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Two writers sharing: Sterling A. Brown, Robert Frost, and "In Dives' Dive."
African American Review, Fall, 1997 by John Edgar Tidwell
If we use Houston Baker's theory of "AMERICA," we can profitably explore Brown's self-described commitment to America. Baker argues that the defining signification of "AMERICA" is an inscribing and reinscribing discourse based in an "immanent idea of boundless, classless, raceless possibility in America" (65); in short, a committed belief in American democratic principles embraces egalitarianism and racial equality. That Brown was quite committed to these values is clear in his now familiar declaration, "I am an integrationist. . . . And by integration, I do not mean assimilation. I believe what the word means-an integer is a whole number" ("Son's Return" 18). In effect, Brown's quest to achieve full integration took him through the process of filling in the fractional status that existed vestigially for African Americans in the U.S. Constitution. Complete racial integration would be achieved, Brown believed, when the "three-fifths" clause placed in the Constitution for purposes of taxing Black slaves would be supplemented with the other two-fifths, thereby making a whole number and representing the achievement of complete humanity. Despite the survival of the "three-fifths compromise" in a body of de jure and de facto Jim Crow practices, Brown remained hopeful about the boundless possibility of America. The context provided by this socio-cultural pursuit frames Brown's exegesis of In Dives' Dive.
The poem focuses ingeniously on gambling, specifically playing poker, a game Brown says neither he nor Frost indulged in ("Son's Return" 20). In the representation of poker as a game, Frost creates a virtual setting to suggest larger ideas about full, participatory democratic politics. Brown found kinship with the speaker of the poem, who finds himself, late at night, losing in the game. "But still," the speaker proclaims, "I am steady and unaccusing." Brown saw himself in this line: Even at seventythree (his age when he gave this presentation at Williams College), he was not "laying blame on anybody. If I lose I am not singing blues about anybody else causing it" (21). The source supporting his belief in the game and his right to participate in it was the Declaration of Independence Shrouded in its protections, Brown agreed with the poem's speaker: "I'm not a good poker player, but . . . I'm going to play my hand out with the cards that come. And that to me is a strong statement of a man's belief in America and in himself" (22).
While "In Dives' Dive" no doubt reaffirmed Brown's passion for courage, belief in democratic principles, and more, Frost probably recalled these same qualities in the context of the controversy that surrounded A Further Range (1936), the collection in which "Dives' "was originally published. Although Frost's poetry, like that of most writers in the 1930s, was consumed with issues of social significance, he nevertheless found himself at the vortex of controversy with A Further Range because his conservative politics were misread or undervalued. Indeed, an argument can be made that A Further Range came under unusual critical scrutiny precisely because Frost's audience was divided on the question of art and its relation to social significance.
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