Killing John Cabot and publishing black: Gwendolyn Brooks's Riot.

Sullivan, James D.

In the late 1960s, at the height of her career, Gwendolyn Brooks .changed publishers, switching from Harper & Row, a major press that could give her widespread distribution and publicity, to small, new, African American-run Broadside Press. Harper & Row had just published arguably her most accomplished book, In the Mecca. in 1968. Sloughing off, the very next year, great stretches of her mainstream-poetry-buying public was a profoundly anti-economic move. Many who had bought her work in the past would now have significant difficulty finding it--indeed, even learning it existed--given the considerably smaller resources of poet Dudley Randall's then-recently founded press. Riot would be among the first books (granted, a small one--a chapbook, really) published by, essentially, a one-man operation that had, until that year, 1969, published only broadsides.

This move has usually been interpreted as a sign of Brooks's commitment to African American cultural nationalism. In fact, she said so herself: "I've been telling everyone who's black, 'You ought to have a black publisher,' and of course that was easy for me to say. I have left Harper not because of any difficulty therewith, but simply because my first duty is to the estimable, developing black publishing companies" (qtd. in Israel 104). And after she started publishing with Haki R. Madhubuti's Third World Press, she told an interviewer:

I couldn't possibly think of going back to any white publisher. I'll always be with a black publisher and if Third World Press discontinues its operations, though it doesn't seem to have any prospects of that, I shall publish my own work. I will never go back to a white press. But I left them, as you probably know, because I wanted to encourage the Black publishers who at that time needed clients. (Brown and Zorn 54)

Not only, in fact, did Brooks forgo the greater royalties she might have received through Harper & Row, but she donated her royalties from Riot back to Broadside Press, thus extending Randall's small resources so that he could afford to publish other African American poets (Melhem 190).

An admirable commitment--the poet withdraws her considerable cultural capital from one institution and deposits it in another otherwise undercapitalized venture, shoring up its finances and thus encouraging it to flourish. All this cultural finance and politics, however, has seemed to some commentators external to the poetry. Kenny J. Williams, for one, regarding Brooks's overt identification with all things cultural nationalist, charges, "Changing one's hairstyle and refusing certain amenities from a white reading public, while perhaps significant political statements, are ultimately far more cosmetic than substantive" (63). That is, such moves do not much affect the poetry or the way we read it.

But Riot, Brooks's first Broadside Press book, just like any other literary text, depends on a specific material form to reach its audience. Poems reach their audiences not as abstract linguistic constructs that are pretty much the same whatever their material published form, but either as performance or as printed artifacts. As performance, the venue and occasion of the recitation, as well as the delivery and gestures of the reciter, inflect the poem for the audience. As for Riot, the material qualities and the provenance of the artifact--as Jerome McGann has argued in his call for a "materialist hermeneutics" (11)--emphasize and create, inflect and deflect the text's meanings. Since Brooks chose to publish Riot with Broadside, readers had to approach the book through a specifically African American context. That context was tied to the artifact that bore the text. Readers of her earlier Harper & Row books had, famously, not always considered it necessary to allow significance to the racial context of the po ems' composition. But with Riot, not only the poet, but also the publisher, the retailers (primarily African American-run businesses), and crucially the target market of presumed readers were black. The domination of the whole communicative process by African Americans greatly decreased the likelihood of anyone's reading the poem through a lens of universal white humanism.

Up through the late 1960s, white critics had made statements about Brooks and her work that, in retrospect, look foolish, but at the time seemed reasonable to them. They had not yet, after all, learned to think of their own whiteness as a racial category, so they had difficulty appreciating experiences specifically marked as non-white as applicable to or even as a part of a universal human experience as they understood it. In fact, as Henry Taylor has pointed out, since the publication of her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, in 1945, white critics had often praised Brooks as "a fine poet, not regardless of her color, but despite it" (267). The publication of her work within a predominantly white context and for a predominantly white audience allowed and perhaps encouraged such judgments. The first major review of her work, the one she has said "initiated My Reputation" (Brooks, Report from Part One 72) took this approach. Paul Engle, reviewing the book for the Chicago Tribune, praised the sonnet sequence "Gay Chaps at the Bar" thus:

And finest of all, they can be read for what they are and not, as the publishers want us to believe, as Negro poems. For they should no more be called Negro poems than the poems of Robert Frost should be called white poetry.... The finest praise that can be given the book is that it would be a superb volume of poetry in any year by any person of any color. (4)

To praise the book in that forum at that time perhaps required stripping away the specifically black elements, praising it as though a white poet might have produced it. (1)

J. Saunders Redding, in an equally positive review of Brooks's 1949 Annie Allen for the Saturday Review of Literature, also felt a need to strip away specifically black references in order to praise the book as a whole. He deplores the tendency of modern poetry to address a limited audience and regrets Brooks's tendency, in some poems, to address a black "coterie." He refers specifically to "Stand off, daughter of the dusk" (Brooks, Blacks 137), with its reference to color distinctions within the black community:

But when [Brooks's] talent devotes itself to setting forth an experience even more special and particularized than the usual poetic experience then it puts itself under unnecessary strain.... Who but another Negro can get the intimate feeling, the racially particular acceptance and rejection, and the oblique bitterness of this?

