A Writer Who Defined Black Power for Herself

By MARY HELEN WASHINGTON

Dec. 8, 2000 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

I was driven to find Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1953 novel “Maud Martha” because it was said to be the first piece of literature in which a dark-skinned black woman was allowed a rich interior life. I was working at the time on my University of Detroit dissertation and searching for black women fiction writers for my first collection of stories, “Black-Eyed Susans.”

Brooks, who died Sunday at age 83, had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950 for “Annie Allen,” yet in 1975 virtually no literary attention was being paid to her fiction or that of other black women.

I nearly memorized “Maud Martha,” wrote my first critical essay about it, bought every copy of it I could find. It became the heart of my scholarship--not just because of Brooks’ exquisite delineation of a woman’s inner life, but for her elliptical, experimental style which, like her poetry, demanded that the reader work hard, reading Maud Martha’s life in tone, symbol, image, gesture.

In her first poetry and in this novel, Brooks writes of the 1940s and 1950s, an era before school integration, before black power, before multiculturalism. She wrote more powerfully than Ralph Ellison about invisibility because she wrote as a black woman and because her subjects were often black women who experienced a far greater invisibility than Ellison’s invisible man.

In the chapter called “low yellow,” for example, Maud wonders if she will be able to hold on to the man she is going to marry for she is “certainly not what he would call pretty. Pretty would be a little cream-colored thing with curly hair. Or at the very lowest pretty would be a little curly-haired thing the color of cocoa with a lot of milk in it. Whereas, I am the color of cocoa straight, if you can be even that ‘kind’ to me.”

Brooks wrote so perceptively about the 1950s. She understood from her own life that this was not the period of black outrage. Racial instruction, if you wanted to be acceptable to white folks, consisted of mild and harsh forms of self-diminution: Cut out that noise, get rid of those loud colors, turn that music down, get yourself some education so that you can become acceptable.

Brooks knew the psychological wounds being inflicted from within and without. In her poem “Beverly Hills, Chicago,” black people drive through a wealthy white neighborhood where they cannot live. Gradually their sense of differentness, of being left out of whatever systems create this kind of neighborhood, their inability to express anger at that system, makes them turn on one another:

Nobody is furious. Nobody hates these people.

At least, nobody driving by in this car.

It is only natural, however, that it should occur to us

How much more fortunate they are than we are. . . .

We drive on, we drive on

When we speak to each other our voices are a little gruff.

Brooks turned sharp but muted anger toward those expressing disdain for the poor. The “Ladies from the Ladies Betterment League” arrive to give money to the poor but find them “too swarthy,” “too dirty,” “too dim” and quickly retreat from the tenement.

Keeping their scented bodies in the center

Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,

They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,

Are off at what they can manage of a canter,

And, resuming all the clues of what they were,

Try to avoid inhaling the laden air.

For opponents of racial equality, whom Brooks calls “men of careful turns, haters of forks in the road,” she reserves her most bitter, most caustic comment. She speaks to them of the subtle, hidden, polite ways of U.S.-style apartheid:

Next, the indifference formal, deep and slow.

Comes in your graceful glider and benign,

To smile upon me bigly; now desires

Me easy, easy; claims the days are softer

Than they were; murmurs reflectively, “Remember

When cruelty, metal, public, uncomplex,

Trampled you obviously and every hour . . . “

(Now cruelty flaunts diplomas, is elite,

Delicate has polish, knows how to be discreet):

Requests my patience, wills me to be calm,

Brings me a chair, but the one with broken

straw . . .

For all the anger in her poetry and fiction, Gwen Brooks was the most gentle of spirits. I spent the weekend with her at her home on Chicago’s South Evans street in the 1970s when she was separated from her husband. I was sick for most of the weekend and she spent a good part of it on the phone with my mother, trying to find the medication I had neglected to bring.

She also took me to a poetry reading where money was collected for a family burned out of their home. I know no one except me saw this, and Gwen did not intend for anyone to see. She opened her purse and, without once looking to see what was in her hand, she took out a huge wad of bills and dropped the entire fistful into the basket.

This spirit lay behind and motivated what critics see as the huge change in her work in the 1970s. But historian Lerone Bennett saw it differently: “Before it was fashionable, she was tone deep in blackness.”

Conventional wisdom holds that Gwen Brooks went to the 1967 Fisk University Writers’ Conference as a “sweet and ignorant” woman, encountered the young black militants led by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) and was converted. Brooks documents a decided shift in emphasis and technique in her work, and clearly she was transformed, as most blacks were, by the events of the 60s and 70s. She began to question her relationships with whites, particularly the appeal of her work to whites and what she saw as its lack of appeal for many blacks. She called her earlier writing “white writing” and resolved to change.

She started a workshop for the South Side Chicago gang known as The Blackstone Rangers, and there was a new black nationalist tone to her poetry: “My aim, in my next future, is to write poems that will somehow successfully ‘call’ all black people: black people in taverns, black people in alleys, black people in gutters, schools, offices, factories, prisons, the consulate.”

