Furious Flower Grows in Virginia

It was an indelible announcement written in black and white for all to see. The first nationally published poem of Gwendolyn Brooks’s appeared in American Childhood, in October 1930, when she was only thirteen years old. Earlier, at eleven, she’d published four poems in a local neighborhood paper, the Hyde Parker, foreshadowing her brilliance. It was a brilliance that would shine through decades and across nations, bedazzling and impacting hundreds of poets and millions of audiences, in all walks of life.

Gwendolyn was a black teenager living on a quiet street in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood at 4332 South Champlain Avenue, where her family had lived since she was four years old.

Bronzeville, the name coined by an editor of a black newspaper, the Chicago Bee, was named for the color of the area’s inhabitants. In those days, Bronzeville proper stretched from Thirty-First to Thirty-Ninth, and from State Street to Cottage Grove. It was a jewel of colored masses in a segregated space. The people were too often poor and illiterate, but they were also industrious and dignified, creative in music, language, dance, and style. They were the salt of the earth and birds who managed to fly with cramped wings. Gwendolyn, ever observant, settled in to learn the ways of her people, the geography and genius of Afro-America.

Hers was a protected space guarded by father and mother. She and her brother, Raymond, were nurtured and shielded by their father, David Brooks, a janitor at McKinley Music Company, and by their mother, Keziah Wims Brooks, a former schoolteacher who had given up working in the classroom to guide her own children. Gwendolyn was loved.

***

It was 1930 when she made her national debut. The world was just entering the Great Depression. But Gwendolyn didn’t feel depressed. She was buoyed by dark ink on the pages of Writer’s Digest, which she discovered at age thirteen. She reveled in the company of other writing souls who were on the same quest as she—to have their expressions published. She learned to send her work out, to include a self-addressed stamped envelope so that it might be returned when it was rejected. For rejection would and did come. She sent poems and stories out. She got them back. Her desk was her headquarters. But one day the letter she had been waiting for, a letter of acceptance, did come. At that moment, she was deliciously light-headed and light-hearted. Her first poem, “Eventide,” was published in a national magazine. No doubt, her family celebrated her. She basked in her first victory, her announcement to the world.

When the sun sinks behind the mountains,
And the sky is besprinkled with color,
And the neighboring brook is peacefully still,
With a gentle, silent ripple now and then;
When the flowers send forth sweet odors,
And the grass is commonly green,
When the air is tranquilly sweet,
And children flock to their mothers’ sides,

Then worry flees and comfort presides
For all know it is welcoming evening.

Of course, there were no mountains in Chicago—except for the mountains of clouds in the sky a young Gwendolyn was fond of studying. And no brook ran down Champlain Avenue. But Gwendolyn had learned, in her extended reading, about these natural wonders, and her imagination soaked up the solace of nature’s beauty. Her experience in the Brooks household provided the template for the comforts of a “welcoming” home.

She was a pretty girl in her darksome way. And she was in love. She was always in love. Words and books were the love of her young life. Who would have thought that a baby girl born to David and Keziah Brooks in the dining room of her grandparents’ two-story, single-family home at 1311 North Kansas Avenue in Topeka, Kansas, on June 7, 1917, would so soon become a published poet? Her parents, having migrated to Chicago earlier, had returned to Topeka for her birth. Gwendolyn was born during the Great War across the ocean, but she must have felt the reverberations of a world in conflict as she grew up. Negro soldiers were deemed unfit to fight by US commanders, so they battled under a French flag and returned home as heroes. She would become used to the theme of war. She was in touch with it, even in her little corner of the world.

Gwendolyn wrote poems a long time before she was published. She would sit on the top of the back steps and dream in poetry about the magic of sky and the mysteries of her future. She wrote a poem a day from the time she was eleven. Sometimes two or three. She was devoted to her poetry because her mother believed in her ability, her gift for it. When she was seven, she showed her mother her page of rhymes. Her mother was overjoyed, excited at the possibility of a poetic daughter who would conquer the segregated world with elegant and eloquent language. She, a schoolteacher, knew how important it was to achieve in letters.

“You’re going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar!” Keziah Wims Brooks exclaimed. And Gwendolyn believed this because her mother had said it was so. Her mother would do all that she could to make it happen. For example, early on Gwendolyn did not have to do chores. Then later she dusted, swept, did some laundry, and washed dishes. But her mother carried the work of the household. Her mother sang “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” as she went about her work for her gifted child. Gwendolyn, with pen in hand, brightened her own corner in her little room of her own.

When she was in her early teens, her father gave her a desk of her own that he got from McKinley’s. It was a desk full of compartments where she kept notebooks that she’d been writing in since she was eleven and special books like “the Emily books,” L. M. Montgomery’s books about a Canadian girl who, like Gwendolyn, wanted to be a writer. Of course, she kept The Complete Paul Laurence Dunbar.