The question is whether Miss Brooks or any other poet (now when so many people find modern poetry obscure and unrewarding) can afford to be a coterie poet. (6-7)

What speaks to experiences particular to an African American readership must be discounted in order to praise the book as art otherwise universal achievement. In ironic retrospect, "Stand off..." looks fairly accessible when compared to the clotted rhetoric of the book's centerpiece, "The Anniad," an intimidating performance dearly addressed primarily to the high modernist coterie of the 1940s--certainly not to any wide public.

Most notoriously and explicitly, Louis Simpson, in reviewing Brooks's 1963 Selected Poems, wrote, "I am not sure it is possible for a Negro to write well without making us aware he is a Negro. On the other hand, if being a Negro is the only subject, the writing is not important" (25). (2) This outright dismissal of African American experience as a fitting subject matter for poetry, predictably enough, provoked a response. Hoyt W. Fuller used it as Exhibit A at the beginning of his essay "Toward a Black Aesthetic" to show the indifference and racism of white audiences when it comes to African American art (4-5). Placing Fuller's essay at the beginning of his landmark critical anthology The Black Aesthetic, Addison Gayle, Jr., positioned Simpson's remark as the provocation against which the book's whole theoretical and critical structure was built: a turning away from a white audience indifferent or even hostile to African American art in order to construct works addressed to a specifically black audience.

By the late 1960s, when Brooks was turning away from a white audience for her work anyway, Dan Jaffe acknowledged the value of African American experience as a topic for poetry, but he located its value in a white audience's reception:

There may be some who will maintain that only a black can judge the validity of Gwen Brooks's poems, or those of any other black poet. The real judgment they may insist is not to be made by white readers and critics.... But the real question is not what Gwen Brooks has to say to those who have shared her experiences, who have already known what she has to say. The real question is whether she can make the alien feel. The purpose of art is always to communicate to the uninitiated, to make contact across seemingly incontrovertible barriers. Can the poet make the white feel black; the healthy, sick; the defeated, hopeful? One of the measures of a black poet's work is whether he can make a comfortable white (who has not had his sense of language and humanity thoroughly shattered) respond. (54-55)

To be fair to Jaffe, he does not insist that white readers are the only proper judges for African American poetry: "This is not to say that Gwen Brooks's poetry will have no value for black readers. They may well find their own surprises" (55). And, in fact, he takes the step of acknowledging the racial and cultural standpoint from which he makes his judgment, titling his essay "Gwendolyn Brooks: An Appreciation from the White Suburbs"--certainly an advance from earlier critics who conflated whiteness with universal humanism, from which they then excluded whatever was specifically non-white.

By the late 1960s, when Brooks had begun to identify herself with the cultural nationalist Black Arts Movement, she began making public statements, in forums addressed primarily to a black audience, about the limitations of white critics. For a 1968 profile in Ebony:

I am absolutely free of any fear of what any white critic might say because I feel that it's going to be most amazing if any of them really understand the true significance of the struggle that's going on.... They will probably look at the blacker products and disapprove of them because, naturally, they have to disapprove of disapproval of themselves. (Garland 56)

For a 1971 interview in Essence:

"Whites are not going to understand what is happening in black literature today. Even those who want to sympathize with it still are not equipped to be proper critics" (Brooks, Report from Part One 176-77). She included this interview in her 1972 autobiography, which she also published through Broadside Press. In fact, the book emphasizes this rejection of white criticism by restating it in two other prominent places. At the end of the book's central autobiographical essay, "Report from Part One," she writes:

There is indeed a new black today. He is different from any the world has known. He's a tall-walker. Almost firm. By many of his brothers he's not understood. And he is understood by no white. Not the wise white; not the Schooled white; not the Kind white. Your least pre-requisite toward an understanding of the new black is an exceptional Doctorate which can be conferred only upon those with the proper properties of bitter birth and intrinsic sorrow. I know this is infuriating, especially to those professional Negro-understanders, some of them so very kind, with special portfolio, special savvy. But I cannot say anything other, because nothing other is the truth. (85-86)

Don L. Lee (Haki R. Madhubuti) opens his preface to the book by quoting this very paragraph (13). So the whole book begins--as does The Black Aesthetic, with Gayle placing Fuller's quotation of Simpson right at the start--with an explicit rejection of a white context and a white readership.

By publishing Riot with Broadside Press, Brooks materially removed her work from a white context and placed it into a black context. The Harper & Row imprint, the imprint of the large commercial publisher, carried with it the business interests of that publisher--to reach as wide a market as possible, an implicitly universal address to all potential purchasers of poetry books. This implicitly universal address, of course, issued from a predominantly white business that saw the most money to be made in a white reading public, one numerically larger and typically with more disposable income to spend on books than an African American readership. The address may have been universal, but the context of its utterance, the publication of the book, was white. The criticisms and reviews of Brooks's work quoted above (other, perhaps, than Jaffe's somewhat more self-conscious one) were similarly made on behalf of a presumably universal audience, but uttered from within a "white" context. (3) Publishing with Broadside pl aced Riot in a specifically African American context. This was not a white publisher's presentation of a black poet's work (black art, white artifact), but a work written, published, and distributed all in a black context. It had to be read as culturally specific rather than as universal.

At the beginning of "The Sermon on the Warpland" in In the Mecca, Brooks quotes Ron Karenga: "The fact that we are black I is our ultimate reality" (Blacks 451). This statement explicitly rejects earlier white critics' calls for a universal humanism in her work and directs the audience to read what follows as specifically addressing African American experience. Rather than affix this statement to the start of everything she wrote from then on, Brooks made sure that the artifact bearing her text always emerged out of an African American material context. The route by which one arrived at Riot and all her subsequent books would be through African American institutions.

The artifact Broadside Press produced for Brooks was designed to fit this work of poetry into everyday life: a title that told the African American audience this book would address recent events in the community's experience, a page count (twenty-two, many with only a few lines) small enough for practically anyone to wedge a complete reading into the most hectic day's schedule, a price of one dollar that would fit nearly anyone's budget. As she said in a 1969 interview, she wanted to reach "black people who would never go to a bookstore and buy a $4.95 volume of poetry written by anyone" (Brooks, Report from Part One 149). The price welcomed readers. It was a price for anyone with a pocket of spare change. The higher prices of her earlier books, on the other hand, immediately divided those who encountered the artifact between, on one hand, people for whom poetry is a priority on which they are willing to spend their money and, on the other hand, that majority for whom it is a low priority if any at all and wh o would not ordinarily lay out their scarce cash for it. In her favorite story of reaching a popular audience, Brooks reports on a group of young poets walking into a tavern with her and reading their work to some appreciative patrons who never would have gone to a poetry reading, no matter how well advertised or conveniently scheduled. (4) This incident, which she refers to again and again in interviews and in her autobiographical writing, became a touchstone for her, evidence of a popular constituency for poetry that, given the current status of the genre, remains, usually, just outside the poet's reach. The low price for Riot was an attempt to lower the barrier between her art and that popular audience so that anyone might step over it.

On the back cover, the author's photo shows her in a natural hairstyle. Her gaze is direct, the composition more that of a snapshot than a portrait. The photographic style and the plain cotton shirt she wears indicate together that the hairstyle is not a fashion statement but a political statement. The photo indicates that the artifact emerges from a black nationalist cultural context, and the back cover blurb specifies the historical and political context for reading the poem: "It arises from the disturbances in Chicago after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968."

The front cover is black: The names of the poet and the press as well as the price are small white spaces in a black field. That is, the field of discourse here, rather than the typical white (i.e., white page interrupted by black ink; the space of public discourse intruded upon by a black voice) is here black. The intrusion upon the black space is, here, white. (5) A roughly torn white circle, a wound in the blackness, holds the jumbled red capitals of the title RIOT in contrast with the stately typography of the poet's name. Open the cover, and the book further emphasizes the establishment of a black context by, paradoxically, quoting a white writer (Henry Miller, writing in the 1940s) in the epigraph. Here, too, the design is white on black. Typographically, the design once again emphasizes that these are little white words in a big black space:

It would be a terrible thing for Chicago if this black fountain of life should suddenly erupt. My friend assures me there's no danger of that. I don't feel so sure about it.

Maybe he's right. Maybe the Negro will always be our friend, no matter what we do to him. (3)

The quotation emphasizes three points: white misunderstanding of black attitudes, white fear of black power, and a dawning awareness in this one white writer that blacks may have interests and desires contrary to those of the white majority.

Turn the page again, and one sees, overleaf from the Miller quotation and opposite the title-page, a reproduction of a painting, Allah Shango, by Chicago artist Jeff Donaldson: two young men behind a sheet of glass, stenciled "GLASS," "SHEET," and, most pointedly though smaller, "Made in USA." Each touches the glass with one hand; one holds a long African statuette by its base. He holds it low, like a club next to the glass--not threatening, just ready. Miller could be describing these young men. One cannot say what they are thinking, though they clearly feel self-assured, but one knows that the club-like artifact of African culture can smash the invisible barrier. Any moment now, a pane may shatter. The Miller quotation and the Donaldson painting represent the liminal moment before all changes violently. A terrible beauty is about to be born. The book is therefore designed so as to complicate and unsettle any white presence (Miller feels uneasy; the perspective in Donaldson's painting is from the vulnerable side of the glass) while it suggests a context of black cultural authority. Even the dedication--"For Dudley Randall,/a giant in our time" (7)--makes perfect sense within the small world of black publishing, where he was enormously influential, but not within the larger, white-controlled world of commercial publishing. The material qualities of the artifact, therefore, are designed to establish an African American context for both interpreting and judging the poem. A reading that presumes a white universal perspective must appear irrelevant or absurd.

