"A material collapse that is construction": History and Counter-Memory in Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca

The introduction to the narrative's protagonist demonstrates the blend of demoralizing poverty and idiosyncratic vision that characterizes the residents of Brooks's Mecca:

   S. Smith is Mrs. Sallie. Mrs. Sallie
   hies home to Mecca, hies to marvelous rest;
   ascends the sick and influential stair.
   The eye unrinsed, the mouth absurd
   with the last sourings of the master's Feast.
   She plans
   to set severity apart,
   to unclench the heavy folly of the fist. (407)

The story of Mrs. Sallie, who is first designated by the more public, official name one might see on her mailbox ("S. Smith"), is immediately situated in the context of racial and class inequality. In contrast to the humiliation of her job as a domestic worker, of preparing "the master's Feast," Mrs. Sallie's Mecca apartment is a "marvelous" refuge. But this refuge is also defined by the "sick and influential stair" she must climb, with "influential" suggesting how the physiological and psychological effects of poverty are interwoven. The densely charged language that follows in the description of Mrs. Sallie likewise blends the physiological with the psychological, but not to suggest that she is absolutely determined by the limitations of her social class and impoverished surroundings. Mrs. Sallie's response to her social position, and to the racism that defines this position, is deliberate: she "plans / to set severity apart, / to unclench the heavy folly of the fist" (emphasis added).

As empathetic as the narrator's understanding of Mrs. Sallie's mode of coping with her world is, the description of her that follows does not "set severity apart" in indicating the psychological cost of her resignation:

   Infirm booms
   and suns that have not spoken die behind this
   low-brown butterball. Our prudent partridge.
   A fragmentary attar and armed coma.
   A fugitive attar and a district hymn. (407)

The jarringly disconnected images suggest a character who is herself "fragmentary" tormented by "fugitive" repressed emotions. The dissociated sensual imagery is interspersed with language referring to those moral codes that define her mode of perseverance. Mrs. Sallie's "prudence," here mocked in the narrator's playfully familiar description of "our prudent partridge," is revealed more fully when she is inside her apartment:

   Now Mrs. Sallie
   confers her bird-hat to her kitchen table,
   and sees her kitchen. It is bad, is bad,
   her eyes say ...

   Her denunciation
   slaps savagely not only this sick kitchen but
   her Lord's annulment of the main event.
   "I want to decorate!" But what is that? A
   pomade atop a sewage. An offense.
   First comes correctness, then embellishment!
   And music, mode, and mixed philosophy
   may follow fitly on propriety
   to tame the whiskey of our discontent! (410)

The simple description of her kitchen as "bad" sparks a chain of associations that reveal Mrs. Sallie's "prudence" as part of a moral code that is based in Christian faith, but which is more properly defined by class and gender codes of "propriety." This emphasis on propriety, on "correctness" first, and "then embellishment," defines Mrs. Sallie's strength as a frugal mother who makes the most of her limited means, but it also unveils the limitations of a moral code based on the bourgeois appearance of goodness rather than on actual social and economic justice. It suggests, that is, how social codes of "propriety" relate to the possession (or lack) of property.