When Gwendolyn wasn’t writing, she was reading. Even at Christmas, she read. She sat near the Christmas tree and re-read the same book on that holy day: The Cherry Orchard, by Marie Battelle Schilling, a gift from Kayola Moore, her Sunday school teacher at Carter Temple Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. Gwendolyn would sit amid tinsel and gold, under a star-topped tree, and lose herself in the same book each year. Or did she find herself in the same book? Did she find herself in any story or poem—a vibrant, vivid, adventuresome self who taught her to live more confidently, at least in her mind? She only had a few friends on her short block.

She was a dark-skinned girl at the time when being a decidedly dark girl was not the most desirable thing to be. Black people, worldly-wise, sang, “If you’re white / You’re all right. If you’re yellow / You’re mellow. If you’re brown / Stick around. If you’re black / Get back. Get back. Get back.” Gwendolyn understood the color code. She was bright that way. At the time her first poem was chosen for publication, she was not the most popular girl in any part of Negro society. But her self-esteem did not depend on others choosing her. She chose herself. Rejection hurt, but she had early on fallen in love with her own color because her parents, by their love of her and her brother, had taught her to love the totality of herself.

On her block, Gwendolyn was known. Even if she spent most of her time in the house, in her room at her desk, writing poems and stories and reading sometimes two books a day, she belonged. At school it was a different matter.

When she went to grammar school, to Forrestville Elementary School, outside her immediate neighborhood, she encountered teasing every other day about her complexion. Her classmates called her “Ole’ Black Gal.” At the time, most of the kids believed everything black was bad—a black heart, a black mood, a black knight, a dark design.

In describing herself as she was in her early teens, she said she was “timid to the point of terror, silent, primly dressed, AND DARK. The boys did not mind telling me that this was the failing of failings.” Gwendolyn withstood the insults but noticed the reverence her classmates had for the light-skinned girls.

The boys were drawn to light-skinned girls like magnets. They fawned over Rose Hurd, Eleanor Griffin, Rebecca Dorsey, and Gwendolyn’s friend Ida Briscoe. These girls had boyfriends. Gwendolyn did not garner the attention of young Negro males until later, when she conversed with Joseph Quinn, light-skinned Herman Lawrence, Theries Lindsey, and more seriously dated one Kenyon Reid.  She had the consolation of and preference for books and her own creative impulse. Because of her interests and temperament—and especially her color—she did not fit in at Forrestville Elementary School. She learned that lightness was one crucial way that Negro society established the worth of its members.

The length and texture of the hair was also important to popularity. It had to be long and curly, and it was best if it did not need a hot comb to be straight or free from kinks. That was Good Hair. Gwendolyn did not have Good Hair. The wardrobe had to be fine, as well, reflecting the economic station of the parents—professional men like lawyers, doctors, politicians or porters and postal workers. To have a schoolteacher for a mother was a boon. But Gwendolyn’s mother was retired, and the family did not have the extra income anymore.

To top it all off, Gwendolyn was not athletic. She did not tumble and jump with ease. She had few social graces. She did not know how to make witty repartee and coin new phrases. Her classmates kept up the insults. One of Gwendolyn’s earliest extant poems seems to be a response to personal slights and insults.

Forgive and Forget

If others neglect you,
Forget; do not sigh,
For, after all, they’ll select you,
In times by and by,
If their taunts cut and hurt you,
They are sure to regret

And, if in time, they desert you,
Forgive and forget.

Gwendolyn’s answer to the cruelty and insensitivity of young schoolmates was the perfect response she learned in the Sunday school she attended every week—a Christian, turn-the-other-cheek answer, reflecting a belief that things would be right by and by. It was a deeply held belief among African Americans as well. This belief, in Gwendolyn’s mind, extended to whites, as well. She was working her life out in the privacy of her poetry.

Think of the pain of a sensitive black girl, beloved at home and snubbed at school, taunted in this way, at best ignored, at worst maligned. The hurt of it ran like a central seam in the garment of her writing. It would later inform her worldview and hold it together.

But as a student, she searched for a place to fit her dark self. She went to three different high schools in this effort.

Her first was the predominantly white Hyde Park Branch, at 6220 South Stony Island, where it was said the best students went. Gwendolyn hated her experience there, though. She felt isolated because she was isolated. She was a black canoe in a sea of whiteness. She was ignored, invisible to all but a few white boys, she would say later, who took an unreciprocated liking to her. Was she interesting to them because she was dark skinned and seemed exotic? Was her black skin alluring as forbidden fruit?

Gwendolyn packed up her books and headed to the all-black Wendell Phillips Academy on 244 East Pershing Road, at Thirty-Ninth Street, not too far from her home. She was hungry for a learning experience among her own people. A girl who lived next door to her on Forty-Third and Champlain had sworn up and down that Gwendolyn would “have a ball” at Wendell Phillips with its rich, black social life. But she didn’t have a ball. She wasn’t a have-a-ball person who knew the latest dances, partied on the weekends, played Post Office and Kiss the Pilla. She wasn’t fast, athletic, stylishly dressed, or light skinned with long hair.

