SOURCE: "'Taming All That Anger Down': Rage and Silence in Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha," in Massachusetts Review, Vol. XXIV, No. 2, Summer, 1983, pp. 453-66.

[In the following essay, Washington discusses the critical reception of Maud Martha and the suppressed rage, self-loathing, and reticence displayed by Brooks's autobiographic heroine.]

      Then emotionally aware
      Of the black and boisterous hair,
      Taming all that angêr down.

Gwendolyn Brooks

When Gwendolyn Brooks' autobiographical first novel, Maud Martha, was published in 1953 it was given the kind of ladylike treatment that assured its dismissal. Reviewers invariably chose to describe the novel in words that reflected what they considered the novel's appropriate feminine values. The young black woman heroine was called a "spunky Negro girl" as though the novel were a piece of juvenile fiction. Reviewers, in brief notices of the novel, insisted on its optimism and faith: Maud's life is made up of "moments she loved," she has "disturbances," but she "struggles against jealousy" for the sake of her marriage; there is, of course, "the delicate pressure of the color line," but Maud has the remarkable "ability to turn unhappiness and anger into a joke." Brooks' style was likened to the exquisite delicacy of a lyric poem. The New York Times reviewer said the novel reminded him of Imagist poems, of "clusters of ideograms from which one recreates connected experience."

In 1953 no one seemed prepared to call Maud Martha a novel about bitterness, rage, self-hatred and the silence that results from suppressed anger. No one recognized it as a novel dealing with the very sexism and racism that these reviews enshrined. What the reviewers saw as exquisite lyricism was actually the truncated stuttering of a woman whose rage makes her literally unable to speak.

This autobiographical novel is about silences. Maud Martha rarely speaks aloud to anyone else. She has learned to conceal her feelings behind a mask of gentility, to make her hate silent and cold, expressed only in the most manipulative and deceptive ways. When she is irritated with her husband, Paul, who pinches her on the buttocks, trying to interest her in the activities of the book he is reading, Sex in the Married Life, she rises from the bed, as though she is at a garden party, and says "pleasantly", "'Shall I make some cocoa?'… 'And toast some sandwiches?'" That she is aware of this pattern and its destructiveness and of her need to change is clearly part of the novel's design:

There were these scraps of baffled hate in her, hate with no eyes, no smile and—this she especially regretted, called her hungriest lack—not much voice.

But the silences of Maud Martha are also Brooks' silences. The short vignetted chapters enact Maud Martha's silence. Ranging in length from one and a half pages to eighteen pages, these tightly controlled chapters withhold information about Maud just as she withholds her feelings; they leave her frozen in an arrested moment so that we are left without the reactions that are crucial to our understanding of her. With no continuity between one chapter and the next, the flow of Maud's life is checked just as powerfully as she checks her own anger. The short, declarative sentences, with few modifiers and little elaboration, are as stiff, unyielding and tight-lipped as Maud Martha herself.

An example of Brooks' tendency to check Maud's activity (and thus her growth) is chapter five, ironically entitled, "you're being so good so kind." As the teen-aged Maud awaits a visit from a white schoolmate named Charles, she begins to feel embarrassed by the shabbiness of her home and worried that her house may have the unpleasant smell that "colored people's houses necessarily had." It is a moment of pure terror. She is the whole "colored" race and "Charles was the personalization of the entire Caucasian plan" about to sit in judgment on her. Charles never actually materializes. The chapter ends with a freeze frame of Maud hiding in the bathroom, experiencing an emotion worse than fear:

What was this she was feeling now? Not fear, not fear. A sort of gratitude! It sickened her to realize it. As though Charles in coming gave her a gift. Recipient and benefactor. It's so good of you. You're being so good.

These last three lines, set off from the rest of the text, are a commentary by a black consciousness more aware and more removed from the event than the teen-aged Maud. While the commentator's indignation is reassuring, we can only imagine how the visit would have affected Maud: whether Charles continues to have such power when he appears, or whether Maud is as truly defeated in the encounter as her position behind closed doors intimates.

