One of the concerted efforts of the “New Negro” writers of the Twenties and Thirties was the attempt to reinterpret black life in America and thereby provide a more accurate, more objective, representation of black people than that popularized in the reactionary and sentimental literature of the preceding decades. Alain Locke, a major voice of the New Negro Movement, wrote in the mid-Twenties that “the Negro to-day wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and short comings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not.”¹ In their creative works, many New Negro writers subscribed to that position, for they knew that much of the earlier literature about the black experience in the United States was fraught with distorted images of ante- and post-bellum black Americans—their life and culture and their history and traditions. That is, much of the poetry, fiction and drama about black people was based on the sentimental, plantation and minstrel traditions, and, therefore, had little or nothing to do with the lives of black people in America. However numerous their failings might be, New Negro writers, with a high degree of achievement, tried to create a new stage upon which to play out the kaleidoscopic drama of black life in America.

The effort to reinterpret Afro-American life and character went in various directions. Following the “just-like-white-folks philosophy,” some writers, for example, created works which emphasized the similarities between blacks and whites. Other writers, subscribing to the decadent white belief in the “exotic Negro,” emphasized the so-called “primitivism” of black people. There were, of course, other writers whose aesthetic visions were broader than those of the aforementioned groups. This third group realized that to express the souls of black folk, the artist has to divest himself of preconceived and false notions about black people, and create an art whose foundation is the ethos from which black life, history, culture, and traditions all spring.

It is this third group of New Negro writers—Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sterling Brown among them—who set out to reevaluate “African-American history and folk culture.”² It is this group of writers who tried to do what James Weldon Johnson said he attempted to do in his later poetry: to rear a superstructure of conscious art upon “the American Negro's cultural background and his creative folk-art.”³ This group of young writers was indeed familiar with the pronouncements that James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and others made on the importance of the Afro-American folk tradition to the development of the black artist.⁴ In their efforts to build a self-conscious art upon folk art, these writers, just as their black predecessors (Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt) had done in their more balanced works, brought to Afro-American literature a quality that became one of its main currents: the ethos of black folk. However, of the younger New Negro writers, it was Sterling A. Brown and Zora Neale Hurston, as Larry Neal points out, who made the systematic studies of certain aspects of the Afro-American folk tradition.⁵ And much of what Hurston and Brown discovered from their studies found its way into their conscious art. While Langston Hughes concentrated on urban black folk in The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), Hurston and Brown, like Jean Toomer in Cane (1923), probed deeply into the life and culture of Southern black folk. But, whereas some may argue that Hurston occasionally failed aesthetically in fiction, Brown succeeded in poetry.

Unlike Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960), whose background was small-town South, Brown was born and reared in Washington, D.C., where his father was a minister of distinction and a professor of religion at Howard University. After he graduated from Washington's Dunbar High School, Brown received the B.A. and M.A. degrees in English literature from Williams College (Massachusetts) and Harvard University, respectively. Such a background was not, however, a liability to him for his preparation as folklorist, critic of Afro-American literature, and poet in the folk manner. Instead his background proved to be an asset, for his New England education and wide reading developed in him a critical sensibility, one which he long used in positive service to the black community. Early in his career as litterateur, he discovered that the representations of black peasants in most books were very different from the black peasants he had known and seen in Washington. Realizing that the images of black people in existing literature were largely false, Brown set out to correct what he saw.

“What motivates a middle-class Black man and a Harvard graduate … to devote his life to portraying less well-to-do folks?” queries Genevieve Ekaete. She answers:

Being Black is the key. … According to [Sterling Brown], he was indignant at the corrupted folk speech publicized by “white comic writers like Octavus Roy Cohen.” From his experience, Brown says, he knew his people didn't talk that way. It wasn't enough for him to enjoin them to “Stop knowing it all!” He had to bring some semblance of balance by putting his people down on black and white to counter the proliferating distortions from other sources.⁶

Then, too, early in his teaching career Brown read the new realistic poetry in American life:—that of Frost, Sandburg, Masters, Lindsay and Robinson, for example. In their “democratic approach to the people,” Brown saw much that reflected his own thoughts about ordinary people. Brown recalls: “when Carl Sandburg said ‘yes’ to the American people, I wanted to say ‘yes’ to my people.”⁷ Brown's “yes” was to give us carefully wrought poems portraying “common” black folk “in a manner constant with them.”⁸ His “yes” to black people was also to give us a series of critical works which attempted to counter “the proliferating distortions” of black folk life and character. As early as the Twenties, Brown began writing a series of critical studies and reviews on the portrayal of blacks in American literature. In 1929, he observed that

From Kennedy's “Swallow Barn,” about the first treatment of the plantation, down to Dixon's rabid Ku Klux Klan propaganda, the Negro has been shown largely as an animal. Kennedy, doing a piece of special pleading, showed the Negro as parasitical, excessively loyal, contented, irresponsible, and so forth. Dixon showed his Negro characters, not as faithful dogs, but as mad curs. His brutes are given to rapine, treachery, bestiality, and gluttony.⁹

Like other New Negro writers, Brown knew that such portrayals were neither accurate characterizations nor true expressions of the souls of black folk.

After study at Williams and Harvard, Brown prepared himself to counter distorting images of black people perpetuated in American literature. To do so, he read widely and critically into the literature by and about black people, and carefully studied Afro-American history and folk culture. Hence his Negro Poetry and Drama, The Negro in American Fiction (both in 1938), and several important periodical essays and reviews—sources which no serious student of American literature can ignore. But to counter the distorting images as poet, Brown knew he had to go beyond books and his Washington experiences for material: he went directly to black people in the South. That is, as he taught and traveled in the South, he lived among and carefully observed those peasants who created black folk traditions—traditions which sustained them in their daily lives. Writing in 1934 about Brown as “folk poet,” Alain Locke asserted that

Sterling Brown has listened long and carefully to the folk in their intimate hours, when they are talking to themselves, not, so to speak, as in Dunbar, but actually as they do when the masks of protective mimicry fall. Not only has he dared to give quiet but bold expression to this private thought and speech, but he has dared to give the Negro peasant credit for thinking.¹⁰

In a word, when Brown taught and traveled in the South, he became an insider to the multifarious traditions and verbal art forms indigenous to black folk, and through his adaptations of their verbal art forms and spirit he, as poet, became an instrument for their myriad voices. Hence Southern Road.

