African-American literature

particularly its celebration of the African-Ameri-
can community, black family, history, culture, and
black masculinity. However, his work is not unlike
that of the more traditionalist ROBERT HAYDEN in
its approach to these themes. For example, Bar-
low is interested in paying homage to black slaves
who made a difference, as Hayden does in “Ga-
briel,” “Frederick Douglass,” and “The Ballad of
Nat Turner.”
Barlow makes this celebration his primary task
in the title poem of his first published collection
of poems, “Gabriel,” a praisesong for the heroic
life and action of Gabriel Prosser. An educated, re-
bellious blacksmith-slave, Prosser is credited with
attempting to lead a slave revolt in Richmond,
Virginia, with, according to Herbert Aptheker,
more than a thousand “conscious revolutionist[s]”
in 1800. The planned insurrection was literally
washed out by torrential rains, as Barlow chron-
icles: “Wind, rain, / cracks in the sky: / a stranger
storm / has come to stop / the march; / high water
/ splashing from hell; /... / Gabriel / & one thou-
sand armed blacks / can’t cross / into Richmond.”
Prosser and several of his followers were hung for
their revolutionary plot.
However, unlike Hayden, who focuses on Ga-
briel’s death in his poem, Barlow concentrates
on the totality of his character’s life, emphasizing
from the outset Gabriel’s complexity as a black
man-slave-rebel-leader-trumpeter. “He is Gabriel;
/ black man & slave; / blacksmith / rebel leader;
/ Thom Prosser’s nigger; / black man, armed &
thinking, blending with the landscape, plotting in
the swamp.” Consequently, Barlow’s Gabriel trum-
pets “death / in life / & life in death.” Like John
the Baptist, Gabriel is prophet preparing the way
for the ultimate revolutionary and liberator, Nat
Turner: “Our own substance / black flesh, black
bone / black fiber & liquid— / a newborn war-
rior— / our son, Nat! Nat Turner.” Born in Virginia
in 1800, the year of Prosser’s failed revolt, Turner
led a successful slave insurrection in Southampton
County 30 years later.
Barlow’s signature style, rhythm, and themes
are deeply submerged in black culture, par-
ticularly music, from folk ditties, Negro spiritu-
als—W. E. B. DUBOIS’s “sorrow songs”—and the

BLUES to contemporary rhythm-and-blues and

jazz. He successfully incorporates these styles by

using antiphonal narrators, or call and response:

(“Steal Away, brother, steal away / question & ques-

tion / Run away, run away”), song titles and lyrics

(“Bitch’s Brew,” “Hear it in the dark / Here is the

spirit in the dark”), and musicians (Aretha, Maha-

lia, Nina, B. B., Otis, Sam, Billie, Diz, and Bird).

Barlow seems to suggest that music is the single

most important means to both knowledge and

understanding of black culture and community,

which Barlow demands that we “feel... in the

spirit / feel... in the dark.” In the spirit in the dark

one can descend into memory (to “re / remember,”

to use a TONI MORRISON trope) to experience con-

tinuity, the fluidity of the past and present. Black

history, the history that records Prosser’s experi-

ence, is, unlike linear Western history, synchronic,

like the planting and harvesting seasons that beat

out the rhythms of traditional life and record rit-

ual praise songs for heroic communal members.

Like Prosser, Barlow becomes cultural trumpeter,

a spirit in the dark.

Not surprisingly, Barlow’s work is replete with

humor and the language of signifying, as is clearly

seen in “The Place Where He Arose,” with its focus

on an urban, cool, posed, styling, profiling brother-

man, determined to register his presence—his

proud black male self—into a world that often

chooses to ignore and, even worse, erase him.

brother-man be out there...

he ain’t no linear dude

so why should he

stroll between the lines

of the crosswalk...

Like Prosser; like Barlow’s brother, Mark (“glid-

ing gazelle-like”); like his father, Andy, with his

“spit – shined shoes”; like the “low-ridin army”

cruising in cars inscribed with such names as

“Prisoner of Love,” “Duke of Earl,” and “Fireball,”

this “dapper dude,” Barlow’s speaker, screams si-

lently and loudly, is a man:

dead up in there

always been here

Barlow, George 37