A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks

George Kent

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813153926
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

This is the first full-scale biography of Gwendolyn Brooks, one of America's major poets. George E. Kent, a longtime friend and literary associate of the poet in Chicago, was given exclusive access to Brooks' early notebooks, which she kept from the age of seven. Kent also interviewed Brooks, her mother, and other family members in Chicago and elsewhere. He scoured records and correspondence with her publishers, editors, and agent. He participated in the poet's literary enterprises and in her wide circle of literary and family friends. The study reveals intimate acquaintance with the Harlem Renaissance, with the Chicago literary scene and its leading figures from the thirties on, with historical developments in black culture and consciousness, and with the significant figures and activities that impressed the poet's life and art. It places Brooks' work in the context of the civil rights movement, the black arts movement, and black nationalism. Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950 for Annie Allen and is today widely recognized as one of the nation's leading poets, yet her work has received less than its due from mainstream critics. Kent's authoritative book has been one step in correcting that neglect.

1

Beginnings

Keziah Brooks first encountered her daughter Gwendolyn’s talent when she found her scribbling two-line verses at the age of seven. The verses filled a page and surprised Keziah by their clarity and originality. Legend has it that Keziah stated, “You are going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar.”¹ Within two years Gwendolyn was writing surprisingly good four-line verses. Sensing her poetic talent, the family gave her the time she needed to perfect her work. Gwendolyn later declared that she believed in the certainty with which her mother spoke, and never stopped writing. She received inspiration also from her father, David, during and after the preschool years, through his habit of singing in the household and reciting poetry and other literature from Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Harvard Classics. She later felt that her father’s readings had made her want to write poems comparable to those she heard from him.

If we seem to be overtaken here by the American Dream, it is one that took different forms in the Brooks family before their arrival in Chicago, and long before Gwendolyn felt that Harper, in its dealings with A Street in Bronzeville, was turning her life into a fairy tale. Family history has it that Gwendolyn’s paternal grandfather, Lucas, a field slave, threw his master into a hollow stump and escaped to join the Union Army. His daughter Viola, born when Lucas was seventy-two, remembers him as a handsome man, nearly six feet tall, dark-skinned, and of erect, soldierly bearing. Lucas married Elizabeth, a mulatto house slave. The union produced Gwendolyn’s father, David, and eleven other children. Lucas and Elizabeth had no time to become literate, though Lucas learned to handle figures well. The harshness of the family struggle in rural Oklahoma and Oklahoma City was scattered with a few rich pleasures but apparently left David, the head of the family after his father died, more anguished and restless than the other children. His brothers turned to trades, and both brothers and sisters married early and centered their lives on home, lodges, and churches, the social and ordering forces of the day. David was not to marry until he was thirty-three. He attended Fisk University, hoping to prepare for a medical education, but was unable to stay more than a year. Early in the century he came to Chicago and made one among the 2 percent of the population that blacks comprised up to 1910. Though there was a small thriving black middle class, David would find the largest number of blacks confined to the service area of the economy. Whites, many of them immigrants, dominated industry, a fact that, after some strife and adjustment, would place them in the mainstream of the economy and give them advantages over blacks.

What David thought of the industrial sector is not known. He went into the service area as a porter with the McKinley Music Publishing Company on East Fifty-fifth Street, a job he would hold for thirty years. In 1914 he accompanied his friend Berry Thompson to the home of Thompson’s friend Gertrude Wims at 4747 South State Street, where he met Keziah Wims, a pretty, slender-faced woman, brown-skinned, slightly shorter than David’s five feet seven. David and Keziah were married in July 1916 at the home of Keziah’s parents, at 1118 North Jackson Street, Topeka, Kansas. Keziah, one of ten children, had lived in a family pattern similar to David’s. Her mother, Luvenia, was skilled in domestic arts and devoted to the usual institutions of church and family. Both families suffered losses through hardship and accidents. But the maternal grandparents otherwise seem not to have faced the degree of hardship confronted by the paternal family. Both families stressed order, discipline, and usefulness, and provided personnel for the trades.

