From Report From Part One

By Gwendolyn Brooks

Home always warmly awaited us. Welcoming, endorsing. Home meant a quick-walking, careful, duty-loving, never-surly mother, who had been a schoolteacher, who played the piano, sang in high soprano, and wrote music to which I wrote the words, made fudge, made cocoa and prune whip and apricot pie, drew tidy cows and trees and expert houses with chimneys and chimney smoke, who helped her children with arithmetic homework. Home meant my father, a janitor for McKinley Music Company. He had kind eyes, songs, and tense recitations for my brother and myself. We never tired of his stories and story poems. My father seemed to Gwendolyn and Raymond a figure of Power. He had those rich Artistic abilities, but he had more. He could fix anything that broke or stopped. He could build long-lasting fires in the ancient furnace below. He
could paint the house, inside and out, and could whitewash the basement. He could spread the American Flag in wide loud clean magic across the front of our house on the Fourth of July and on Declaration Day. He could chuckle. No one has ever had, no one will ever have, a chuckle exactly like my father’s. It was gentle, it was warmly happy; it was heavyish but not hard. It was secure and seemed to us an assistant to the power that registered with his children, always, as magic. My father, too, was almost our family doctor. We had Dr. Carter, of course, precise and semi-twinkly and efficient–but it was not always necessary to call him. My father had wanted to be a doctor. Thwarted after one year’s training, he read every “doctor book” he could reach, learning fine secrets and curing us with steams, and fruit compotes, and dexterous rubs, and, above all, with bedside compassion. “Well, there, young lady! How’s that throat now? Well, let’s see. This salve will take care of that bruise! Now we’re going to be all right.” In illness there was an advantage: the invalid was royalty for the run of the seizure.

MAMA! –telling me when I showed her, at seven, a page of rhymes: “You’re going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar!” Star-bits in her eyes! She and my father praised me to anyone who visited the house. And my mother praised me to Langston Hughes. She made me show my poems to him when he came to recite at our church, Metropolitan Community Church in Chicago. And she praised me to James Weldon Johnson, author of “God’s Trombones,” when he came to a fancier church: her assault was–”SHE’S the one who sent you all those wonderful poems.” The great Dr. Johnson drew himself up, which he had every right to do, crossed his hands in front of him. “I get so many OF them, you kno-OW, “was his textured response. Our encounter with Langston, though, was comfortable, regenerative. “You’re very talented!” he exclaimed. “Keep writing! Some day you’ll have a book published!”