The last high school, from which she graduated, was Englewood High School, at 6201 South Stewart Street. Because she didn’t live within the school’s district, she used the address of one of her few friends in order to attend. Englewood was not solidly white like Hyde Park or wholly black like Wendell Phillips. It was mixed, though the majority of the students were white. But she did not feel so much like an outsider there. Still, no one ever said, “Hey, Gwen, are you coming to the party tomorrow night?”

No one ever said, “Girl, didn’t we have a ball last Saturday night!”

Certainly no one ever said, “Oh, you’re a doll!”

Or, “Heaven must be missing an angel.”

But something romantic happened at Englewood, all the same. It was said that “when a white boy of affluent family flirted with her in class, he was threatened by a black boy who had a hitherto-controlled ‘crush’ on her.” What did Gwendolyn make of that scene? She blushed, no doubt mortified.

At Englewood High School three teachers recognized her talent for poetry and writing in general. Ethel Hurn in history and Margaret Harris in journalism encouraged her directly, and Horace Williston in American poetry encouraged her as well. Gwendolyn had tried to be published in the school paper but was rejected; then she turned in a book review—written in verse—of Janice Meredith, by Paul Leicester Ford, which Gwendolyn had only half read because she hated it so. Hurn was greatly impressed with her writing and said Gwendolyn “had a future.” Gwendolyn earned an A and her teacher’s continued interest.

Concurrently, she joined the journalism club, and teacher Margaret Harris also believed in her. She had run into her on the bus one day and told Gwendolyn she thought she had talent. Gwendolyn was embarrassed to be singled out in public on the bus. But at home, in the safety of her room, she reveled in the encouragement. From Miss Harris in the journalism club she learned the W’s—who, what, when, where, why. She also developed a discerning eye, which would help shape her life’s work.

So three white teachers offered her plums of encouragement. There was no black teacher at the school, but Gwendolyn read about the ideas of other African Americans in the Chicago Defender. It was the most popular newspaper about Negro life at the time, and the most respected. An honored guest in many black homes, in truth, it had prompted many African Americans to vacate the cruelties and limitations of the South and seek out the opportunities and promise of the cities of the North.

Founded in 1905 by Robert Abbott and situated at Twenty-Fourth and Michigan Avenue, the Defender was sold by Pullman porters at stop-off points in towns, cities, and hamlets throughout the South. It was the town crier of the national black community and kept black people everywhere in touch with the black condition. It raised a hue and cry about the lynching in the South, reporting in great detail. It highlighted job openings in factories and steel mills in the North, and recruited workers for those jobs. It offered visions of life in domestic service and career advancement for the educated.

In addition, the Defender offered details of Negro social life—weddings, funerals, engagements, graduations, parties, recitals, musical venues, and athletic competitions. Charitable organizations, fraternities, sororities, and social clubs were highlighted. It was the Chicago Defender’s David Kellum who founded the Bud Billikin Back to School Parade, an institution on Chicago’s South Side that attracts hundreds of thousands onlookers and participants from across the city today.

Gwendolyn aspired to publish poetry in the pages of the Chicago Defender. She wanted to publish there as Langston Hughes did. On August 18, 1934, when Gwendolyn was seventeen, the following poem appeared in the pages of this national organ:

To the Hinderer

Oh, who shall force the brave and brilliant down?
There’s no descent for him who treads the stars.
What else shall he care for mortal hate or frown?
He shall not care. His bright soul knows no bars.

Take his weak frame and twist it to your will.
Strive to discourage and to make him fall;
Oh, make him suffer! Cause his tears! But still
Shall not his spirit rise and vanquish all?

What things the Power buried in the skies
Of man’s attempt to bruise and hinder man?
What pity has that Force for our poor cries
When crude destruction is our foremost plan.

Was “To the Hinderer” a hidden response to the chilly racism she’d encountered at Hyde Park Branch School, or a response to editors who were cold to her submissions she’d begun to send out? Or did the poem address, in its velvet-wrapped way, the society at large, surrounding Bronzeville and inside Bronzeville? Gwendolyn’s was a gifted mind answering back with subtlety.

She would continue to send poetry to the Chicago Defender, which published her writings on the uselessness of fame, the bliss of friendship, quarrels. These were mature considerations for an adolescent girl. In four years, she published seventy-five poems in the paper’s Lights and Shadows column.

In September 1935, after completing high school, Gwendolyn went directly to the new Woodrow Wilson Junior College, which had just opened its doors at Sixty-Eighth and Wentworth. She would graduate in 1936. While at Wilson, Gwendolyn enjoyed friendships, worked hard at her studies, and wrote regularly. More and more, her work began to engage Negro people, the people of her community, and the world at large.

