SOURCE: "'Chocolate Mabbie' and 'Pearl May Lee': Gwendolyn Brooks and the Ballad Tradition," in CLA Journal, Vol. XXX, No. 3, March, 1987, pp. 278-93.

[In the following essay, Mootry discusses the appropriation of folk ballad and blues conventions in Brooks's poetry. "While, on the surface, these folk elements make her poetry more accessible to the reader," writes Mootry, "a closer examination reveals insinuations and refinements of technique that augment the complexity so characteristic of her work."]

Among the five major volumes of Gwendolyn Brooks' poetry, one of the notably recurring poetic forms is the ballad. From "The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie," in her first volume, to "The Ballad of Edie Barrow" in her last major book, Brooks shows a continued interest in this popular or folk art form. Brooks' attraction to ballads is not unique. In their revolt against the artifice, formalism, and abstraction of eighteenth-century classicist poetry, romantic poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth often turned to folk ballads for subjects and techniques. They liked the fact that the ballad, as a folk form, focused on the outcasts of society, including abandoned mothers, prisoners, and beggars. At the same time, they valued the ballad's language and structure because it seemed to avoid the pretensions of eighteenth-century classicist poetry. In his famous preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth maintains that the language of all poetry, like the language of the ballad, should be neutral, simple, and essentially the same as everyday speech. Coleridge and Wordsworth, however, aimed merely to imitate the ballad form in order to demonstrate the value of their new theory of poetics. Brooks' use of the ballad reflects a similar desire to recover a simpler, more direct, poetic form; it also reflects her belief that the poet should "vivify the commonplace."

However, Brooks goes beyond the mere imitation of ballad themes and techniques to create more varied and complex structures. The result is that while on one level her ballads are simple and direct, on another level they are deeply ironic and complex, both in theme and technique. Thus through her use of ballads, Brooks meets the demands of two ostensibly disparate audiences: the "art for art's sake" audience with its emphasis on the poem as its own excuse for being and the "common" audience who looks for familiar structures and social or moral messages. In the process, Brooks recovers the ballad tradition by using its themes and techniques; she reinvigorates that tradition by infusing it with new themes and variations; and finally, she critiques the tradition by using parodic techniques. The overall effect, however, is the revelation of contemporary, often unpleasant, truths about Afro-American and American society.

In this essay, observations of Brooks' use of the Western folk ballad tradition in her poetry will be based on the analysis of the poems "The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie" and "Ballad of Pearl May Lee," which appeared in her first volume. A Street in Bronzeville (1945). These poems were selected not only because they are literary ballads, but because, as their titles suggest, each is Brooksian in its emphasis on a "woman-identified" vision. Gordon Hall Gerould, in his study of the European folk ballad, notes that "the sorrows peculiar to women serve the ballad poets … for some of their most poignant moments." Brooks continues this thematic aspect of the European folk ballad tradition, often infusing into her own literary ballads the complex use of additional folk elements from the Afro-American spirituals and blues (sacred and secular) traditions. Before analyzing the poems, however, it may be useful to review briefly the major folk ballad conventions.

I. The Ballad Tradition

The original popular (or folk) ballad is anonymous, transmitted by oral tradition, and tells a story, often about events well known to its audience. Whatever affects the thoughts and emotions of a community may become the subject of a ballad, but the most frequent themes are unfaithful lovers, shocking murders, mysterious happenings, and political oppression. For example, the latter theme is expressed in the English ballads of Robin Hood, who defended the rights of the common people against the predatory rich. Perhaps because the story is usually well known to the audience, the ballad poet tends to present his narrative in a series of dramatically striking episodes. The audience is left to fill out the complete narrative since characterization is brief, transitions are abrupt, and action is often developed through dialogue.

The language of folk ballads is usually simple in diction and meter. However, because many ballads have been handed down from generation to generation, the diction often ranges from the Scottish or Anglo-Saxon vernacular to archaisms reflecting past poetic oral conventions or everyday usage. Inversions of syntactical structures are also common, perhaps to maintain earlier narrative conventions. Regarding stanzaic form, the typical folk ballad uses the ballad stanza, an abcb four-line stanza with alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. However, even where the ballad stanza is not employed, there tends to be the use of refrains and repetition of phrases or parallel phrasing. Often a refrain is repeated with only a slight change, creating what is called an incremental refrain.