For much of her life, Brooks supported herself through grants--including two Guggenheims--lectures, poetry readings and part-time college teaching.

In 1975, she left Harper & Row, and would never again be published by a white publisher. Despite intense clamoring for her work that would have paid her well, she remained with small black presses--Broadside, Third World and her own David Press.

What many neglected was her qualification: “My newish voice will not be an imitation of the contemporary young black voice, which I so admire, but an extending adaptation of today’s G.B. voice.”

What is almost never noted about Gwen’s transformation in the 1970s--and she helped to mute this aspect of her life--is that she was also developing a strong feminist voice. The weekend I spent with her she made very clear to me that she was through with the “role” of wife. She told Essence magazine in 1971 that marriage was “a hard, demanding state,” and that she had “no intention of ever getting married again. No, not to God.” Later, however, she and her ex-husband, Henry Blakely, did remarry, and they remained together until he died in 1996.

But the liberating feeling of black consciousness had spilled over into this part of her life too, and though she would never use the term “feminist” and would be seething with anger at my applying the term to her, she was quietly, with few public statements about it, becoming one. That feminist consciousness is already present in “Maud Martha” and its almost unknown sequel, “The Rise of Maud Martha,” which I reprinted in my 1987 anthology, “Invented Lives.”

Throughout Brooks’ novel, her main character chafes at the role of wife. When Maud wants to experience cultural events, her husband Paul clowns, dismisses her desires, and falls asleep. When Maud is reading, Paul wants to initiate sex. She is used to beautiful and sacred holiday traditions, but instead she finds herself on Christmas night inhaling cigarette smoke, passing around Blatz beer, eating Chicken Inn chicken and removing “from her waist the arm of Chuno Jones, Paul’s best friend.”

In a 1975 interview, Brooks describes with relish how she allows Maud Martha to dispense with the role of housewife: “Well, she has that child and she has another child and then her husband dies in the bus fire that happened in Chicago in the ‘50s. One of those flammable trucks with a load of oil ran into a street car and about thirty-six people burned right out on 63rd and State streets. So I put her husband in that fire. Wasn’t that nice of me? I had taken him as far as I could. He certainly wasn’t going to change. I could see that.”

Brooks took pains to camouflage her feelings that marriage could stifle and limit women and that women had as much right as men to careers, especially to their work as artists. She agreed to allow me to publish an essay she wrote for Negro Digest in the 1950s called “Why Negro Women Leave Home.” It is a wonderfully outspoken essay, explaining what she saw as necessary for a woman to feel “clean, straight, tall, and as if she were part of the world.”

With the “good taste of financial independence” generated by World War II-era defense industry jobs, black women, according to Brooks, were refusing to settle for marriages that deprived them of dignity and self-respect. At first she agreed, then later asked me to remove it from the collection because she did not want the animosities between black men and women to be trumpeted before the white world. I understood her reluctance, but I also felt that this was the one area in which the intrepid interpreter of black life retreated.

The young black militant men whom she lionized and celebrated behaved quite differently with women of their own age. I experienced a harsher, meaner side of them, and saw the way their militant posture became a justification for their exploitation of young women. If Brooks ever saw this, she never wrote about it publicly. I once said in an essay that she gave men heroic roles in her poetry but that her women were seldom endowed with the power, integrity, and magnificence of her male figures, and that essay caused an estrangement between us that never really healed.

I both loved and feared Gwen, loved her for her passion and commitment, for her poetry and skill with words, for her generosity. I also feared that passion, her absolute convictions. Once she decided to wear her hair natural, never to descend to the straightening comb or hair relaxer again, she had a terrible fierceness about its importance and a disdain for the women who returned to what she considered a form of self-hatred. The last time I saw her, she was the honoree at the annual Howard University Black History Month fund-raiser. My hair was both blond and relaxed, very chic, I thought. But I was afraid to face her with this sign of whiteness upon me. Yet she was lovely and cordial and ready to hug me again. I wish she could see me now in my new gray Afro twists. She’d approve.

Brooks was a brilliant American modernist, devoted to form and craft. She merged black colloquial speech with formal poetic diction, experimented with various kinds of literature and used her gift to document and critique the lives of 20th century blacks.

The words she wrote in honor of Langston Hughes eloquently mark her own social and poetic role:

In the breath

Of the holocaust he

Is helmsman, hatchet, headlight

See

One restless in the exotic time! and ever,

Till the air is cured of its fever.

Mary Helen Washington, a professor of English and African American literature at the University of Maryland, is a visiting scholar at UCLA’a Center for African American Studies.

From ‘Annie Allen’ (1949)

First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string

With feathery sorcery; muzzle the note

With hurting love; the music that they wrote

Bewitch, bewilder. Qualify to sing

Threadwise. Devise no salt, no hempen thing

For the dear instrument to bear. Devote

The bow to silks and honey. Be remote

A while from malice and from murdering.

But first to arms, to armor. Carry hate

In front of you and harmony behind.

Be deaf to music and to beauty blind.