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

Perhaps because the boundaries of any community are somewhat permeable, Brooks both finds and makes a place for herself at the center of Black cultural life, even as she struggles with being a misfit and outsider at times. Her place in American letters, by contrast, changed dramatically with the publication of Annie Allen (1949), which seemed to cement her "universal" status with the Pulitzer Prize. This collection showed the same focus on Bronzevillean life as her previous book, with even more attention given to the lives of girls and women. It includes, notably, "The Anniad," a mock epic about a girl's coming of age. It also contains poems with a wry critique of white racist indifference, voyeurism, and charity. Its form evinces a more extreme high modernism, however, which drew both appreciation and suspicion from white reviewers and Black readers alike. While those like Redding feared seeing her formal talents "dribble away in the obscure and too oblique" (7), most members of her Black audience may well have been dismayed for opposite reasons, finding the vision of Black life eclipsed by a high formality. Both reactions suggest a dichotomy between content and form (a Black inside and a white outside) that would become more intense during the Black Arts Movement.

Some Black critics also saw the book as obscuring Black life and cutting short Black communication by the direction of its appeal. It was heard, in many ways, as a call to whites. Don L. Lee (later Haki Madhubuti), addresses this conflict in his preface to her 1972 autobiography Report From Part One:

   Annie Allen (1949), important? Yes.
   Read by blacks? No. Annie Allen more
   so than A Street in Bronzeville seems to
   have been written for whites. For
   instance, "The Anniad" requires
   unusual concentrated study ... [and]
   the book has ... a pleading tone....
   there is too much "Grant me that I am
   human, that I hurt, that I can cry." (1718) (5)

Although she would defend her early work, in general as being "political" and full of "rage," (6) Brooks seems to have accepted Lee's critical retrospective on the tone of Annie Allen. Describing the state of Black poetry at that time, she wrote in 1975: "The Forties and Fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable" ("Flowers" 1).

The authorization by the white literary establishment that the Pulitzer represented nonetheless gave Brooks a kind of "footing" that Lee acknowledges. The praise from white quarters, which Lee points out "all quarters" encouraged her to accept gratefully--expanded Brooks's cultural access and accessibility across racial lines. It brought both international recognition and a new following among "those 'negro' blacks who didn't believe that one is legitimate unless one is sanctioned by whites first." It also enabled her to get more work writing reviews and such, which was good experience and provided necessary funds (Lee 16-19).