Killing John Cabot and publishing black: Gwendolyn Brooks's Riot

Rather than offer a realistic description of the sort of social renewal Brooks hoped for in the aftermath of the riot, the third part, "An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire," suggests instead Brooks's utopian hopes. In this love poem, this free-verse aubade, one lover addresses another as they rise to part in the morning. In a book of wildly shifting tones--between Cabot and the speaker in "Riot," from one vignette to another in "The Third Sermon"--the last poem uses the most surprising tone of all: tenderness. Whereas "The Third Sermon" has blasted the experience of the riot apart into a dozen often irreconcilable perspectives, the book ends with a moment of intimacy. The title suggests that this couple has indeed found a way to "Conduct [their] blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind." This is the rebirth Brooks hopes for, the closeness of these two lovers writ large, a unity made possible now by the riot's destruction of an unhealthy social structure.

The first line reads, "It is the morning of our love." The second stanza refers to their union "In a package of minutes" and calls the two lovers "Merry foreigners in our morning" (21). At the start of their new relationship after, apparently, their first night of making love, they feel giddy still with the novel excitement of one another's bodies. This moment of falling in love, in all its intensity of pleasure, holds promise of rich delight stretching onward through the foreseeable time to come. Such a morning is no time to objectively consider how such love sometimes sours or how, even if it lasts a lifetime, it cannot maintain that hilarious intensity forever. This is, rather, the moment to feel the greatest awareness of their unity:

There is a moment in
Camaraderie
when interruption is not to
be understood.
I cannot bear an interruption.
This is the shining joy;
the time of not-to-end. (22)

When "The dust [has] settled" from the riot, Brooks hopes for and encourages this response: an intense feeling of community. As the now-lovers may have known one another before, may even have felt some connection before this night, African Americans of Chicago would certainly have felt a shared identity before the incidents described here, but the poem offers a hope that this powerful shared experience would lead to a richer sense of communion than ever before. The Phoenix rises in all hopefulness for five hundred richly fulfilling years.

Yet "Because the world is at the window / we cannot wonder very long" (21). They have their varying responsibilities within the community they are creating. Though the speaker hates any interruption in their new intimacy, "We go / in different directions / down the imperturbable street" (22). The chapbook ends, in fact, with the acknowledgment--exhortation, perhaps--to responsibility within the new situation.

Looking back on Riot, Brooks did not feel entirely satisfied with her achievement. In an interview, she stressed the new direction her career took with its publication, along with her judgment that she had not quite succeeded: "Riot was really an effort at communication with a lot of people. I didn't succeed except in patches. It too [like In the Mecca] is meditative" (Hull and Gallagher 33). In 1969, she was torn between her high modernist ambitions, most fully achieved in Annie Allen, and her desire ever since the tavern reading to reach a popular audience. Thus, Arthur P. Davis, for one, considers the first part, "Riot," "Gwendolyn Brooks at her best," while the tessellated "Third Sermon," is written in the poet's obscure style" (102). Brooks herself cringed when she learned that the first line of "An Aspect of Love" --"It is the morning of our love"--had appeared in a Rod McKuen poem, and so she removed the line from all subsequent reprintings (Brooks, Report from Part One 187). To echo a poet of such mas s appeal was, as yet, too low-culture for her.