Bolstered by the openness of the college experience, the communion of friends, the recounting of events of the day over radio, newsreels, and in the newspaper, she gave a passionate and urgent cry in response to the Italian dictator Mussolini, ally to Hitler. She responded to the rumblings of a world soon to be at war on October 12, 1935, in yet another contribution to the Chicago Defender :

Words for Mussolini

“Dark men must learn to bow to bright”
How many, many times a flesh
of black has masked a soul of white.
Lord, Lord, I ask this gift of You!!
Grant me a voice, and speaking eyes.
That the quick-throbbing truth I know
May reach the deeps of earth and skies.

I want to tell them all in words
Shining and hard, and very cold,
This message that I know is Yours—
Else whence the richness of its gold?
I want to tell them that the sod
Is drab and deeply dark of hue,
Yet their material nourishment
From out the hated blackness grew.

The rose whose sweets they cherish sprang
From that same blackness they despise.
A hundred times I beg of You—
Grant me a voice, and speaking eyes.

Thus, Gwendolyn pleaded with eloquence and fire. She implored God for “a voice, and speaking eyes.” And she would have these two major gifts.

Even though Gwendolyn herself demonstrated some ambivalence about the color of her skin and the color of her soul, she turned her gifts on intraracial conflicts of self-acceptance and self-love. Having gained perspective through age, experience, and self-confidence, she rebuked self-hate over and over again.

In a poem that she noted was “to be published in Opportunity,” the journal of the Urban League, she scoffed at the woman who wrote on a job application that Gwendolyn had “Negroid features, but they’re finely spaced.” Gwendolyn felt the apology in the qualifying conjunction “but.” She would have better phrased the sentence, “I’ve Negroid features—and they’re finely spaced.”

Gwendolyn celebrated “A Brown Girl” (April 8, 1936): “But there is one tall brown girl: How high and fine her head / Her mouth, how firm; her eyes how cool; / How straight and strong her tread: / As if to say, ‘I have no fear.’” This poem is reminiscent of the celebratory poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, the Negro Renaissance stressing racial pride.

In print, Gwendolyn celebrated the beauty of Negroness, and she castigated intra-racial colorism. She was bold and public in her address. But Gwendolyn also created a handmade volume of unpublished poems dated July 23, 1936, shortly after she graduated from Woodrow Wilson Junior College. It would include poems written from 1935 to 1936. She entitled it Songs After Sunset, suggesting work composed in near darkness, in quietude, away from the business of the day. These “songs” are mostly love poems “both worldly (friendship, marriage, nature) and divine (animism, God, Nature).”  These poems are profoundly private—and universal.

WE

An old man said this thing to me:
“The loveliest word of all is ‘we.’”

Gwendolyn had been keeping notebooks since she was eleven and named them for each year, except for 1932, which went missing. These notebooks were named variously My Fancy Book, The Red Book or The Merry Book, The Blue Book of Verse, The Account Book, and Book of Thoughts.

She was so devoted to writing in her notebooks that at one point her mother grew concerned. To divert Gwendolyn’s attention, and save her eyesight and health, she poked her head into Gwendolyn’s room one day.

“There’s a big fire down the street,” Keziah told her daughter.

“Yes,” Gwendolyn said, and kept on writing. She was creating.

But her mother was her chief champion, taking her to a lecture and reading by the esteemed James Weldon Johnson, writer of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” He was also the author of God’s Trombones, poems of sermons of Negro preachers; was the national secretary of the NAACP; and had been the United States consul to Venezuela. He was a Great Man. A Great Negro. Gwendolyn was tongue-tied at the thought of meeting him. She too wanted to do Great Things.

Years before, in 1933, when she was sixteen, Gwendolyn had sent some of her poetry to James Weldon Johnson. He had been kind in his reply and had offered valuable, encouraging feedback and legitimate and constructive criticism. On August 30, 1937, he wrote to her:

My dear Miss Brooks:

I have read the poems you sent me last. Of them, I especially like Reunion and Myself. Reunion is very good, and Myself is good. You should, by all means, continue you[r] study and work. I shall always be glad to give you any assistance that I can.

Sincerely yours,
James Weldon Johnson

In addition, he wrote kind and insightful notes in the margins of the poems.

Dear Miss Brooks—You have an unquestionable talent and feeling for poetry. Continue to write—at the same time, study carefully the work of the best modern poets—not to imitate them, but to help cultivate the highest possible standard of self-criticism.

Then he offered meticulous and generous criticism of poems she had sent. The poems included “Once She Lived,” “Decay,” and “Aftergloom,” poems befitting a sensitive, young woman with a serious, even morbid, bent.

Gwendolyn took Johnson’s responses to heart. They discussed eliminating unnecessary words and feeling free to break the rigidity of the measured form. She knew the works of certain Negro poets such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Now she turned her attention to T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and e. e. cummings.

So the prospect of meeting James Weldon Johnson was thrilling.

