Sterling Brown's poetic voice: a living legacy

Sometimes the discussions would give way to an impromptu reading by the "Prof," and Brown would invariably read "The Ballad of Joe Meek." The poem outlines the exploits of a "fighting fool" who started out as a mild-mannered man curious about the rough treatment of a black woman. The ballad ends with Joe talking in a different way:

"Ef my bullets weren't gone, An' my strength all spent - I'd send the chief something With a compliment. "An we'd race to hell.

And I'd best him there, Like I would of done here Ef he'd played me fair." (Poems 162)

In this poem and others, Brown becomes the African voice, the eloquent griot who makes the past merge into the present by dint of his virtuoso skill. Those who heard Brown read his poems, tell his remarkable "lies," or give his irreverent toasts are convinced of the power of this man whom Sonia Sanchez calls in her tribute poem "griot of the wind/glorifying red gums smiling tom-tom teeth" (92).

Perhaps nowhere is his power more evident than in his signature poem "Strong Men" Taking the leit-motif from Carl Sandburg's line "The strong men keep coming on," Brown celebrates the indomitable spirit of black people in the face of racism and economic and political exploitation. As Brown recounts the horrors of the Middle Passage, the scourges of slavery, and the humiliation of economic peonage and social segregation, his message is not merely one of unrelieved suffering and victimization but one of stoicism. Evoking the sound of spirituals and seculars, Brown allows these songs with all of their remembered stoicism and irony to transport the listener from the past to the present:

They dragged you from homeland, They chained you in coffles, They huddled you spoon-fashion in filthy hatches, They sold you to give a few gentlemen ease.

They broke you in like oxen, They scourged you, They branded you, They made your women breeders, They swelled your numbers with bastards. . . . They taught you the religion they disgraced.

You sang: Keep a-inchin' along Lak a po' inch worm. . . .

You sang: Bye and bye I'm gonna lay down dis heaby load,

You sang: Walk togedder, chillen, Dontcha git weary. . . . The strong men keep a-comin' on The strong men git stronger. (Poems 56)

Much of the force of the poem may be attributed to syntax. Brown launches most of his lines with heavily stressed verbs that are preceded by the contrasting pronouns they or you, which also must be stressed strongly. The cadence of the poem suggests the rhythm of a martial approach, which quickens and becomes more pronounced as the poem reaches its conclusion:

What, from the slums Where they have hemmed you, What, from the tiny huts They could not keep from you. . . .

One thing they cannot prohibit - The strong men . . . coming on The strong men gittin' stronger. Strong men. . . . Stronger. . . . (57-58)

Brown also becomes the African American voice, the elegant trickster, the bodacious badman, the heroic strong man, as he juggles wit, understatement, irony, and humor with his inimitable style. Perhaps nowhere does Brown take humor more as his metier than in the Slim Greer tales. A favorite of many generations, the character is based on a virtuoso tall-tale teller whom Brown met waiting tables at the Hotel Jefferson in Jefferson City, Missouri. In the Slim Greer tales, we find the hero in humorous situations that obliquely comment on the absurdity of Southern racism. In "Slim in Hell," the joke exposes Southern racism and oppression with a kind of laughter out of hell. Brown's unsuspecting hero makes a discovery on his visit to hell: