A Blue(s) (Notes) for Sterling Brown by Joshua Myers
Sterling Allen Brown
American professor, folklorist, poet, and literary critic.
1901 – 1989
This article is available as a downloadable PDF
I am from the Drylongso, striking, New Negro on campus, George Padmore, Maude White side of things.
…the William Leo Hansberry side of things.
I was created by the Thinkers and Drinkers, no tea for the feeble, Negro section curated by Dorothy Porter tradition.
I sit with Robin Gregory and Mary Lovelace.
And we sit at the feet of C.L.R. and Doxey, with Damas and Walters. The Institute for the Arts and Humanities. The Toward a Black University Conference.
We learned what it was from Traylor and Harrell.
I am the child of the Nonviolent Action Group, Ujamaa, and Black Nia F.O.R.C.E. Ture is not just a totem, someone stuck in the sixties and honored only after his death.
We learned from the people who dreamed a better world.
So this is the legacy we stand upon. Sterling Brown University. The Mecca.
A different project, not a copy of anything existing. Not excellence, but a reimagined thing altogether.
I guess only those who feel it do know, after all.
-from Joshua Myers, “Genealogy”
I am a child of children who were the children of Sterling Allen Brown. The project of Africana Studies—what some have called Black Study—is enlivened through his understanding and development of a way seeing what we might call a project of Black living.
Brown bequeathed to us a way of thinking through what it is that made that project such a dangerous, yet necessary undertaking and it has inspired generations to take up that project of life—Black life. Brown’s work emanates from a genealogy that we must know, that we must study. He is our representative thinker, an exemplar of that great cloud of witnesses. We must ever invoke his memory for when ancestors are not known, the chains are broken, and we ourselves cannot be known.
We might ask how Sterling Brown understood the drama of this thing called life. In his keynote at the 1997 dedication of the Sterling Brown Chair at Williams, held in Washington, DC, Cornel West used another word—tragicomic to describe this moment that Brown sought to understand, the modern world, this modernity that folk associated with Brown’s Howard University have sought to either enter or for the more imaginative of them, transform. It was Brown who saw this world through the lens of the people who were discarded by that modernity, whose humanity was not required. Only their bodies.
But we know that they—that we—were more than our bodies. That we could see the world, that we that we had a lens that demonstrated that African people were not only human, but as Cedric Robinson asked us to consider, that we were humans of a specific sort. That we were as one of Brown’s late students, Amiri Baraka once described—Blues People.
The blues is spirit
The blues is soul
The blues is ancient Black stories retold
The blues is spirit
The blues is soul
And the blues is re-membering ancestors, young and old
I
Sterling Brown generated a theory of life from Black people, themselves. But he was not simply a participant-observer, or as he was once incorrectly called, “a culturally removed ethnographic investigator.” This was not mere social science. There was something else at work. To fully comprehend what grounded Brown’s vision of these Blues people, we have to go deeper than an academic theory, there was something in the spirit. The Blues is spirit.
An appropriate place to start is his parents. Sterling Nelson Brown who was born into the community of the enslaved in Tennessee, eventually becoming a minister and professor of divinity at the very Howard University, Sterling A. would call home for so many years. And of course, there was his mother Adelaide Allen, who was the valedictorian of her class at Fisk University in Nashville, who birthed him to a world of literature, of the word. They were both well-known and relatively well-to-do members of Washington D.C.’s Black elite. Sterling A. was born into this world in 1901, into a class that had a deep and sonorous pride in their ability to overcome and enter into the world of whites with complete equality—or so they thought. They situated themselves in proximity to whiteness intellectually and even culturally, leaving behind their roots in the blues of Blackness, the Africans who lived literally in the gutter.
They sent their children to the Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, which after embracing and then discarding the radical educational philosophy of its legendary principal, the one and only Anna Julia Cooper, became the closest that Black elite had to a finishing school. Thanks to Jim Crow and its illogic, the teachers at that institution actually had PhDs, but were not invited to teach at the nation’s colleges and universities, because they were Black. So their Blackness helped produce that coterie of intellectuals who would go on to extend the political project of Black middle class-ness—as well as those who would break that contract.
Brown was the recipient of a scholarship from Williams College, a prestigious honor that was reserved every year for a top student at Dunbar. An honor also awarded to Rayford Whittingham Logan, the Pan Africanist and historian, who coined the term to describe the life-worlds of the people that Brown would gravitate toward: “the nadir,” the lowest point of Black existence in the United States of America, that period from the end of Reconstruction, known in the South as the beginning of Redemption, until the beginning of the Great European War.
