“Exhaust the Little Moment”: Deliberations on Death and Dying

Gwendolyn Brooks’s second volume of poetry is a coming-of-age narrative that charts the rites of passage in a young Black woman’s life: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Annie Allen is among the most lyrical, formally proficient, yet challenging works of Brooks’s oeuvre.

These poems are set in the forties, the same decade they were published. They take us into the heart of midcentury Black Chicago, the city sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton would call the “Black Metropolis.” A community of first- and second-generation Southerners had migrated to a place they sardonically called “Up South.” Just as their brethren back home would wage Civil Rights battles a decade later, these urban dwellers are fiercely engaged in a struggle for equity in housing, employment, education, and political power.

Onto this tumultuous landscape emerges a dreamer named Annie Allen. In language that is at once tender, taut, and elevated, Brooks moves us between the hopes and dreams of a young woman’s interior life to actions in her observed reality. Sheltered, sometimes hemmed in by the bond of parents and family, Annie nonetheless chafes at socially imposed and self-defined limitations of race, gender, and economic status.

Along with the social justice issues of an era that literary scholar Lawrence Jackson defines as “The Indignant Generation,” Annie is preoccupied with daydreams about love and marriage, of heroes and knights riding into her life and sweeping her off her feet. Yet she is also preternaturally troubled by thoughts of death and dying.

This is the forties, after all, when unspeakable violence rages in “hunched hells across the sea.” The war effort is intensely felt at home with shortages of consumer goods and food rationing. Women enter the workplace in unprecedented numbers, filling jobs left vacant by male military recruits. Reports of armed combat in the war theaters of Europe and Asia scream across the airwaves in radio and newsreel, in newspaper reports. Even as people negotiate the minutiae of their everyday lives, the hardships of war cast a deep shadow across the nation. Black men are mustered into service in segregated troops, fighting and dying to protect a nation mired in racial bias.

Annie Allen wasn’t the first of Brooks’s works to engage themes of war, death, and dying. Nor would it be the last. Her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, included “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” a poem exploring the aftermath of war among a gathering of decommissioned soldiers. “Negro Hero” is dedicated to the valor of Dorie Miller, a Black naval cook who manned anti-aircraft guns and shot down bombers during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The war years were also a backdrop for Maud Martha, Brooks’s 1953 novella and only work of fiction.

Compounding the dangers of death abroad was the reality that Black life is imperiled at home. This “chat with death” is intrinsic to Annie Allen’s walk in life. The collection opens with a poem memorializing Ed Bland, a fellow Chicago poet who “grew up being curious,” only to have his young life “snipped off” in WWII Germany.

Though I was born in the decade after Annie Allen, my childhood experience was not dissimilar. I grew up in Black communities that functioned as self-contained villages. Southern migrants grew greens, tomatoes, green beans, peppers, and corn in backyard gardens. The watermelon man rode through the streets in his horse-drawn cart, singing out “Watermelon! Sweet watermelon!” On some streets at daybreak, one might even hear the raucous crowing of a rooster. So I recognized Annie Allen’s Black Chicago. In “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,” the first of the collection’s four sections, “Sunday chicken” invites us into one such neighborhood with fowl “beaking about the yard.”

Cab Calloway’s 1940 hit, “A Chicken Ain’t Nothin’ but a Bird,” sang praises to the gastronomic delights of the yard bird. Yet tender-hearted Annie sees chickens as more than just livestock. She admires their beautiful plumes of “speckle-gray, wild white” and “lovely baffle-brown.” She becomes so attached to those backyard chickens that the practice of killing and roasting them for the “man-feast” of Sunday dinners seems a kind of cannibalism.

Annie sees embracing the “no” as a protection against possible harm, while “yes” is fraught with danger. “do not be afraid of no” is a rumination on the necessity of negation. Brooks gives us war images of medaled heroes risking life and limb for the approbation of “yes”:

To say yes is to die
A lot or a little. The dead wear capably their wry

Enameled emblems.

There is Sweet Sally in the “ballad of the light-eyed little girl,” who carries in a cardboard box the body of a pigeon she had dearly loved but inexplicably starved to death:

She has taken her passive pigeon poor,
She has buried him down and down.
He never shall sally to Sally
Nor soil any roofs of the town.

In some cases, death can be a celebration of life. In “the rites for Cousin Vit,” a coffin cannot contain the irrepressible spirit of a woman who danced the snake hips and slurped bad wine. Despite the indisputable fact of her death, Cousin Vit simply “Is.”

As an adult woman riding the environs of affluent “Beverly Hills, Chicago,” Annie wryly notes the eases and comforts of affluence, as compared to a life of lack. In the very definition of white privilege, even death fails in its role as the Great Equalizer:

                            Not that anybody is saying that these people have no trouble.

Merely that it is trouble with a gold-flecked beautiful banner.

Nobody is saying that these people do not ultimately cease to be. And

Sometimes their passings are even more painful than ours.

It is just that so often they live till their hair is white.

They make excellent corpses, among the expensive flowers....

But literal death is not her only preoccupation. There is also the demise of dreams, cherished ideas, and expectations. In the long epic poem, “The Anniad” (after Virgil’s “The Aeneid,” the epic poem of a Trojan fleeing the fall of Troy), and “Appendix to the Anniad,” Annie will find love, only to see it imperiled when: “They took my lover’s tallness off to war,/Left me lamenting.” The adolescent dreamer has become a despondent adult, her childish fantasies of a handsome hero traded for “a tan man” who will break her heart and leave her to raise their children alone.

Annie’s worries aren’t only about the macabre aspects of death, at least not entirely. There is an interlude of gallows humor. Brooks introduces pathos and playfulness when a solemn family death prevents Annie from playing her favorite records: “Charmaine,” “Honey Bunch,” and “Singing in the Rain.” Young Annie is so resentful of the corpse on the cooling board, that she tiptoes into the living room and pokes out her tongue at the “old relative” lying there.

It is in her very awareness of death that Annie Allen celebrates the ephemeral act of being. Life itself is a series of “little moments” that once exhausted, herald the arrival of death:

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.
And be it gash or gold it will not come
Again in this identical disguise.
—From “Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.”