In all the chapters covering Maud's girlhood on the south side of Chicago in the 1930s and 40s, there are powerful oppositions to her freedom. In chapter one, for example, "description of Maud Martha," she decides on a personal metaphor for herself: she is a dandelion, a sturdy flower of demure prettiness, but just as a puff of wind can destroy it, so her belief in its—and her—power to allure is easily shaken, for,

it was hard to believe that a thing of only ordinary allurements—if the allurements of any flower could be said to be ordinary—was as easy to love as a thing of heart-catching beauty.

Maud's wish to be alluring is dashed in the last two sentences of this chapter by a sudden shift to a description of her prettier sister, Helen, who is described in a gasp of pure pleasure at the thought:

… her sister Helen! who was only two years past her own age of seven, and was almost her own height and weight and thickness. But oh, the long lashes, the grace, the little ways with the hands and feet.

Once, at age ten, when she is trying to appear more daring than she feels, she calls out "'Hi handsome'" to the little boy Emmanuel riding by in his wagon. He scowls back, "'I don't mean you, old black gal'" and he offers the ride to her sister Helen. In this chapter Maud tries to account for the mysterious, implacable design which has determined her inferior status and the greater worthiness of light-skinned beauties like Helen. In the short, staccato sentences that characterize much of the novel's narration, she tries to be nobly superior about her family's preference for Helen:

It was not their fault. She understood. They could not help it. They were enslaved, were fascinated, and they were not at all to blame.

Yet is not her nobleness we feel in these sentences, but her anger. These broken utterances, as Anna Julia Cooper called them, are evidence of a woman denied expression of powerful feelings.

The painful awareness of herself as an undesirable object whose worth cannot be gauged by eyes accustomed to dismissing the commonplace mystifies the child Maud. She is disdainful of her family's failure to see that she is smarter than Helen, that she reads more, that old folks like to talk to her, that she washes as much and has longer and thicker (if nappier) hair. But from the age of seventeen to the birth of her first child (chapters ten through nineteen) her own self-perception is dismissed while she abandons herself to the obligatory quest for a man. When she is finally chosen by one of "them," or, in her words, when she "hooks" Paul, her language and attitude shift. She now sees herself entirely through Paul's eyes. In the chapter called "low yellow," Maud engages in a grotesque act of double consciousness in which she fantasizes about Paul's negative view of her:

He wonders as we walk in the street, about the thoughts of the people who look at us. Are they thinking that he could do no better than—me? Then he thinks. Well, hmp! All the little good-lookin' dolls that have wanted him—all the little sweet high yellows that have ambled slowly past his front door—What he would like to tell those secretly snickering ones!—That any day out of the week he can do better than this black gal.

Rewarded for her pains with marriage, Maud settles down to "being wife to him, salving him, in every way considering and replenishing him." In chapter sixteen "the young couple at home" we perceive how Maud is the one who's been "hooked," who feels hemmed in, cramped, and "unexpressed" in this marriage. Though she is as disappointed as he in their life together, she evades her feelings. Once, in a classic example of self-abnegation, she worries that he is tired of her:

She knew that he was tired of his wife, tired of his living quarters, tired of working at Sam's, tired of his two suits…. He had no money, no car, no clothes, and he had not been put up for membership in the Foxy Cats Club…. He was not on show…. Something should happen…. She knew that he believed he had been born to invade, to occur, to confront, to inspire the flapping of flags, to panic people.

Maud's lack of voice and indirection become more troubling for us when, as a grown woman confined to a small apartment and to being Mrs. Paul Phillips, she seems to have become an accomplice to her own impotence. Maud's passivity in the face of the persecutory actions of others inhibits her growth and reflects her resistance to facing her anger. When Maud and Paul are invited to the Foxy Cats Club Ball, where acceptance requires sophistication and good looks, Maud is once again up against the image of the "little yellow dream girl." Thinking about how she will forestall her old feelings of inferiority, she prepares for the event in language we know will defeat her:

"I'll settle," decided Maud Martha, "on a plain white princess-style thing and some blue and black satin ribbon. I'll go to my mother's. I'll work miracles at the sewing machine."

