By Kalamu ya Salaam
Her language was exquisite. A woman who never went out the house looking ragged. Colors matched. Elegance without extravagance—not the fool’s gold of flash, instead the timeless beauty of simply (but not simplistically) stated substance. How she packed tons of tall meanings into short stanzas and succinct paragraphs.
Especially Maud Martha taught me the power of small stones skipping across the river of our experiences. And that was the ultimate power of Ms. Brooks. Our people were her work.
Lloyd driving a bus thru the Southside, his hat at the angle of good humor while doing the drudgery of daily labor. Or Bessie teaching tough children the strength of tender caring. The working us were Brooks heroes and sheroes.
Deep within the husk of the ordinary resides the exceptional and the seminal; there is where our ability to find joy and beauty in the midst of pain and ugliness manifests itself. When we, like Ms. Brooks, see ourselves not only as we are, but also as we can be, see both the outer shell and the inner seed, that is the moment of triumph: satin Sundays, women and men moving home despite the whirlwind. How furious such a flowering. Gwen knew and named our essences.
Most famous Negro writers wrote about white folks and wannabees or else were content to be tour guides into the entertainment jungles of black, brown and beige erotic/exotica Judas-ly offered as authentic American Negro life. (I wish I were exaggerating but I am probably understating the literary pathology that Gwendolyn Brooks quietly eschewed.)
You know the mainstream wanted to claim Ms. Brooks. All those sepia and tan photographs looking like a middle-aged librarian. Surely they could trust her not to cause a fuss. I wonder what they thought when she went Blackstone.
The establishment had awarded her the Pulitzer as seductive offering to be a digested Negro. Her reply to their tribute was to turn Third World. She declared that her Blackness (B-L-A-C-K) was essential to her humanness. No bleaching here.
She took the forties, a tortured time, and showed us the beauty of us on the street, the corner, taking a taxi, leaping a wall, longing to dance in the backyard, eating beans, toiling in factories, marching off proudly to war, returning quietly, or loudly, but returning to the Sundays of ourselves.
By the fifties and sixties we had abortions and motherhood spoken so forthrightly it stunned us into silence. She had a way of softly speaking hard sentiments that most of us seldom admitted to ourselves even in the seclusion of midnight moments.
Came the seventies and she was often the cornerstone in a room full of young marbles rolling around in search of something solid to stand on. I mean she helped many of us see which way to go simply by sitting wisely among us, reading young us while continuing to write about all our ages.
“Go where?,” we asked. “Be wherever we are!” her example replied. She taught us the joy and relevance of homecoming.
Her ultimate literary value was not her technical achievements, even though those were awesome. Sure, she had a Shakespearean grasp of the King’s English. She could have been quintessential properness but knew that it would not be right to let correctness be the bottom line of her legacy.
Gwen Brooks sought and caught the badness of Black beyond mere technical mastery; she moved into the sincerity of articulating heart/home, which is where all great art ultimately must come from. From her I learned that any of our conceptions of human beauty and goodness was counterfeit if it did not include us at its core. From her I learned that our life stories were Biblical in their breadth and depth, Koranic in their inspiration and accomplishments, a paradoxical koan: no human is greater than us and we are no greater than any other human.
Her early work was breast milk. Her last work grandmotherly hands. And all the in between songs, sonnets, sermons, stanzas and mama-says were mature, loving embraces.
Gwen Brooks exemplified Blackness not as stereotype but as the human archetype we, at our best, were capable of achieving