By S. Brandi Barnes
Perhaps it would be best to start a tour of the communities known as Woodlawn and its neighbor Park Manor. And perhaps it would be better to circle the house at 74th and Evans here in Chicago, where Gwen once lived with Henry, Henry Jr., and daughter Nora.
Somewhere before here, she wrote things like Annie Allen and Maud Martha and perhaps while here, she penned “We Real Cool,” where they thinned gin. Precisely where the Golden Shovel Pool Hall, she was referring to was located, is unknown. As pool halls go, they are in themselves, universally the same. So the cool was in them all.
Very little remains of 63rd Street in Woodlawn the other black belt, once a jumping alive, burgeoning and sometimes- splitting at its literal seams
community of people, homes, buildings, businesses, skating rinks, theatres, churches, and car dealerships. All were occupants of these streets that gave Gwen so many tangibles to strut and tell the world about. This was done despite the rickety, clanging noise of the “El” trains along 63rd, where Lorraine Hansberry, Sam Greenlee, and Gwen once lived.
The blue and white, small frame house sits among other houses and apartment buildings. It is picturesque as picket fences go. This is the inner city and therefore, metal fences are more likely. If you have never been here before and if I were not with you giving this tour, you would still know which house was The House of Gwen.
It was luck that I had the chance to meet her at the first writers conference I attended, sponsored by Alice Browning under the auspices of the International Black Writers Conference. It was 1980 and I would meet many prominent poet and writers including Dudley Randall and Gwendolyn Brooks, whose combined talents graced the poetry workshops.
These doctors told the mostly seeking and searching, non-published new poets to NOT QUIT our jobs (if you had one), to write poetry. She spoke to the highs and lows of writing poetry – from the business standpoint. This was the best advice one could give to the audience of starry eyed beginners…seeking fame and fortune for feelings.
After informing us of the variables in the business of writing poetry, she listened patiently to us who braved to read our awful poems – the “did I write that 10 years later?” type poems.
She listened to our mediocre work that needed fixin’. She listened also to good poems that needed a little fixin’ too.
She was the Gwendolyn Brooks, giving of her
time (mostly all afternoon); her space (she was
approachable); and her wisdom that she shared. What more could one ask of her?
It was a privilege to come to this house as part of Henry’s writing group and be in the presence and home of such literary legends. The modesty of the furnishings was indeed deceptive, for this was one of those towering experiences. In many ways you’d learn that Gwen Brooks lived at least materially much like the people she wrote about, although she was an international celebrity.
These neighborhoods and their inhabitants lived in her. They were trapped in her heart and captive to her ears, nose, throat, mind, and eagle eyes for details. So came written and spoken word pictures that only an Annie Allen or Maud Martha could have said or one proficient in the creation of, “Niggeroes and Niggerenes,” as she instructed us in Primer for Blacks. As a word inventor, I wonder what she would have said about the movement going on now to bury the “N” word?
As the once national poet laureate and lifetime Illinois Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, she was expected to be supportive of new writers, and the writing community at large. She chose to give of herself generously in various ways. She did much of that from this framed house….and so came the notes and short letters in response to queries and letters to her, and: she wrote words of inspiration to you on blue note sheets (blue like the house).
Ms. Brooks chose to walk and talk the role of financial benefactor for those writers committed to the word and the writers community. A little or big something to keep you going – you see; or a reward for your efforts (yes, she noticed); and of course those little notes or book blurbs. There was always something to keep in your treasure box, or tucked away in a hidden panel labeled “Notes from Gwen Brooks.”
You look at this house and neighborhoods and know she caught the African-American to “Blacks” community with precision, nobility, and a plain dignified smoothness – here, there, and everywhere.
I don’t know how she would have responded or portrayed the woman who boarded the #4 Cottage Grove bus that I was riding. This woman was tall, very thin, cinnamon brown skin, slightly high off of something, clad in jeans, leather jacket, patchwork quilt type head scarf: tied the way Gwen wore hers. She had a pork chop in one hand, no bread, and a can of non-descript soda pop in the other. She was talking loud in between bites on the chop, or drink from the can. Would Gwen Brooks have written about her at all? Just what connection does this woman have with the international community other than being Black and of African ancestry, boarding a bus at 75th – one and a half blocks from the house Gwen once lived in?
The woman appeared to me, to be a space cadet. I suspect if she had caught Gwen Brooks’ eye and filled her head as so many before her had, Mizzzzz Brooks would not have criticized her. If she had chosen to write about her, I suspect she might have reproduced her with compassion and accuracy that only quick, piercing eyes and an open mind could seize. She would have done so with love.
I remember doing my Gwen Brooks impression for a few writer friends, one evening when we had gathered. They fell out with laughter. I had her, inflections and all. Later, I imagined her catching me the way a mother catches a child imitating a family member, or television personality. I wonder how she would have reacted? Amused? Delighted? Unmoved and unfettered? Or would I have become a subject of that unmatchable, bulls-eye Gemini wit?
Her impact on me as a recipient of her Significant Poet award, is one of forever honor and a continuing source of inspiration. As a poet impacting another poet, our challenge is to be original and ideally, creatively fresh with language, something she never let us forget by example. So she could make one love reading….and when you read her as a writer, how can you not be humbled?
This is a woman, wife, poet, teacher, mother who prided herself on being plain by choice. She knew without a doubt that she was awesome, and her depth was her volume…her parade. Therefore, she could stand on the podium quietly next to the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, the night he was elected.
Depending on your point of view, the move to the lakefront condo was timely and er… well…scenic. Given the calmness or choppy waters of Lake Michigan, the Museum of Science and Industry a short walk south, park land and more shoreline, as far as one can see without a telescope: and surely a sun rising from the water east, a view of God’s created nature is just what a writer needs. Well, we can say she put that fallacy to shame.
This new community she and Henry moved to, surrounded by the University of Chicago, is far more diverse physically. There are high rises to the left, to the right, to the west…with Asians, Anglos, genuine Africans, university people, middle to upper class, better police patrols, (robbers too), and shopping close by.
We cannot form a ring around this high rise as neatly as we can the blue frame house. As our poet laureate however, Ms. Brooks-Blakely put in good time in our community. So let us as people, as children of her legacy, gather around the little house on Evans and form a new circle of life – – and call out her spirit, or visions of the many of us, each “Niggeroe and Niggerene.”…even those who cry I’m half-Indian.”
Let us request and declare LANDMARK status for this house. ..and call out the voices she nurtured and help us have. Let us do so until we are breathless. The images her spirit has of us will never leave its head. If you have any imagination you can feel her big, kind, yet eagle eyes looking out at you/us: each Niggeroe and Niggerene…What she has given us back is everlasting.