Although many ballads begin in medias res, just as frequently the ballad employs stock opening phrases to establish its narrative structure. In any event, because of its elliptical episodic structure, colors, actions, and even dialogue are often metonymic and multifunctional. Finally, ballads often also close with some kind of summary stanza. This final stanza often continues the incremental nature of ballad repetition, as well as the simplicity with which tragic situations are presented.

These are some of the major features of the Western European folk ballad. Of course, there are many variations and exceptions to these rules, but for the purpose of this essay, these core conventions may serve as a guide in assessing how Brooks uses the folk ballad tradition and how she departs from it in two of her most powerful literary ballads.

II. "The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie" and the Afro-American Sacred Tradition

In "The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie," Brooks deals with the pathos of intraracial discrimination, one of her recurring themes. Seven-year-old Mabbie falls in love with her classmate, Willie Boone, moons over him in history class, and waits for him outside the grammar school gates. In an epiphanic scene, Mabbie's erstwhile "lover" appears insouciantly in the company of a light-skinned, long-haired beauty. At the poem's conclusion, Mabbie is left to "chocolate companions" and to her own resources.

In "The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie," Brooks uses many of the European ballad conventions mentioned above. For instance, the poem begins with an opening phrase which establishes its narrative character: "It was Mabbie without the grammar school gates…." The use of the connective "and" reinforces both the poem's plot structure and its apparent simplicity. An almost childlike progression of sentences makes up this first stanza:

     It was Mabbie without the grammar school gates.
     And Mabbie was all of seven.
     And Mabbie was cut from a chocolate bar.
     And Mabbie thought life was heaven. (emphasis mine)

Repetition appears in the phrasing, "It was Mabbie … / And Mabbie was … / And Mabbie thought…." This parallel repetition recurs in the third stanza, which repeats the opening line: "It was Mabbie without the grammar school gates." The repetition becomes incremental with the closing stanza, where the opening line is again repeated with the meaningful change of one word, "without," to the word "alone," i.e., "It was Mabbie without the grammar school gates" (first stanza) becomes "It was Mabbie alone by the grammar school gates" (sixth and last stanza—emphasis mine).

Archaic or somewhat outdated usages appear unobtrusively in "Chocolate Mabbie." The word "without" in the poem's first line is clearly archaic; and certain words have an archaic aura, e.g., "saucily," "woe," and "lemon-hued" in the fifth stanza. To this suggestion of the old ballad tradition, Brooks juxtaposes modern vernacular language, particularly in the key phrase, "cut from a chocolate bar." Also noteworthy is Brook's use of predominantly Anglo-Saxon words. Often monosyllabic, often with hard consonants, and often used alliteratively, these words with Anglo-Saxon roots create a harsh if vigorous tone and reinforce Brooks' debt to the European (English) folk tradition. Examples of these key words occurring in "Chocolate Mabbie" include "without," "gates," "seven," "cut," "thought," "heaven," "school," "cool," "soon," "brow," and "alone." Also, the preponderance of "to be" verbs and pronouns reflects an Anglo-Saxon linguistic base. One of the few interpolations of an Afro-American vernacular phrasing in the poem occurs in the fourth line of the second stanza where Brooks describes Mabbie's ardor for Willie: "Was only her eyes were cool" is at once a balladic inversion and a Black English construction. The very absence of sustained Black English in the poem accentuates this line, which interestingly anticipates the masterful title of one of Brooks' most famous poems, "We Real Cool."

Turning to its stanzaic form, "Chocolate Mabbie," like the traditional ballad, uses the abcb rhyme scheme with rhythmic alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. For instance, the first stanza of the poem scans as follows:

     It was, Mabbie without the grammar school gates.
     And Mabbie was all of seven.
     And Mabbie was cut from a chocolate bar.
     And Mabbie thought life was heaven.