The first of the poem's three parts, "Riot," makes explicit the irrelevance of trying to understand the April 1968 disturbances in Chicago from an external perspective. One must understand it from inside, from the point of view of the community that exploded. The choice of epigraph alludes to the historical irony that the death of the American prophet of non-violence unleashed a storm of violence. Brooks quotes Martin Luther King, Jr.: "A riot is the language of the unheard" (9). The proper response to violence is not to condemn it, but to inquire into its causes. What has led people to this extreme? What have they been trying to say? King used the line in a speech at Ohio Northern University a few months before his murder. In the midst of explaining his theory of non-violence, he said:

But in condemning violence it would be an act of irresponsibility not to be as strong in condemning the conditions in our society that cause people to feel so angry that they have no alternative but to engage in riots. What we must see is that a riot is the language of the unheard. (King)

What they have to say had not been adequately addressed in public discourse, just as specifically African American experience had been excluded as a legitimate literary focus in prior criticism of Brooks's work. In Riot, especially in the second part, she lets the rioters speak. She writes what earlier critics would specifically exclude as an acceptable topic. This book expresses explicitly what the critics quoted above had not heard or had not wanted to hear in her work.

"Riot" introduces us to the white, prosperous, highly cultured (in European tastes), and liberal John Cabot. The riot is described from his point of view, but by a speaker who mocks him throughout the poem. She does not accept his well-educated perspective as authoritative, but rather as contemptible. Brooks had used this technique before--white point of view, black speaker unsympathetic with it--in, for example, "The Lovers of the Poor" and "Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat," both in her 1960 The Bean Eaters. Cabot would apparently see himself as more liberal than the bigoted suburban matron in "Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat." After all, he socializes with those "Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka" (9), and even as the rioters take him down, he imagines himself a Christly sacrifice, blessing his executioners: "Lord!/Forgive these nigguhs that know not what they do" (10)--a virtuoso of condescension--"nigguhs" expressing the contempt his forgiveness only implies. Like the lovers of the poor from "the Ladies' Bette rment League" who, visiting from suburban Lake Forest and Glencoe, gag at "the urine, cabbage, and dead beans,/Dead porridge of assorted dusty grains,/The old smoke, heavy diapers, and, they're told,/Something called chitterlings" (Blacks 350), Cabot too takes olfactory offense at "the fume of pig foot, chitterlings, and cheap chili" (10). He resembles also the addressee of the 1945 poem "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith," who would object to Smith's bad taste. But in "Riot," Brooks does not chide gently as she does in those other three poems. Satin-Legs Smith turns and makes the prosperous white liberal who would prefer geraniums and Grieg to Smith's own choices into the object of his own scathing scrutiny. In this historical moment, Cabot, not Smith, is the one with the distorted values, limited social perceptions, and narcissistic world view.

Here, Brooks does not restrain anger elsewhere sublimated. In the 1945 "Negro Hero," Dorrie Miller sublimates his anger at whites by killing Japanese. For "Riot," on the other hand, Brooks lets her characters express such anger directly. In "In the Mecca," Way-Out Morgan may "consider Ruin" (Blacks 431), and Amos may call for the "long blood bath" (Blacks 424), but in "Riot" Brooks lets such characters act out the violence that has heretofore festered and fed upon itself in their imaginations. She seems to let Way-Out Morgan, with his slogan "Death-to-the-Hordes-of-the-White-Men!" (Blacks 430), out from his tiny apartment and into the street, where he shares his hoarded guns with Satin-Legs Smith. This is Way-Out Morgan's long-awaited "Day of Debt-pay" (Blacks 431) for, among Brooks's other martyrs, Emmett Till, Rudolph Reed, and Medgar Evers. When Cabot looks up and sees that "the Negroes were coming down the street" (9), one may see the great host of Brooks's characters from her earlier work on the march.

Even those like Cabot who consider themselves good liberals are not exempt. In a 1971 interview, Brooks spoke caustically about the white literary friends she had made in earlier phases of her career. She had come to realize that, to them, she was a social token, a signifier of their liberalism, just like Cabot's "Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka."

They thought I was lovely. I was a sort of pet. They thought I was nice. I believed in integration, and so did they. Almost every time they'd have a gathering. I'd be one of them. But now, I rarely see these people, though a couple still call themselves my friends. (Report from Part One 177)

In Cabot, she is, of course, killing a fictional character, but he seems to represent the white Chicago literati with whom she used to socialize. While "The Lovers of the Poor" gently satirizes self-regarding and condescending philanthropy, a white reader could easily enough see the critique as directed at someone else, someone less sensitive, and laugh along with the speaker at those silly ladies. In "Riot," however, a sympathetic white reader's self-perception as "the wise white ... the Schooled white... the Kind white" is irrelevant to the rioters "coming toward him in rough ranks. / In seas. In windsweep" (9).