Gwendolyn and her mother went to their church, Carter Temple Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, on the northwest corner of their block, to hear Johnson’s lecture. Her mother was aggressive, pushy for her talented, shy child.

“She’s the one who sent you all those wonderful poems!” Keziah enthused to Mr. Johnson.

He responded coldly. He was hoisted high inside of himself. He crossed his arms in front of his chest and lifted to full height. “I get so many of them, you knooow.”

Gwendolyn felt her face go hot. Why had she supposed he’d be otherwise? He was, after all, a Great Man of Achievement.

Her meeting with poet-writer Langston Hughes was kinder. Again, her mother took her to a church. This time it was Metropolitan Community. They went to meet this Great Man of Letters, a poet in touch with the pulse of the people and the pulse of poetry itself. He laughed gently and warmly upon meeting Gwendolyn and her mother.

Ever dreamy-eyed and practical, Keziah Wims Brooks insisted that her daughter show Hughes her poems. He read them on the spot, then leaned forward and gazed directly at her. “You’re very talented!” he exclaimed. “Keep writing! Someday you’ll have a book published!”

He was a soft-spoken man, but his words had weight. Standing there in church, he provided a gospel of clarity and empathy. His friendship would follow Gwendolyn through the years.

After graduating from Wilson Junior College, Gwendolyn went in search of a job. Her family needed her. She could not live by poetry alone. She was nineteen years old, able-bodied, educated, and expected to work. She of the “voice and speaking eyes” was a natural reporter. She not only liked to observe clouds, as she did on the back porch, but also liked to study people. She loved to listen in on the gossip between neighbors. At thirteen, she reported all that she had seen and heard in her own handwritten rag, the Champlain Weekly News. It sold for five cents. The press of schoolwork had caused Gwendolyn to cease publication of her newspaper. Now, Dewey Jones, who edited the Lights and Shadows column of the Chicago Defender, where Gwendolyn’s poems were printed almost weekly, encouraged her to interview for a job as a reporter on the paper. Gwendolyn wrote to publisher Robert Abbott, posthaste. His reply was welcoming. An appointment was set up.

Gwendolyn and her mother met Abbott with anticipation. At first he met them with welcome on his countenance. Quickly, though, the warmth turned to cold stone. He was abrupt. “If we hire you, you will have to be on time every day.” The meeting was over. They were dismissed, and she did not hear from him again.

Gwendolyn sensed she had met the stone wall of color prejudice. Robert Abbott was color-struck. That is what Negroes called his strict preference for light-skinned Negro women.

Not to be deterred from her journalistic instincts, Gwendolyn again published her own newspaper. This time it was mimeographed. The News-Review sold for a nickel. A remaining copy demonstrates that Gwendolyn was in touch with cultural affairs and current events. This issue included local news and a speech by associate justice of the US Supreme Court Hugo L. Black. Gwendolyn’s brother, Raymond, contributed a cartoon of Justice Black, a former Klansman, saying, “I number among my friends many members of the colored race.” Along with the quote is an image of a black man hanging from a tree.

Gwendolyn contributed a poem, a short story, and an editorial, as well as biographies of Negroes of achievement. She quoted Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, and the Reverend Harold Kingsley “on the endurance of blacks.” There was a Negro authors quiz, including luminaries from the Harlem Renaissance.

Young Gwendolyn was a race woman, but she had to get a job. She worked for spells in domestic service. She went to the Illinois State Employment Service, which sent her to the Mecca Flats Building at Thirty-Fourth and State Street. It was a nine-block walk from the Brooks household.

Opened initially as a hotel in 1893, the ninety-six-unit apartment complex, known as the Mecca, was built on the edge of the Black Belt for upwardly mobile Negroes. Its fame spread far and wide. The dream of it sparked the imaginations of children and adults all the way to the Deep South.

At the Mecca, Gwendolyn would work for a “spiritual adviser,” E. N. French, who made huge sums of money off the dreams, desires, and longing of needy and sick people. Gwendolyn, with other workers, answered imploring letters and bottled so-called curative medicine for the charlatan. These bottles, meant to attract love and money and good health and the resolution of difficult situations, were delivered by Gwendolyn and others throughout the Mecca. Ever the observant reporter, Gwendolyn witnessed “murders, loves, lonelinesses, hates, jealousies. Hope occurred, and charity, sainthood, glory, shame, despair, fear, altruism.”  The young poet became intimately acquainted with the vast edifice and its denizens.

She worked among this spectrum of dark humanity for four months, for eight dollars a week, a portion of which she contributed to the Brooks household. She kept the job out of necessity but had to let it go when the “spiritual adviser” wanted to promote her to associate pastor. It was a job that would have entailed some preaching on her part. Gwendolyn could deliver potions, but she wasn’t to deliver false notions or preach promises made of air. She would store the Mecca and its members in the storehouse of her mind and call up the innumerable nuances years later, failing to create anything significant about the place, again and again, until many years later. For now she still lived at home and gathered life around her in her mind.

