A prophet overheard: a juxtapositional reading of Gwendolyn Brooks's "In the Mecca"

The poem is mythical and biblical not only in its style but also in its sources. It draws together remnants of Dante's descent into hell, the pastoral ideal of the twenty-third psalm and the American-Johnny-Appleseed-Dream, and the parables of the lost coin and sheep for examples, to fashion a loosely narrative quest. A little girl has gone missing, and the entire massive project must be searched to find her. Apartment by apartment, floor by floor, the Mecca is combed, and its inhabitants questioned. What emerges in the poem is not only the loss and containment of the little girl--who has been murdered and stuffed under a bed--but the multitudinous losses that comprise the lives of those who are trapped in the building. The Mecca, despite its expansiveness, provides little space for the exercise of freedom, and so is experienced primarily as a place of confinement. The walls of the building itself might be seen as constructed from the cramped lives and constricted voices of its inhabitants. They have become immobile bricks in their own prison-house.

The construction of Brooks's poem mirrors the monumental architecture of its setting. "In the Mecca" appears on the page in thick, long columns of irregular verse. Individual characters and their unique "places" are crowded in. Juxtaposed, they jostle against each other and press out against a jagged margin. This jumble of voices and places is punctuated with stark expressions that struggle to emerge from the depth of confusion--the most notable being Mrs. Sallie's cry in the Black vernacular, "WHERE PEPITA BE?" Offset by uppercase letters, this singular and panicked call is soon resubmerged in crowded multiplicity:

   ... Cap, where Pepita? Casey, where
      Pepita?
   Emmett and Melodie Mary, where
      Pepita?
   Briggs, Tennessee, Yvonne, and
      Thomas Earl,
   where may our Pepita be? (13)

The mother thus questions her older children by name, striving to preserve each one's unique place. But they reply in an anonymous chant of ignorance: "Ain seen er I ain seen er I ain seen er/ Ain seen er I ain seen er I ain seen er" (14). The plosive sounds of the girl's lame and BEing are diffused into dull anonymity and absence. Word slides into word, voice blends into voice, face blurs into face in the Mecca's cramped quarters, against a mother's cry and vision that insist on the particularity of a singular loss.

Like her initial recognition--"SUDDENLY, COUNTING NOSES, MRS. SALLIE / SEES NO PEPITA. 'WHERE PEPITA BE?' "--the mother's question to her neighbors comes in a longer line, standing out slightly but insistently from the cluttered stanzas: "One of my children is missing. One of my children is gone" (15). Each neighbor then replies, in ignorance of Pepita's whereabouts, with his or her own story of space, place, and loss.

Against inhuman pressures from without, characters strive to construct points of connection or shrines of meaning in their ever-narrowing spaces. What they reject or cling to may not appear sensical to those outside the Mecca building or poem, but it is part of a larger survival strategy. Melodie Mary's mind, for instance, cannot encompass any grief too large. Her world is too small and too full of pain already. So, for Pepita's older sister,