The poem destroys "whitebluerose" John Cabot and, by implication, all the European-derived aesthetic assumptions with which he is associated. We are, after all, introduced to him in the first stanza through his tastes, the touchstones he cannot lay aside and by which he judges all else. As the rioters approach, he almost [but never quire, of course] for- got his Jaguar and Lake Bluff; almost forgot Grandtully (which is The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim's, the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri. (9)

As these cultural references are irrelevant in understanding the riot, their literary equivalents would be irrelevant to judging Riot. Brooks, furthermore, presents Cabot's destruction through one of the most prestigious poetic forms in the English tradition: blank verse, the form most famously wielded by Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. Though we are not told Cabot's literary tastes, no doubt he would profess to admire such work. Within these regular, formal lines, Cabot perceives the rioters, in contrast, "coming toward him in rough ranks" (9). The blank verse expresses the myopic white point of view, but it will not contain--in fact, it celebrates--the black rage that bursts out in splinters in the next section.

In the second section, "The Third Sermon on the Warpland," the unheard find their language. Actually, Brooks rejects generalized views of the riot as a single experience or the rioters as a unified mass of the sort Cabot perceives bearing down on him. The riot is full of individualized experiences, so she presents it as a collage. Some of the vignettes appear on pages of their own, some juxtaposed with another vignette, isolating the fragments from one another so that it is materially impossible for a reader of the chapbook to see the riot whole, but only through glimpses.

One vignette presents the news media, specifically the Chicago SunTimes, not so much as a source of information as a clearinghouse for rumors. Brooks quotes the tag that peppered the news section of that paper throughout the days of the riot: "Rumor? check it / at 744-4112" (17). Nor does the Black Philosopher, a character who appears intermittently throughout the poem, offer much in the way of an overall interpretation. His final comment is: "There they came to life and exulted, the hurt mute. Then it was over. The dust, as they say, settled." (20)

He focuses on the element of joy, but he does not presume to suggest where it all leads. The gangbangers do not know how to respond either: "'Coooooool!' purrs Peanut [a leader in the Blackstone Rangers gang]./.../I This Peanut will not let his men explode./.../These merely peer and purr, I and pass the Passion over" (18). This ambivalent exclamation may be either admiration for what he sees around him or an admonition to "his men" to stay cool, to remain aloof from this disorganized passion, to maintain their discipline. They go so far as to confer with their enemies, the Disciples, with whom they are "mutual in their 'Yeah!--/this AIN'T all upinheah!'" (18). According to D. H. Melhem, upinheah is "a Black English expression of the sixties [that] means 'hip,' 'with it,' smart or clever. The language stresses the young men' s communality" (198-99). Yes, their communality, but in an ambivalent way. Their use and Brooks's use of the argot reinforces the sense of a coherent community by forming a linguistic boun dary that excludes outsiders and expresses their alienation from what is happening to their community. They do not participate in and are not a part of this watershed event. Facing the Rangers, across the page gutter, the white liberals--Cabot's political cousins--are visually paired up with the gangbangers in their alienation from the riot. Their language too expresses simultaneously a solidarity with and an alienation from the community that was exploding. Like the Rangers, they disapprove; they season their disapproval, however, not with admiration, but with condescension: "But WHY do These People offend themselves?" say they who say also "It's time. These People." (19)

They interpret the riot as signifying the African American community's incapacity to organize and govern itself, requiring the intervention of "the wise white...the Schooled white...the Kind white." The excessive satire, indeed the caricature, of white liberals in this vignette, imbedded, once again, within an artifact that establishes a specifically African American context, stresses all the more the rejection of an external perspective on these events. Even if people inside the community do not fully understand it, outsiders who try to interpret it will only sound ridiculous.

Brooks excludes also points of view that might express sympathy with the rioters yet condemn their violence, as though "A clean riot" were possible: A clean riot is not one in which little rioters long-stomped, long-straddled, BEAN- LESS but not knowing Why go steal in hell a radio, sit to hear James Brown and Mingus, Young-Holt, Coleman, John, on V.O.N. and sun themselves in Sin. (4)

They have no theory or understanding of their hunger such as the Black Philosopher might provide. They only know their transgression is exhilarating. Their hunger is more spiritual than material, yet its expression, of course, has material consequences: arson, looting, vandalism, death. Though bean-less, rather than plunder a West Side restaurant, they burn it so as to watch "Crazy flowers/cry up across the sky" (12). And they loot radios and records, not food--black pop music such as that by Melvin Van Peebles to feed their souls rather than "Jessie's Perfect Food" to feed their bellies. King's "unheard," though perhaps "not knowing Why" themselves, express their strongest needs through their choice of what to steal.