According to biographer, Joanne Gabbin, author of the Sterling Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (1985) it was at Williams that Brown was introduced to the Western tradition of letters, under the tutelage of George Dutton, the social realist. Brown would say that it was where he learned to read. Though Western literatures were important and had to be learned, “the real” of Black experiences were obfuscated by the more American tradition of minstrelsy.
Socially, Brown was isolated at Williams. The college had pursued a policy whereby the Black students were kept apart from the student body, assuming that it was with “their own” that they’d feel most comfortable. Brown would speak about the distinction of being at Williams at the young age of seventeen, but one that also felt much like tokenism. Despite the isolation, Brown created and cultivated Black space, building enduring relationships with the other Black students that were there, including Allison Davis, who would become a social scientist in a tradition that included St. Clair Drake, Horace Cayton, Charles Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier and others who are still grossly misunderstood, though some of us at least know their names. Brown would also become close to future physician Carter Marshall, government worker Ralph Scott, and finally his eventual colleague at Howard, Mortimer Weaver. This was his Williams, a maroon space inside a white European- American college. An intellectual experience that furthered opened him, nonetheless to the power of the word of which his mother had already introduced him.
After graduating in 1922, he found that there was more to discover in the European tradition that had so overwhelmed the curricula, as if it were the only tradition. Pursuing a Master’s degree at Harvard, he came to study the work of the Imagists. He imbibed the New England literary masters, Edward Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost. It was also during his year at Harvard that Brown found resonating rhythms in the work of Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Alfred Edward Housman, and others, who tried in varying ways to approach the common language of the common people.12 Their works, though, could not get to the core of the lives of Brown’s people. It resonated because it demonstrated that beyond the Victorian sensibilities of the age, and the Black attempt to mimic all that was wrong in those sensibilities (i.e. all of it), that there lied an otherwise sensibility. An otherwise possibility, that made realizing another way of existing in the world that province of the work of the Black poet. But Brown was not fully there yet. That realization still lay on the horizon. The moment in his life that was perhaps most responsible for that realization, and that personal and artistic transformation, was—as it had been for W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as writers today, like Jesmyn Ward, Kiese Laymon, and perhaps most critically and acerbically, Imani Perry—was the decision to go back South.
In the South, Brown re-discovered his people and found a unique voice. One that he felt strived to record the authenticity of Blackness. For the rest of his life, he wrote from that space, he critiqued from the space, he lived in that space. In his first three years as a professor of English at the historically Black, Virginia Theological Seminary, in Lynchburg, Brown uprooted his father’s expectations that he join the clergy after a bout of teaching, insinuating himself in the lifeworlds of the rural Black folk in town. Gabbin’s depiction of Lynchburg’s idyllic Blackness is moving:
“The Black people of the rural communities surrounding Lynchburg, as steeped in the traditions of the spirituals, the blues, the aphorisms, the old lies, and the superstition of folk life as they were in the purplish red clay of the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, taught the young professor something of folk humor, irony, fortitude and shrewdness. In turn, Brown’s honest, uncondescending friendship with several of these people brought him into the inner circle of their community. They told him the humorous stories that were kept like fine, aged wines until the right time. With equal ease, they boasted about their first generation “Seminary” students and lambasted the village scoundrels. They took special pleasure in introducing the young professor to “white lightning” and “life everlasting,” indigenous products of the region.”
It was not romantic, it was beautifully and painfully real. It was not utopian, it was the locus of an imaginative, but generative way of being in the world. It was—in other words—the meaning of the Blues.
And this life was the Blues. In Lynchburg, he met Black folk—the real folk of folk traditions of folklore—like Mrs. Bibby, the tough-as-nails Black woman who held her tongue for nobody. She was a source of a Black truth, that though we struggle, we still find in our hearts that ability to speak of an unspeakable joy, even as we try to deal with the harsh reality of this world of hurt. And there was Big Boy, the vagrant, wondering wandering guitarist who brought his plaintive melodies into Brown’s classrooms, his chords a mirror to a Black world, his singing voice a reminder of that otherwise possibility. They both would become more than simply his muse, they were his understanding of Blackness, his understanding of the Blues. They were he and he was they. To riff on the London-bred singer, Michael Kiwanuka, they were all together, Black people in a white world (but creating Black worlds all the while). But as they might also recognize, that other world wasn’t gon last always.
