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Sterling A. Brown and the Afro-modern moment
African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Mark A. Sanders
Playing on this dramatic tension between past and future, "Odyssey of Big Boy" concerns itself, then, with the present moment of vocalization, with the ongoing dynamic of self-articulation and self-recreation, and the ability of voice to project and reconstruct. For Davis the past looms as power and evidence; the future serves as hope and possibility dependent upon the present voice and its ability to shape the past and thus the future. For Big Boy Davis, his performing voice, enacting a ritual of mythic invocation, works as a visionary tool, allowing him to access the broader meaning which leads beyond his immediate circumstances. In short, "Odyssey" dramatizes the perpetually temporal, the entirely subjective moment which is at once excruciatingly private yet self-consciously public and representative, both in process and aspiration. In this sense, "Odyssey of Big Boy" addresses the dynamics of individual and collective history; it exults the challenge to rationalize, reshape, and rediscover the past and, by extension, the challenge to discover expansive possibilities for the future. As Davis reshapes himself in the form of John Henry, and thus shapes his life-song in reference to the culture's superlatives, his vocal odyssey also constructs Davis as artist, both musician and poet able to squeeze from his experience "a near-tragic, near comic lyricism" (Ellison 129). His successful vocalization projects Davis as a metaphor for the artist and his/her ability to shape and recreate reality, to access alternative and liberating psychic spaces. And of course implicit in this reading is Brown himself, the poet able to envision and provoke profound transformation.
These larger concerns force "Odyssey of Big Boy" beyond an insulated ritual of self-proclamation to an eloquent introduction to the entire collection, and perhaps Brown's larger poetic project, which stresses dynamics and movement. Brown reconceives the past and history as active agents in the ongoing present. Kimberly Benston comments: "Brown's poems inscribe the past not as a nostalgic after-thought but as a process engendering unlimited visions, not as a feeble gesture toward an unrealizable ideal but as a dynamic proposition, an after-song that is both petition and re-petition" (Benston 35).
Thus, as "Odyssey of Big Boy" works as perpetual vocal epic, Big Boy Davis - improvisationalist, student of tradition, and blues hero-serves as the sign of the modernity of folk culture, and as the possibility of artistic expression born of eclectic antecedents. Davis synthesizes idioms, voices, traditions, and forms, and thus exacts the essentially eclectic process at the heart of Brown's aesthetic project. Davis establishes the metaphoric perimeters for Southern Road's master trope, the road, and thus anticipates "When the Saints Go Ma'ching Home," "Strong Men," "Ma Rainey," and "Southern Road." Each of these poems and the collection as a whole explore the triumphs and vicissitudes of contemporary Southern black life, and thus they stress the ongoing agency of folk forms in confronting contemporary dilemmas.
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