Having so meticulously crafted a context of moral sympathy with the rioters, Brooks does not flinch at the most tragic fact of the riot: People died. No one of the likes of John Cabot died in the Chicago riot, but nine African American men did. To mourn them, however, would implicitly condemn the event that killed them. So she takes another route. She imagines one who might be, in more sentimental hands, a particularly pathetic victim, a "Motherwoman," and then, rather than mourn the death, she celebrates the life. "She lies among the boxes/(that held the haughty hats, the Polish sausages)," her body but a container, like the boxes, hardly relevant after use. Nor is she corpse-like, but looking now rather "in newish, thorough, firm virginity/as rich as fudge is if you've had five pieces." The closest the vignette approaches to mourning is the line that begins the list of some of her life's pleasures--"Not again shall she"--but any hint of regret gets lost then, after the "shall," in a tenseless list of friend s, lovers, and hints of a full life (16). As in some of Brooks's other poems about dead women, particularly "southeast corner" and "the rites for Cousin Vit," this one describes the woman's passing as an expression of her abundant liveliness.

Immediately below the "Motherwoman" vignette, Brooks offers a rejection of mainstream tragic sensibility. A twelve-year-old boy (probably no reader of Hemingway's book on bullfighting, but capable as any of us of plucking a phrase out of the cultural atmosphere) shouts, "Instead of your deathintheafternoon,/kill 'm Bull! / kill 'm Bull!" (16). Immature? Yes, but without comment, an expression of the spiritual release some of the rioters felt.

The third vignette on that page becomes, by juxtaposition, linked to the others: "The Black Philosopher blares / 'I tell you, exhaustive black integrity / would assure a blackless America...'" (16). Whatever that means, Brooks's ellipsis suggests he has been cut off in the middle of explaining it. He "blares" so as to be heard amid the chaos of the riot. No one is listening to him. Back on the first page of this "The Third Sermon on the Warpland," he could offer Marxist comments on the relationship between European-derived culture and the African labor that made it economically possible: Our chains are in the keep of the Keeper in a labeled cabinet on the second shelf by the cookies, sonatas, the arabesques...(11)

And he suggests that the "remarkable music" the white listener does not hear, "The blackblues," both derives from that condition of enslavement and oppression, and also expresses an impulse for vengeance. It is, addressing the white who does not listen, "A / Death Song For You Before You Die" (11). Before the riot starts, the Black Philosopher has ample space in which to theorize, but in the midst of the riot, people act without thought. Twelve-year-old Yancey, the anti-Hemingway, doesn't care about the cultural theory, but in the excitement of the moment blurts out with exuberant anger. Brooks exhorts her readers in the last line of "The Second Sermon on the Warpland" at the end of In the Mecca, "Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind" (Blacks 456). When the tornado arrives, the cultural materialist philosopher may keep shouting and explaining all he likes, but nobody will or even can listen to him as they are engaged, all around him, in authentic expression. Like theorizing, mourning b ecomes possible only at some remove from the "the noise and whip of the whirlwind." In the midst of what Brooks saw as an historical turning point for her community, to pause for mourning would be a sentimental abdication of the responsibility to see clearly and to act upon "what! is going on" (14).

Previous experience with white critics had taught Brooks that such material would be judged harshly if published in a mainstream context. Within this painstakingly crafted alternative context, the voice of the white liberal, as we have seen above, must seem irrelevant. So when that voice deplores the violence--"But WHY do These People offend themselves?"--to deplore it is made, within this context, to seem a wrong response. Brooks offers the Phoenix myth as a framework for a more positive response. She uses a dictionary definition of the word as epigraph for "The Third Sermon": "In Egyptian mythology, a bird which lived for five hundred years and then consumed itself in fire, rising renewed from the ashes.--Webster" (11). She reminds her readers that fiery destruction and death are a prelude to renewal and that this mythic framework has an African provenance. That is, having rejected a white cultural context likely to deplore the violence, she provides an African framework within which to see it more positive ly. And rather than the white liberal approach of declaring from outside the community, "It's time to help I These People" (19), she offers, directly overleaf from that parody of condescension, an image of sell-renewal. Furthermore, memory will no doubt distort and transform these events into legend. Whatever actually happened in the riot matters less than what people do with the opportunities it presents: "Lies are told and legends made. / Phoenix rises unafraid." Perhaps most important is what happens next, when "The dust, as they say, settled" (20).

Rather than offer a realistic description of the sort of social renewal Brooks hoped for in the aftermath of the riot, the third part, "An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire," suggests instead Brooks's utopian hopes. In this love poem, this free-verse aubade, one lover addresses another as they rise to part in the morning. In a book of wildly shifting tones--between Cabot and the speaker in "Riot," from one vignette to another in "The Third Sermon"--the last poem uses the most surprising tone of all: tenderness. Whereas "The Third Sermon" has blasted the experience of the riot apart into a dozen often irreconcilable perspectives, the book ends with a moment of intimacy. The title suggests that this couple has indeed found a way to "Conduct [their] blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind." This is the rebirth Brooks hopes for, the closeness of these two lovers writ large, a unity made possible now by the riot's destruction of an unhealthy social structure.