It was at this moment in his life that he met Daisy Turnbull. A product of a group of self-made Black folk, she inherited the stories of life as her enslaved grandparents remembered it. And though of light complexion, vowed to retain that legacy when others of similar stature might have traduced it for life as a white person. Daisy married Sterling in 1927, and the two set off for a long life together, a life she enriched through her encouragement that Brown share his discovery to the world beyond the rural south. A life she also enriched by reeling him in, when it seemed he was ready to unravel. They would soon move.
Brown left Virginia only to meet further evidence of that thing that he had discovered about his people, about himself. He found it in Jefferson City, Missouri after taking a job at historically Black Lincoln University. While away from his duties, Brown sat in the city’s hotel, listening to the stories of Slim and a brother who went by the name Revelations. In Nashville, after taking a job at his mother’s and family friend, W.E.B. Du Bois’s alma mater, historically Black Fisk University, he learned from Gillie, who had his own barbershop and was a purveyor of a form that Brown would come to adopt as his own—the lie, what we know as the “tall tale.” In learning the rudiments of how to lie, Brown was introduced to another Black way of addressing the world, addressing reality with unreality, so that we pass through reality to realize another reality. This is Black thought. And Brown as an elder came to be known, like Gillie, as a great liar. What better way to live in a country founded on lies? It was Black folks who were under no illusions. So they created better ones. And in those lies, there also lied a commentary on what we might be if we no longer had to lie. This is Black Study.
These biographical details become critical, for they illuminate the ultimate meaning of his work, the ultimate desire that underpinned Brown’s literary career. Black people’s lives deserved to be elevated to the perch of the artistic, not so people could gawk, stand in awe, or appropriate it. But because at its core art is about representing humanity to itself so that we can find ways to realize life, to really see. For peoples of African descent, life is a cycle, and through a conspiracy of denial of the saliency of our lives, the circle had been broken. And we needed ways of repairing that which had been disrupted.
From his engagements with the folk at his previous teaching stops, Sterling Brown learned what it was to speak and live with and for Black people writ large. This was the era of the Harlem Renaissance, of which Brown was a minor participant and critic (though it was in this context where his first poems first appeared in important magazines like the National Urban League’s Opportunity). It was the era of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Pan-African Congresses. In the year that he returned to Washington, DC it would become a time in which Blacks experienced the extension of their nightmare. In 1929, as what appeared to many as the collapse of capitalism began, Brown took the job at the place from which his most enduring work would be launched: Howard University.
The blues is a feeling
The blues is a seeing
The blues is a Black tradition always repeatin’
The blues is a feeling
The blues is a seeing
And the blues is a kinda livin’, our own world we be in
II
Howard University proved itself to be for Sterling Brown what it is and was to all who make the elaboration and excavation of the meaning of African humanity to be their life’s work: a veritable mixed bag. A useful rendering of what I mean: My office is located in the iconic Founders Library, which sits atop one of the highest points in Washington, D.C., giving credence to the idea of Howard as occupying the Hilltop. At the very top floor of that building is a bank of rooms known in Brown’s time as the “Faculty Studies.” While we house the Africana Studies program there now, in Brown’s days, in order to get away, to escape the demands of the faculty from a strict administration and from other nuisances, he and others would climb all three flights (really five) of stairs, to reach this highest floor, in one of the highest points in D.C., atop a hill, just to have time and space to think. But if that was an inconvenience, it paled in comparison to some that would be experienced later on.
Brown often called himself, a minor poet and a major teacher. Though he was indeed a master teacher, more of which later, it is clear that his reduction of himself as a minor poet was a bit modest. His crowning achievement, if you will, was his 1932 collection, Southern Road. It is a work that has endured in the minds of those who have sought to study the question of the influence of Black folk traditions on the literary, almost as if those two were innately separate. Perhaps they were, and if that is true, it was because what passed for the literary was so thoroughly grounded in European culture that it was almost a scandal to assert that folk traditions that emanated from other cultures could pass as literary. No matter. Brown’s work evinced not so much the concern of proving Black people’s cultural traditions as worthy of designation. After all, he worked alongside people like William Leo Hansberry—the uncle of Lorraine and teacher of African history and culture—who knew that Europeans did not invent writing, and thus could not have invented or have a monopoly on literature. Southern Road was an attempt to demonstrate to Black people themselves not that they had a literature, but that they had humanity that deserved consideration on its own terms, not as a proof that “we can do literary things too.” Only they needed proof, but what we needed was the healing power of our own traditions re-presented to us.
Poetry is how we access the dreams of ancestors long gone, it is the pre-eminent form where articulation converges with imagination. It is a form that is often rendered on the page, but exists in other spaces, in the curves of the lindy hop, in the notes of the stride piano. But Brown chose the page—verse. His work was mediation between our ancestors’ dreams and our possibilities.
