"The Kindergarten of New Consciousness": Gwendolyn Brooks and the Social Construction of Childhood - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Richard Flynn

Brooks's poetry explores even more fully the view shared by Black scholars that no single definition of "childhood" could accurately describe the lives of Black children. When A Street in Bronzeville was published on August 15, 1945, World War II was coming to an end and the Cold War was still on the horizon. Despite segregationist policies in the armed forces, the war years and immediate postwar years promised expanded opportunity for Black males in the urban North. In her "public" war poems in the volume, Brooks confronts the complicated intersection of race and masculinity. But while the war poems are the most overtly political poems in the volume, A Street in Bronzeville is no less engaged with homefront politics. The complexity of Brooks's depiction of masculinity in the volume both complements the more "domestic" poems in the book and foreshadows Brooks's Annie Allen (1949) and The Bean Eaters (1960), later poetry which, Susan Schweik observes, "more and more confront[s] political conflicts and violenc e within U.S. culture" (326). [4] Brooks's politics are deliberately subtle, a strategy that enables her to assume a highly effective, if understated, role as an advocate for Blacks in America.

Among the models for social protest that Brooks had likely read was Richard Wright's documentary book 12 Million Black Voices (1941), an eloquent and searing indictment of the plight of urban Blacks after the Northern migration, lavishly illustrated with photographs chosen by Edwin Rosskam from the files of the Farm Security Administration. Long a fan of Wright's work, Brooks was delighted to receive Wright's complimentary reader's report for Harper which concluded, "Miss Brooks is real and so are her poems." Writing to thank him, Brooks confessed to Wright that he "had been a literary hero of hers for years" (Kent 63). Among the poems Wright had singled out for praise, was Brooks's now-famous poem "kitchenette building": "Only one who has actually lived and suffered in a kitchenette could render the feeling of lonely frustration as well as she does" (qtd. in Kent 62). Wright's indictment of the kitchenette in 12 Million Black Voices paints kitchenette life as hopeless in a way that Brooks's poem does not:

The kitchenette is the author of the glad tidings that new suckers are in town, ready to be cheated, plundered and put in their places.

The kitchenette is our prison, our death sentence, without a trial, the new form of mob violence that assaults not only the lone individual, but all of us, in its ceaseless attacks.

The kitchenette with its filth and foul air, with its one toilet for thirty or more tenants, kills our black babies so fast that in many cities twice as many of them die white babies....

The kitchenette creates thousands of one-room homes where our black mothers sit, deserted, with their children about their knees.

The kitchenette blights the personalities of our growing children, disorganizes them, blinds them to hope, creates problems whose effects can be traced in the characters of its child victims for years afterwards. (105-10)