The Brooks household was as gentile and orderly as an Elizabethan garden with each stick of furniture, knickknack, doily, and child in its place. David Brooks, head of the family, sang in a rich baritone while he worked around the house after working at McKinley Music Company. He sang his songs and went about family life good-naturedly. He could fix anything. He fastened pipes and the rivulets of water ran down his strong, black arms while he fixed the plumbing. He nailed down loose floor boards; he yanked out bent nails. He made the world right. He had studied medicine for a year at Fisk University in Nashville. His studies had ended when he started a family. He welcomed his children and loved to fulfill his doctoring skills on them. He fed them spoonfuls of cod-liver oil. He sat by Gwendolyn and Raymond’s bedside and spoke softly to whichever of them was sick. He had a beguiling bedside manner and knowledge gleaned from reading and black folk medicine. Gwendolyn thought her father made her times being sick and convalescent worthwhile.

Her mother, Keziah, was dutiful, performing chores with supreme efficiency. Her house was immaculate. Her children were scrubbed and lotioned. But she made no outward displays of affection. Yet all the household tasks she performed so cheerfully, the caring and encouraging words, her vigorous pursuit of her children’s excellence, were proof of a deep maternal love.

By the 1930s, when Gwendolyn was a precocious preteen and teenager, she observed all manner of people, dressed in their best, strolling down the avenue, on their way to Forty-Seventh and South Parkway. In the vicinity of the Brookses’ household, seven blocks away, vendors lined Forty-Seventh Street. The Regal Theater, which opened its doors in 1928, was nearby, part of a complex that also included the Savoy Ballroom, a Walgreens, and the South Center Department

Store, with the Madame C. J. Walker Beauty Salon and Walker School of Beauty opened. The complex was built by Harry M. and Louis Engelstein, white men in pursuit of the Negro dollar. When Negroes had money, they spent it in their community because they had to. There was nowhere else to go.

The Regal Theater was magnificent, an alluring palace of marble floors and decorative cornices. Its seat covers were imported from North Africa. Its chandeliers, made of crystal, came from Belgium. Artwork suggesting Moorish castles under a North African sky of stars enclosed the space. The Regal was the place to be. And all of Bronzeville, the classes of the Black Metropolis, went there. The Regal Theater attracted the whole of the Negro community because it attracted the headliners of the day, as well as rising local talents. It offered films as well, like Flying Down to Rio with Chicago’s Etta Moten Barnette, whose husband, Claude, was the head of the Associated Negro Press. It showed features with Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy. Its live stage shows featured comedians and performers that included Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Count Basie, zoot-suiter Cab Calloway, banana-leaved Josephine Baker, and tap dancer Bill Robinson. Gwendolyn, her mother, and brother went to see movies at the Regal Theater that stirred Gwendolyn’s romantic fantasies, and she went to see live stage shows that she would write about later.

Within a four-block radius of the central site of Bronzeville—Forty-Seventh and South Parkway—was Providence Hospital, at Fifty-First just off South Parkway, staffed by Negro doctors and nurses. There was also the George Cleveland Hall Branch Library on Forty- Eighth and Michigan Avenue, with its impressive collection of work on and by Negroes in the Vivian Harsh Research Collection of Afro- American History and Literature; the South Parkway Branch of the YWCA; and the Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments. Each of these would be significant to Gwendolyn’s life and work.

The NAACP Youth Council held its meetings at the YWCA building and, in 1937, Gwendolyn, at the urging of Lula Battle, her friend from Wilson, attended a meeting and joined the group. The council included an ambitious group of progressive, forceful, young intellectuals who would accomplish significant things. They were not leftists, but they pressed against the status quo of repression and poverty assigned to Negroes. Of the members, Joseph Quinn, head of the council, would become a teacher in California; Sarah Merchant, important to Gwendolyn in another way, would also become a teacher; George Coleman Moore, a teacher as well as a writer; Theries Lindsey, a friend from Wilson days, would become an attorney; and John H. Johnson would found and build a media empire that included Ebony magazine, Jet, Negro Digest/Black World magazine, Ebony Jr., Fashion Fair cosmetics, and the Ebony Fashion show. Last, but not least, was Gwendolyn’s friend Margaret Taylor Goss, who became a renowned painter, writer, cofounder of the South Side Community Arts Center, and founder/ director of the DuSable Museum of African American History.

The camaraderie among NAACP Youth Council members was intense, and Gwendolyn entered a more active and activist moment in her life. Thelma Johnson, president of the council, and Margaret Goss created a sense of hospitality and community for the members. They socialized together and held dances and gatherings, but they also engaged in meaningful and substantive talk. Gwendolyn was still reserved, but she began to blossom in a space suited for her passionate interior. She entered into the activism of the group, protesting against lynching. Council members wore paper shackles around their necks, symbolizing the lynch rope, and marched, carrying placards protesting the wrong done to the Scottsboro boys in Alabama. And Gwendolyn went to dances and danced. She was accepted as a writer, a thinker, and a committed race woman. Her peers in the council were young, gifted, and Negro, and it was the end of the 1930s in Chicago, in Bronzeville. She was finally one of the group.