When Southern Road appeared in 1932, reviewers, as James Weldon Johnson had observed in his introduction to the collection, were quick to recognize Brown's absorption of the spirit and the verbal art of black folk. Critics realized that Brown had tapped the black folk ethos which later Afro-American poets would draw from, that he had captured the essence of black folk life and culture, without the distortion and sentimentality of earlier American writers. In form and content, most of Brown's poems reflect some aspect of the life and oral traditions of black people. And it is through his folk-oriented poems that he makes his most significant contribution to the corpus of Afro-American poetry.¹¹

In the Preface to the 1921 edition of his Book of American Negro Poetry, James Weldon Johnson made an influential comment about the direction the black poet in America should take. Inherent in Johnson's seminal statement are the principles embodied in Brown's major poetry. Johnson asserted that what the black American poet

needs to do is something like what Synge did for the Irish; he needs to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without, such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation. He needs a form that is freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor; a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, and peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos, too, of the Negro, but which will also be capable of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations, and allow of the widest range of subjects and the widest scope of treatment.¹²

To give voice to the common black man in poetry, Brown drew heavily on forms that grew directly out of the black American experience; he made use of Afro-American folksongs—their techniques, idiom and spirit. Brown knew that the ideas and art of the folksongs were expressive of the people who created them; that Afro-American “folk forms and cultural responses,” to use the words of George E. Kent, “were themselves definitions of black life created by blacks on the bloody and pine-scented Southern soil and upon the blackboard jungle of urban streets, tenement buildings, store-front churches, and dim-lit bars.”¹³ What, then, could be more appropriate modes for poetic reinterpretations of black life in America than the worksong, the blues, the spiritual, and the ballad?

In “Southern Road,” the title poem of his first collection, Brown draws upon the forms and spirit of the worksong and the blues. To express the tragic voice of despondency of black chain gangs so often seen on Southern roads, Brown fuses adapted techniques of the worksong and the blues. But the aesthetic and ideational result is something more than the blues or the worksong.

Because the worksong as a distinctive form has all but passed away, it is important here to make a brief comment on its nature and function. At one time the worksong was sung by black laborers throughout the Americas and Africa. Like much black music, the worksong is functional; it was composed not for the entertainment of an audience but as an accompaniment to labor. As a functional form of music, the worksong was variously “used to pace work” and “supply a rhythm for work,” to give directions, to “help pass the time,” and “to offer a partial outlet for … tensions and frustrations and angers.” Moreover, for convicts, worksongs changed “the nature of the work by putting the work into the worker's framework rather than the guards'.”¹⁴ On the worksong accompanying voluntary and involuntary labor, Brown wrote that

… worksongs accompany work in unison. Roustabouts on the levees, steel-drivers, axemen in the woods, the shantymen on the old windjammers, lighten their labor by singing in rhythm with it. A gang driving spikes will sing, punctuating their lines with a grunt as the hammer falls. … [T]he verses are somewhat unconnected, the men singing what first comes to their minds, concerned chiefly with the functional rhythm.¹⁵

Brown's comments are descriptive of the type of worksong which accompanies communal labor and requires group rhythm—what Bruce Jackson calls “timed work,” such as cross-cutting, logging, flatweeding, and steel-driving.¹⁶ The grunt (“hunh”) Brown mentions is a rhythmical or timing device in some worksongs. In others such as “Here, Rattler, Here,” a repeated ejaculatory phrase or line following the song leader's assertion serves the same function. Brown's comments on the worksong, especially his observations on its rhythm and the inconsecutiveness of its stanzas, are essential to our understanding and appreciation of his adaptation of its communal form in “Southern Road.” The artistic techniques of a worksong like “John Henry Hammer Song” not only bear his comments out but suggest the kind of worksong he drew on for conscious poetry.

A comparison of the first stanzas of “Southern Road” and “John Henry Hammer Song” will show how Brown incorporates the rhythm of the worksong in his poem:

Swing dat hammer—hunh—
Steady, bo';
Swing dat hammer—hunh—
Steady, bo';
Ain't no rush, bebby,
Long ways to go.

(“Southern Road”)

Dis is de Hammer /hunh/
Killt John Henry /hunh/
Twon't kill me, baby, /hunh/
Twon't kill me

(“John Henry Hammer Song”)¹⁷

Brown punctuates lines one and three with “hunh,” the “grunt” he refers to as being uttered “as the hammer falls.” Although the transcriber of “John Henry Hammer Song” did not represent the “grunts,” the rhythm of the work which the song accompanied probably required that “hunh” be uttered after the song leader's assertions in lines one, two, and three. The “bebby” in Brown's poem and the “baby” in the hammer song serve the same function: they, like the grunt, aid in the rhythm; and they signal the closing of each stanza. Moreover, they suggest the presence of not so much an auditor but a fellow worker, as does the directional “Steady, bo'” in stanza one of Brown's poem. In “Southern Road,” Brown, it should be remembered, does not imitate the rhythm of the worksong. Rather, like Johnson in his use of the rhythm of the folk sermon in God's Trombones, Brown adapts the rhythm of the communal worksong.