Like David, Keziah had made an epic struggle to attain an education, an effort shared completely only by her sister Beulah, who became a sewing teacher. Keziah supported herself at Emporia Normal in Kansas by a loan from her sister and by the not always humane domestic service. Like David, she had aspirations—the dream of becoming a great concert pianist. One of her jokes was that she somehow felt if she could simply persist in taking the music courses, she could accomplish her mission. “This misconception stayed with me throughout childhood and a part of adulthood. I did not give up the idea of becoming a pianist until after marriage.” Past fifty, she composed her first song, “Luvenia,” in memory of her mother, and later a sacred song entitled “I Want to Be Consecrated to Thee.”

The new Brooks family took a series of residences in Chicago. They roomed at 4142 South Evans until Keziah became pregnant with Gwendolyn, when she briefly returned to her mother’s in Topeka. Shortly after Gwendolyn’s birth in Topeka at 1:00 P.M. on Thursday, June 7, 1917, Keziah and David took an apartment at 5626 South Lake Park Avenue, Chicago. Led about the apartment by members of the family, Gwendolyn was not allowed to crawl. Sixteen months later Gwendolyn’s brother, Raymond, was born and the family was complete.

Although comfortable, the Brookses sought to purchase a home, a quest intensified by the attack upon Keziah by a demented woman. They found a lifelong home in what soon proved to be a changing neighborhood at 4332 South Champlain. It was a short street cut off from the main traffic and marked by family homes, well-kept lawns, beautiful trees, clean streets. The yards, front and back, were pleasant for the children, but what held great attraction for Keziah were the large porches from which she could enjoy the fresh air and see her acquaintances. “Since I had never made a habit of visiting neighbors in their homes, our large porch afforded me this delightful pastime.” Being attached to home, she was comfortable in a neighborhood where weekly or monthly visits did not occur. The Brooks family was the second black family on the block, following the Sharplesses. The Mitchell family was the third. By then the neighborhood was secured institutionally for blacks, since they had purchased the Carter Temple Church a few months before the Brookses moved in. Keziah joined the church and attended regularly until her children were married.

Obviously, the neighborhood corresponded to Keziah’s own sense of order and quiet rituals. Her neighbor at 4324 had two small children and, like herself, “was greatly concerned about how and with whom they played.” The families agreed that their children would play together, and Gwendolyn and Raymond gathered with the other two in the Brookses’ back yard, where they played quietly and made mud pies.

A typical day for the children began with breakfast at eight or nine— toast or biscuits with butter and jelly, orange juice, applesauce, or bacon and eggs with cereal and juice. Or, as Gwendolyn still remembers, oatmeal with cream floating on it, graced with butter, sugar, and other additions. Then off to play for Gwendolyn and Raymond when they were preschoolers—or later off to school. Lunch was at noon or thereabouts—often soup, bread and butter sometimes topped with sugar, and applesauce. During the week, dinner might be hamburger patties, pork chops, or lamb chops, and a salad that almost always contained sliced tomatoes. Sundays probably brought roast chicken, roast lamb shoulder, or leg of lamb.

The children were dressed twice a day. Before they were of school age, they put on rough but clean clothes in the morning so they could play freely, and their hair received the first of the day’s combings. After lunch they washed and dressed in nicer clean clothes and Gwendolyn’s hair was again combed—their afternoon play was expected to be more restrained. Except for making mud pies, Gwendolyn and Raymond’s favorite games during early childhood tended not to be of the dirtying kind. Their favorites outdoors were tag and hide and seek. The indoor family games included checkers, dominoes, jigsaw puzzles, and occasionally whist.

The late Lorraine Williams Bolton, head of the art department at Hampton Institute and a childhood friend of Gwendolyn’s, pointed out that the pattern of Gwendolyn’s rearing was similar to her own and that of many Chicagoans. It tended to encourage inwardness and withdrawal into imaginative resources—a necessity in the face of the strict limits placed upon disorderly play and inquisitiveness. Children read or drew—or soon, as in Gwendolyn’s case, exploited other artistic talents. Lorraine Bolton herself became a painter and is said to have written two novels before she was twelve.