"On that night, I'll wave my hair. I'll smell faintly of lily of the valley."

The words she uses to refashion herself—white, princess, wavy, lily—all suggest how complete a transformation she imagines she needs in order to be accepted. At the club, Paul goes off with the beautiful, "white-looking" curvy Maella, leaving Maud on a bench by the wall. Maud imagines how she might handle the interloper:

I could … go over there and scratch her upsweep down. I could spit on her back. I could scream. "Listen," I could scream, "I'm making a baby for this man and I mean to do it in peace."

Instead of asserting herself, however, Maud chooses to say nothing. The scraps of rage and baffled hate accumulate while she resists the words of power as though she has subjected her language to the same perverted standards by which she judges her physical beauty. In one of the early chapters she describes the "graceful" life as one where people glide over floors in softly glowing rooms, smile correctly over trays of silver, cinnamon and cream, and retire in quiet elegance. She imagines herself happy and caressed in these cool, elegant (white) places, and she aspires to the jeweled, polished, clam lives the people live there. This life, as she imagines it, is like a piece of silver, silent and remote and behind bright glass. The black world, as symbolized by the Foxy Cats Ball, is, by comparison, hot, steamy, sweaty and crowded. Far from caressing her, this real world batters her until she retreats into her imagination, refusing to speak in it because it does not match the world of her fantasies. She conceals her real self behind the bright glass of her strained gentility.

All of this pretense, this muted rage, this determination to achieve housewifely eminence—the feminine mystique of the 1950s—the desire to protect herself, "to keep herself to herself," masks so much of Maud's real feelings that we are compelled to consider what is missing in Maud Martha. Are there places in the novel where the real meaning of the character's quest is disguised? Are there "hollows, centers, caverns within the work—places where activity that one might expect is missing … or deceptively coded"?

Something is missing in Maud Martha, something besides the opportunity to speak, something we have the right to expect in Maud's life because Maud herself expects it. She has already—in the first chapters—begun to chafe at the domestic role, and yet Brooks suggests that Maud has no aspirations beyond it. When Maud asks in the last chapter, "'What, what, am I to do with all this life?'" she is expressing the same sense of perplexity her readers have been feeling throughout the novel. How is this extraordinary woman going to express herself? She claims not to want to be a star because she once saw a singer named Howie Joe Jones parade himself before an audience foolishly "exhibiting his precious private identity" and she has vowed that she will never be like that: "she was going to keep herself to herself." The artist's role, she says, is not for her. But the fact that she has considered and dismissed the possibility is revealing:

To create—a role, a poem, a 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.

Everywhere in the novel, however, Maud's artistic intentions are indirectly revealed. She perceives the world sensuously, she responds to the complexity of beauty.

What she wanted to dream, and dreamed, was her affair. It pleased her to dwell upon color and soft bready textures and light, on a complex beauty, on gem-like surfaces. What was the matter with that? (italics mine)

What indeed is the matter with a woman having such subversive ideas? In an article on the sexist images of woman in modernist texts, Joyce Carol Oates maintains that by aspiring to art women violate the deeply conservative and stereotypical images of men. The autonomy of the artist is considered unnatural for women, unfeminine, and threatening. Maud uses the language of the artist as she surrenders her claim to be an artist; her language betrays her. Maud's gifts are words, insight, imagination. She has the artist's eye, the writer's memory, that unsparing honesty which does not put a light gauze across little miseries and monotonies but exposes them, leaving the audience as ungauzed as the creator.

