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Sterling Brown's poetic voice: a living legacy

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Joanne V. Gabbin

When I first heard Sterling Brown reciting "Long Gone," I knew that I was in the presence of a large and vibrant soul. The deep resonance of his voice, with its rumbling bass, brought me willingly into his world of stoic heroes and Southern roads:

I don't know which way I'm travelin' - Far or near, All I know fo' certain is I cain't stay here.

Ain't no call at all, sweet woman, Fo' to carry on - Jes' my name and jes' my habit To be Long Gone. . . . (Poems 23)

More Articles of Interest: Memories of Sterling Brown; "Runnin' space": the continuing legacy of Sterling Allen Brown; A Son's Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown; Sterling Brown and the 'vestiges' of the blues: the role of race in English...; Sterling Brown: maker of community in academia

Sterling A. Brown - poet, critic, legendary teacher, irreverent raconteur - whose life spanned the first eighty-eight years of the twentieth century, is gone, but fortunately his voice remains. His is the voice of the poet that captures the blues moan of lost and long-gone loves, the chant of saints who pray to be in the number, the tragicomic cry in the face of injustice and violence, and the jubilee songs of endurance and perseverance.

The man who would capture the authentic nuances of black people was born in Washington, D.C., on May 1, 1901, in a house at Sixth and Fairmount. He was the last of six children and the only son born to Reverend Sterling Nelson Brown and Adelaide Allen Brown. The young Sterling grew up on the campus of Howard University, where his father had taught in the School of Religion since 1892. A preacher's kid, Sterling was brought up hearing the hymns and spirituals sung at Lincoln Temple Congregational Church, where his father pastored. Later in life, when he became a devotee of blues and jazz, he had no difficulty combining and synthesizing these forms, generally considered antithetical, in his work. Though Brown's fun-loving personality rejected his father's penchant toward sobriety and reserve, the Reverend Brown's standards of integrity and spiritual strength made an indelible mark on his sun's character. In the poem "After Winter," Brown tenderly remembers the days with his father on a farm near Laurel, Maryland:

He snuggles his fingers In the blacker loam The lean months are done with, The fat to come.

His eyes are set On a brushwood-fire But his heart is soaring Higher and higher.

Though he stands ragged An old scarecrow, This is the way His swift thoughts go,

"Butter beans fo' Clara Sugar corn fo' Grace An' fo' de little feller Runnin' space." (Poems 74)

Brown is the "little feller" who remembers his father as hopeful, loving, and bound to the soil. The depth of feeling in the poem serves to suggest the extent of his father's impression on him.

From his mother, Adelaide Allen Brown, the young Sterling inherited a love for poetry and books. On May 14, 1973, Brown recalled for me that she read widely and had a great facility with reading poetry:

My mother read . . . Longfellow, she read Burns; and she read Dunbar - grew up on Dunbar - "'Lias! 'Lias! Bless de Lawd!" "The Party," and "Lay me down beneaf de willers in de grass." . . . I remember even now her stopping her sweeping . . . now standing over the broom and reading poetry to me, and she was a good reader, great sense of rhythm.

It is this inherited sense of rhythm, unmistakably sure, that we hear in Brown's poetry.

Through his poetry we also come to know ourselves in all our beauty and ugliness, truth and treachery, confidence and insecurity, humor and pathos. Brown created portraits of the blues-singing roustabout Calvin "Big Boy" Davis, the phlegmatic Old Lem, the flamboyant Sporting Beasley, Ma Rainey, and the irrepressible Slim Greer, whose images parade before us as convincing portraits of ourselves. He took our speech with the rich cadences of backwater blues and field hollers and transformed it into poetry that touches our soul.

Brown's most significant achievement was his subtle adaptation of song forms, especially the blues, to his poetry. Experimenting with the blues, spirituals, work songs, and ballads, he invented combinations that, at their best, retain the ethos of folk forms and intensify the literary quality of the poetry. Because these folk forms were conceived and developed in the matrix of the folk community, they were products of folk aesthetics. In his introduction to the "Folk Literature" section in The Negro Caravan (1941), Brown gave a convincing view of how the folk, for instance, pulled from a common storehouse in producing the spirituals. He explained that individuals "with poetic ingenuity, a rhyming gift, or a good memory" (414) composed or remembered lines out of the folk tradition and - in conjunction with the group, and with its approval - shaped the stanzas. As these songs were passed from one generation to the next, the songs were changed, updated, and sometimes lost. The folk artists who created the blues created in solitude, yet their blues messages intimately touched their listeners. Blues singers conveyed their listeners' preoccupation with love (in all its varieties), their misfortunes and losses, their wisdom and resilience.

In the hauntingly melancholic "Long Track Blues," Brown becomes the blues singer with a poetic intensity that allows us to understand more than the railroad lore of the early twentieth century, more than lost or unrequited love. We hear in his words something about permanent loss, death, and an end that may not round into a beginning:

Sterling Brown's poetic voice: a living legacy

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Joanne V. Gabbin

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