Thus he had to rely on how they saw things. As former executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the then doyen on Black cultural criticism, James Weldon Johnson put it in the introduction to the first edition of Southern Road, Brown “adopted as his medium the common, racy, living speech of the Negro in certain phases of real life.” These collections of poems which captured those experiences in the rural life Brown had immersed himself within were for Johnson
works that articulated the imaginations of the folk [he had] deepened its meanings and multiplied its implications… [and] absorbed the spirit of his material, made it his own; and without diluting its primitive frankness and raciness, truly reexpressed it with artistry and magnified power. In a word, he has taken this raw material and worked it into original authentic poetry.
And yet for those unconnected to that folk tradition, and to that ancestral call, the book lingered in obscurity, and is today is still out of print. Hearing this echo four decades later, was Sterling Stuckey, son of poet Elma Stuckey, and a recent ancestor who developed historical studies that take seriously the autonomy of Black folklore as a form, as a way of knowing Blackness, as a way of situating Black political traditions as authentic. He had heard Brown’s voice on a LP, possibly the Folkways volume, Anthology of Negro Poets edited by Arna Bontemps, and wondered how “a Williams College Phi Beta Kappa, a Harvard man, a college professor and eminent writer could have a voice with so much of earth and sky and sunlight and dark clouds about it; a voice unafraid, an instrument Blues-tinged.”23 Stuckey would invite Brown to lecture before Chicago’s Amistad Society in the early 1960s, as he stood watch over a younger generation beginning to embrace the old dean, a younger generation that would take that authenticity a step further—or perhaps a step back to the gutbucket, down-home, in your face Blues, updated for a 1960s world in flux. Those words appeared in Stuckey’s introduction to the 1972 edition of Southern Road, introducing it to another generation. And Brown, remained somewhat engrossed in a Howard-Washington, D.C. bubble, which was perhaps stultifying for his writing career, but not for his ultimate purpose.
Southern Road bequeathed to us poems like “When the Saints Go Machin’ Home,” which demonstrated his mastery of the Blues form with lines like,
Oh, when the saints go ma’chin home
When the sayaints goa ma’chin home
A literal blue note. The extra letters is a worrying, flattening, filled with an realization, added to the lines to produce an affect, a feeling, words fail to describe. A feeling that does something to and for us, a feeling that evokes and creates life anew.
And in the ethics and theology of the Blues, that same poem is where we affirm that despite the troubles, like the great flood of 1927 which so consistently envelops the poems in this collection, we had as the gospel singer Helen Baylor had: “a praying Grandmother.” Brown writes,
Mammy
With deep religion defeating the grief
Life piled so closely about her,
Ise so glad trouble doan last always,
And her dogged belief
That some fine day
She’d go a-ma’chin’
When de saints go ma’chin home.
This was a poem dedicated to Big Boy, Brown’s friend from Lynchburg. And it was a reminder that trouble did indeed have its limits, that there would be hope after struggle, as in in another poem in the collection entitled “After Winter,” which is based upon Brown’s own family, in particular his father.
In that piece Brown, writes
He thinks with the winter
His troubles are gone’
Ten acres unplanted
To raise dreams on.
The lean months are done with,
The fat to come.
His hopes, winter wanderers,
Hasten home.
“Butterbeans fo’ Clara
Sugar corn fo’ Grace
An’ fo’ de little feller
Runnin’ space…”
There is of course space for laughter and joy. And in the case of Brown, for lies. In the Slim Greer series, based on his conversations with Slim in Jefferson City, Brown writes narrative poems that contain fabulist accounts of Black life, including tales of Slim passing for white until he plays the piano, and applying for a job until he realized that he’d actually have to work hard, and Slim visiting Hell only to realize it was run by a white police officer from the South, and then quickly getting out of dodge. Humor was one way to cope with the reality of Black life at the dawn of the Great Depression. The blues were another. We read lament in poems like “When de Saints Go Ma’Ching Home” and in “Children of the Mississippi” where Brown writes
Winter a-comin’
Leaner dan ever
What have we done to you
Makes you do lak you do
How we done harmed you
Black-hearted river
These folk know fear, now, as a bosom crony;
Children, stepchildren
Of the Mississippi….