In addition to adapting the rhythm of the communal worksong, Brown takes the worksong to a high level of conscious art. He transforms the worksong into a piece of coherent art by creating stanzas which are connected in content as well as rhythm. Like most worksongs, “Southern Road” is not narrative. Brown's poem does, however, recount a unified and coherent series of situations or conditions of a despondent but stoic convict. That panoramic series produces one effect: sympathy or sorrow for the tragic fate of the speaker who has been sentenced to life imprisonment for murder.

Concentrating on the convict's woes, the poem takes into account the problems of his family in the outside world as well as his own within the confines of the prison. He can do nothing about those problems, for he is powerless. The first stanza is about his own and his fellow convicts' immediate situation. Their work, which has no private goal, is interminable—hence they need not rush. In the following stanzas we discover the cause of his imprisonment, and the mental anguish brought on by it and the condition of his family. In a state of powerlessness, he is tormented psychologically as well as physically, for his daughter has become a street woman; his son, a wanderer; and his wife, a hospitalized mother of a coming child. Moreover, the convict-speaker thinks of his poor mother rocking her misery, and he recalls his father cursing him on his deathbed. The last three stanzas move back to the convict's immediate condition: he is chained (“double-shackled”) to dehumanizing labor, with a white guard damning his soul. The final stanza brings his suffering full circle: he is doomed; he is on the chain gang for life—“po' los' boy / Evahmo'.” His appears to be an insurmountable despondency, for his powerlessness and that of his lost family, and the social and economic curse of the larger society render him helpless. Unlike the ironic and rebellious speaker in “John Henry Hammer Song” and other worksongs, the speaker in Brown's “Southern Road” assumes a blues attitude. He of necessity resigns himself to his tragic fate.

“No poem more pathetically depicts the despair of the entire race than ‘Southern Road,’” writes Jean Wagner.

Here the entire spirit of revolt is already snuffed out and transcended, since it is seen as useless, and there is a stoic acceptance of destiny. Confronting a hostile universe, the black man knows that he is dolefully alone and has no surviving connection with an outside world that might offer him help or a gleam of hope.¹⁸

“Southern Road” is a lyrical expression of powerlessness and despondency—one picture of “the tragedy of the southern Negro.” It is, then, important to remember that the speaker of the poem is a convict, not a Black Everyman; that his despondency is that of his people, but that other poems in Brown's first collection and elsewhere are needed to round out his picture of the tragic condition of Southern black folk. It is important to remember, too, that in the world of Sterling Brown the black man's response to the inhumanities of his white oppressors is not always acceptance. His response, however futile it may prove to be, is sometimes like that of Joe in “The Ballad of Joe Meek” or that of Sam in “Sam Smiley”: revolt in the face of inevitable destruction.

To express the powerlessness and despair of his convict-speaker, Brown also assimilates the stanzaic pattern of the blues. Like the traditional blues stanza, each stanza of “Southern Road” is divided into two parts. Part one constitutes a statement, or presents a situation or problem. Part two gives a response, the speaker's (or more accurately, singer's) reaction to the problem or the effect of the problem upon him. Moreover, as in the blues, the statement of the problem or situation is repeated in “Southern Road” but without the occasional variation. The statement is followed by a concluding response once presented—e.g., “Ball and chain, bebby, / On my min'.” A reordering of one of Brown's stanzas reveals how closely it approximates the traditional stanza of the blues:

Chain gang nevah—hunh—
Let me go;
Chain gang nevah—hunh—
Let me go;
Po' los' boy, bebby,
Evahmo'. …

Rather than emphasize the speaker's response to the problem as in “John Henry Hammer Song,” Brown concentrates on the problem through repetition, thus intensifying the tragic situation of the speaker. In Brown's hands the worksong is transformed into a new blues form, a blues-worksong, permeated with all the resignation and toughness of traditional blues. In the direct and terse idiom characteristic of the Afro-American folksong, Brown, in “Southern Road,” captures at once a single and, ultimately, a communal cry of the desponding Southern black voice.

Brown draws more directly on the traditional form, the subjects, and the idiom of the blues in other poems. In some of those, however, he, as self-conscious artist, is less successful than in others in which he fuses various folk and literary techniques. In the former, he, as Alvin Aubert observes of Langston Hughes's direct use of the blues mode,¹⁹ almost replicates those artistic techniques marking the distinctiveness of the blues form. The three poems which comprise “New St. Louis Blues,” for instance, adhere too closely to the blues form. In them, Brown uses the two-part three line stanza form of classic blues, each line marked by a caesura. But instead of the common aab rhyme scheme, Brown's stanzas are triplets. Aesthetically, these poems are like Hughes's “Morning After” and “Midwinter Blues.” They lack what George Kent calls the resources of the blues singer: “the singing voice, instrumental music, facial expression and gesture”—all of which help the singer drive his lyrics “into our spirit.”²⁰

Brown's poems in the blues mode are more captivating than Hughes's. What interests us most about Brown's poems in “New St. Louis Blues” is the broadness and variety of his subjects and his handling of them. In Hughes's blues mode poems, the central subject is usually love relationships, rendered in the first person and through the associational technique of the blues. Less individualized, Brown's poems in “New St. Louis Blues” cover various subjects. In “Market Street Woman,” there is the troubled life of the prostitute, to whom life is “dirty in a hundred onery ways.” Written in the first person, “Low Down” describes the down-and-outness of a “bummin' cut plug,” who tragically internalizes society's vision of him as a worthless being and who views life and that which follows as a loaded game of dice. “Tornado Blues” recounts the havoc wrought by a storm on a poor black community, which must suffer not only from the storm's destructiveness but from the economic exploitation of the white community also. In “Tornado Blues” and such poems as “Children of the Mississippi,” “Foreclosure” and “Cabaret,” the Southern black man is a victim of natural disasters as well as racial injustice. These six poems clearly support Jean Wagner's thesis that Brown's poetry “depicts the Negro as the victim not only of the white man, but of all that surrounds him.”²¹