Gwendolyn was a little girl during the Harlem Renaissance, which stretched well beyond New York. Being Negro was in. Negroness was even in vogue on Broadway in shows like Shuffle Along and whites infiltrated Harlem to be entertained at nightclubs where light-skinned beauties danced in their glory. All this activity flurried in the air like flecks of smoke from a stupendous fire that was headquartered in Harlem but fanned out across the nation. It swirled down to a quiet street in Bronzeville and a young Negro girl named Gwendolyn. And in the 1930s, new embers of another Renaissance were starting to burn in Bronzeville. Chicago was the perfect place for another Renaissance. In the 1920s, Chicago’s Black Belt had been the center of economic and political power for Negroes. This crucial power was based upon many institutions that had been established from 1890 to 1915, including a bank, a hospital, a YMCA, an infantry regiment, effective political organizations, lodges, clubs, professional baseball teams, social service institutions, five newspapers, and a number of small businesses.  Yet before there could be a flowering, there was a Depression to survive.

The Depression years (1929–1940) were felt in the Brooks home. Even though Negroes claimed often that they didn’t feel the Depression because their community was always in a state of depression and just getting by, the Great Depression hit hard. There was mass unemployment—factory and mill layoffs, domestics lost their jobs. Twenty-five million men were out of work—both Negro and white.

After Franklin D. Roosevelt won the election, in 1932, lengthy relief lines for government assistance lined the street. There were work programs instituted to offer employment to hungry people who were looking for more than a handout. They wanted a leg up, some boot straps to pull themselves up by.

In the Brooks household, father David often brought home twenty-five dollars a week during the best of times at the McKinley Music Company. During the worst of times, during the Depression, he brought home eight to ten dollars a week. Gwendolyn’s parents quarreled over money and even separated for a time, during which David took Gwendolyn and her brother, Raymond. But the family was reunited, and David took on a second job, house painting. It was during those trying times that Keziah Wims Brooks changed the family menus from lamb, hamburger patties, and chicken with potatoes and vegetables to beans, beans, and more beans. They ate the beans without complaining. Some people had less. Yet whatever was on their table, they welcomed to it hungry strangers who knocked at their door.

After dinner, David Brooks would spend quality time with his children. He had a deep love of books and read to them Paul Laurence Dunbar poems. He sang songs to them and he told them stories. He told them about his father, who had been a slave. Once his father had achieved freedom, he moved to Oklahoma. He was enterprising and proved to be a successful farmer. In turn, his white neighbors grew envious and poisoned his mules and horses. So he moved. From this family story, Gwendolyn learned about the poisonous power of envy and knew it was something to guard against. Her father told them all the things he had seen in the world, especially the events of the summer of 1919. The Depression that hit some years later was hard, but the Red Summer of 1919 was harder.

David and Keziah had brought newborn Gwendolyn from Kansas to Chicago just two years before the Red Summer, when postwar race riots swept American cities. Hundreds, mostly black people, were killed. In most cases, whites had attacked Negro people. In Chicago, whites got more than they bargained for: the blacks fought back. Robert Abbott of the Chicago Defender had exhorted black people in a 1915 slogan, “If you must die, take at least one with you.” (Never mind that Abbott was the same man who treated Gwendolyn coldly during a job interview because her complexion was not light enough.) Negroes in Chicago did just that. Chicago was what white poet Carl Sandburg called “the Hog Butcher for the world.” It could cut a man down. One had to be tough to survive in Chicago.

Gwendolyn Brooks came from this community of tough-minded people. She would sit at her desk now in the late 1930s, more mature, more conscious of herself and her world. Her calling was clear—to write, and that included writing about her surroundings. She was surrounded by life, by Bronzeville.

Excerpted from A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks by Angela Jackson, forthcoming from Beacon Press on May 30, 2017. Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press, 2017.

Ten years ago, Sarah Browning and a group of fellow poets founded Split This Rock, a literary nonprofit that works at the intersection of poetry and political activism and hosts the biennial Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in Washington, D.C. Browning recently announced that she will step down from her role as executive director of the organization at the end of the year, and that the search for her replacement will begin after this year’s festival, which will be held from April 19 to April 21. With her final year at the organization underway, Browning discussed her past decade at Split This Rock, the continued need to consider poetry a form of social engagement, and the upcoming festival. 