The first line reads, "It is the morning of our love." The second stanza refers to their union "In a package of minutes" and calls the two lovers "Merry foreigners in our morning" (21). At the start of their new relationship after, apparently, their first night of making love, they feel giddy still with the novel excitement of one another's bodies. This moment of falling in love, in all its intensity of pleasure, holds promise of rich delight stretching onward through the foreseeable time to come. Such a morning is no time to objectively consider how such love sometimes sours or how, even if it lasts a lifetime, it cannot maintain that hilarious intensity forever. This is, rather, the moment to feel the greatest awareness of their unity: There is a moment in Camaraderie when interruption is not to be understood. I cannot bear an interruption. This is the shining joy; the time of not-to-end. (22)

When "The dust [has] settled" from the riot, Brooks hopes for and encourages this response: an intense feeling of community. As the now-lovers may have known one another before, may even have felt some connection before this night, African Americans of Chicago would certainly have felt a shared identity before the incidents described here, but the poem offers a hope that this powerful shared experience would lead to a richer sense of communion than ever before. The Phoenix rises in all hopefulness for five hundred richly fulfilling years.

Yet "Because the world is at the window / we cannot wonder very long" (21). They have their varying responsibilities within the community they are creating. Though the speaker hates any interruption in their new intimacy, "We go / in different directions / down the imperturbable street" (22). The chapbook ends, in fact, with the acknowledgment--exhortation, perhaps--to responsibility within the new situation.

Looking back on Riot, Brooks did not feel entirely satisfied with her achievement. In an interview, she stressed the new direction her career took with its publication, along with her judgment that she had not quite succeeded: "Riot was really an effort at communication with a lot of people. I didn't succeed except in patches. It too [like In the Mecca] is meditative" (Hull and Gallagher 33). In 1969, she was torn between her high modernist ambitions, most fully achieved in Annie Allen, and her desire ever since the tavern reading to reach a popular audience. Thus, Arthur P. Davis, for one, considers the first part, "Riot," "Gwendolyn Brooks at her best," while the tessellated "Third Sermon," is written in the poet's obscure style" (102). Brooks herself cringed when she learned that the first line of "An Aspect of Love" --"It is the morning of our love"--had appeared in a Rod McKuen poem, and so she removed the line from all subsequent reprintings (Brooks, Report from Part One 187). To echo a poet of such mas s appeal was, as yet, too low-culture for her.

The late sixties do not, of course, mark a clean break in Brooks's poetry. The literary sophistication of her earlier work persists in the later work, and the political thrust of her later work pervades her earlier work as well. (6) After all, she considered the 1960 "We Real Cool" her greatest success by her new popular standards; of her later work only "The Boy Died in My Alley," from the 1975 Beckonings, in her judgment, came close (Hull and Gallagher 20).

Riot, however, makes a decisive break in the material contextualization of Brooks's poetry. Before that chapbook, her books arrived in one's hands through the ostensibly transparent medium of a major publishing house. One was not to notice the institutional mediation, but read transparently through it to the poet's work. A publication is not, however, an utterance of only the writer, but an utterance also of the publisher and of the other institutions-such as retailers, schools, and libraries--through which the artifact passes. Each institution, in conveying the text, places its own quotation marks around it, offering it--even when expressing full approval--within the context of its own values and interests, which are, of course, not always the values and interests of the writer. The reception of Brooks's work through 1968 clearly demonstrates the extent to which a publisher's imprint inflects both the way a work is valued and the way it is understood. When contrasted with Broadside, it becomes clear that Harper's imprint is racially marked as white and that it carries a set of assumptions and values with which Brooks wished, by the late 1960s, to dissociate herself. Literary publishers specifically identified as African American, such as Broadside Press and Third World Press, on the other hand, quote the text (Brooks's or anybody else's) within a context of values and interests specifically marked as black, in the process placing more emphasis and value than do publishers marked as whit e upon the depiction of and comment on African American cultural and social experience, and they thus encourage readings that particularly value these aspects of the texts.

In the 1960s, Brooks was coming to understand poetry not simply as a set of texts, but as a cultural practice that implicated a broad range of people who produce, distribute, and consume poetry in a variety of contexts and settings--from the editorial offices of Harper & Row and the armchairs of her reviewers to the workshops she conducted in her living room for local college students-and the tavern they wandered into for their impromptu reading--each of which inflects the text's meanings. Who publishes a literary work is, therefore, not just a commercial accident, a note upon the spine or title-page irrelevant to the meat of the book. The founding of small African American presses such as Broadside and Third World made it possible to publish work identified with African American cultural nationalism without that level of irony added to the text by reliance on white cultural institutions. The challenge here for the criticism of African American literature is to recognize that literature always appears under t he name not only of an author, but also of a racially marked publishing institution whose mission always inflects the work.