Beyond the obvious blues form previously noted, the art of “New St. Louis Blues” is an achievement, for here Brown takes blues techniques to a literary level. In “Tornado Blues” he skillfully uses personification, a figure of speech frequently used in the blues. In some blues such as Leadbelly's “Good Morning Blues,” Bessie Smith's “In House Blues” and Leroy Carr's “Midnight Hour Blues,” the blues itself is personified. Brown's personification of the merciless tornado and its effects gives irony to the situation in “Tornado Blues.” After the heartless wind completes its work and disappears, it leaves in its wake destruction, fear, death and sorrow. The speaker in the poem comments:

Newcomers dodge de mansions, and knocked on de po' folks' do',
Dodged most of the mansions, and knocked down de po' folks' do',
Never know us po' folks so popular befo'—

It is ironic that these poor black people, rather than rich white people, would be visited, for they had little to offer their cruel guests. Brown's extended use of personification gives coherence to “Tornado Blues”—a coherence less directly achieved through the usual associational technique of traditional blues.

In “Ma Rainey,” Brown uses the blues in another way, or rather he uses self-conscious poetry to comment on what Larry Neal refers to as the ethos of the blues.²² Although “Ma Rainey” is a celebration of a single blues singer, Brown's poem is ultimately a description of the general effect and function of all blues singers and their art. The idea of Brown's poem is not unlike some of the views set forth by Larry Neal, Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison on the blues and blues singers. The blues singer, writes Neal, acts “as ritual poet” and “reflects the horrible and beautiful realities of life.” “The blues singer,” Neal continues, “is not an alienated artist attempting to impose his view on the world of others. His ideas are the reflection of an unstated general point-of-view.”²³ Murray sees the blues musician as “fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest, and the medicine man. He is making an affirmative and hence exemplary and heroic response to that which André Malraux describes as la condition humaine.”²⁴ For Ellison, Bessie Smith was a “priestess”; she was “a celebrant who affirmed the values of the group and man's ability to deal with chaos.”²⁵ That Brown's Ma Rainey was not “an alienated artist” but a priestess-poet-medicinewoman of the people is voiced throughout the poem. First of all, “as ritual poet” Ma Rainey attracted throngs of people wherever she performed—e.g., in Missouri and

Fo' miles on down,
To New Orleans delta
An' Mobile town. …

And when she performed, her first person songs, which expressed the collective experience of her people, moved her auditors, for she could “Git way inside” them: “She jes' catch hold of us somekindaway.” Her performance was ritual; and her songs, medicine to “keep us strong.” In other words, her effect, though secular, was not unlike that of the black folk preacher in his sermons: it gave her auditors fortitude to confront and endure “de hard luck / Roun'” their “do'” and “de lonesome road” they “mus' go. …” Her songs bore witness to their many troubles and, thereby, made meaning of the chaotic world they confronted perpetually. No wonder, then, when Ma Rainey sang “Backwater Blues”—that song of personal and collective suffering from natural disaster—

‘… de folks, dey natchally bowed dey heads an' cried,
Bowed dey heavy heads, shet dey moufs up tight an' cried,
An' Ma lef' de stage, an' followed some de folks outside.’

Brown's skillful use of the blues mode in part four of “Ma Rainey” is similar to Hughes's in “The Weary Blues.” In neither poem is there mere replication. Rather the blues mode is thematically functional in each poem. Brown uses the form to illustrate further the effect of Ma Rainey's blues artist on her auditors. He excerpts and alters lines (one line of the statement and the response) from three stanzas of Bessie Smith's popular “Backwater Blues,”²⁶ and follows them with a stanza (quoted above) in the blues form. That stanza, a triplet, describes the effect of Ma Rainey's ritualized performance—an effect which is at once cathartic and entertaining.

It is important to note that Brown's selection of “Backwater Blues” is very appropriate. Not only do the lines further the poem thematically; they, like the poems of “New St. Louis Blues,” indirectly make a comment on the subject of the blues: that its subject is not limited to love relations. Because several women blues singers had popularized the form with lyrics dealing with love, many people concluded that the blues “are a woman's longing cry for her ‘man’. The subject matter,” wrote Brown in 1937,

is not so limited, however, and blues aplenty can be found bewailing tornadoes, high water, hard times in farming, or insisting upon the need for traveling, for leaving this cold-hearted town. As well as self pity there is stoicism in the blues.²⁷

Moreover, Brown's selection of “Backwater Blues” gave an air of immediacy to the poem—i.e., his readers were no doubt familiar with Bessie Smith's song and the countless problems caused by floods in the Mississippi Valley, and other river and lowland areas, as recounted in Brown's “Children of the Mississippi,” “Foreclosure” and other poems. Therefore, while implying that the range of the subject of the blues is not limited, Brown, in part four of “Ma Rainey,” provided his early readers with an experience that was as immediate to them as the threat of air pollution is to us.

Brown's use of other forms of black folk music is similar to his fusion of the blues mode in “Ma Rainey.” His fusion of folk music forms with self-conscious literary techniques is thematically functional and constant with the folk and folk life he portrays. In “Strong Men,” for example, there are quoted lines from various black folksongs. “Strong Men,” it should be noted, is about black people's strength to survive in the face of racism and economic exploitation; the poem is a celebration of the stoicism of black Americans. In other words, in spite of the white man's dehumanization of him from the Middle Passage through the twentieth century, the black man has endured; he has never been completely broken, as it were, for “The strong men keep a-comin' on.” In fact, “Gittin' stronger. …” To develop the idea of black stoicism, Brown juxtaposes his catalogue of inhumanities against black people to passages from spirituals and secular songs. The songs Brown quotes bespeak the black man's hope, strength and endurance—his dogged will to survive—born out of the suffering, profitless labor, racial segregation, etc., described in the poem. For centuries these songs and others have served as a solace and a source of strength for black people. As Brown says in “Children's Children,” these songs, though unknown or laughed at by first generation Great Migrators, were the “sole comfort” of a suffering Black South people, who have known

Long days beneath the torrid Dixie sun
In miasma'd riceswamps;
The chopping of dried grass, on the third go round
In strangling cotton;
Wintry nights in mud-daubed makeshift huts
With these songs, sole comfort.