Further balladic elements include the repetition of phrases and the use of parallelisms mentioned above, particularly the incrementally juxtaposed line which opens the first and last stanzas:

     It was Mabbie without the grammar school gates.
     ...................
     It was Mabbie alone by the grammar school gates.

Balladic epithets also appear in such phrases as "the pearly gates," "bold Willie Boone," "lemon-hued lynx" and "sandwaves." Yet while these epithets merely adorn the traditional ballad, in "Chocolate Mabbie" they become hyperbolic, a mockery within a mock-tragedy. "Bold Willie Boone" and his "lemon-hued lynx" are inflated references to school children which infuse "Chocolate Mabbie" with a satiric tone. The foreshadowing voice of the narrator deepens the sense of satire when describing Mabbie's school gate vigil in the fourth stanza:

     Oh, warm is the waiting for joys, my dears,
     And it cannot be too long,
     Oh, pity the little poor chocolate lips
     That carry the bubble of song!

If exaggerated language in "Chocolate Mabbie" mocks the ballad tradition when it is applied to these prepubescent ordinary characters, the poem's understated plot similarly burlesques another major ballad feature, the episodic, sensationalist plot. While the plot of "Chocolate Mabbie" is "cinematic" in that it offers a montage-like series of images, in actuality the story is minimal. The reader observes a love-sick Mabbie outside the gates, observes Mabbie in the history class, and observes Mabbie desolately watching Willie leave with his "lemon-hued lynx." These everyday "events" in "Chocolate Mabbie" pale before the far more shocking events of such traditional ballads as "Sir Patrick Spence," in which a heroic sailor is involuntarily sent to his death, or "Child-Waters," where a young woman's consuming love ends in an illegitimate baby and public humiliation.

In spite of her occasional parodic stance, Brooks adds to the traditional ballad conventions a theme that is at once universal and particularlized. "Chocolate Mabbie," at its core, is a poem about unrequited love. To the theme of unrequited love is added the theme of intraracial discrimination within the black community. As Arthur P. Davis has noted, this is a recurring issue in Brooks' poetry. When this theme is linked to the theme of a female child's developing identity the black community. As Arthur P. Davis has noted, this is a recurring issue in Brooks' poetry. When this theme is linked to the theme of a female child's developing identity within the black community, it may not be sensationalist, but it does take on the power of harsh revelation. The result, ultimately, is that "Chocolate Mabbie" is not only about the loss of love, but even more so, it is about the loss of innocence.

It is in addressing the theme of "innocence versus experience" that Brooks further modifies her use of the European ballad tradition by drawing on subjects and themes common to the Afro-American sacred folk tradition. The opening lines of "Chocolate Mabbie" express Mabbie's delusions of love in quasi-religious terms. To Mabbie, who "thought life was heaven," the grammar school gates have become "the pearly gates." References to "pearly gates" recur frequently in Afro-American spirituals, usually when linked to the theme of the Second Coming. This messianic theme and its attendant imagery are parodically and mockingly reconstructed in the third stanza, where Mabbie's hopes for Willie's attention are expressed in the final line: "He would surely be coming soon." Thus, in another hyperbolic strategy, Mabbie is shown as having made a religion of love. Yet, from another perspective, the folk spirituals or sacred tradition is not so much mocked as used as an analogue of secular dilemma. In a further analogy to the biblical tradition, Mabbie, like Adam and Eve, is banished from her prelapsarian state. Thus if the imagery suggests apocalyptic visions, it also looks backward to the Fall. Mabbie's "guilt" is a moot point because she, like all humans, is original sin personified, being "graven by a hand less than angelic." However, the implications are twofold. Brooks is not only speaking of original sin in a Calvinistic sense, but primarily of the social "sin" of being born black and female. In addressing this theme of loss of innocence, Brooks resorts neither to a sense of predestined fate nor to the romantic transcendence of ideal black womanhood so common to her predecessors during the Harlem Renaissance. Rather, the bitterness of Mabbie's rejection by Willie and the collapse of Mabbie's naive worldview is balanced by the implied possibility of the reconstruction of self in society. Mabbie must learn to use her personal resources, to cherish her "chocolate companions" and not to waste her personal resources, to cherish her "chocolate companions" and not to waste her time brooding over male "betrayal." As Brooks advised in her autobiography,

