Michael
Harper dedicates Every Shut Eye Ain’t
Asleep, an anthology of poetry by African Americans since 1945, to Sterling
Brown—“poet, folksayist, scholar-teacher, pioneering wordsmith in a dynamic
American lexicon, especially the laconic meditations and metaphysics extant in
folkspeech as the underbelly of the nation’ s lexicon.” Sterling Brown’s first
book of poetry, Southern Road, 1932,
was introduced by Sterling’s mentor, James Weldon Johnson with whom he
quarreled about “dialect being limited to pathos and humor.” Joanne Gabbin, in
her book on Sterling refers to Richard Wright’s term, “The Forms of Things
Unknown,” the anonymous folk utterances, spirituals, blues, work songs and
folklore created and passed on by African Americans in our country. I know from
my own experiences in villages where my people come from that the contours of
the secret, hidden world can be glimpsed in folk expressions.
One
September evening in 1981, Sterling came to share his thoughts and poems with
my undergraduate students at American University. If there is a pillar holding up this world, I
think of Sterling. I’d give a lot to hear his wisdom on our Congress in these
days!
Sterling:
“My approach is largely portraiture of people. I’m more concerned with
revealing qualities of their life than revealing qualities of my own life. I wrote one poem that is autobiographic or
semi-autobiographic: “After Winter.” [Sterling’s father, Sterling Nelson Brown,
born in 1858 before Emancipation, worked
as a molder in a brickyard, saved enough to buy a small farm for his parents
and to go to Fisk. He later graduated from Oberlin Theological Seminary.
Sterling Senior was friends with Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and taught at Howard
University for some 30 years. He was a man of great moral courage, and stunning
accomplishment in his own right. Sterling’s mother, Grace Adelaide Brown,
taught in the D.C. schools for over 50 years ] Sterling was educated at Dunbar High School, Williams
College and did graduate work at Harvard. He taught at Virginia Theological
Seminary and College and then for close to 60 years at Howard University. Here
he encountered Kelly Miller, father of poet and dramatist May Miller, and Alain
Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois. He attributed to his mother his love for poetry. “She
read Longfellow, Roberts Burns, and she read Dunbar,” he writes.
Sterling
Brown captures another side to his father. In summers during his boyhood, his family
lived on a farm in Howard County at
Whiskey Bottom Road.
“I was
greatly influenced not only by Housman and Frost, Edward Arlington Robinson. In
college I learned about Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Milton. I
wanted my poetry to be simple, sensuous,
what you could see, hear taste, touch, poetry that conveyed feeling. But
one day on the Boston Commons I read Untermeyer’s Modern American Poets, found Sandburg, To get to the language of
the people, away from an artificial literary language, what Whitman wanted to
do when he heard America singing. Robinson
went to a small town off the coast of Maine, from the ordinary, getting
something extraordinary, Sandburg in Chicago, Frost in the farmers of New
England. Handling of my own people, felt
it had been stereotyped, actuality hadn’t been shown, I did know there was a
field to be cultivated. Virginia
Seminarian College was poor in money but rich in humanities.”
Sterling
said “I learned the arts and sciences at Williams and Harvard but I learned the
humanities in Lynchburg at Virginia Seminary. Students were older than I, but coal miners in the summer, worked the farms
and in hotels. They showed me certain qualities of life. I was sent there by
Carter G. Woodson, (his high school
teacher, father of Black History Month,) and my father. My father told me to
learn something about my people, learn something about myself.”
In
opposition to James Weldon Johnson, on the limitations of folk speech, Sterling
told us: “Folk speech is not limited: it is capable of tragedy, irony. The spirituals
were not only pathos…’ Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land, let my people go,’
or ‘I don’t know what my mother wants to stay here for. This old world aint been no friend to her.’ I
found it in the blues. I found the pithy, epigrammatic, the ironic quality as
Zora Neale Hurston said, ‘Hitting a straight lid with a crooked stick.’ I found
the blues rich in this. ‘Got a handful of Gimme and a mouthful of Much
Obliged.’. Whole lot packed into that. Found it
in the folk tales, found a great deal. Found a language here. Made use of the
folk expressions. Students
at Virginia Seminary brought me a wandering guitar player, had coal dust on his
lungs, but too weak for recording, Big Boy Davis taught me a great deal.
“In my
class I was teaching Emerson, Thoreau, transcendentalism. Over in the corner one of the students was
fast asleep snoring. I didn’t want
anybody snoring in my class and I rebuked him. That Saturday, friends took me
out to Coolwell, Virginia. Opening in the woods, wonderful house, squared logs,
foothills of the Blue Ridge. This was
the home of my sleeping student. He was
farming a hundred-acre farm, working Friday afternoon until Monday morning and
then he’d come to my class on transcendentalism. From then on he could sleep in
my class, but he didn’t want to anymore. I’d go out and cut wood with him.
“All the
neighbors would come to talk to the Professor Brown, ask me questions that I
couldn’t answer! Got to talk one night
about Brother Moore, a trifling man , his horses got out, his cows got lost. Folks
kept saying, He means good. Sister
Biffie took her pipe out of her mouth one night and said: ‘He may mean good, but he do so doggone
poor.’ That I used ever since in my talk on Sentimentality. Wanted
to give credit to the Blues; Handy was the first. Ma Rainey, I heard in
Nashville Tenn. She was no beauty until she opened her mouth. Bessie Smith was
a better singer but Ma Rainey was more for the audience. I got a chance to talk
to her.”
Sterling
always ended his readings with “Strong Man” Sterling Brown influenced three generations
of writers and thinkers and his influence continues and will beyond this day.