Notes

(1.) Ann Folwell Stanford, however, reads "Gay Chaps at the Bar"--as well as Negro Hero," also included in A Street in Bronzeville--as seering racial critique. Stanford's reading suggests that Engle picked a series of poems with some of the greatest engagement in racial politics in order to deny the relevance of a racially specific interpretation.

(2.) Upon the 1993 reissue of Brooks's Selected Poems, Simpson wrote that, after his notorious 1963 review, Brooks had thanked him for it, and he insisted that his remark had subsequently been misinterpreted (Wright 23). In the second volume of her autobiography, Brooks reprints her teasing introduction to Simpson's reading at a Poetry Society of America event, alluding playfully to that infamous remark (Report from Part Two 114-15).

(3.) Ironically, this includes the remarks of African American reviewer J. Saunders Redding.

(4.) The fullest account of this incident appears in Kent 210-11, though Brooks comments in an interview on Kent's lack of "sympathy with my constant announced concern for the taverneers" (Hull and Gallagher 22).

(5.) The cover was designed by Cledie Taylor, who also used a white-on-black design for the 1966 Broadside Press broadside edition of Brooks's poem 'We Real Cool." On the ways that particular design choice can alter readings of this poem, see Sullivan 33-38.

(6.) Other critics have commented on the continuities before and after 1967, the year Brooks has claimed to have made the decisive break in her career. See, for example, Baker 50, Bolden xiv, Lindberg 284-85, and Lowney 19.

Works Cited

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature. 1974. Washington, DC: Howard UP, 1982.

Bolden, B. J. Urban Rage in Bronzeville: Social Commentary in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks. Chicago: Third World P, 1999.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. Blacks. Chicago: David, 1987.

-----. Report from Part One. Detroit: Broadside P, 1972.

-----. Report from Part Two. Chicago: Third World P, 1996.

-----. Riot. Detroit: Broadside P, 1969.

Brown, Martha H., and Marilyn Zorn. "GLR Interview: Gwendolyn Brooks." Great Lakes Review 6.1 (1979): 48-55.

Davis, Arthur P. "Gwendolyn Brooks." Wright 97-105.

Engle, Paul. "Chicago Can Take Pride in New, Young Voice in Poetry." Wright 3-4.

Fuller, Hoyt W. "Toward a Black Aesthetic." The Black Aesthetic. Ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. Garden City: Anchor, 1972. 3-11.

Garland, Phyl. "Gwendolyn Brooks: Poet Laureate." Ebony July 1968: 48-56.

Hull, Gloria T., and Posey Gallagher. "Update on Part One: An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks." CLA Journal 21.1 (1977): 19-40.

Israel, Charles. "Gwendolyn Brooks." American Poets Since World War II: Part 1: A-K. Ed. Donald J. Greiner. Dictionary of Literary Biography 5. Detroit: Gale, 1980. 100-06.

Jaffe, Dan. "Gwendolyn Brooks: An Appreciation from the White Suburbs." Wright 50-59.

Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1990.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. Address. Ohio Northern U, Ada, OH. 11 Jan. 1968. Heterick Memorial Library, Ohio Northern U. 21 Mar. 2000. <http://www.onu.edu/library/king96.htm>

Lindberg, Kathryne V. "Whose Canon? Gwendolyn Brooks: Founder at the Center of the 'Margins.'" Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers. Ed. Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996. 283-311.

Lowney, John. "'A material collapse that is construction': History and Counter-Memory in Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca.'" MELUS 22.3 (1998): 3-20.

McGann, Jerome. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.

Melhem, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1987.

Redding, J. Saunders. "Cellini-Like Lyrics." Wright 6-7.

Simpson, Louis. "Don't Take a Poem by the Homs." Book Week 27 Oct. 1963: 6, 25.

Stanford, Ann Folwell. "Dialectics of Desire: War and the Resistive Voice in Gwendolyn Brooks's 'Negro Hero' and 'Gay Chaps at the Bar.'" African American Review 26 (1992): 197-211.

Sullivan, James D. On the Walls and in the Streets: American Poetry Broadsides from the 1960s. Urbana: U at Illinois P.1997.

Taylor, Henry. "Gwendolyn Brooks: An Essential Sanity." Wright 254-75.

Williams, Kenny J. "The World of Satin-Legs, Mrs. Sallie, and the Blackstone Rangers: The Restricted Chicago of Gwendolyn Brooks." A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Ed. Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. 47-70.

Wright, Stephen Caldwell, ed. On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996.

James D. Sullivan is Assistant Professor of English at Illinois Central College and the author of On the Walls and in the Streets; American Poetry Broadsides from the 1960s (U of Illinois P, 1997).