Like the ancient Africans in the Nile Valley— who knew that the water was the source of life, that if the river did not flood, that they would starve, so they called on the God of the river to restore balance to their lives—those Africans, along the banks of the Mississippi created a Blues, which were in many ways invocations to a God that was both of this world and 14 beyond it. A God that was present in everything, whose name had to be uttered and spoken, or played on a guitar. Brown wrote about those invocations, and then he invoked those higher powers in his own works like “Memphis Blues,” which after narrating the possible destruction of the city during the flood, ends with
Memphis go
By Flood or Flame;
Nigger won’t worry
All de same–
Memphis go
Memphis come back,
Ain’no skin
Off de nigger’s back.
All dese cities,
Ashes, rust…
De win’ sing sperrichals
Through deir dus’.
And in a completely different register, the climax of the poem “Sister Lou,” about a woman who had just passed from this world, Brown writes
Jesus will find yo’ bed fo’ you
Won’t no servant evah bother wid yo’ room.
Jesus will lead you
To a room wid windows
Openin’ on cherry trees an’ plum trees
Bloomin’ everlastin’
An’ dat will be yours
Fo’ keeps.
Den take yo’ time….
Honey, take yo’ bressed time.
This is an antinomianism that is not a rejection of struggle, but a rejection of this world, as the only possible world. The Blues, then, are not sad, as the saxophonist Branford Marsalis once told the documentarian Ken Burns. “Misery”, writes Robin D.G. Kelley, “does not define the Blues, contrary to popular belief.” Kelley quotes surrealist Paul Garon who argued that through its “fidelity to fantasy and desire, the blues generates an irreducible and, so to speak, habit-forming demand for freedom and what Arthur Rimbaud called true life.” And so just as they were social realist, the Blues were also surreal. The power of the Blues has been well documented, captured in the words and works of theorists like Amiri Baraka, Samuel Floyd, Angela Davis, James Cone, Clyde Woods, and even Albert Murray. In various ways, they posit that there’s a something in the message of Black life that is best articulated through this form, this way of being and feeling. In “Willie’s Testament” on his debut album, the Mississippi blues guitarist, the late Willie King puts it this way, “It’s a feeling from the blues that gave me great hope, great inspiration. It’s a feeling that you can feel, when you feel it…every once in a while, you get that feeling of a new day, you can just see it…an old brother told me, you got to participate in the blues, sing the blues, dance the blues, play the blues, on any instrument you wanna play, and this would keep the blues offa you, now if you don’t wanna participate in the blues, then the blues gon be on you…you start hollerin’ the blues, you feel them blues just gettin in the wind…”
No poem in Southern Road captures this duality, this generative, otherwise possibility than “Ma Rainey,” the best known of Brown’s poems. He writes,
Ma Rainey
Sing yo’ song;
Now you’s back
Whah you belong,
Git way inside us,
Keep us strong….
O Ma Rainey
Li’l an low;
Sing us’ bout de hard luck
Roun’ our do’;
Sing us’
bout de lonesome road
We mus’ go….
Then it continues
She sang Backwater Blues one day:
It rained fo’ days an’ de skies was dark as night,
Trouble taken place in de lowlands at night.
Thundered an’ lightened an’ the storm being to roll
Thousan’s of people ain’t got no place to go.
Den’ I went an stood upon some high ol’ lonesome hill,
An’ looked down on the place where I used to live.
An’ den de folks, dey natchally bowed dey heads an’ cried,
Bowed dey heavy heads, shet dey dry moufs up tight an’ cried,
An Ma lef’ de stage, an followed some de folks outside.”
Dere wasn’t much more de fellow say:
She jes’ gits hold of us dataway.
What is it to be held, is it to merely to be bound? Or is being held by Ma Rainey akin to care? This double signification is not clarified in the poem, but the fact that we are held by Ma Rainey remains significant, that we are held by Sterling Brown is critical. For it requires us to be still. To “be still and know, that I am God.” To be still and imagine a life beyond mere survival.