It is natural to wonder why Brooks, in her "autobiographical novel," did not allow Maud the same independence and creative expression that she herself had as a writer. After all, Brooks was her own model of a black woman artist in the 1950s. In her autobiography, Report From Part One, she describes the exuberance she felt as she waited for books she would review to arrive in the mail, the "sassy brass" that enabled her to chide Richard Wright for his clumsy prose, and her eager sense of taking on the responsibility of a writer. But Maud, who craves something "elaborate, immutable, and sacred," who wants to express herself in "shimmering form," "warm, but hard as stone and as difficult to break," is never allowed to fulfill these cravings.

Novelist Paule Marshall has pointed out that women writers often make their first woman protagonist a homebody, as if to expiate for their own "deviance" in succeeding in the world of men. There is, she says, some need to satisfy the domestic role, and so they let their characters live it. Maud Martha ends with a pregnancy, not a poem; but if Maud has no life outside of marriage, she has a child, through whom she begins to hear her own voice.

The pregnancy actually becomes a form of rebellion against the dominance of both her mother and her husband. She screams at Paul in the midst of her labor pains, "DON'T YOU GO OUT OF HERE AND LEAVE ME ALONE! Damn! Damn!" When her mother, who is prone to faint over blood, comes in the door, Maud sets her straight about who's important in this drama: "'Listen, if you're going to make a fuss, go on out. I'm having enough trouble without you making a fuss over everything.'" In that one vital moment of pulling life out of herself, Maud experiences her own birth and she hears in the cries of her daughter Paulette something of her own voice:

a bright delight had flooded through her upon first hearing that part of Maud Martha Brown Phillips expressing herself with a voice of its own. (italics mine)

Shortly after the birth of her child, Maud speaks aloud the longest set of consecutive sentences she has so far uttered. For a woman who has hardly said more than a dozen words at one time, this is quite a speech:

"Hello, Mrs. Barksdale!" she hailed. "Did you hear the news? I just had a baby, and I feel strong enough to go out and shovel coal! Having a baby is nothing, Mrs. Barksdale. Nothing at all."

Pregnancy and the birth of a child connect Maud to some power in herself, some power to speak, to be heard, to articulate feelings.

Yet however powerful the reproductive act is, it is not the same as the creative process: a child is a separate, independent human being, not a sample of one's creative work. Without the means to satisfy her deeper cravings for her own inner life, Maud's life remains painfully ambiguous. Brooks must have felt this ambiguity in Maud's life, for when she imagined a sequel to Maud Martha, she immediately secured some important work for Maud and dispensed with the role of housewife. In a 1975 interview, Brooks was asked to bring Maud Martha up to the present day, With obvious relish, Brooks eliminates Maud's husband:

Well, she has that child, and she has another child and then her husband dies in the bus fire that happened in Chicago in the fifties. One of those flammable trucks with a load of oil ran into a street car and about thirty-six people burned right out on Sixty-third and State Streets. So I put her husband in that fire. (italics mine) Wasn't that nice of me? I had taken him as far as I could. He certainly wasn't going to change. I could see that.

Brooks insists that Maud feels some regret at the loss of her husband, but returning from the funeral Maud is "thinking passionately about the cake that's going to be at the wake and how good it's going to be." Having safely buried Paul, Brooks proceeds to explain how Maud Martha will get on with her own adventures. She will be chosen as a guide to accompany some children on a trip to Africa, and will use her slender resources to help them. She will live her life with herself at its center.

Brooks' tone as she describes the sequel to Maud Martha—so freewheeling and aggressive and self-assured—reveals by comparison the uncertainties and the tensions of the 1953 version. Maud needs a language powerful enough to confront life's abuses. Maud's polite, precious and prim little rhetoric is no match for the uncouth realities she faces as a poor black woman. Rhetoric and setting seem to be at odds with each other just as they are in Brooks' 1949 epic poem Annie Allen in which, using the language of the tradition of courtly love, she tries to tell the tragic love story of a poor black woman named Annie Allen. There is power in yoking together the diction of chivalric, religious, and classical traditions and that of a woman born into a world of "old peach cans and old jelly jars," but the power of Annie Allen derives from the poet's ironic perspective. Maud's life is told in her own words and thoughts and so the poet's perspective is not available. Maud needs more access to the vernacular.