[b]lack women must remember … [t]hat her [sic] personhood precedes her femalehood, that, sweet as sex may be, she cannot endlessly brood on Black man's blondes, blues and blunders. She is a person in the world—with wrongs to right, stupidities to outwit, with her man when possible, on her own when not…. Therefore she must, in the midst of tragedy and hatred and neglect … mightily enjoy the readily available: sunshine and pets and children and conversation and games and travel (tiny or large) and books and walks and chocolate cake….

By infusing satire and parody into "Chocolate Mabbie" Brooks establishes the poem's distance from the simple folk ballad tradition. Despite the ballad conventions and sacred imagery, the poem has a mocking quality which gives it a complex cutting edge and reinforces its ideas. The childlike syntax of the opening stanza goes beyond balladic simplicity to a primerlike quality. It is as if an elementary school child is adding sentence to sentence with no sense of subordination. This simplicity underscores the fact that on one level Brooks is writing about "puppy-love" and humorously focusing on a transitory childish crush and its inevitable demise. Yet, in the final stanza the narrator loses her sardonic tone. Thus the reader is reminded that if this is, from one perspective, childish subject matter, ultimately it is a serious poetic statement about the dilemma of growing up black and female in America.

III. "The Ballad of Pearl May Lee" and the Afro-American Blues Tradition

"The Ballad of Pearl May Lee" shows Brooks at her grittiest—blackening and womanizing the ballad form. Through her focus on a black woman narrator, her stark descriptions of grim, racially based sexual drives and her linkage of the theme of revenge with the brutal racist act of lynching, Brooks achieves remarkable complexity both in the poem's structure and in its poetic statement.

The theme of this second, longer poem, like the subject of "Chocolate Mabbie," is the common folk ballad theme of unrequited love. "Pearl May Lee," however, is a sensational story about a lynching, told through a dramatic episodic narrative which includes several shifts in scene and the use of dialogue in its rhetorical strategy. True to folk balladry, the tale opens at a crucial point in the progression of events. The reader/listener overhears Pearl the narrator retelling her story in medias res:

      Then off they took you, off to the jail,
      A hundred hooting after….

Thus, in the "Ballad of Pearl May Lee" Brooks changes from the third-person narrator of the European ballad to the immediacy of a highly involved first-person speaker, which is characteristic of the Afro-American blues tradition. Pearl May, the poem's opening speaker, addresses her once derelict and now murdered lover, Sammy, and retells the gory details of his lynching. In the process, however, Pearl May becomes herself the subject of the poem; it is her emotional reactions to events and not the events themselves that Brooks brings into focus. The narrative stance in the poem fluctuates. At times Pearl is almost an objective chronicler of events, as when she recounts in the thirteenth stanza: "They wrapped you around a cottonwood tree." At other times she acts as a judgmental choric voice, as when she remarks, "You had it coming surely." But hers is primarily a lyrical voice, reflecting on her own dilemma and feelings, as when she soliloquizes; "Though never was a poor gal lorner."

As with the traditional ballad, "Pearl May Lee" contains several episodic shifts in scene. The poem opens with the speaker in her home; then the speaker dramatizes the jail cell scene following Sammy's arrest; next, in a kind of flashback, Sammy and Pearl's school days are recalled; subsequently Pearl May imagines Sammy's seduction scene on the fringe of town in the back of a Buick; next she imagines the lynching scene; and finally, she returns to her present state of mind. These abrupt shifts in scene are simultaneously balladic and also reflective of blues techniques. Sammy's incarceration recalls many "jailhouse" blues songs. Ironically, while he is held behind cell bars, Pearl May, like so many blues women, is imprisoned by her confusion and despair. She literally begs to be dug out of her depression and loneliness when she cries: "Oh, dig me out of my don't despair / Oh, pull me out of my poor-me." In so doing she echoes the paralysis expressed by Ma Rainey, the great classic blues songwriter and singer, in "Deep Moaning Blues:"

     My bell rang this morning, didn't know which-a-way to go,
     I had the blues so bad, I sit right down on my flo.

