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

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Richard Flynn

These concerns are further expressed in her early '50s journalism which appeared in Black journals like Phylon and Negro Digest, as well as in an essay Brooks wrote for the travel magazine Holiday titled "They Call it Bronzeville" (October 1951). Addressing the magazine's White audience using the conceit of a "white Stranger who enters Bronzeville for the first time" (61), Brooks demonstrates the intersection of class and race in the construction of childhood by contrasting the children of Woodlawn--"the elite area of Bronzeville"--with those of "Bronzeville proper." In the Woodlawn neighborhood of "brown-brick bungalows and attractive small apartment houses...the children"

But eight-year-old Clement Lewy lives "an interesting life, a life perhaps like an unmixed batter--lumpy, vaguely disheveled." Clement, a latchkey child whose "mother has grown listless since her husband deserted her," nevertheless

are very light, or maybe apricot, a sort of sunburst brown. If, unhappily, the children are dark, just plain out-and-out dark that nothing can be done about, that not even Golden Peacock or Black and White bleach can "help," then their parents have to spend money on clothes, have to force music or art through those black unfortunate finge rs, have to maneuver those black bodies into the right social situations, have to "scheme." (62)

looks alert, almost too alert; he looks happy, he is always spirited. He is in second grade. He does his work and has been promoted at the proper times. At home he sings. He recites little poems. He tells his mother little stories wound out of the air. His mother glances at him once in a while. She would be proud of him if she had the time. (63) [13]

As with the children who populate Brooks's first two volumes of poems, the restrictions of color and class impinge on the promise of artistry. The very existence of a ghetto, "something that should not exist--an area set aside for the halting use of a single race," Brooks argues, has a profound effect on children's attempts to negotiate what is "essentially only what is ordinary: human struggle, human whimsicality, and human reach toward soul-settlement" (61).

The photographs accompanying the article (undoubtedly chosen by the editors rather than Brooks) contradict Brooks's portrayal of Bronzevillians as ordinary human beings. Rather, they are drawn as entertainers and exotics: a debutante ball at "an exclusive Bronzeville social club"; a gathering of artists and writers; Eldzier Cortor, nationally known Chicago artist, depicted with a nude man wearing a Haitian ritual mask; a light-skinned cover girl posing for "Tan Confessions, a racy sister magazine of Ebony, influential Negro monthly"; and "Sepia Show Girls" at the White-owned Club De Lisa. The lone remaining photograph depicts a boy of six or seven drinking from a glass by a window in an obviously shabby apartment. The caption reads: "HIS ARM BROKEN, his mother dead, his father vanished, this Bronzeville waif looks wistfully at life from the window of his foster home" (114). Brooks's effort to teach the White Stranger that Bronzeville is "a place where People live" (116), is undercut by the photo spread which suggests that Bronzeville is a place of dancing, singing, happy, exotic, oversexed adult Negroes who abuse and neglect their children.