not imposed." So is her portrayal of womanhood and of the ordinary person.

At the crux of Brooks's composition is the development of her central actor. Of course; the chronology of the novella is its outer movement, but it is Maud Martha's sensibility, her perception of the world, that enlivens the narration. Yet Brooks does not use the "I," the first person point of view. As is her custom in many of her poems (e.g., "The Rites for Cousin Vit," "Mrs. Small"), the author creates a character for whom she cares intensely, but from whom she is clearly detached. And though the substance of the novel is told through Maud Martha's eyes, Brooks suggests, by her use of the objective third person, that other eyes see what hers see. While the reader feels intimately connected to Maud Martha he/she is constantly a ware of the world around Maud Martha as separate from and yet connected to her. Brooks use of an omniscient narrator who sees through Maud Martha's eyes emphasizes the sensibility of her central actor solidly located in a world of many others. The beginning of the vignette "Tim" illustrates how effective this technique is as a means of establishing Maud Martha's relationship to the outer world:

Oh, how he used to wiggle!—do little mean things! do great big wonderful things! and laugh laugh laugh.

He had shaved and he had scratched himself through the pants. He had lain down and ached for want of a woman. He had married. He had wiped out his nostrils with bits of tissue paper in the presence of his wife and his wife had turned her head, quickly, but politely, to avoid seeing them as they dropped softly into the toilet, and floated. He had a big stomach and an alarmingly loud laugh. He had been easy with the ain'ts and sho-nuffs. He had been drunk one time, only one time, and on that occasion had done the Charleston in the middle of what was then Grand Boulevard and is now South Park, at four in the morning. Here was a man who had absorbed the headlines in the Tribune, studied the cartoons in Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post.

These facts she had known about her Uncle Tim. And she had known that he liked sweet potato pie. But what were the facts that she had not known, that his wife, her father's sister Nannie, had not known? The things that nobody had known.

Clearly, Tim and his life exist outside of Maud Martha's head, but it is her language that articulates his individuality. And it is also her language that indicates that she is a woman, is black, and lives in a certain section of Chicago. The way she chooses details that appear trivial on the surface but cumulatively communicate a feeling for and a knowledge of this man, the way she focuses on intimate details that emphasize his relationships with others, are styles of speaking that often indicate a woman's voice. The content of these details tells us that he is a working-class black man who lives in Chicago and is somewhat interested in the world beyond him. And it is typical of Maud Martha's personality that she would ask what was beneath the surface—What were "the things that nobody had known?"

The qualities of Maud Martha's language is, in fact, of considerable importance to the major theme of the novella. Brooks carefully constructs Maud Martha's voice as that of a woman. The images she uses throughout the book are often derived from the world of the home, the world of cooking, of flowers, ferns and furniture, the world of emotional relationships—worlds that have traditionally been seen as woman's domain. And much of what Maud Martha says is not said aloud; it is usually her internal conversation with herself, since her observations, critiques, and musings are not considered important. There is also a way in which her persistent attention to size (which sometimes stems from her own feeling of littleness) connotes "the smaller sex," as well as the ordinary person, a scale that is reflected in the tinyness of the novel itself. And it is often because she understands that there is sometimes so much in what appears to be so little that she gleans many insights about herself and her world.

In fact, the critical aspects of Maud Martha's sensibility are her ability to see beneath the mundane surface of things and to transform the little that is allowed her into so much more than it originally was. As Paule Marshall puts it, "In her daily life, Maud Martha functions as an artist. In that way this novel carries on the African tradition that the ordinary rituals of daily life are what must be made into art." In her adolescence, Maud Martha is able to put this insight into words in the vignette, "At the Regal."

To create—a role, a poem, picture, music a rapture in stone: great. But not for her.

What she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other.

She would polish and hone that.

That awareness of her own being, as valuable, unique, as created by herself yet connected to those around her, marks her personal development. So that she can refuse to be devalued by her potential employer, Mrs. Burns-Cooper, though there is only "a pear in her ice box and one end of rye bread." She can be hurt by her husband's desire to be a social somebody, understand how that is linked to his hidden dislike of her dark skin and heavy hair and yet maintain her own sense of worth, precisely because she has developed her own standards, her own concept of the valuable.

It is the articulation of this value in Brooks's unheroic ordinary black girl from Chicago, a value that is almost always celebrated in the heroic, the extraordinary, the male, that marks the distinctive language, movement, substance of Maud Martha. Through her use of nuance, Brooks is able to present this celebration in its essential form, suggesting that Maud Martha is one of any number of ordinary people, who, against the limits of the mundane life, continue to create themselves.