The blues is spirit
The blues is soul
The blues is ancient Black stories retold
The blues is spirit
The blues is soul And the blues is re-membering ancestors, young and old
The blues is a feeling
The blues is a seeing
The blues is a Black tradition always repeatin’
The blues is a feeling
The blues is a seeing
And the blues is a kinda livin’, our own world we be in
III
Sterling Brown was indeed a major teacher. For decades, he was the elder statesman of the Department of English, always there introducing students to the world of literature, a world in which he creatively sought to intervene by reminding them of the effervescence of Blackness. The student movement to emerge at Howard University in the 1960s became Brown’s entrée into the world of Black Power. It is a fascinating genealogy that underscores the importance of the cultural question that rested at the core of Black activism and that sixties generation of radicals who believed that it was the fact of Blackness that had to be conserved. Though Brown would have never called his cultural project, “nationalist” and he still retained some fealty to the word, “Negro,” it is not at all coincidental or ironic that to those who would define their movements under the rubrics of “Black Power” saw him as their godfather. At Howard, these radicals began their work in nonviolent direct action, starting the group, the Nonviolent Action Group, eventually becoming the Howard affiliate of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Brown had given his namesake, the activist Ed Brown, a work-study job, and was later introduced to the group that Ed had become part of, embracing them as only a godfather could. According to another of those students, Michael Thelwell, whose reminisces of these connections is most prescient, the two had hit it off because Ed—kicked out of Southern University for his activism there—was “a veritable virtuoso of southern Black culture.” From then on, they called each other “Cuz Brown.” Ed was the older brother of H. Rap Brown, now Jamil Al-Amin, who is today still in federal prison, likely framed and in retaliation of who he was to the movement and to us.
In what might be likened to a seminar if we were to follow the German model that found itself inserted into the American academy, but what actually most closely resembled an mbongi, from the Ki-kongo, who meant by that, “a house without walls,” Sterling Brown would gather these students around to transmit what he knew. It was from these sessions, in Brown’s office located in a little white house on campus, that the group was shown for the first time in Stokely Carmichael’s words, “how to really appreciate and love our people’s culture.” In his must-read autobiography, Ready for Revolution, in the chapter, “Howard University: Every Black Thing and Its Opposite,” (a chapter that continues to frame how I read the University), Carmichael writes of Brown:
In the turmoil of the struggle and the cultural confusions of official Howard, exactly what we were fighting against almost instinctively was always as clear as desert light. Prof helped us to see clearly at least one of the things that we really were fighting for: in the largest possible sense, to preserve and advance a legacy—our people’s humanity as expressed in terms of their own devising. Psychic and cultural autonomy; the right to be and define ourselves without embarrassment, apology, or external constraint.
In these words, Carmichael sounds a lot like Cedric Robinson, who has characterized the Black radical tradition as “the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.” It was Sterling Brown who served as a link in that chain.
But in his own “Sterling Brownian” way. Thelwell remembers that at these sessions, which eventually extended to his home, Brown would pull out a fifth of Wild Turkey, lay back, and engage them in lies, poetry, and music. For Brown, it was dead serious, but also light—like the Blues. He managed to creatively demonstrate the hidden curriculum of Black Studies while providing an intellectual and cultural foundation for how Black activists would engage the question of white supremacy in the struggles to come. He would always close with a recitation of his poem, “Old Lem,” which has the following refrain:
They don’t come by ones
They don’t come by twos
They come by tens
And they did, but they could not kill us all. Ed Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Michael Thelwell, Courtland Cox, Tim Jenkins, Charlie Cobb, Jean Wheeler Smith-Young, Cleveland Sellers. This group would graduate from Howard, and like earlier generations of Sterling Brown students—like A.B. Spellman and Amiri Baraka—would contribute to the Black freedom struggle, first by transforming Howard, by inviting everyone from Malcolm X to James Baldwin to speak on campus and protesting the university’s gradualism, and then in various ways ranging from civil rights activism to Black Power to Pan Africanism, always evoking the memory and instructions of Brown, to—as Sellers asserts—“clarify their philosophy.”
Howard also caused him pain. If it is true that there are two Howards, as Carmichael, Jenkins, and most recently Ta-Nehisi Coates have written, it was the “official” capstone of Negro education that resented everything about Brown. He did not earn a Ph.D., and yet he was among the most brilliant minds on campus. He marched to the beat of a different drummer, as the title of his unpublished collection illustrates, but he knew all that there was to know about your beat. And it did not impress him. He had many scholarly accomplishments: edited the most important anthology of Black literature, The Negro Caravan (1941), his books and articles of criticism including The Negro in American Fiction (1938) and Negro Poetry and Drama (1938), his work with the Federal Writers Project as national editor of Negro Affairs. Yet he invited the jazz pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith to give lectures in his classes. A Howard that did not understand jazz could not understand Brown. Like William Leo Hansberry and historian Chancellor Williams, to the Black bourgeois Howard, he was an outsider.