One wonders if Brooks also denies Maud a more dynamic role in the novel because of her own ambivalence (understandable in terms of the restrictions on women in the 1950s) toward women as heroic figures. In her poetry all the heroes are men, from the dapper hustler Satin-Legs Smith to the renegade Way-out Morgan or the soldier in "Negro Hero" or the armed man defending his family against a white mob, Brooks selects the heroic strategies of men and the ritual grounds on which men typically perform. Even a plain man like Rudolph Reed has a moment of glory as he runs out into the street "with a thirty-four / And a beastly butcher knife." He dies in defense of his family, while his wife, who has been passive throughout the entire ballad, stands by mutely and does nothing "But change the bloody gauze."

Brooks, in her poetry, seldom endows women with the power, integrity, or magnificence of her male figures. The passive and vulnerable Annie Allen, the heroine of her Pulitzer Prize winning poem, is deserted by her soldier husband and left pathetically mourning her fate in her little kitchenette, "thoroughly / Derelict and dim and done." Sometimes Brooks' women manage to be "decently wild" as girls, but they grow up to be worried and fearful, or fretful over the loss of a man. They wither in back yards, afraid to tackle life, they are done in by dark skin; and like "estimable Mable," they are often incapable of estimating their worth without the tape measure of a man's interest in them.

Brooks does allow Maud to grow in some ways, to become more in control of her life and to speak out against the racist violence of her life. When Maud moves away from the domestic sphere of her little kitchenette apartment and out into a larger social and political world she feels more urgently the need to speak. There are three racial encounters leading up to Maud's self-affirmation. Each encounter involves a change in the language Maud has available to her; each moves her closer to experiencing and expressing her rage. In the last of these three encounters Maud makes the longest speech of the novel: she tries to explain to her child, Paulette, that Santa Claus loves her as much as any white child.

A large downtown department store in the 1940s, a place where black women were generally allowed to work only as "stock girls" or kitchen help, is fundamentally alien territory for Maud, and yet it is on this hostile ground that she finally asserts herself. On the traditional Christmas visit to see Santa Claus with Paulette, Maud notices that Santa is merry and affectionate with the white children but distant and unresponsive with Paulette, looking vaguely away from her as though she is not there. As Maud sees her own child learning the lessons of inferiority and invisibility she speaks up to him in a clear and uncompromising statement that forces him to recognize Paulette:

"Mister," said Maud Martha, "my little girl is talking to you."

Maud suddenly experiences her anger as powerful enough to lead to physical violence. She yearns to "jerk trimming scissors from purse and jab jab jab that evading eye." Now there is no desire to cover up her rage, to feign cold indifference:

She could neither resolve nor dismiss. There were these scraps of baffled hate in her, hate with no eyes, no smile, and—this she especially regretted, called her hungriest lack—not much voice.

Ironically this chapter, where Maud regrets her lack of voice, is the one where she does the most talking. In the longest speech of the entire novel she tries to make Paulette believe that Santa Claus did like her:

"Listen, child. People don't have to kiss you to show they like you. Now you know Santa Claus liked you. What have I been telling you? Santa Claus loves every child, and on the night before Christmas he brings them swell presents. Don't you remember, when you told Santa Claus you wanted the ball and bear and tricycle and doll he said 'Um-hm?' That meant he's going to bring you all those. You watch and see. Christmas'll be here in a few days. You'll wake up Christmas morning and find them and then you'll know Santa Claus loved you too."

From Maud Martha, this is a veritable torrent of words, but the problem with her words is that they are still part of her subterfuge: She denies Santa Claus' rejection of Paulette and insists that Paulette deny her own perception of Santa's cold indifference.

The honest voice in this chapter is Paulette's. She persists:

"Why didn't Santa Claus like me?"

"Baby, of course he liked you."

"He didn't like me. Why didn't he like me!"

