"The Kindergarten of New Consciousness": Gwendolyn Brooks and the Social Construction of Childhood - Critical Essay

In 1947, with his colleague, psychologist Robert J. Havighurst, Davis published a child-rearing manual with the commercial publisher Houghton Mifflin. Titled Father of the Man: How Your Child Gets His Personality; the book is a curious amalgam of self-help and scholarship. Addressed to middleclass mothers (10), and concerned mostly with private behavior and psychological concerns, Father of the Man nevertheless draws on the authors' scholarly study "Social Class and Color Differences in Child-Rearing," published in the December 1946 issue of American Sociological Review. This research, based on 200 "guided interviews" with "fifty mothers [of young children] in each of four groups, white middle class, white lower class, Negro middle class, and Negro lower class"--most of them residents of Chicago's South Side ("Social Class" 700)--is also presented as Appendix I in Father of the Man (215-19).

Though the Wordsworthian title of the latter study might suggest a Romantic faith in divine childhood, more accurately, it reflects Davis's background as a poet and literary critic. [9] In addition to chapter epigraphs by Shakespeare, Auden, William Saroyan, Steinbeck, and Lewis Carroll, Davis includes epigraphs from Sterling Brown's Southern Road and Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville, published two years earlier. His use of Brooks's work in the context of a child-rearing manual from a major trade publisher for an audience of middle-class (presumably White) mothers illustrates the cultural and ideological dissonance between his claims for childhood as a universal human stage and his concern about the specific effects of social-class and colorcaste distinctions on actual children. Chapter III of Father of the Man, entitled "Silver Spoon or Sugar Teat?" bears two epigraphs, one from Brooks and one from Davis's mentor, W. Lloyd Warner:

A class system also provides that children are born into the same status as their parents. A class society distributes rights and privileges, duties and obligations, unequally among its members. --W. Lloyd Warner

I've stayed in the front yard all my life.

I want a peek at the back....

And maybe down the alley,

To where the charity children play,

I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.

They have some wonderful fun.

My mother sneers, but I say it's fine.

How they don't have to go in at quarter to nine.

Gwendolyn Brooks (17)

Davis's omissions from Brooks's poem are telling. Aside from truncating the end of the third and all of the last verse paragraphs, the ellipsis omits the speaker's hunger and urgency to explore the unfamiliar, and most likely her sexuality: "Where it's rough and untended and the hungry weed grows. / A girl gets sick of a rose. / I want to go in the back yard now" (Blacks 28). [10] Abstracted from its context in the "Street in Bronzeville" sequence, "a song in the front yard," in Davis's edited version, is a far less threatening--and a far less complex--poem. The little girl who speaks "a song" expresses admiration for the "bad woman" Johnnie May because she intuits that her "bad" identity is largely a matter of masquerade: