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"The Kindergarten of New Consciousness": Gwendolyn Brooks and the Social Construction of Childhood - Critical Essay
African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Richard Flynn
We watch strange moods fill our children, and our hearts swell with pain. The streets, with their noise and flaring lights, the taverns, the automobiles, and the poolrooms claim them, and no voice of ours can call them back.... We cannot keep them in school; more than 1,000,000 of our black boys and girls of high school age are not in school.... It is not their eagerness to fight that makes us afraid, but that they go to death on city pavements faster than even disease and starvation can take them. As the courts and the morgues become crowded with our lost children, the hearts of the officials of the city grow cold toward us. (Wright 136)
I GIVE YOU MY GALLERY.
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So many boys. Boys. Lincoln West. Merle. Ulysses. Shabaka. Martin D. The Near- Johannesburg Boy. Diego. Kojo. Seven boys in a poolroom during schooltime. The Pool Players, Seven at The Golden Shovel-
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Die soon. Today, many such boys--their girl friends, too--EXPECT to "die soon." In Chicago. In New York. In Springfield, in Philadelphia. In Whatalotago, Alabama. In Detroit. (In Washington D.C.?) They do not expect to become twenty-one. They are designing their funerals. Their caskets will be lined with Kente cloth. They choose their music: they want rap, they want Queen Latifah. (Brooks, Rep art from Part Two 123-24)
In Report from Part One, Gwendolyn Brooks gives an account of her "conversion" to Black [1] militancy at the 1967 Fisk Writers' Conference. Impressed by the energy and anger in the work of Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) and others, Brooks recognized that "there is indeed a new black today." Acknowledging that for most of her life "almost secretly [she] had felt that to be black was good," she writes that she had "'gone the gamut' from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new black sun." "I...am qualified," Brooks proclaims, "to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now" (84). Since In the Mecca (1968), Brooks has published her work exclusively with Black presses such as Broadside, Third World Press, and her own David Company, work characterized by a turn toward free verse as well as increasingly direct political content. Although the "kindergarten of new consciousness" fostered in Brooks a new Black identity an d a new sense of Black people as her primary audience, her poetry, as she insisted in an interview with Claudia Tate, has always been "'politically aware'" (42).
Part of her political project has been a clear-eyed, tough, and compassionate look at the plight of children. From A Street in Bronzeville (1945) to the present, Brooks's work has used the image and voice of the child to negotiate a complex poetic strategy that explores "childhood" as a position from which to critique prevailing constructs of class and race. For Brooks, the subject of childhood represents a means through which she can interrogate and unmask dominant notions of domesticity and child-rearing as part of her own radical social and poetic agenda.
Childhood as a subject would gain force in the '40s and '50s for other American poets, including Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Randall Jarrell. But for most poets the subject of childhood was steeped in nostalgia, indicative of the growing trend toward introspection among White intellectuals occasioned by the rise of a newly psychologized self. By contrast, Brooks chose to write about "the children of the poor," to borrow the title of her sonnet sequence from Annie Allen. Critic Gary Smith argues that, "if Brooks's poetry about adults is bleak, her poetry about children is even more so" (130): "Her children do not exist in a pastoral world apart from the socioeconomic and psychological problems that beset her adult characters." Despite this bleakness, Smith argues, children represent "hopeful possibilities" and the transformative potential of "imagination or a radical innocence" (139). Nevertheless, as Brooks's work makes increasingly clear, the imaginative potential and radical innocence of the Roman tic child had to be revised or translated for an age in which innocence was reified, radicalism suspect, and color consciousness discouraged, and in which dissent itself became the subject of Congressional investigations.
Prior to the McCarthy-era backlash, Chicago had become an intellectual and artistic mecca; according to Robert Bone, "the flowering of Negro letters that took place in Chicago from 1935 to 1950 was in all respects comparable to the more familiar Harlem Renaissance" (448). Brooks's career began in those years, during the same cultural moment as the newly prominent Black social scientists trained by Robert Park's Chicago School of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Years before cultural critics would routinely discuss the social construction of race, gender, and sexuality, works written in part or in whole by these social scientists attest to how profoundly the material and emotional circumstances of children are affected by "color-caste" and class distinctions. Drake and Cayton's Black Metropolis (1945), a sociological study of Brooks's South Side neighborhood, [2] Dollard and Davis's Children of Bondage (1940), and Davis and Gardner's Deep South (1941) demonstrate clearly that childhood is a social cons truct. Many of these same scholars contributed to An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 study of race relations in the United States which would prove controversial when the Supreme Court relied on its findings in deciding Brown v. Board of Education (1954). [3] Although the opportunities and working conditions for Black scholars in the U.S. were still "shaped by racism," as William Banks notes (130-31), the emergence of the new Black scholarship coupled with the promise of integration made the '40s a hopeful time. But this hope proved to be short-lived. By the 1950s, anti-communist hysteria fueled a resurgence of White supremacist racism as virulent as that during the early decades of the twentieth century. After the '40s, the redefinition of childhood was subsumed under the prevailing cold war family values ideology.
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