The old undefeated black woman in “Virginia Portrait” has her “Old folksongs chanted underneath the stars …,” along with her religion and her pleasant memories of times past to help her survive the many problems she faces. Through his use of black folk music in “Strong Men,” “Children's Children,” and “Virginia Portrait,” Brown comments on Black South strength and, indirectly, the function of music in black life and culture. As in “Strong Men,” Brown uses excerpts from the spiritual for thematic purposes in “When de Saints Go Ma'ching Home.” The lines from the spiritual of the same title are expressive of the dream of the speaker-musician: on Judgment Day he hopes to meet his mother in Heaven and be counted among the saints. The lines from the spiritual also have a technical function; they serve as transitions from one roll call to the next of persons the musician envisions as likely and unlikely saints. Brown's incorporation of passages from black folksongs in his poetry is not unlike a technique T. S. Eliot, Melvin Tolson, Ezra Pound and Robert Hayden employed in their poetry. But Brown's poetry makes fewer demands on the reader.

The stark simplicity and directness of expression in the catalogue of inhumanities in “Strong Men” and, especially, “Old Lem” are akin to those in the following slave secular recorded by Frederick Douglass in My Bondage and My Freedom (1853):

We raise de wheat,
Dey gib us de corn;
We bake de bread,
Dey gib us de crust;
We sif de meal,
Dey gib us de huss;
We peel de meat,
Dey gib us the skin;
And dat's the way
Dey take us in;
We skim de pot.
Dey gib us de liquor,
And say dat's good enough for nigger.(28)

A passage from “Old Lem” will show Brown's ability to capture that same simplicity and directness of expression through the voice of Old Lem:

“They weigh the cotton
They store the corn
          We only good enough
          To work the rows;
They run the commissary
They keep the books
          We gotta be grateful
          For being cheated;
Whippersnapper clerks
Call us out of our name
          We got to say mister
          To spindling boys
They make our figgers
Turn somersets
We buck in the middle
          Say, ‘Thankyuh, sah.’”(29)

The voice of Old Lem adapts the cadence of the slave secular. Moreover, like the speaker in the slave secular, Old Lem, without resorting to excessive figures of speech or bombastic, emotional language, articulates the powerlessness of his people and the many injustices heaped upon them. No rhetorical tricks becloud his revelation of facts. The clarity and power of the dialect he speaks belie the false image of the black man in the literature of the minstrel and plantation traditions, in which he is represented as a verbose clown, misusing and mutilating polysyllabic words. Using collected folklore, folksongs, and the living speech of the peasant blacks he met and befriended as indices to rural black dialect, Brown, in “Old Lem” and many other poems, attempted to counter the vicious propaganda about black dialect disseminated in American literature. In a word Brown took the dialect of the black peasant and shaped it into consummate art.

Not all of Brown's folk characters speak with the simplicity and directness found in “Old Lem.” Like other dialects, black folk speech has its variety, and the form used at a given moment depends upon the occasion as well as the nature of the speaker and his linguistic region. Hence the dialect of the speaker in “Sister Lou” is constant with her Southern character and her vision of Heaven, whereas some of the vocabulary (“down the country,” “dicties,” “pennies on de numbers”) of the speaker's dialect in “Tin Roof Blues” reflects his Northern urban experience. In “Sister Lou,” the female speaker's vision of Heaven, that place where she and her auditor hope to be relieved of the troubles of this world, is couched in an idiom that is replete with homely images. Her images and metaphors are reflective of her experience and her status in Southern society. As in spirituals and gospel songs, her God, Jesus, and the saints are seen in anthropomorphic terms. Her Heaven is reflective of places of earthly wealth—places which, from her angle of vision, suggest comfort. The passage from this world to the next will be by train, and, during her auditor's stay in heaven, she should visit “Wid frien' Jesus fo' a spell.” God and His saints have human attributes, and her relation to them will be a human relation. Although the organization of this Heaven is reflective of what she knows on earth, God, the Master of the Big House in Heaven, will change her role. No longer will she be the servant; she will become a lady with her own room

… wid windows
Opening on cherry trees an' plum trees
Bloomin' everlastin'

She will, moreover, have servants, but they will not disturb her room or her rest. She, a lady in Heaven, will be done with all the rushing imposed on black servants in this world. In short, Brown's poetic idiom of the folk, however secular, is constant with the folk vision of Heaven—a reflection of all that the folk have seen as positive and wanted in this world.

Again in “Memphis Blues,” Brown employs the rhythm idiom of black folk church. In fact, he fuses the rhythm and imagery of the black folk sermon with the ejaculatory response of the blues and gospel, and the rhythm of folk rhymes. Parts one and three of “Memphis Blues” employ the rhythm of black folk rhymes. Although part one uses the rhythm of the folk rhyme, underlining its Biblical and historical allusions is the black folk preacher's vision of the threat of destruction. The threat here is not so much “the fire next time” for which the sinner is to prepare his soul, but the destruction of Memphis, Tennessee, by floods and tornadoes. Ultimately the poem is a comment on the transitory nature of all things man-made. In other words, just as great cities of the past fell to decay, so will Memphis. But, because this Memphis does not belong to the black man, the various speakers are indifferent to its inevitable destruction; if Memphis falls, “Nigger won't worry,” or if “Memphis come back / Ain' no skin / Off de nigger's back.” Rather than prepare for the destruction as the auditors of an exhorting preacher would expect his congregation to do, the speakers stoically accept it without reprimand from the general speaker. Their indifference is summed up in part three, an excellent employment of the rhythm of black folk rhymes:

Memphis go
By Flood or Flame;
Nigger won't worry
All de same—
Memphis go
Memphis come back,
Ain' no skin
Off de nigger's back.
All dese cities
Ashes, rust. …
De win' sing sperrichals
Through deir dus'.

