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

But I say it's fine. Honest, I do.

And I'd like to be a bad woman, too.

And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace

And strut down the street with paint on my face. (Blacks 28)

Davis intentionally obscures the issue of race in his study as part of a strategic insistence that class differences are far more important than color differences. [11] Brooks's front-yard singer, however, is far more rebellious and complicated: The emblems of her rebellion are both "brave" and "night-black." The painted face seems to the speaker to provide an identity that can be assumed at will, perhaps a form of racial as well as sexual masquerade, but the poet maintains an ironic distance from the speaker, knowing that such performances have limited transgressive potential. However, the child speaker's monologue as "a song" helps her to negotiate difficult questions of self in the context of a specific culture and community. As Brooks demonstrates in the volume as a whole, identity, like community and culture, cannot be satisfactorily reduced to "good" vs. "bad." The diversity of Bronzeville belies easy moral distinctions; populated by a wide variety of characters from the heroic to the hypocritical, A St reet refuses to shy away from the neighborhood's pervasive tensions over class and color. [12] And Brooks as author generally refrains from easy judgment. One surmises, for instance, that the mother of the front-yard singer has acted out of love and concern for the child's well-being. But since, inevitably, "a girl gets sick of a rose," that protective restraint has left the girl ill-equipped to confront the realities of the world she longs to experience. The mother's too rigid morality is inadequate sustenance for the incipient adolescent, who begins to question the binaries of class--working poor vs. charity cases--of sexuality, and, arguably, of color--the purity of the rose vs. night-black lace stockings.

While she seems sympathetic to the girl's longings, as her biographer George Kent observes, Brooks "rejected the exotic vein of the Harlem Renaissance," injecting "satire and realism" into her portraits of ordinary Bronzevillians (66-67). Reminiscent of Allison Davis's 1928 Crisis essay (see n9), Brooks's contribution to Phylon's 1950 symposium on "The Negro Writer"--"Poets Who are Negroes"--cautions Negro writers against getting carried away by the "ready-made subjects" of Black life: "No real artist is going to be content with offering raw materials. The Negro poet's most urgent duty, at present, is to polish his technique.... The mere fact of lofty subject, great drive, and high emotion," Brooks argues, is insufficient to make poetry, because these qualities lack "embellishment," "interpretation," and "subtlety" (312). Though often read as a product of "the strain that Brooks felt in attempting to negotiate a fruitful relationship between race and art... during a historical period that mingled racial prid e with an integrationist ethos" (Mootry, "Down" 9), Brooks's essay assumes that the