Invited to help write the history of the university, with his fellow Williams College alum and sometimes antagonist, Rayford Logan, Brown dropped out of the project when it became clear that it would be a project that reified Howard as “the capstone” and not a critical look at the rough underbelly of the institution. By 1967, past the age that Howard forced retirement on professors, Brown was a patient at St. Elizabeths Hospital, a psychiatric facility. The university had him committed perhaps fearful that someone who could be so close to the folk traditions of the very Black people many of them felt were beyond the pale—could also be someone intimately close to so many students. Nathan Hare, another professor in that tradition, who had also been fired returned to visit him at the hospital, but Brown refused to see anyone associated with Howard. He would remark a few years later after his release, that he was the only person to be hired, fired, rehired, retired, and then rehired. It seems that at some point, probably during his hospitalization and removal from the classroom, the cleavage between Brown and the students was deepened. In 1968, in a stunning display of the disruption of the cultural and genealogical continuity of Black thought, of which the activist Courtland Cox remarked Brown had taught them, Howard students who were engaged in the Black Power struggle had Sterling and Daisy turned away at the door from a ceremony that was actually honoring them. The brothers at the door did not know how they looked, and simply assumed that anyone as light as this couple could not be the honorees. It took those who had remembered them to save the Browns from that embarrassment, an incident that perhaps explains Brown’s deprecation of elements of that movement. It was a Blackness that did fully know itself. Sterling Brown’s work was what had brought them to the place of Black Power, to the place where they had to reject the bourgeois foundations of Negro education. Everyone did not remember. To those students who could remember that it was he—not them that had done the work, in those heady years they would come to find it necessary to change the name of the university, to reflect the “other Howard.” Their first choice was Sterling Brown University. Though it was unsuccessful, that element of Howard is today known as the Mecca. This is Sterling Brown’s complicated Howard legacy.
And then there’s his DC legacy. By the 1970s, all cultural workers, artists of every medium made their pilgrimage to 1222 Kearney Street. Paula Giddings, Ernest Gaines, E. Ethelbert Miller, Joanne Gabbin, Haile Gerima, and others far too numerous to name. He would become particularly close to the photographer Roy Lewis, the poet Michael Harper, and the historian Sterling Stuckey. Today, the home is a cultural landmark on DC’s African American Heritage Trail. The Browns were known for throwing parties in this home. Daisy was the host par excellence to these popular affairs where Brown would hold forth down in the basement sharing his love of Black music. He was known to curate the playlist, which of course was not as easy it would have been for us with Apple Music and Spotify—he arranged his extensive collection of records. They featured plenty of blues. But also, a music that Brown had grown to deeply respect and admire: the music white folks called jazz. Brown was known to arrange the music in a particular order, to be played at a particular time.
Among the artists that were important to Brown were his childhood friend, Edward Kennedy Ellington, otherwise known as the Duke. Testing his guests’ proficiency, Brown often went around the room asking if anyone could name everyone in the trumpet section on a particular record. In interesting ways, Ellington’s arrangements provided space for improvisation, which Samuel Floyd likened to signifying. The childhood friends both found ways to liven their art with Black folk culture and thus remake our understandings of music, and of poetry. Along with Ellington, there was Louis Armstrong, in whose horn the blues form extended to jazz. This “creative-improvised music” transported the blue note— that extended flatted fifth, the so-called worried note, that musicologists trace to West Africa— into a different and vibrant setting. By emphasizing through flattening, the note became the vehicle for imaginative transformation, it opened us up to the spirit. It is the chill that runs down the spine. This intervention became the basis underpinning the music that would ultimately become the music of the revolution in Black culture in the middle of the twentieth century. The trumpeter and contemporary heir to Louis Armstrong, Nicholas Payton writes of that moment, saying that “he changed the feel. It’s one thing that have your own feel, but it’s an entirely different thing to change the conception of what a quarter note feels like…and we’re still borrowing his quarter notes—the forward motion and the pulse of that, he changed feel forever.” In each iteration of its existence, jazz worried the line, just as Brown transformed our understanding of Black reality, by worrying the poetic line by changing the feel. We gotta keep worrying. Which is to say, we gotta keep adding multiple and new inflections to the lines of Black creative imagination, so we can live in the feeling evoked by Ellington, Armstrong, Rainey, Bessie Smith, Leadbelly, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and on and on.