The rhythm of that stanza is similar to that in the following rhyme entitled “Aunt Kate”:

Ole Aunt Date, she died so late
She couldn't get in at the Heaven Gate.
The Angels met her with a great big club,
Knocked her right back in the washin' tub.(30)

And in “Precious Things”:

Hold my rooster, hold my hen,
Pray don't touch my Grecian Bend.
Hold my bonnet, hold my shawl,
Pray don't touch my waterfall.
Hold my hands by the finger tips,
But pray don't touch my sweet little lips.(31)

Through the rhythm of folk rhymes, Brown intensifies the black man's indifference toward the destruction of Memphis, for folk rhymes are not only humorous but playful. The threat of the destruction of Memphis is dismissed lightly, for it is of less concern to the black man than it is to the white man, who claims the city as his own.

Presenting each speaker's reaction to the threat of destruction, part two of “Memphis Blues” fuses the voices of the black folk preacher, and the blues and gospel singers. Each stanza is divided into two parts: a call in the voice of the preacher and a response in the voices of musicians. Like the black folk preacher using repetitious, formulaic and rhetorical questions to exhort his congregation to prepare their souls for Judgment Day, the general speaker calls:

Watcha gonna do when de tall flames roar,
Tall flames roar, Mistah Lovin' Man?

And the Loving Man responds:

Gonna love my brownskin better'n before—
          Gonna love my baby lak a do right man,
                    Gonna love my brown baby, oh, my Lawd!

The first two lines, which initiate the last three lines of each stanza, convey the threat of destruction, presented in terms of the traditional fire-water-wind-flame imagery found in the folk sermon. The general speaker's identification or address to each speaker responding by his vocation or avocation recalls the descriptive appellation of the “sinner man” and “gambling man.” The repeated, formulaic call (“What you gonna do when …”), Presented in a carefully measured rhythm, exemplifies one of the techniques used by the folk preacher to “move” his congregation. Ironically, the response of each speaker in the poem has nothing to do with the impending destruction; while Memphis is being destroyed, each speaker plans to do what he thinks is best for him. On the other hand, the sentiment and repetition of the response recall the blues, but its ejaculatory “oh, my Lawd” is from the tradition of the “shout,” and spiritual and gospel singing, which runs throughout “New Steps.” “Memphis Blues,” then, is not a blues poem in the sense that “New St. Louis Blues,” “Kentucky Blues,” “Riverbank Blues,” and “Ma Rainey” are. But underlining each speaker's indifference in “Memphis Blues” is the sensibility of the blues singer—his stoic ability to transcend his deprived condition.

The dialect of the black folk figures in Brown's poetry is constant with their character. Honed in black folk life, the dialect he employs has none of the “humor and pathos” of the contrived speech used by “black” characters in the literature of the plantation tradition. Neither is the dialect in his poetry a transcription of how blacks supposedly spoke. Although he retains some of the pronunciations common to black speech, Brown does not arbitrarily mutilate the spellings of words to suggest the unlettered character of his folk. At a time when many black poets were avoiding black dialect as a medium for poetry, Brown, wrote Johnson in his Introduction to Southern Road, “infused his poetry with genuine characteristic flavor by adopting as his medium the common, racy, living speech of the Negro in certain phases of real life.” From that speech, Brown, with a good ear and a sensibility attuned to the folk, selects its varied rhythms, idioms, metaphors and images, and transforms them into conscious art.

Like Euro-American and other Afro-American poets of the twentieth century, Brown has also employed the traditions of the folk ballad in his poetry. Influencing more than fifteen poems in Southern Road, the ballad, along with the blues mode, is the most frequently used form in the collection. At times, he adopts the ballad form; at others, he combines the narrative techniques of the ballad with artistic techniques of other forms. “Ma Rainey” and “Georgie Grimes,” in which he combines the narrative technique and the stanzaic patterns of the ballad with the ethos of the blues, are excellent examples of the fusion of folk forms. “Ma Rainey” is, says Stephen Henderson, an “invented … blues-ballad, which, as a literary phenomenon, is as distinctive as Wordsworth's ‘lyrical ballad.’”³² In other poems, such as “Frankie and Johnny,” “The Ballad of Joe Meek,” and the Slim Greer series, Brown relies, in the main, on the ballad tradition to interpret the experience of black people.

His poems in the ballad tradition are not confined to the subjects iterated in Gordon Hall Gerould's The Ballad of Tradition or those B. Malcolm Laws sees as the prevailing themes of the black folk ballad.³³ Brown's literary ballads, while sometimes adhering closely to the folk ballad form, cover numerous subjects from black folk life. Racial injustice, exploits of folk heroes, tragic love affairs, religion, suffering in poverty, freedom, the need for travel—all of these and many others constitute the subjects of Brown's ballads. His poems in the ballad form alone, more than his poems employing other forms of Afro-American music, give us a broad slice of black life in America.