"It maybe seemed that way to you. He has alot on his mind, of course."

"He liked the other children. He smiled at them and shook their hands."

"He maybe got tired of smiling. Sometimes even I get—"

"He didn't look at me, he didn't shake my hand."

In the chapter "a birth" Maud has said that her daughter's voice is part of her own. Mother and child are locked in a conversation that forces Maud out from behind the bright glass of her pretense. Now Maud admits rage, laments her lack of voice, speaks aloud, and bites back the tears as she looks down at her child's trusting face, knowing she cannot keep for her a fairy tale land where no Santa Claus ever hates a black child. Brooks does not leave Maud frozen in this chapter; we do see her acting and speaking. But perhaps the most important change is that Maud is given her most aggressive role when she confronts the racism of that cool, elegant, white, fantasy world.

If Brooks' novel seems fragmentary and incomplete, undoubtedly it is because the knowledge of one's self as a black woman was fragmented by a society which cannot imagine her. I am thinking specifically of the 1940s and 50s, those post World War decades which enshrined the Great American Domestic Dream of a housewife and a Hoover in every home. If the housewife in that dream was a white woman, the servant was always a black woman—simple and unsophisticated, as the reviews called Maud Martha. The leading black magazines of those years—Ebony, Negro Digest, Crisis—contributed their share of images of black women as idealized child-like creatures and assumed that their basic role was to satisfy the male imagination. The magazine Crisis alternated pictures of cute babies and "cute" women on its covers, while the covers of Negro Digest featured bathing beauties, tennis beauties, homecoming queens, and pin-ups in various stages of undress. In contrast to these pictures of black women, the back page of the Digest spotlighted "Men of Achievement," so that back to back with the smiling faces and exposed bodies of black women were mini-stories about the first black man to enter a prestigious college, to excel in athletics or to perform valiantly in some war. The August 1947 issue of the Digest featured on its back page the bravery of Negro volunteers (all men) during the Civil War; on the cover there is a picture of a fan "girl" whose partially nude body is coyly hidden behind a polka dot umbrella. Beneath the fan girl's picture is the title of the opening article by Era Bell Thompson, "What's Wonderful About Negro Men."

The articles about black women in these magazines range from condescending to obscene. The titles themselves reveal extreme hostility: "What's Wrong With Negro Women?", "Are Black Women Beautiful?", "The Care and Feeding of the Negro Woman." This last article, based on the metaphor of cultivating a really fine pet, claims that a properly trained female will develop the loyalty of a German Shepherd and the cleverness of a Siamese cat and will provide many hours of diversion and relaxation for her owner. The article "What's Wrong With Negro Women?" lists among the many shortcomings of black women their lack of cultural interests, their sense of inferiority to white women and their lack of militancy: "Where are the Negro women of self-sacrifice and courage in the cause of the race?" the writer Roi Ottley wonders. "There is not one woman to rank with the distinguished Harriet Tubman."

If we consider the way Maud Martha was received in 1953 by the literary community (black and white males), then we can clearly see another example of how black women were silenced in the 1950s. Despite Brooks' stature as a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, no one in 1953 had more than 600 words to say about the novel. The reviewers of Ellison's Invisible Man, (published just the year before, when Ellison was relatively unknown), suffering no such taciturnity, devoted as many as 2,100 words to Ellison's novel. The New Republic, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic contained lengthy and signed reviews of Invisible Man. Wright Morris and Irving Howe were called in to write serious critical assessments of Ellison's book for The New York Times and The Nation. In contrast, The New Yorker review of Maud Martha was unsigned, suggesting that the real "invisible man" of the 1950s was the black woman. Brooks' character was never held up for comparison to any other literary character. Ellison's nameless hero was not only considered "the embodiment of the Negro race" but the "conscience of all races;" the titles of the reviews—"Black & Blue," "Underground Notes," "A Brother Betrayed," "Black Man's Burden"—indicated the universality of the invisible man's struggles. The titles of Brooks' reviews—"Young Girl Growing Up" and "Daydreams in Flight"—deny any relationship between the protagonist's personal experiences and the historical experiences of her people. Ellison himself was compared to Richard Wright, Dostoevsky and Faulkner; Brooks only to the unspecified "Imagists." Questions about narrative strategy, voice, and methods of characterization that were asked of Invisible Man were obviously considered irrelevant to an understanding of Maud Martha since they were not posed. Most critically, Ellison's work was placed in a tradition; it was described as an example of the "Picaresque" tradition and the pilgrim/journey tradition by all reviews. Maud Martha, the reviewers said, "stood alone." Not one of these reviewers could place Maud Martha in the tradition of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy (1948), or Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928). Is this because no one in 1953 could picture the questing figure, the hero with a thousand faces, the powerful, articulate voice, as a plain dark-skinned woman living in a kitchenette building on the south side of Chicago?