At the same time, structurally, Pearl's lines recall the traditional ballad lament, as seen in this concluding stanza from "Bonny Barbara Allen:"

     "O mother, mother, make my bed!
     O make it safe and narrow!"

This lament parallels the concluding stanza of "Pearl May Lee":

     "Oh, dig me out of my don't despair.
     Oh, pull me out of my poor-me.
     Oh, get me a garment of red to wear…."

Both of these laments contrast with the similarly structured mock, lament in the sixth stanza of "Chocolate Mabbie":

     Oh, warm is the waiting for joys, my dears!
     And it cannot be too long.
     Oh, pity the little poor chocolate lips
     That carry the bubble of song.

In the presentation of episodes the language of "Pearl May Lee" is, like ballad language, simple, idiomatic, sometimes harshly direct. Pearl May's reaction to Sammy's lamented death is to "cut [her] lungs with … laughter," but she realizes paradoxically that "never was a poor gal [herself] lorner." Many blues idioms infuse the vernacular language of this poem with a particularly Afro-American blues realism. For instance, Sammy's rejection of Pearl is phrased as the inability to "abide dark meat." Yet Brooks juxtaposes this stark sexual reference with the romantic ballad language Pearl uses when she tries to imagine Sammy at his fatal lover's tryst. In this narrative-within-the-narrative, balladic phrases appear in such lines as "The moon an owl's eye minding; / The sweet and thick of the cricket-ballad dark" (emphasis mine).

Dialogue in "Pearl May Lee" is similarly varied. It is usually simple, even crude, as when the white woman turns against Sammy with the accusation: "You raped me, nigger." However, at times the poem's diction includes balladic phrasing, as when Pearl May begs, "Oh, get me a garment of red to wear." The structure and semantics of this request are not a part of contemporary American or Afro-American language, particularly the usage of "garment" instead of "dress." The use of the word "garment" fits into the poem's patterning of words with Middle English etymology, both within and outside dialogue. Such words, which often begin with hard sounds and are often used alliteratively, recreate the forceful balladic tone of many English ballads. Other examples in "Pearl May Lee" are "cut," "laugh," "dig," and "pull."

In addition to its balladic language conventions, "Pearl May Lee" is composed of variations on the ballad stanza. While much of its phrasing comes from the blues, and while its dramatic situation is a blues dilemma, stanzaically it departs from classic blues verse form of three lines with an aab rhyme scheme. Instead, its variation on the ballad stanza relies heavily on the use of three devices; repetition, rhyme, and refrains. For example, the first stanza sets a pattern for stanzas two through five, stanzas eight and nine, and stanzas eleven through sixteen. In each, three lines are followed by a refrain which repeats the rhyme of the second line. The entire first stanza reads:

     Then they took you off to the jail,
     A hundred hooting after.
     And you should have heard me at my house.
     I cut my lungs with my laughter.
       Laughter,
       Laughter,
     I cut my lungs with my laughter.

Stanzas six, seven, and ten, however, consist of six lines, with the opening two lines being followed by a repeated set of lines. For example, the sixth stanza reads:

      At school, your girls were the bright little girls. (a)
      You couldn't abide dark meat. (b)
      Yellow was for to look at. (c)
      Black for the famished to eat. (b)
      Yellow was for to look at. (c)
      Black for the famished to eat. (b)

Not only are phrases and refrains repeated within stanzas, but in a complex patterning of parallel structures, entire stanzas are repeated for incremental emphasis. Thus, the fourth and fifth stanzas are repeated as stanzas fifteen and sixteen. Only one line is altered in the process: "But you paid for your white arms, Sammy boy," in the fourth stanza, becomes "You paid for your dinner, Sammy boy," in the fifteenth stanza. However, Brooks cleverly varies her stanzaic rhymes and repetition throughout the poem by using off rhymes, hyphenated word rhymes, and even coinages, e.g., the word "lorner" in stanza two, which is a comparative of the obsolete Middle English word "lorn."

