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

   headlines are secondary.
   It is interesting that in China
   the children blanch and scream,
   and that blood runs like a ragged wound
   through the flesh of the land.
   It matters mildly....

But, she wonders, "Where are the frantic bulletins / when other importances die?" and she identifies with something smaller and closer to her own compact existence:

   Trapped in his privacy of pain
   the worried rat expires,
   and smashed in the grind of a rapid heel
   last night's roaches lie.

The young girl "likes roaches, / and pities the gray rat" (10), substitute images for her missing sister.

She shares something of her brother Brigg's need for self-containment. In the vice-grip of external pressures, he determines to maintain his own rigid boundaries. He selects an armor more rigid than the roach's, though: "Briggs is adult as a stone / (who if he cries cries alone)." This fossilized existence protects him from loss, but it also precludes the sense of growth, hope, empathy, or community that might breed change. Thus, when he must go out among the gangs, "across the intemperate range," he perceives that "Gang / is health and mange. / Gang / is a bunch of ones and a singlicity." For a boy for whom "Immunity is forfeit, love / is luggage, hope is heresy," and the risk of annihilation mounts daily, the violent price of joining a gang seems reasonable. The poet urges her readers to feel the pain of this dilemma--"Please pity Briggs" (11)--but cautions against objectifying the Meccans as wholly "other" and thus further solidifying the walls of their containment. "... there is a central height in pity," she writes, highlighting the self-elevation that would disguise itself as depth, "past which man's hand and sympathy cannot go";

   past which the little hurt dog
   descends to mass--no longer Joe,
   not Bucky, not Cap'n, not Rex,
   not Briggs--and is all self-employed,
   concerned with Other,
   not with Us. (11)

With this line, the poem invites its readers in--to see its inhabitants as "Us," and to struggle alongside, in the dim and cramped quarters, to make meaning and to search for points of outlet and transformation in the Mecca walls.

Of course, any attempts by "outsiders" to make sense and safety out of such a site of oppression risk ethical compromise. When whites finally do arrive to track down Pepita--in the form of "The Law" with a "lariat of questions (18-19)--they do so primarily to contain black crime within the color line and to pronounce sentence upon it. They show no interest in the distraught black mother or show an ability to follow her lead. Their form of rescue merely effects another trespass.

As Brooks's determination to write "to Blacks" suggests, there is no easy entrance here for the white reader. Resolved to ignore her white readers, he leaves us to knock at the door. In Charles Bernstein's terms, I am frequently caught between the absorptive pull (imaginatively identifying as an insider) and the opposing push (against white--and white feminist--incursion). In recognizing the latter force as a necessary resistance from those more thoroughly "inside," I can neither oppose it nor harness it for myself. I can only enter a necessary dance, in and out of the push-and-pull, to remain engaged, to keep moving, and to keep pressing toward the kind of action the poem might be calling for. It is my contention that readers with racial privilege need not simply turn away in grief from the prophet's hard word, like the rich young man in the gospel story. But if our entrance into discipleship begins with an act of identification, it ultimately requires, like camels through the eyes of needles, a more radical transformation of spatial relations than can be achieved by mere good will. (27)