TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) - Eric McHenry knelt before Gwendolyn Brooks at a book signing in Topeka in 1996, awestruck by the historic figure he was thrilled to meet.
The young reporter and future poet laureate of Kansas, who stands 6-foot-6, was crouching in deference to one of the “towering geniuses of 20th century poetry,” as he describes her now.
Brooks, who was born in Topeka and died in 2000, would have turned 100 this year. To celebrate her centenary, McHenry is planning a celebration in June at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, and two new anthologies pay tribute to Brooks.
“Revise the Psalm” organizes Brooks-inspired writing around themes found in her work - motherhood, sisterhood, manhood, love, politics, place and craft. “The Golden Shovel” features new poems honoring Brooks.
“Her work will carry on,” McHenry told The Topeka Capital-Journal (https://bit.ly/2kfHlyD ), “because there was such an originality, and because her ear was so good. Everything, no matter how ordinary it is, that she’s describing becomes extraordinary because of the language she chooses. You read a line of Brooks and you just think nobody else could have said it that way.”
Her writing clamored with pool players who lurk late, thin gin and die soon, the down-keepers, sun-slappers, self-soldiers and harmony-hushers, and a domestic worker whose mouth is absurd from the last sourings of the master’s feast.
From the beginning, Brooks earned praise for examining the minutiae of black urban experience - particularly in her hometown of Chicago. Her first collection of poems provoked Mademoiselle magazine in 1945 to select her as an outstanding woman of the year. Five years later, Brooks became the first black person to receive a Pulitzer Prize.
She received two Guggenheim fellowships, the National Medal of Arts, and scores of honorary degrees - including one from Washburn University - and served for decades as poet laureate of Illinois.
Embracing her influence, Brooks personally financed and judged poetry contests, organized workshops, and took young authors under her wing. One of the editors of “Revise the Psalm,” Quraysh Ali Lansana, describes himself as her last protege.
Brooks worked with Lansana to organize “epic” three-hourlong open mic nights, which continue in her name. Each year, Brooks would write a $500 check to a winner chosen by the audience.
Lansana said his work on the anthology is an effort to ensure his mentor is remembered.
“I feel like Miss Brooks is woefully understudied and undervalued in the canon, though I believe she is one of the most significant writers of the 20th century,” Lansana said. “There are many people who believe that way, but there are just the people who don’t know who she is.”
He attributes her obscurity to a decision she made to embrace the Black Arts Movement following a meeting of young black writers in 1967. She walked away from Harper and Row at the height of her career to publish with black presses.
“I think she took in many ways a ding or a hit to her legacy,” Lansana said, “even though she continued to write really fantastic and amazing work for decades after that. But when she made that move, her career suffered.”
In a 1971 interview with The Topeka Daily Capital, Brooks rejected the characterization of her work as militant and defended making “art by black people, about black people and to black people.”
“If you had the kind of adventures the average black man and woman experience in their everyday life, you too would feel rebellious, uneasy,” Brooks said. “Some people lash out. Others just smolder.”
Carolyn Wims-Campbell smoldered Friday while trying to avoid coverage of the presidential inauguration. Campbell, whose father was first cousins with Brooks, was the first black member of the Kansas State Board of Education.
She lamented the dark downward spiral she foresees for the country.
“The other day I was somewhere,” Campbell said, “and this lady stopped me and she says, ’You know the song “We Shall Overcome,” ’ and I said, ’Oh, yeah, you know I know.’ She says, ’When are we going to overcome?’ And I said, ’I don’t think we ever will. We’re always going to be singing that song. We shall overcome. Someday.’ “
Brooks began writing about “our black revival, our black vinegar, our hands, and our hot blood,” but her work also pointed toward a common humanity. In a 1984 interview with herself for a university journal, the poet reflected on the things that excite her. Among her answers: “My developing suspicion that The American People, although capable of considerable amounts of self-deceit, are not lemmings, after all.”
Where Brooks showed optimism, her protege exercises “a light cynicism,” pointing to “the kind of race and class turmoil that we’re experiencing in the country.”
“We are all we have,” Lansana said. “If folks of all ethnicities and genders and sexual orientations and religions don’t come together to figure out how we’re going to change, or talk against how things are and things that are coming, then nothing will happen and it will be a very dark few years.”
The struggle echoes across generations. Brooks spoke of failed efforts for integration and a need for black people to help themselves. Similar interests brought her ancestors to Topeka.
In “Revise the Psalm,” co-editor Sandra Jackson-Opoku writes about the Exoduster movement, those who fled the “violent aftermath” of Reconstruction in the South. When segregation followed, the next generation migrated further north.
Coincidentally, Brooks’ mother was a teacher at Monroe Elementary School, now the historic site of a landmark case that struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine.
In a 1967 interview with Roy Newquist, Brooks said she “always resented” being born in Topeka.
“My parents were living in Chicago, but my mother wanted me to be born in her hometown, with her mother, so when I was due to arrive she went to Topeka,” Brooks said. “When I was about a month old we came back to Chicago, so I feel that I’m really a native Chicagoan. After all, I grew up here and attended Chicago public schools.”
Several schools there now bear her name, along with the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University.
Jackson-Opoku in an email explained the “particular and overwhelming pride” of being a native of Chicago, home to “the largest, most self-sufficient, successful black community in the nation.”
“I’d like to think that that Exoduster spirit that forged the nature of her parents in Kansas was also part of what made Gwendolyn Brooks who she was, both as a woman and a poet,” Jackson-Opoku said.
By 1996, Brooks had softened her attitude toward Topeka. Standing before a crowd gathered at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library to honor her as a woman of distinction, Brooks reflected on the pride she felt as “a little Topeka girl” and thanked Sonny Scroggins for his efforts to have a park dedicated in her name the following day.
An audio cassette recording McHenry saved captures an audience laughing at her stories, moved by her rhythmic readings. Brooks tells them of a recent conversation with a 12-year-old girl who, after watching her “carefully and soberly,” asked since she was so old and nearing death to tell her how to live.
“Take care of your body,” Brooks told the crowd. “Otherwise, you won’t have the energy to be whatever it is you want to be.”
Campbell said she wants to “spruce up” a park named for Brooks before the June celebration, which she is helping organize. Campbell said she hopes to attract young Topekans who “need to realize they have some talent.”
McHenry said he expects the event to include poetry readings and people who knew Brooks.
“As poet laureate, there are a number of poems I talk about because I think they’re really accessible to a lot of audiences and really rich in their potential for really fertile discussion,” McHenry said. “And one is ’The Bean Eaters,’ by Gwendolyn Brooks.
“It’s just a short poem looking into the lives of a poor, elderly African-American couple, in an urban setting, probably in Chicago, and virtually nothing actually happens in the poem, but by the time you’ve finished its 12 little lines, or whatever it is, you have such a profound sense of the richness and depth of their lived experience, it’s like you’ve read a little novel. And I think that giving marginalized people - to use an overused term - this sort of attention and dignity that they fully deserve was a big part of her project, among other things.
“I don’t know if she would articulate it like that necessarily. I think like any artist she was just trying to make art from what’s around her. Well, no, I don’t want to say that either because I think she may have had a social agenda.
“She may very well have thought, ’Why not the bean eaters? Why not them as a subject for American poetry?’ “
A signed copy of “Young Poet’s Primer,” by Gwendolyn Brooks, published in 1981, is available in the Topeka Room at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library.
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Information from: The Topeka (Kan.) Capital-Journal, https://www.cjonline.com
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