In addition to coinages reminiscent of European ballads, phrases like "white arms" and "pink and white honey" form part of the many balladic epithets used in "Pearl May Lee." Some of these epithets come from the romantic ballad tradition, such as the "cricket-belled dark" mentioned above; others from American and Afro-American vernacular. The sheriff, for instance, is "the red old thing," while Sammy hates "dark meat."

Colors in "Pearl May Lee" are used metonymically in both the balladic and Afro-American vernacular sense. References to white, red, and black thread the poem, creating multiple associations with racial hegemony (the white Southern oppressors), violence (the angry sheriff is described as a "red old thing"), life ("garment of red"), and the reality of intraracial color discrimination ("Black for the famished to eat; yellow to … look at").

The use of dialogue as a foreshadowing device as well as a dramatic element is another balladic technique in "Pearl May Lee." For example, the sheriff predicts to Sammy: "You son of a bitch, you're going to hell!." And the white woman, his erstwhile lover, promises: "My body tonight, niggerboy. I'll get your body tomorrow."

Ultimately, all of the personae in "The Ballad of Pearl May Lee" are actors in a dramatic tragedy that is at once universal in its linkage of the great themes of desire and death, but particular in its peculiarly American and Afro-American nuances. The "red old" sheriff and the "hundreds hooting after" reflect a racist Southern communal history of vigilante justice based on the principle of unadulterated Southern womanhood. While their actions parallel the actions of the seven foresters in "Johnie Cock" who gleefully dismember a virile youth for the brash "crime" of poaching, the racial motivation for the lynching of Sammy is uniquely American. Similarly, while the white woman betrayer-lover parallels the old palmer who sneaks away to tell the foresters of Johnie's crime, again the peculiar mixture of desire, shame, and racial hatred reflects a special American dilemma. Pearl May's cutting laughter and sense of justification ("You had it coming surely") reflects the painful but prescient "I told you so" attitude of characters like Johnie Cock's mother, who begged him to "stay at hame." But the fury and brutal sense of revenge felt by Pearl May is perhaps more akin to that of Lady Erskine, who, in the ballad "Child-Owlet," has her nephew dismembered because he refused her advances. Even if Pearl's ambivalence, the ambiguity of her final state of mind ("Oh, dig me out of my don't despair … Oh get me a garment of red to wear"), parallels the convention of remorse following revenge common to the ballad convention, it also parallels the Afro-American blues mixture of "meanness" and regret as reflected in these lines:

     Too sad to worry, too mean to cry,
     too slow to hurry, too good to lie,…. (Ma Rainey,
     "Victim of the Blues")

Thus, both the ballad tradition and the blues tradition are reflected in "Pearl May Lee"'s structure, in its imagery, and in its core theme of the interrelation between sex, violence, and death. By making her speaker-heroine a semi-omniscient first-person narrator, Brooks was able to use the conventions of these two traditions to enhance her "woman-identified" stance and her art.

In conclusion, Brooks' use of folk traditions varies considerably. At times, it is straightforward, at other times parodic; and often it is a complex mixture of both. Further analysis of her use of the traditions of ballads, blues, and spirituals needs to be made before any full understanding of her art can be achieved. The relationship between the blues tradition and the ballad tradition, for instance, needs further exploration. At this point, based on two powerful examples, it can be argued that Brooks turned to folk forms—ballad, blues, and spirituals—not out of any sentimental attachment to a given tradition but to deepen her poetic structure. While, on the surface, these folk elements make her poetry more accessible to the reader, a closer examination reveals insinuations and refinements of technique that augment the complexity so characteristic of her work. In so doing, Brooks has met her own criteria expressed in this early statement for an effective black poet:

The Negro poet's most urgent duty, at present, is to polish his technique, his way of presenting his truths and his beauties, that these may be more insinuating, and therefore, more overwhelming.