492 Making It New: 1900–1945Editor of Negro Affairs for the Federal Writers’ Project from 1938 to 1940, and a
researcher for the classic study of race An American Dilemma (1944) by Gunnar
Myrdal, he produced an extensive body of poetry, published in Southern Road (1932),
The Last Ride of Wild Bill (1957), and Collected Poems (1980).
“I wanted to get an understanding of people, to acquire an accuracy in the portrayal
of their lives,” Brown explained of his poetry, adding that there was “a flavor, a color, a
pungency of speech” in black language that offered him, he felt, the best way of getting
at this understanding. So, like Hughes, Brown exploited African-American idioms
and cultural forms, welding them with the free verse forms of Whitman, Sandburg,
and Lindsay to evoke a sense of the extraordinary nature of supposedly ordinary black
people – some of them known to the wider public, and some of them not. “When de
Saints Go Ma’ching Home” (1927), for example, celebrates the black blues guitarist,
Big Boy Davis, using African-American vernacular and jazzy rhythms to reproduce
the reality and rhythms of his life. “Ma Rainey” (1931) is a loving recreation both of
the blues singer of the title and of the black community and culture she embodied and
voiced. “Strong Men” (1931) tells of all the anonymous ancestors who were enslaved
“to give a few gentlemen ease” and helped build the roads and lay the tracks for
America, although they received no credit for it. Typically, it interlaces the long line of
Whitman and Sandburg with echoes of black folk songs and spirituals to create a
vision of the black past that now gives the black present strength. Other poems show
a similarly rich confluence of traditions being used to get at an understanding of
the black people who were Brown’s ancestors and contemporaries. In “Slim in Hell”
(1932), for example, Brown draws on the tradition of the tall tale, stories about “the
colored man in heaven,” and the myth of Orpheus to describe a suspiciously familiar
version of the infernal regions. “De place was Dixie / Dat I took for Hell,” Slim declares.
To which Saint Peter responds, in exasperation, “Where’n hell dja think Hell was /
Anyhow?” Other poems use an elegiac or satirical mode, to consider, say, the example
of those black heroes who fought for freedom (“Remembering Nat Turner” (1929)) or
the triumphalist tone and terrible consequences of white racism (“Song of Triumph”
(1980)). Always perceptible in his work is his fundamental belief in the tonic nature of
black speech, its remedial and redemptive qualities: the way it could be used, he felt, to
resist white oppression and restore black dignity. And driving it, continually, is the
conviction he shared with others, like Hughes, that, as Brown himself put it once, “art
is a handmaiden to social policy.”
Not everyone shared that conviction, however. George Schuyler characteristically
insisted that “the Aframerican” was “subject to the same economic and social forces”
that shaped “the actions and thoughts of the white American.” “It is sheer nonsense,”
he declared, “to talk about ‘racial differences.’ ” Few would have put it as categorically
as that, it may be. But there is a sense in which poets like William Stanley Braithwaite
(1878–1962), Anne Spencer (1882–1975), and, above all, Countee Cull en (1903–1946)
found themselves inclining in the same direction. Braithwaite, for instance, remained
committed throughout his life to the idea that poetry should be an expression of
spiritual truth and beauty beyond the claims of politics or race. Wary of any work he
saw as polemical or didactic, he favored traditional, lyrical voices in his influential,GGray_c04.indd 492ray_c 04 .indd 492 8 8/1/2011 7:54:04 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 04 AM