Chasing Ms. Brooks

My initial encounter with Ms. Brooks occurred year two of an eight-year bid in a medium/max facility at Roxbury Correctional Center, Housing Unit III, C-Tier, Cell 17 in Hagerstown, Maryland, by way of a library cart. Up until this juncture in the stagnant day-to-day life of incarceration, I mostly read books like Convicted in the Womb by Carl Upchurch and Makes Me Wanna Holler by Nathan McCall, memoirs that spoke to my “state” within the state of corrections, as well as the “state” I longed to leave behind. When the trustee rolled the cart in front of my cell during institutional lockdown—meaning, a dude got his skull cracked open with a SecureView RCA 13-inch television screen ordered through prison commissary and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital—I peeped Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks leaning against John Grisham’s A Time to Kill. I was intrigued, because I had not read many Black women authors up to this point—to be fair, I hadn’t read much of anybody, man or woman. However, I will confess at one time the only thing I did read was numerical ink printed on dead presidents. But the four walls of concrete that became prison demanded I read book after book to combat the isolation, the loneliness, the guilt of having invested so much in dead presidents, which equated to a life wasted.

The bio on the back revealed a poet born in Topeka, Kansas, now living in Chicago. The Pulitzer Prize caught my attention. Even my ignorant self knew that was big time. She must be big time, I contemplated. I didn’t know how one could be a poet and call themselves that with conviction. I wanted to be a writer, but I kept thinking: how do you do that? If I told you I read the book in Cell 17 on the top bunk, that would be a lie—never got the chance. Two days later, before I could read the first page, the guards came and ransacked my four walls—the construction that bound me to the state—confiscating all the library books I possessed, claiming them as contraband. I never laid eyes upon Maud Martha again in prison, but I would soon discover there would be many more encounters with Brooks and her literary trail of language. How could I predict years later prison would not have eaten me alive, and I would be studying at an MFA program designed in her aesthetic likeness, the only one in America that focuses on African American Literature and theory, or interning at Third World Press, an institutional edifice Brooks called home to her work? I could not predict being in a classroom with her mentees: Haki Madhubuti, Sterling Plumpp, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Kelly Norman Ellis—I couldn’t, because I did not know who they were.

After prison, when I discovered A Street in Bronzeville, and later Annie Allen, and before my MFA experience, the poems brought me back to post-segregation and desegregation in Birmingham, Alabama. As a young Black kid, I existed days, months without dappin'-up, huggin', or high five’n people outside Black communities, and so to me, Brooks validated my early beliefs that people outside our forced, invisible, yet, visible barriers were the real outsiders, the other. There was a possessiveness Brooks possessed in her language, her settings, imagery—the unapologetic Blackness and the lives rendered human with an unbreakable will that spoke “The Ham” (or Birmingham) to me in a way no writer had succeeded. When I walked through Chicago State University’s gates in 2004, I knew I was coming to (re)discover my [self]. But also, I came because of the poet Sterling Plumpp, my MFA thesis advisor/mentor. Sterling is straight up Mississippi, living in Chicago with the distinct gift of weaving several narratives through a singular, long narrative for the sake of making a point. Sterling migrated to Chicago where he would eventually become part of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBACI), a group of writers mentored by Gwendolyn Brooks.

Although I thought I knew “We Real Cool,” had deconstructed the poem inside out in terms of its relationship to the Black male’s mortality/authority, the socio-economical state and concerns of the Black Life Matter(s), and how the poem reveled in beauty through an ugly reality—it was Sterling who directed me to the all-encompassing "We," explaining its relevance through his personal relationship with Brooks. When he pronounced Brooks’s “We,” he owned it and never relinquished it throughout the poem. Sterling and I talked about the “We” from different perspectives, which initiated my investigation of Brooks’s internal dialogue with the Black community, embracing the idea of a collective “We” long before the Black Arts Movement. Perhaps history will revisit Brooks’s BAM period with a new lens, given the current socio-political-economic climate fueled by race within this country.

I feel a certain kind of way in terms of critique and shade thrown at Brooks for daring to be critical of the world in which she lived through a poetics valuing Black life, while othering the dominant narrative. Maybe it is because at the time I became aware of Brooks’s evolution as a writer, I had begun the process of claiming her as a literary mentor to an orphan, as in me—one devoid of a literary past or foundation to stand upon as a wanna-be writer. I mentioned the influence of Brooks’s earlier work, but, in actuality, it was the oft overlooked, the most ignored, discounted work of her lifetime, In the Mecca, that endeared me to Brooks. In the Mecca presents the most deliberate literary beat-down/mic-drop in modern history. A 20-year epic poem in the making that demonstrates command of Western aesthetic and poetic form, giving way to the maxim within communities of color that—I can know and do you better than you. By the end of the poem, Brooks’s literary prowess lyrically and metaphorically articulates:  F-that, I will not sell my Black-soul-self for a handclap. BAM—

But deeper still, and dig this, the work, which I consider canonical for MFA and/or graduate writing programs, never sniffed the daylight with writers teaching in those programs. Brooks was criticized for abandoning the formal for the political, and that her politics affected her poems, which is insane. The work had always been political, but it took new influences from young lions & lionesses like Don L. Lee and Nikki Giovanni at a conference at Fisk University in 1967 to help find her aesthetic way. How often do writers come off their perch of “literary stardom” to say, let me redo this and see if I can get it right? Brooks received shade not only outside the Black community, but from people within the Black community as well. They all know who they are; no need to name names. This “shade” grew out of a larger systemic problem of politics and/or social commentary and art. I saw and heard it play out with the next two generations of writers who tell the horror stories of being in writing programs that criticized anything political they had to say—the exclusion, the lack of inclusion, the isolation, the erasure, the devaluation of their experiences—I heard it all within the scared circles of workshop. These writers were often told identity did not matter, that the object had to separate from the condition to be art, to transcend to a universality. I have often been of the mindset that the differences we are create the universality we seek.

I was not a horror story, nor did I lack confidence in Blackness. I grew up in one of those Birmingham communities where Tony Morrison says “something was lost in integration.” But more than that, I also credit the echo of Ms. Brooks’s literary trail and the Gwendolyn Brooks Workshop. We met at Chicago State’s MFA program, workshopping twice a month on weekends for two years. In our minds, we were following in the footsteps/tradition of Brooks; we imagined one of us writing the next Annie Allen, because Brooks gave us license to feel that way—that we were writing from the inside out. Perhaps the closest I have gotten to what it feels like to have been in the presence of Brooks was with Brooks’s talented mentee Carolyn Rodgers, whom I met at the Gwendolyn Brooks Conference for Black Literature in 2006. When I met Carolyn, I felt like I had met Brooks, in a way. Carolyn’s intentional Black poetics resonated in a way others could not. After years out of the literary scene, Carolyn wanted to work her way back in and we at Willow Books, of which I am Senior Editor, had agreed to edit and publish her next book. Sadly, we never got to the book because Carolyn passed.

Yes, I have been chasing, as in always being the figure approaching, closer than I appear, but never close enough—running in like the Running Man on a treadmill; and yes, I often wonder through all the chasing and the degrees of separation, what would I have actually said to Ms. Brooks, had we met. If I did manage to unfreeze my mouth, it would be, “thank you for allowing me to stand on your shoulders.” Of course, I imagine Ms. Brooks replying, “Chile, I got plenty of room for you and generations. Come on over here and gimme a hug. We folks.”