As Lorraine explained, there were many Chicagoes in that period. Gwendolyn remembered that Lorraine, a schoolteacher’s daughter, was numbered by Gwendolyn and others among the rich. Admired for her stylish dress, she gained even more stature among the children when her awkwardness in athletics exposed her expensive underwear. Gwendolyn’s own Chicago was among those Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake called the “respectables,” people not of self-conscious class, color, educational, or aristocratic distinctions but somewhere in the middle, the good-doing people determined to live within a firm moral ordering. Autobiographies have confirmed the existence of the various Chicagoes: the extreme American Dream striving of Katherine Dunham’s father in Glen Ellyn and environs; the ostensibly assimilated family of Willard Motley growing up among whites in the West Sixtieth Street area; the hard-pressed, disintegrating migrant families of Alden Bland’s Behold a Cry and Richard Wright’s American Hunter.

Wright records the shock of the southern rural migrant’s first encounter with Chicago. “My first glimpse of the flat black stretches of Chicago depressed and dismayed me, mocked all my fantasies. Chicago seemed an unreal city whose foundations were sinking slowly into the dank prairie. Flashes of steam showed intermittently on the wide horizon, gleaming translucently in the winter sun. The din of the city entered my consciousness, entered to remain for years to come. The year was 1927.” Thinking that his Aunt Cleo lived in an apartment, Wright was disturbed to find that she lived in a single room. “I was baffled. Everything seemed makeshift, temporary. I caught an abiding sense of insecurity in the personalities of the people around me. I found Aunt Cleo aged beyond her years. Her husband, a product of a southern plantation, had, like my father, ‘gone off.’ Why had he left? My aunt could not answer. She was beaten by the life of the city, just as my mother had been beaten. Wherever my eyes turned they saw stricken, frightened black faces trying vainly to cope with a civilization they did not understand.”²

David Brooks had struggled through the terrors of Oklahoma and his father’s sufferings. He had dealt with institutions and graduated from high school. Keziah too had dealt with urban institutions that to some degree coped with life expectations. Both had been through a refining fire before coming to Chicago, and David had had many years in the big city in which to acquire both poise and a sense of when to bow to necessity. They were ready for tried and true traditions and for submitting their children to them. Although the young Gwendolyn experienced a band of order and a set of values, she also felt anxiety from her contact with less sheltered children, a contact that placed its mark upon her personality and her art.

Gwendolyn had run golden in the quiet, orderly, and restraining environment provided by her parents in her preschool years. But upon entering Forrestville Elementary School at the age of six, she found a different set of values, one for which her quiet and orderly ways offered no support. She did not have what she would later call “sass” or “brass.” She had not learned to fight or to be athletic. She was not a player of jacks or a rider of bicycles. Her most exciting moments had come not at any high point of activity but when, on her back porch, she sat facing the dream world in the sky. There she could feel the beauty of the scene and the beauty of her own life and of life in general. Her nearest contact with this brasher world was the strange matters revealed in the overheard voices of the family’s tenants. They sometimes cursed or dropped and threw things. Standing at the foot of the stairway, she and Raymond would listen and giggle. She would, of course, discover later that quarreling could invade the warm cocoon of her own family life.

But at the Forrestville School, matters went beyond quarreling. Even her nice dresses, gifts from her Aunt Beulah, created problems. The children ignored her or, seeing her wallflower-like withdrawal, called her “ol’ stuck-up heifer” and declared that they wanted “nothin’ t’ do with no rich people’s sp’iled chirren.” Among the “rich” were the children of black doctors, lawyers, city hall employees, post office workers, and teachers. They formed a pecking order.

But her major deficiency, others believed, was the absence of light skin and “good grade” hair. Possessing neither the rough and ready skills nor the light color and “good” hair nor the affluent family, Gwendolyn faced a difficult struggle. Even the Forrestville Elementary School building, as she was later to describe it in her novel Maud Martha (1953), looked solid and somewhat f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Beginnings
• 2. Into the Morrow
• 3. Struggles, Triumphs
• 4. Bright Waters
• 5. A Complicated Universe
• 6. Reachings
• 7. Foreshadowings
• 8. Changes
• 9. Recognized in Her Country
• 10. Brave New World
• Afterword
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index