“Frankie and Johnny” is an example of Brown's use of the subject of a traditional ballad. In this poem, he retains the subject of a love relationship, but he changes the narrative from that found in the traditional ballad, variously called “Frankie and Johnny” to comment on the cruelty, and the sexual racism and fear of the rural South. In the traditional ballad, both lovers are black, but in Brown's poem Frankie is changed to a white girl, “A halfwit” who “Kept a crazy love of torment when she got bigger.” Moreover, the source of conflict in the traditional ballad is the unfaithfulness of Frankie's lover, Johnny, whom she, with a thirst for revenge, kills without remorse. The conflict in Brown's poem, on the other hand, is racial and sexual. Sadistic Frankie seduces Johnny, a black plowman, to make love to her. To torment her racist father, a “red-faced cracker, with a cracker's thirst,” Frankie spoke to him about her affair with the black plowman. When her “pappy” discovers the truth, the inevitable occurs: Johnny is lynched. The lynching brings pleasure to the sadistic Frankie: “And Frankie yowled hilariously when the thing was done.” In spite of Untermeyer's assertion that “Frankie and Johnny” is “a ballad which any genuine lover of folk-songs ought to let alone,”³⁴ we can argue that Brown's transformation of the story of the traditional ballad is an achievement which points toward one of the major sources of racism—sexual fear.

There is in some of Brown's other ballads a balance between the narrative action and the characters portrayed—i.e., neither the characters nor the action is subordinate to each other. The character portrayal and the action in “The Ballad of Joe Meek”³⁵ seem to exist as an illustration of the idea embodied in the first two stanzas of part one and part five. In those sections of the poem, Brown, again using the stanzaic pattern of the traditional ballad, exploits the proverbial truth, folk wisdom, of folklore. The truth is this: the external attributes and overt actions of a human being are not always an index to his thoughts or probable actions. So was the case of meek Joe, who, as the narrative progresses, assumes the role of “bad nigger,” a black folk hero represented in folklore by Railroad Bill and Stagolee, and in real life by Jack Johnson and Muhammed Ali. The motivation of Joe's “badness” is not akin to that of Stagolee, whose ego is insulted when Billy Lyons steps on his Stetson hat. Joe's change from meekness to badness is motivated by the hot weather (dog days) and police brutality:

Strolling down Claiborne
          In the wrong end of town
Joe saw two policemen
          Knock a po' gal down
He didn't know her at all,
          Never saw her befo'
But that didn't make no difference,
          To my old boy Joe.

In his revenge of the “po' gal” Joe takes on the qualities of the supernatural hero:

Shot his way to the station house,
          Rushed right in,
Wasn't nothing but space
          Where the cops had been.
They called the reserves,
          And the national guard,
Joe was in a cell
          Overlooking the yard.
The machine guns sputtered,
          Didn't faze Joe at all—
But evvytime he fired
          A cop would fall.
The tear-gas make him laugh
          When they let it fly,
Laughing gas made him hang
          His head an' cry.
He threw the hand grenades back
          With a outshoot drop,
An' evvytime he threw
          They was one less cop.

In the end, Joe, like Railroad Bill, is shot in cold blood. But, as in the legend of Railroad Bill, the white lawmen, in their attempt to capture and subdue Joe, bring out a force larger than the defying black man. From the narrative of “The Ballad of Joe Meek” emerges a well drawn portrait of the “bad man” as hero. Here the motivation for “badness,” often absent from the folk ballad about the badman, is explicit. But providing motivation and folk wisdom, Brown raises the folk hero to the level of a living character rather than a type or stereotype.

The tragic and comic are fused in “The Ballad of Joe Meek.” In part one of the poem, Joe is represented as a meek creature, whose abnormal humility is foolish. The narrator humorously tells us how Joe went beyond what was required by the Bible:

The good book say
          “Turn the other cheek,”
But that warn't no turning
          To my boy Joe Meek.
He turned up all parts,
          And baigged you to spank,
Pulled down his breeches,
          And supplied the plank.

The incongruity of the early meek Joe, “Soft as pie,” in part one and the image of the powerful, defying Joe in the rest of the poem produces a folk humor that is achieved only in the Slim Greer series and “Sporting Beasley.”

In addition to providing entertaining action, Brown's ballads paint pictures of numerous folk characters and various aspects of black folk life. There are suffering chain gang Jim in “Convict,” protesting Scotty in “Scotty Has His Say,” indigent Sam contrasted with wealthy Samuel in “Mister Samuel and Sam,” badman Mojo Pete and Deacon Cole in “Checkers,” ruined Lulu in “Seeking Religion,” wandering working-man Big Boy in “The Odyssey of Big Boy,” tragic Johnny in “Johnny Thomas,” and many others. The sources of these portraits are not figures in Afro-American folklore. These portraits are informed by the black folk life of the rural South and some of the folk Brown met and befriended.

The series of ballads devoted to the adventures of Slim Greer gives us a highly developed character against a panoramic background of black folk life. The comic ballads are essentially tall tales. In “Slim Greer,” the narrator relates Slim's tall tale of how he, who is “no lighter / Than a dark midnight,” passes for white. Here he is the trickster or “con man,”³⁶ who is able, for a while, to deceive “a nice white woman” and her family. “Slim wore the deadpan mask and behind it perpetuated the joke on white society, but his inner nature came out when he played the blues.”³⁷ Slim again assumes, in “Slim Hears ‘The Call,’”³⁸ the role of trickster when he is down and out, when “Big holes is the onlies / Things in” his pockets. He plans to become a bishop in order to get his “cake down here” and his “pie in the sky,” a trick he learned from his old buddy. The final stanza of the poem points an accusing finger at the clergy. Having stated his plans to follow the example of his trickster-buddy, Slim concludes:

An' I says to all de Bishops,
          What is hearin' my song—
Ef de cap fits you, brother,
          Put it on.

In “Slim Greer in Hell,”³⁹ “Slim in Atlanta,” and “Slim Lands a Job?” Brown's traveling epic hero finds himself in humorous situations—but situations which recall the forms of oppression and racism which black people encounter. In addition to the ballad tradition, it is the black tradition of storytelling and folk humor that informs these ballads. Implied in them is the black man's ability to see not only the tragic aspects of his life, but those comic elements also—even in the absurdity of white racism.

