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

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Richard Flynn

Negro ... cannot escape having important things to say. His mere body, for that matter, is an eloquence. His quiet walk down the street is a speech to the people. Is a rebuke, is a plea, is a school. (312)

This is not the observation of a poet single-mindedly heralding art over political engagement. Her injunction to the Negro poet to "polish his technique" is directed at focusing "his way of presenting his truths and his beauties, that these may be more insinuating, and, therefore, more overwhelming" (312).

In May, 1950, Brooks received the unexpected news that she had won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Annie Allen. As the first Black person to win the Pulitzer Prize, she was thrust into a public role as cultural observer and spokeswoman, particularly regarding race matters. Despite this newfound fame, she and her husband and son were still living in a two-room kitchenette at 623 East 63rd Street. In early 1951, the thirty-three-year-old Brooks was delighted to find herself pregnant with her second child, Nora. Hoping to raise enough money for a down payment on a house, she sought to supplement the meager $500 advance she had received for her novel Maud Martha (1953) and turned to writing feature stories for popular magazines. Among these stories was "How I Told My Child About Race," published in the June 1951 Negro Digest. Brooks recalls an incident of racist violence, when "six or seven young white men" threw "handfuls of rocks" and shouted "'Look at the nig-gers' "at Brooks and her then five-year-old son Henry, Jr., during their evening stroll by "the beautiful buildings of the [U]niversity" of Chicago. Brooks vowed with bitter irony "never again to take evening walks east of Cottage Grove with [her] son":

Formerly I had felt that if any place at all was safe, the university district, mecca of basic enlightenment and progressive education would be safe. The buildings, with their delicate and inspiring spires, seemed now to leer, to crowd us with mutterings--"Oh no, you black bodies!-- no sanctuary here. You have found no sanctuary, you will find no sanctuary anywhere. This beauty is not for you, the architects, the builders, did not have the elongations of your filthy shadows in mind as they worked, as they shaped. Get out, get out, get out..." (30)

When Henry, Jr., asks "why-why-why--would 'those men' want to hurt us," his mother regains her composure, explaining that those with "light skins" feel that they are "better than us and that therefore they are entitled to rule others":

When you are bigger you may be able to help them change the way they feel by teaching them.... you are a person, and good, wise, and helpful to the world. Even without their education in mind, you would want to be good, wise and helpful anyhow. While you are little and helpless, you can do nothing but try to see trouble before it hits you with stones, and get away from it as best you can. (10)

The richly contradictory symbol of the University of Chicago occasions an expression of rage, though tempered somewhat by her tone of equanimity as she speaks to her son. Though it was home to Allison Davis and, for its time, represented a progressive approach to race relations, the University was nonetheless a stately and visible symbol of White privilege in Brooks's Black neighborhood. Furthermore, as she contemplates the imminent birth of her daughter Nora, Brooks knows that a similar explanation of race will have to be repeated.