…In Memory of Gwendolyn Brooks
By Afaa Michael Weaver
We talked. We corresponded, and although our contacts were infrequent over the period of twenty years, I had the pleasure of spending quality time with Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks. I have memories.
It was nineteen eighty-five. In January, I had received the NEA that allowed me to leave factory life. I spent that spring traveling and enjoying my success. With no knowledge of the place and anyone who lived there, I landed in Paris and spent two months in Europe, using my Eurail pass to travel the continent by train. In London I gave a reading for the journal Race Today, run by Linton Kwesi Johnson and others in Brixton. C.L.R. James was elderly and sickly, attended to by members of the journal staff and the community. It was just after the Brixton riots. I was free, and Gwen was part of that manumission as she was on the NEA panel that gave me the award. I knew the applications were reviewed anonymously, but I sent her a letter of gratitude, to which she responded by inviting me to read for the Poetry Office at the Library of Congress. When I arrived that autumn day in 1985, Gwen directed me to sign the famous book of poets, a guest register that covers the greater part of the twentieth century with the signatures of poets remembered and forgotten. I was reading at the Library of Congress for the first time, as I would come back two years later.
After this first reading at the Library of Congress, we went to lunch, and I found myself being fed by Mae Miller, as she graciously offered me her soup. It was more of a directive than an offer. I had no choice but to accept, and she watched me as I ate. Mae, the daughter of Kelly Miller, had come to the reading with a friend, and the two of them wanted to make sure I ate well. Gwen was at the other end of the table, trying to peep down to make sure I was not being overwhelmed with care. It was the gaze of someone who knew not only to look down the table at a guest but to look down the corridors of time, casting eyes both ways, to what has gone, what is with us, and what may lie ahead of us, the future. Gwen Brooks had another hand in my own future, as Michael Harper later told me that she informally spoke up for me as I was being considered for admission to Brown’s graduate program in that spring of my manumission.
“You should have come to the head of the line,” she said to me once, years later, after I finished the graduate writing program at Brown and settled into my teaching job at Rutgers. She had come to the Painted Bride Art Center to read. Essex Hemphill, whom I had met twenty years before, was in line, so I thought it was good manners to join the line, in my place.
“It’s so good to see you,” she said with that sincere energy she always gave. Generosity you might call it. I would say it was more. Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks lived with a sense of history, its roll and its stream, just as she recorded Langston Hughes’ visit to her home when she was sixteen and how he encouraged her.
“Do you write about the people in the community where you live?”
I did not know how to answer her that time. I had left Baltimore for Philadelphia, a city that loves to condescend to southerners. It was not a city where I knew where to look for Saud, Madie, or Satin Legs Smith. Philly is unlike Chicago, where Gwen spent so much of her life, the Chicago of Gladys’ Luncheonette, where you could go on Sundays with church folk and get that Sunday afternoon kind of dinner with fried chicken and greens, a place where no one made fun of the fact that you were eating fried chicken and greens. Gladys’ Luncheonette is gone now.
I quietly said I was trying or that I would try. I honestly don’t remember as I sit here in Somerville, Massachusetts, tonight with the unlikely sound of air hammers and trucks doing an odd kind of night construction. This morning was a gorgeous spring morning and I took the bus to Central Square in Cambridge to send money home to my family, to shop, and to eat lunch. It’s that kind of sense of having a familiar space in the world that Gwen knew was so important to a poet, that and the familiarity of language.
In nineteen ninety-two Gwen came to Rutgers to read at my invitation, there was standing room only in the large lecture space there on the Camden campus. Gwen held people captive, yet I wonder how many truly knew the value of the moment. Gwen made the English language our own. She tamed it, gave us a deeper contour of how to lay the vernacular inside this unwieldy tongue so many of us are born to with anxiety, whether that anxiety be rooted in race or class. For African-Americans it is a long look down the corridor of time where the walls are papered with laws against our learning to master the language of those who would deny our humanity, and it was Gwen who made it sing in places where laws tried to outlaw a black poetic. She did it with the hand of a lady, the carriage I see in the engraved image of Phillis Wheatley.
“Michael, save one of those little sandwiches for me before you gobble them all up.”
That was about as stern as Gwen ever got with me on the few occasions I spent time with her. We were at the Belvedere Hotel in Philadelphia having a full British tea. She treated me and my wife after the Rutgers reading.
In the midst of white linen I was swallowing them whole almost, no care to the etiquette of such things, and in Philadelphia throwing etiquette to the wind can be a dangerous gesture. It is the city of societies and manners, where black women set the standards for the middle class. However, Gwen had an intimate relationship with the vernacular. She loved it.
Driving over the Ben Franklin bridge and heading to the Belvedere Hotel in downtown Philly, she described the small apartments typical of where she and her husband lived in the early years of their marriage, the living spaces that are immortalized in Annie Allen. When she described those places, she went into the almost melancholic way of memory, moving away from the present into some other space, one guarded by personal thoughts and rituals. It is a certain privacy, a poet’s privacy, this space of memory, and Gwen buffered her public access with certain boundaries, one of which that she preferred trains over planes wherever possible.
As Gwen rode along on Amtrak over the years, I wonder what she saw or what she thought, remembering perhaps the moment she learned she had won the Pulitzer Prize, or the many invitations she received to public and private events. In some intense and somewhat frightening way, she must have felt so alone. I write that as I remember now a moment in a biography of John Berryman where it is noted that he did not enter the living room where Gwen was seated during a party for her. Berryman explained that he did not dislike black people. He just did not want to be around them socially, and the tone of that attitude takes me to a reading of how Benjamin Franklin was horrified when left alone in a room with Phillis Wheatley, and we were on the bridge named for him, heading into a city partly designed by Benjamin Banneker.
“Gwen, you were our black genius.” I wonder if she can know I am writing this. If so, if she does know, is it over the passageway of some bridge? I wonder.
Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden cast the frame of a formalist postmodern poetics, the frame of an elegant mansion, and neither of them went into the confessional mode of decorative motif in their poetic projects, and already I am disappointed that some critics do not take into account the pressures of American society, specifically its anti-black racial prejudice, in noting a certain lack of personal revelation in Gwen’s work especially. I think now of a recent review of Elizabeth Alexander’s Library of America edition of Gwen’s work where the reviewer laments the lack of windows into Gwen’s personal life in her work. It could not have been otherwise given the stream of tradition, but nowadays even tradition is being questioned, and we now question the self’s existence.
Of course, the self is fluid and unfixed. That is old wisdom. The current speculation has to do I think more with the fragmentation in life as we now live it, how the greater hand of technology is both connecting and dividing people everywhere. It is the anxiety of a manufactured chaos, something apart from the existential wondering that was part of the post WWII intellectualism. At that time Americans lamented the dropping of the bomb, and now it seems the bomb we have dropped is globalization.
“That woman doesn’t like me.” Gwen was speaking to me about one major American critic who ignored her work. But then there are those of us who love her, who have some sense of gratitude to her for knowing her place in the line stretching back over time, the line that had its own wisdom and knew when to turn itself into bridges, out of the stuff of black people’s hopes, and their instinctive love of language.