Like jazz, Sterling Brown’s poetic legacy was becoming somewhat cathedralized in American arts and letters. He was invited to give lectures all across the country. His unpublished poems were brought out in two collections, The Last Ride of Wild Bill by Detroit’s Broadside Press in 1975 and a major publisher, Harper and Row, brought out his Collected Poems, which included his follow-up to Southern Road, No Hiding Place, a collection no publisher would touch in the 1930s. On his birthday, May 1, 1979, the D.C. City Council declared Sterling Brown Day. It was a propitious moment, Daisy would leave him later that year, transitioning after a 52 year marriage, plunging Sterling into a period of despair. The context for this revival of interest in Brown is important. It as a D.C. scene, which had been flourishing since the late 1960s, and had received a shot in the arm when Mayor Marion C. Barry, appointed the Black Arts Movement stalwart, Larry Neal as a Commissioner of the Arts and Humanities in 1976. The groundbreaking visual artist, Jeff Donaldson was at Howard at the same time, creating a vibrant setting that included poets, dancers, visual artists, who all saw in Brown a predecessor. He was in fact, one of the few artists of the New Negro era that was still around. On 1984, they made him the first Poet Laureate of the city. This belated recognition gave the elder some joy.
Earlier in this period of revival, he returned to Williams in 1973, to give one of his more famous speeches, “A Son’s Return: Oh, Didn’t He Gamble.” There he propounded on life as a Black person at Williams during the war and in the immediate aftermath—A Black person in a Black world inside Williams, but necessarily interacting with the other world. In the speech Brown remarked, however, that the color line never made him unhappy; and in that statement we find perhaps a quintessentially Blues ethic—a Blues life at Williams College. Living in an off-campus house with other Black students, Brown remembered his exploits with the Student Army Training Corps, with athletics, with girls, and pledging Omega Psi Phi, and of course he regaled the students with a few lies. But within the world of academia, he remembered his professors: George Dutton, Bliss Perry, and Albert Licklider. And what it was like to study under them. He stated finally that, “I think the business of the teaching and the importance to me of Williams is there. I learned here to think, I try to make my students think. I learned, I say, critical realism. I want my students to be critically realistic. I want them to look at what is on the page, and think about it.” In many ways, Brown worried the tradition of critical realism, and in many ways, he worried the meaning of Williams College, and ultimately he worried the meaning of Black Studies.
There is now an entire bibliography of works on this towering figure, developed by Sterling Brown scholars like Gabbin, Mark Sanders, and John Edgar Tidwell. Their work includes edited collections, the publication of Brown’s unpublished works, and special issues of African American literary studies journals, the most important being the special issue of Callaloo in the Fall of 1998 as well as Tidwell and Steven C. Tracy’s edited collection After Winter (2009). They have kept Brown’s genius available to the academic world. Tidwell’s long-awaited biography, which would be the most extensive, titled “Oh Didn’t He Gamble” taken from the subtitle of the Williams talk in 1973. Through the work of the Williams Black Alumni Network, David L. Smith, and others as well as the longtime chair of English Eleanor Traylor, respectively, there are at Williams and Howard, chairs named for Brown. And Howard is home to a student poetry group, known as the Sterling Brown Society. I wonder what Brown would make of the fact that he is both well-known among a segment of the Black academy, yet lesser known among our many students, and more importantly their families—the folk, lesser known among the musicians, lesser known among the newer Black poets, lesser known among the liars of the Black world. What might we gain from extending this revival beyond the academy into the spaces that made Brown’s blues possible? How we might use Brown’s work to engage the on-going struggle for Black self-determination, inspiring those workers in the Black liberation struggle as he did? The Blues are not a closed circle, though they move cyclically. They continue to go round an’ round. Seeing and feeling them, we must attach ourselves to ancestors whose job it is to guide us, round an’ round. If we do so, we can see how they resolved their moment, so we might see how we can resolve ours. Sterling Allen Brown’s life, his blues, is a record a document—and a mirror. We can never forget.
The blues is spirit
The blues is soul
The blues is ancient Black stories retold
The blues is spirit
The blues is soul
And the blues is re-membering ancestors, young and old
The blues is a feeling
The blues is a seeing
The blues is a Black tradition always repeatin’
The blues is a feeling
The blues is a seeing
And the blues is a kinda livin’, our own world we be in
The blues is radical
The blues is spiritual
The blues is Black people’s secular and sacred ritual
The blues is radical
The blues is spiritual
And the blues are Sterling Brown, his life, a world made lyrical
A blue note for Sterling Brown.
A Blues for Sterling Brown.
Joshua Myers is an assistant professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University, where he has taught since the Fall of 2013. A 2009 Howard University graduate, he received his PhD in Africana Studies from Temple University in 2013. He is a member of the board of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and has spent the last two years working with DC Black Power Chronicles as well as the Africa World Now Project Collective. In addition, he edits the online journal, A Gathering Together and has two upcoming book projects, the first of which is a history of the Howard University student protest of 1989.