The supreme confidence of Ellison's text—its epic sweep, its eloquent flow of words, its historical significance—invites its greater critical acceptance. By comparison the Maud Martha text is hesitant, self-doubting, mute, retentive. Maud is restricted, for the most part, to a domestic life that seems limited and narrow. At the end of the novel, poised on the edge of self-creation, at the moment we expect the "illumination of her gold," she announces that she is pregnant again, and happy.

My initial reaction to this ending was critical of Brooks for precluding any growth beyond the domestic life. But that disappointment ignores the novel's insistence that we read Maud's life in tone, in images, and in gestures. Released from an incapacitating anger, Maud becomes exhilarated and full of energy. In the last chapter she is out of doors with her daughter on a glorious day. She is outside of all the spaces that have enclosed her—the bedrooms, the kitchens, the male clubs, the doctors' offices, the movie theatres, the white women's houses, the dress shops, the beauty parlors; out of the psychic confines which left her preoccupied with her "allurements" and presumed deficiencies. Free from destructive self-concern, Maud thinks of the people around her, of the glory and bravery in their ability to continue life amid the reality of city streets, lynchings in Mississippi and Georgia, and the grim reminder of death as the soldiers, back from war, march by with arms, legs, and parts of faces missing. Maud says she is ready for anything. So this catalog of evils (include the Negro press' preoccupation with pale and pompadoured beauties) has to be seen as Maud's growing sense of relation to the social and political problems of her world. Even Maud's pregnancy can be seen as a powerful way-of-being in the world. For, in the midst of destruction and death, she will bring forth life.

Brooks then re-introduces the raised arm image of the first chapter, when Maud at age seven longed to fling her arms rapturously up to the sky. In the final chapter the raised arms are like "wings cutting away all the higher layers of air." There is the suggestion of flight and transcendence; her arms, purposeful and powerful, directing her up out of a dark valley. In sharp contrast to the child whose dearest wish was "to be cherished" as a yellow-jewelled, demurely pretty dandelion, this Maud thinks of the common flower as an image of survival and self-possession:

for would its kind (like her) come up again in the spring? come up, if necessary, among, between, or out of—the smashed corpses lying in strict composures, in that hush infallible and sincere….

Still, in spite of all the victorious imagery in this last chapter, there is a sense of incompleteness about Maud's quest; some exploration not undertaken, some constriction of the blood. Brooks does not solve the problem of Maud's anger or of her silence. Part of this lies in the privateness of Maud's story. Her constant self-analysis and self-consciousness emphasize her solitariness. She lives alienated from the two blood-related women in her life—the fussy, domineering mother and the vain sister. She has no women friends. Though she succeeds through heroic individual effort in rejecting others' definitions of her, she is still unable to express the full meaning of her growth. True, the presence of another "woman-in-embryo" allows her a first move towards freedom but she does not have the advantage of Zora Hurston's Janie who can tell her story to an eager, loving listener whose life is changed by hearing the tale. I only wish Brooks had found a way for Maud to know that someone in the community had grown ten feet higher from listening to her story.