What changes have you seen in the literary world since starting Split This Rock?
When we started this organization, there were very few literary organizations engaging in activism. I went to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference in 2003, three weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, and I could find only two sessions that engaged political questions at all. We were actively being told not to write political work fifteen years ago. That’s why we started D.C. Poets Against the War [a movement in 2003 to protest the war in Iraq] and then Split This Rock, which emerged from that movement. Split This Rock brought the activism piece into the picture. Now, of course, everybody is focused on making change with their poetry and doing so more explicitly. But I’m telling you, ten years ago, there was no home for it. And that’s why we built it.

The name “Split This Rock” comes from a poem, doesn’t it?
It does, from a Langston Hughes poem called “Big Buddy.” It ends with, “When I split this rock, / Stand by my side.” So it’s about splitting the rock of injustice but also the solidarity that’s needed—that need for community.

How does Split This Rock make poetry and activism accessible?
We try to bring poetry into as many spaces as possible and encourage everyone to write. We host community writing workshops twice a month in D.C. They’re free, drop-in; all you have to do is show up. The room is physically accessible, with transcription service for people with disabilities. You don’t have to have an MFA or any educational experience or introduction to poetry. We believe that, as Roque Dalton wrote in a poem, “poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” And our programs prove it. People are hungry for the imaginative language of poetry and for the authentic voice of one another, the heart-language, because so much of our experience is mediated now by propaganda, by commerce, by social media. We’re being sold to all the time. So we’re hungry for more authentic experience, and that’s what poetry is: It’s idiosyncratic language; it’s weirdness and wildness.

What would you say to those who might suggest that poetry and activism are incompatible?
Writers have always engaged the world around them. And as a writer you have to write what’s pounding up inside you. And if what’s pounding up inside you is injustice—if there’s a mother who has to work two jobs just to get food on the table, or if you are that mother, and you’re writing late at night and hoping there’ll be enough food to get you through the end of the week to the next paycheck—then that’s what you’re writing. That’s the poem. That’s what’s going to have power: What is the fire in your belly?

Nobody should tell anybody else what to write. I’m not telling anybody what to write. These poems were always being written; they just weren’t finding a wide audience because journals weren’t publishing them. The guidelines were saying, “No causes.” The contests weren’t awarding these poets the awards. The universities weren’t giving these poets the jobs. Because of racism, and because of conservatism. And homophobia and sexism. Split This Rock was founded to help these poets, like myself, feel less lonely and be more effective as poet-citizens, so that we could join together when we wanted to do activism—but also to amplify our voices and to create our own platforms.

Split This Rock cites Federico García Lorca’s concept of duende as one of its core values, which is described on your website as “recognizing the potential imaginative power of fear and embracing poets and activists who grapple with difficult issues and take risks in their writing and public work.” Why are fear and risk both necessary to move things forward?
It ain’t easy. None of it. We’re not going to make change if we stick to platitudes and simplicity, either in our poetry or in our social justice work. So we have to go to dark places, difficult places, in ourselves and in our relationships with one another and in our society. And that’s hard. I think it certainly helps us to sometimes be patient with one another. Split This Rock is one of the few places in the literary world, but really anywhere, where folks who are twenty-one and folks who are seventy-six are hanging out in the same room, having conversations. And maybe they have radically different cultural references and life experiences. So duende informs that because it’s scary to say, “You know, I don’t actually know anything about what you’ve just said.”

I’ve never studied poetry formally, so even when I’m with a bunch of academics and they use terms that I don’t know, I have to say to them, “Guess what, I don’t know what you’re saying!” [Laughs.] Which is a scary thing for me to say. I try to face my fear. But it’s at all levels, and we have to do it at all levels: personal, creative, collective, national. I’m the descendant of slave owners. I write about that in my work and I’m trying to push that, hard. I don’t know how my extended family’s going to feel about it, let alone other white people from the South. I wasn’t raised in the South, only half my family is from the South, so I’m going to be treated as an outsider, but that’s an issue where I feel like we have to face our fears as white Americans.

What guests and panels are you excited to feature in this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival?
Sharon Olds has been added to the lineup, which is really great news. She was supposed to feature at our very first festival in 2008 but was unable to come. Likewise, Sonia Sanchez kicked off our first festival and she will be back to mark this tenth anniversary. But also we have young poets like Paul Tran and Terisa Siagatonu. We always try to honor voices of all ages and in all places in their writing lives.

This being the first festival under the new political regime, we are particularly interested in how poetry is being used in resistance and in how poets are taking care of themselves and one another. We’re all feeling a lot of despair, I think, and we heard that in the proposals we received. There are a lot of sessions about using sadness, about using rage—in our poetry, but also in our community building—and acknowledging these things as real. Crying. Holding one another in celebration and in support.

What’s next for you—writing?
Yes. I don’t do well without structure, even this late in my life. I’m thinking about grad school. But at the very least, I would like to have more time for my own poetry and creative nonfiction. My second book just came out, but it was ten years between books. It would be nice not to have ten years till the next one.

Nadia Q. Ahmad is the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine.