So if we go down
          Have to go down
We go like you, brother,
          ‘Nachal’ men. …

—“Strange Legacies”

The failure to recognize the central place of Sterling Brown as one of its most necessary innovators is an embarrassment to Afro-American writing. The publication of his Collected Poems¹ offers one more chance to end this severe case of cultural absent-mindedness.

Brown's achievement, which he shares with his contemporary, Langston Hughes, is that he planted foundations beneath modern black verse, and in so doing, provided the core of identity for imaginative Afro-American writing. Not knowing this is like not knowing what Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington added to instrumental black music.

Brown completed the indispensible task of naturalizing black verse within black vernacular. The earliest dialect efforts of Dunbar and his school had never shaken off the reductive mimicry of minstrelism. Brown and Hughes rescued the use of Black English in literature from the confines of a specialty gimmick in black writing (like a buck and wing in a coon show) and liberated its possibilities to the widest ranges of modern art. They found ways to make poetry in black people's own linguistic and artistic idioms: the blues, “ballits,” proverbs, “lies,” toasts, spirituals, oral histories and myths that are still the better half of black verbal creativity. They put the blackness into black writing, democratizing it by creating a comfortable, legitimate space where everyday black folks could be expressed. They did this along with other writers of the New Negro era, but none with Brown's depth and originality.

A particular kind of genius is needed to do what Brown and Hughes did, no matter how inevitable it looks now. Every group that has a modern literature had to wait for the right maker to come along and do the obvious—seize the instrument of literacy to capture the speech, myths and values of his/her people, instead of slavishly following the verbal and intellectual precedents of some older, imperial example, like Latin or Victorian English. For the inventor of a script for the poetry of his or her people, the difficulty is something like discovering your own speech in the flow of an alien medium. It's a job remotely related to the invention of the alphabet, also easily taken for granted by later users.

Brown, then, is a major example of the national poet described by Carolyn Rodgers.² The writer who polishes the language of the tribe is likely to be also one who opens his voice so his people can speak through it on his pages. The role is well recognized in Chaucer, Dante, Robert Burns, but is also illustrated by Nicloas Guillen, Hughes, Henry Dumas, Whitman, Margaret Walker, E. A. Robinson, Edgar Lee Masters, the poets of Haitian indigenism, Yeats, Sembene and hundreds of others.

The movement of Brown's poetry within black writing is towards re-rootment, a return to the source. After he began a commanding acquaintance with western literature at Williams and Harvard, he went South to teach and to learn from his “own-folk,” like DuBois before him. Thus armed, he pitched himself without possibility of retreat into the basic struggle of intellectuals of his breed, the defense of national culture against the official, pseudo-universal culture of the dominant elite.

What needs to be observed is the subtlety and honesty Brown brings to this version of the writer's craft. His resettlement falls outside the too rigid characterization Fanon draws of the “native intellecutal” who, after frustrated social climbing, suddenly discovers that he has a people. Brown escaped the fate of the poet described by Baraka, who “loves his people with an abstract love.”

In his campaign of literary reconstruction, Brown had to steer a course between two extremes. One is the smothering force pressed against the possibilities of finished art in black speech. He rankles still at inanities like one white critic's assertion that in sixteen lines of Brer Turtle you have the whole range of Negro character. He is also challenged by James Weldon Johnson's ranking of Negro dialect poetry as capable of but two stops, pathos and humor. The other danger, often betrayed in negritude and the Harlem school of New Negro writing, is the leap into escapist mysticism and counter-elitism. In a rare self-characterization of his mission, he says “I didn't want to attack a stereotype by idealizing. I wanted to deepen it. I wanted to show that what you think this is has these other dimensions.”³

The magic slides sidemouth out his downhome verse like a wink, stories in homespun pirouette on their points, wry sociologies mount syncopations, convicting details ripple insinuations in pools of rime, the aphoristic rewards of slavery stand tethered in understatements. Sterling knows how folkspeech in the face of Standard picks up the quality of metaphor, opens ethnographic sorties into other cultural worlds. Part of his music is the play between meanings of the same words in different tongues, a play kept lively by exchanges between rhythms. And he can swing, like a streamline special.

I got me a Blackcat's wishbone,
Got some Blackcat's ankle dus'
An' yuh crackers better watch out
          Ef I sees yo' carcass fus'.

He is the master of Afro-American humor, wild, vagrant laughter, the merry side of madness. His talent for deep song, where the word becomes thing, can remind you of Billie Holiday:

The poor-white and nigger sinners
          Are low-down in the valley,
                                                                 The rider is a devil
                    And there's hell to pay;
                                                                 The devil is a rider,
                    God may be the owner,
          But he's rich and forgetful,
                                        And far away.

It's poetry earned by one who holds as touchstone, this: “I don't know what my mother wants to stay here for. This old world ain't been no friend to her.”

The best appraisal of the success of Brown's enterprise remains Alain Locke's essay “Sterling Brown: The New Negro Folk-Poet.”⁴ Locke acknowledges Brown's singular, elusive gift in capturing “the ancient common wisdom of the folk.” It is worth the trouble, though, to modify some of the key terms Locke used in conveying the departures implied in Brown's art. Where Locke says “ancient,” we might think and use ancestral. For dialect, better read Black English. Better, too, to see Brown as national poet than “folk-poet.” For honorable as that title might be, the wear and prejudices of usage make calling Brown a folk-poet a bit like describing Duke Ellington as a jungle-music entertainer. For similar reasons, many black musicians, Ellington first among them, have rejected the term “jazz.”⁵

The description of Brown as “folk-poet” is cramped, even at the coordinates of his leading strengths, character and language. The expression being national, concern for character flows naturally from it. Hence, Brown's work comprises a panoramic Afro-American gallery, although our memories are most swiftly seized by his “portraitures,” as he calls them, of root people. A census of this gallery, however, includes peasants, farmers, yes, but also coal-truck drivers, blues singers, streetcar conductors, gangsters, levee workers, gamblers, prostitutes, domestics, pullman porters, railroad men, chain gang convicts, true, but also city slickers, chorus girls, politicians, college students, preachers, doctors, teachers, society belles, business men, professors, himself. Thinking of the spread of his characters, we should remember the adjoining galleries of Edgar Lee Masters and E. A. Robinson.

The reach of Brown's language is equally palpable. “Dialect poetry” is too narrow, a falsification. Less than half his collected poems are in dialect orthography. An attractive formulation for me once seemed to be a breakdown of the voices in his verse into three kinds: literary, as in the Vestiges section of Southern Road; Black English, as in the poem “Southern Road”; and a mix of the two—a sophisticated observer narrating a framework for folk documentaries, as in “Odyssey of Big Boy” and “Strong Men.” This third category waits for special attention, because it holds some of Brown's most powerful pieces, “Strange Legacies,” “Old Lem,” “Saints,” “Ma Rainey.”

But this breakdown won't stand up. Long ago, Locke noted the full black-folk expressiveness of poems not in dialect, like “Maumee Ruth.” The poems in deepest Black English reverberate so strongly that we hear their twang and cadence even in absence of phonetic orthography. (The greater breadth of “Black English” over “dialect” is also demonstrated.) Further, there are linkages and continuities in the voices used over a wide spread of sociology and geography—Louisiana, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia, Boston, New York, D.C., and the roads between. His poetic forms are drawn from both oral and literary traditions, from the too fine “New St. Louis Blues” (“Whoever runs dis gamble sholy runs it well”), through ballads, high barroom boasts like “The Last Ride of Wild Bill,” dramatic monologues (sometimes as versified oral histories), straight through to romantic lyrics, free verse and black verse introspections, to posied sonnets, like “Nous n'irons plus au bois. …”

Mostly, poetic form conforms to the social background of the speaker; and poetic devices notable in English poetic tradition, like incremental repetition, fabliau, dramatic monologue are used overlapping with parallels in Afro oral tradition. But there is always the possibility of tonal and sociological complexity. The blues singer in “Long Track Blues,” the last poem in his collection, is Sterling himself; the “babe” is his wife, Miss Daisy, who died shortly before publication.

                    Went down to the yards
To see the signal lights come on;
                    Looked down the track
Where my lovin' babe done gone.

OTHER DIMENSIONS OF BROWN'S POETRY

It is easy to mistake the interest of scholars and artists in the lore of the folk for solidarity. Since the 60's, the use of Black English in Afro literature has become commonplace, and in recent novels almost standard. Some of the most crafty exploiters of the new literary idiom use it with little commitment to the people who supply its raw materials, individualists seeing in the new medium their main chance for fame and wealth. Brown's project of reducing the costly separation of oral and literate media in his society was pursued with motives grounded differently from those of many folk-based black writers of the 20s' black awakening and after.

His concentration on precise, reportorial detail plus his celebrated detachment can raise a false impression of Brown as a kind of candid camera realist, free of moralizing, sentiment or ideology. The publication at last of No Hiding Place after forty years (one of three complete volumes in this collection) should change that impression. As a whole, the book is urban, populist and militantly democratic and anti-racist. It is a tough-lipped book, laced with biting satires and a strain of 30's social radicalism. The folk are transformed here into an embattled people—the Depression perfecting their traditional afflictions—but fighting back, as in the much-loved “Old Lem,” possibly the most effective use of incremental repetition in the English language (“They don't come by one's, they don't come by two's …”) and “An Old Woman Remembers.” No Hiding Place also dramatizes the commonalities of black and white workers, divided and usually conquered by capitalistic racism. Was the new tone, after the more objective Southern Road, the reason Harcourt Brace turned the book down after announcing its forthcoming publication?

All along, Brown had been more closely allied to the intellectuals of the New Negro movement, to social scientists like Ralph Bunche, E. Franklin Frazier, Allison Davis and Rayford Logan, than he was to the literati of Harlem. The ideology of New Negro intellectuals shared more of the spirit of Europe's Enlightenment than its Renaissance. It saw more progress (a “key word”) coming from the application of critical social thought to the problems of the “American Negro”, here and now, than from utopian, morale-building fantasies like yearning for Africa. It was anticlerical, secular, down on all forms of social escapism. It concentrated on the issues and problems of black individuals and communities instead of celebrating black people's intuitive knowledge “how to live”. It leaned toward environmentalism to explain weaknesses in Afro-American society, as opposed to the Harlemite account of Afro personality through primitivism and exoticism. Its efforts reached its scholarly peak in An American Dilemma, its practical triumph in the U.S. Supreme Court decision desegregating public schools.

So Brown's persistent deconstruction of “the Harlem Renaissance” has more to it than cursing a missed boat. It has to do with his resistance to intellectuals bandwagoning through shortcuts. By contrast, the New Negro movement offered a more commonsensical, representative, national frame of reference. The issue Brown raises with the concept of the Harlem “renaissance” still has some bite. What would Afro-America be if it allowed its brains and nerves to be represented by intellectuals of New York, or any other single city? What would Afro-American literature be—a literature, remember, whose first, most important body of work is its Southern-based oral traditions—if it allowed its character to be shaped by the speakeasy exoticism of the Harlem literary extravaganza?

The Harlem “renaissance” in Brown's thought and poetry is encapsulated in “Cabaret,” written before the craze faded, albeit after a visit to a nightclub in Chicago, 1927. The “renaissance” and its writers are imaged in those painted, theatrical chorus girls, mimicking for “Hebrew and Anglo-Saxon overlords” a parody of Southern creole beauties longing for home: “I've got my toes turned Dixie ways / Round that Delta let me laze”, while

(In Mississippi
the black folk huddle, mute, uncom-
prehending,
Wondering how come the good lord
Could treat them this way.)

It's not just people who are stereotyped; stereotyping is also stamped on places, historical eras, causes, large ideas. The “Harlem renaissance” is a stereotype that was believed by many of its victims, and still claims good brains. Brown's position on the “renaissance” was critical from the beginning, consistent with his life-long intellectual outlook and literary project: “I wanted to show that what you think this is has these other dimensions.”

Responses to the new material in the collected poems should include surprise. We have comfortably accepted his persona as cracker-barrel humorist and raconteur, local-colorist and snap-shot chronicler, while Brown has also been a “long-breath singer”, one of those few black artists whose work taken whole carries a broad structured, nearly programmatic vision of Afro-American reality, punctuated by a sharply defined order of values. It should be clear now that Brown's critical writing is part of his creative project—its debunking of fraudulent ideas, its anecdotal method, its reticence regarding sweeping constructs. The Negro Caravan, the first major anthology of black American writing which Brown edited along with Arthur P. Davis and Ulyssees Lee, reinforces a diverse and national perspective. While the “renaissance” was oceans wider than sixteen lines of Brer Turtle, it shrinks, along with other fads, in the Caravan's generous oral and literate dimensions.

Brown's intellectual stance actually outflanks even New Negro ideology. To paraphrase a remark made of Henry James, his is a mental process too fine for all but the most compelling natural ideas to penetrate. Ideas are there, and we should search the poetry more shrewdly for them; but they hold a different weight in the scheme of things. He is more skeptical of bulky conclusions, even from the academy, than many of his social scientist colleagues of the New Negro movement. He has never, for instance, shared their seduction by the idea of progress, instead crediting the variances of history to a kind of seasonal flow, “the swing of the pendulum.” From “Memphis Blues”:

          Memphis go
Memphis come back,
          Ain' no skin
Off de nigger's back.

His concept of man and of the Negro is more natural and commodious than the theorems of An American Dilemma (some of which he used). Some idea of his worldview lies in the order of values surrounding the people in his poetry. Those hopelessly beguiled by pretensions, modish escapisms, whether of religion, politics or art become the butts of uproarious yarns—the foolish militant in “Crispus Attucks McKoy,” the Garveyite in “The Temple.” Appreciating this vein of his work should help set apart his version of national poetry from the black nationalist poetry of the 60's and early 70's. And for all his devotion to root people, his realism fends off sentiment or miserabilism in witnessing their flaws and weaknesses. At the extreme, note his meditation on race traitors in “Memo: For the Race Orators.” It is the house servant who blows the whistle:

Show how he remains: a runner to the master,
To the time-keeper, the warden, the straw boss, the brass-hat,
The top-hat, the big shot, the huge noise, the power,
Show him running, hat in his hand,
Yelping, his tail and his hindquarters drooping.

The folly and tragedy people bring upon themselves in Brown's poetic tales arise out of their drifting from ancestral stabilities, trying to assimilate into vanities—into movie images of bad dudes, and jail, into the glitter-lights of tin-roofed towns, and prostitution. The cities are markets of glitter and de-naturalization, the traffic of loss and assimilation. The last lines of “Memphis Blues” read:

All dese cities
Ashes, rust …
De win' sing sperrichals
Through deir dus'.

The folk values of his world, which are also his values, are kin to the “core black culture” revealed in Drylongso. Brown's world shows a fuller appreciation for the hustling Slim Greers, the Sporting Beasleys, the Scrappys, putting on dog, than Gwaltney's crime-beseiged respondents can muster. The order of values here admires the vitality and heart of these high, wild spirits, but it does not heroize them. He does not say of them, “You had what we need now, John Henry / Help us get it.” They are not asked, as is Ma Rainey, “Git way inside us, / Keep us strong. …”

Beneath the glare of false idols, the idea of humanity in Brown's world is a strength in moving on, in face of natural and social obstacles, in full knowledge and acceptance of the limitations of mortality, the ultimate source of laughter. To acknowledge death and, therefore, limits, means to accept contradictions and complexity; the Panzaic principle outlasting Quixotic idealisms. The balance of contradictory, vital forces, which never add up to absolute salvation, being what is meant by “nature”. The refusal to assimilate to less than naturally grounded ideas, racism among them, being its notion of strength. It is the old, Adamic affirmation of the value of being above all else. It holds, as Goethe did, that life is more interesting than the interpretation of life. The possibilities of social advance in this view lie within the people conceived in this image, not within quickie political nostrums or their spokesmen. Leaders are mentioned in “Strong Men,” Brown's great poem of ethnic identity, only obliquely:

They bought off some of your leaders
You stumbled, as blind men will …

Any such paraphrase takes a risk. The suspicion of words outside their context of actuality, where they become abstractions or the reveries of bourgeois lyricists, accounts for the prevalence in Brown's work, of narrative, story, action and character, the carpet of experience in specific settings.

Still one more limitation accepted is the lack of novelty in this human image, a vision shared with multitudes, expressed by Homer, Chaucer, Burns, and so many others, we should not be thrown off its track by local colorations, confusing them with chauvinism. Brown's originality lies in his ability to realize this human image with the sonority, depth and accent it also finds in the blues, gaining over them on the printed page as much as is lost to voice and guitar. Old Man Buzzard spews his evil prophecies at Fred in his fields: your woman won't be true, your friends won't last, good luck and health will soon be gone and death will find you alone.