The poetry of Sterling A. Brown gives a kaleidoscopic picture of black folk character and life in America—a picture that is constant with the folk themselves. In the main, Brown's are a Black South folk, who, through song, dogged will, ironic laughter, wisdom, “strange legacies,” and faith, confront and survive a hostile universe, in spite of the dehumanization they encounter perpetually. “Illiterate, and somehow very wise,” Brown's black folk are strong men who “keep-a-comin' on / Gittin' stronger. …” Although he concentrates on the folk of the rural South, he gives us a brief picture of the black folk of the urban North in Part Three, “Tin Roof Blues,” of Southern Road. Like their Southern brothers, they, too, face a hostile universe, but, cut off from their Black South ancestral roots, Brown's Northern black folk act out their illusions of joy and “arrival” in what they thought would be a Promised Land. In his varied portrayals of black folk, Brown makes no apology for them or their lifestyles. Neither does he present distorted pictures of them. To counter the propagandistic images proliferated in American literature, he, with the integrity of the true artist, represents black folk realistically through forms created by them and a spirit that emanates from their lives. In short, his poems eloquently fulfill James Weldon Johnson's request that the black American poet turn inward for an aesthetic that bespeaks the souls of black folk.

Notes

1. “The New Negro” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 11.

2. Larry Neal, “Eatonville's Zora Neale Hurston: A Profile,” Black Review No. 2, ed. Mel Watkins (New York: William Morrow, 1979), p. 15. Hereafter referred to as Black Review No. 2.

3. Along This Way (New York: Viking, 1937), p. 152.

4. For the importance of the folk tradition to the New Negro writer, see Chapter 2, “Folk Art and the Harlem Renaissance,” of Bernard Bell's The Folk Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1974), pp. 20-31.

5. Black Review No. 2, p. 15.

6. “Sterling Brown: A Living Legend,” New Directions: The Howard University Magazine 1 (Winter 1974): 8-9.

7. Ekaete, “Folk Art and the Harlem Renaissance,” p. 9.

8. Ekaete, “Folk Art and the Harlem Renaissance,” p. 8.

9. “Negro Literature—Is it True? Complete” in The Durham Fact-Finding Conference (1929), p. 27.

10. “Sterling Brown: The New Negro Folk Poet,” Negro Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard (London: Wishart, 1934), p. 113.

11. “Folk oriented poems” and poems “in the folk manner” refer to Brown's poems that are about the “folk” or those poems which use some of the technique of folk poetry. The poems in Part Four of Southern Road fall into neither of the above classes; the poems in that section are “subjective” or “confessional.” After the publication of Southern Road, Brown wrote other poems, some of which were published in periodicals, and others were collected in various anthologies.

12. The Book of American Negro Poetry, ed. James Weldon Johnson (New York: Harcourt, 1959), pp. 41-42.

13. “Langston Hughes and Afro-American Folk and Cultural Tradition,” Langston Hughes, Black Genius: A Critical Evaluation, ed. Therman B. O'Daniel (New York: William Morrow, 1971), p. 183.

14. Bruce Jackson, ed., Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 29-30.

15. “Contributions of the American Negro,” One America, ed. F. J. Brown and J. S. Roucek (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), p. 593.

16. Jackson, Wake Up Dead Man, pp. 31-33.

17. The Negro Caravan, ed. Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee (New York: Arno, 1970), p. 465. Hereafter referred to as The Negro Caravan. Sterling Brown quotes a version of stanza one of the song with “grunts” at the end of the first three lines in his article, “Negro Folk Expression: Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads, and Songs,” Phylon 14 (1953): 57.

18. Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, trans. Kenneth Douglas (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1973), p. 490. Hereafter referred to as Black Poets of the United States.

19. “Black American Poetry, Its Language, and the Folk Tradition,” Black Academy Review 2 (Spring-Summer 1971): 75.

20. Self-Conscious Writers and the Black Tradition. Taped NCTE Distinguished Lecture, Stock No. 77785 (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English).

21. Black Poets of the United States, p. 483.

22. Larry Neal, “The Ethos of the Blues,” The Black Scholar 3 (Summer 1972): 42-48.

23. Neal, “The Ethos of the Blues,” pp. 44, 46.

24. Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans (New York: Avon, 1971), p. 89.

25. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 257.

26. Chris Albertson, Bessie (New York: Stein & Day, 1972), pp. 127, 131.

27. Sterling Brown, Negro Poetry and Drama (Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937), p. 27.

28. My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Arno, 1969), pp. 252-53.

29. For the text of “Old Lem,” see The Negro Caravan, pp. 387-88.

30. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, ed., The Book of Negro Folklore (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958), p. 342.

31. The Book of Negro Folklore, p. 334.

32. Understanding the New Black Poetry (New York: William Morrow, 1973), p. 51.

33. See Laws's chapter on the Afro-American ballad in his Native American Balladry (Philadelphia: The American Folklore Society, 1964).

34. “New Light from an Old Mine,” Opportunity 10 (Aug. 1932): 250.

35. See the following for the text of “The Ballad of Joe Meek”: Bernard W. Bell, ed., Modern and Contemporary Afro-American Poetry (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1972), pp. 31-35.

36. S. P. Fullinwider, The Mind and Mood of Black America (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1969), p. 215; Stephen A. Henderson, “A Strong Man Called Sterling Brown,” Black World 29 (Sept. 1970): 9.

37. Fullinwider, Mind and Mood of Black America, p. 215.

38. For the text of “Slim Hears ‘The Call,’” see Jean Wagner's Les Poètes Nègres des Etats-Unis (Paris: Librarie Istra, 1963), pp. 596-600.

39. See B. A. Botkin's Folk-Say—The Land is Ours (Norman: Univ. Of Oklahoma Press, 1932), pp. 246-49, for the text of “Slim Greer in Hell.”