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Killing John Cabot and publishing black: Gwendolyn Brooks's Riot
African American Review, Winter, 2002 by James D. Sullivan
The first of the poem's three parts, "Riot," makes explicit the irrelevance of trying to understand the April 1968 disturbances in Chicago from an external perspective. One must understand it from inside, from the point of view of the community that exploded. The choice of epigraph alludes to the historical irony that the death of the American prophet of non-violence unleashed a storm of violence. Brooks quotes Martin Luther King, Jr.: "A riot is the language of the unheard" (9). The proper response to violence is not to condemn it, but to inquire into its causes. What has led people to this extreme? What have they been trying to say? King used the line in a speech at Ohio Northern University a few months before his murder. In the midst of explaining his theory of non-violence, he said:
But in condemning violence it would be an act of irresponsibility not to be as strong in condemning the conditions in our society that cause people to feel so angry that they have no alternative but to engage in riots. What we must see is that a riot is the language of the unheard. (King)
What they have to say had not been adequately addressed in public discourse, just as specifically African American experience had been excluded as a legitimate literary focus in prior criticism of Brooks's work. In Riot, especially in the second part, she lets the rioters speak. She writes what earlier critics would specifically exclude as an acceptable topic. This book expresses explicitly what the critics quoted above had not heard or had not wanted to hear in her work.
"Riot" introduces us to the white, prosperous, highly cultured (in European tastes), and liberal John Cabot. The riot is described from his point of view, but by a speaker who mocks him throughout the poem. She does not accept his well-educated perspective as authoritative, but rather as contemptible. Brooks had used this technique before--white point of view, black speaker unsympathetic with it--in, for example, "The Lovers of the Poor" and "Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat," both in her 1960 The Bean Eaters. Cabot would apparently see himself as more liberal than the bigoted suburban matron in "Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat." After all, he socializes with those "Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka" (9), and even as the rioters take him down, he imagines himself a Christly sacrifice, blessing his executioners: "Lord!/Forgive these nigguhs that know not what they do" (10)--a virtuoso of condescension--"nigguhs" expressing the contempt his forgiveness only implies. Like the lovers of the poor from "the Ladies' Bette rment League" who, visiting from suburban Lake Forest and Glencoe, gag at "the urine, cabbage, and dead beans,/Dead porridge of assorted dusty grains,/The old smoke, heavy diapers, and, they're told,/Something called chitterlings" (Blacks 350), Cabot too takes olfactory offense at "the fume of pig foot, chitterlings, and cheap chili" (10). He resembles also the addressee of the 1945 poem "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith," who would object to Smith's bad taste. But in "Riot," Brooks does not chide gently as she does in those other three poems. Satin-Legs Smith turns and makes the prosperous white liberal who would prefer geraniums and Grieg to Smith's own choices into the object of his own scathing scrutiny. In this historical moment, Cabot, not Smith, is the one with the distorted values, limited social perceptions, and narcissistic world view.
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