‘Doan give a damn
Ef de good things go,
Game rooster yit,
Still kin crow,
Somp'n in my heart here
Makes me so.
.....No need in frettin'
Case good times go,
Things as dey happen
Jes' is so;
Nothin' las' always
Farz I know …’

The “other dimensions” Brown's poetry aims for beneath the stereotypes are those of whole life, without additives, preservatives or debilitating refinements. The basic contradiction he attacked is not DuBois' noted “twoness—an American, a Negro,” though his work capitalizes the overlap of much Afro and WASP experience. He attacked, at greater depth, the supposed contradiction outlined by Frederick Douglass who said he thanked God for making him a man, while Martin Delaney thanked God for making him a black man. Beyond the stereotypes and the elitist, colonialist and racist dreck, Brown's poetry asks, where's the difference? “What it means to be a Negro in the modern world,” he wrote in the 30's, “is a revelation much needed in poetry. But the Negro poet must write so that whosoever touches his book touches a man.”⁶

A couple of years ago he said, “I am an integrationist, though that is an ugly word, because I know what segregation really was. And by integration, I don't mean assimilation. I believe what the word means—an integer is a whole number … I want to be accepted as a whole man.” In his battles against racism and its first line of defense in the arts—inferiorized, distorted images of other people—it is this drive toward wholeness that makes his poetry national. “I love the blues, I love jazz, and I'm not going to give them up.”⁷

CONCLUSION

It is time, now, to go beyond particularist appreciations of Sterling's art, to do more than rifle through his works for personal favorites. His commitment to wholeness and complexity urges us to envision his work as a whole. It's a fool's errand to look for some blueprint or grand plan there. But there are proportions: folk and bourgeoisie, South and North, country and town are given space in his work gauged to their importance in his perception of his times. And the subtitled sectioning of the poems is a key to some sense of design.

There are groupings among the poems, the most essential coming in pairs, as contrasting opposites, or complements, sometimes as two dialoguing voices within the same poem. The martyred hero is admired in “Old Lem” while the foolish martyr in “Crispus Attucks McKoy” is satirized in riming, footstomping guffaws. “Children of Mississippi” is available for stark contrast to “Children's Children.” Every melancholy dirge has its uproarious, tall-tale twin. The call and response of distinctive fates and voices multiply finally into the ensemble improvisation of a community expressing itself. Though a production mounted in Washington, D.C. by actor-director Robert Hooks in the mid-70's made a beginning, the full realization is yet to be made that the work of Sterling Brown is, more than a gallery, a national theater.

Brown's collected poetry, then, stands as an effective integration of certain elements of Euro-American literacy with Afro-oral consciousness, placed in the deep center. In his poems, the already created consciousness of his race is forged into a modular replication of black culture. Seen whole, as a kind of narrative minus a dominating plot, the interaction of contrasting values, the lines of character-destiny, provide the motivations and dynamics of the society reverberated there, where the major themes—the twisting paths of human motivations, pride in work, the ruin of children, love, death and the sweetness of life in its shadow, wanderlust, the adhesiveness of men to women, the irredeemable evil of ritual murder, the wit of the trickster, the kinship of laughter and courage—are the scaffolds of its dialectics. This work, based on principled, studied observation, offers a synopsis of black consciousness in the decades after the Great War, yet with ringing implications for the present. When Afro-American social thinkers end their neglect of literature as an analytical probe, they will find in Brown's collected poetry an important document for their study.

As for the literary generation of the 60's, with the notable exception of Stephen Henderson and Sterling Stuckey, it has mostly failed to recognize the central precedent in Brown's literary project of goals it claims as its own. As Alain Locke observed a half century ago, “Gauging the main objective of Negro poetry as the poetic portrayal of Negro folk-life true in both letter and spirit to the idiom of the folk's own way of feeling and thinking, we may say that here for the first time is that much desired and long-awaited acme attained. …”

Notes

1. The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, selected by Michael Harper (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).

2. “The Literature of Black,” Black World (June 1970).

3. Hollie I. West, “The Teacher,” The Washington Post (Nov. 16, 1969), F2.

4. Reprinted in Nathan Huggins, ed., Voices from the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 251-257.

5. One problem with such redesignations is that they risk the wrath of Brown's own learned insistence. Armies of linguistic and semantic debate stand at the ready over these questions. Michael Harper, in his preface to the Collected Poems, avoids all ethnic reference; and Sterling Stuckey, in his introduction to Southern Road, avoids black in favor of American Negro, Brown's emphatic self-description. The hazard of the newer terms pays off in fuller appreciation for the scope and reference of Brown's work in contemporary discourse, providing we respect the battles Brown fought during the New Negro era regarding the ideas behind these terms.

6. “Contemporary Negro Poetry, 1914-1936,” in Sylvestre C. Watkins, ed., An Anthology of American Negro Literature (New York: Random House, 1944), p. 261.

7. “A Son's Return: ‘Oh, Didn't He Ramble,’ in Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto, eds., Chant of Saints (University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 18.