"Runnin' space": the continuing legacy of Sterling Allen Brown

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Eleanor W. Traylor, R. Victoria Arana, John M. Reilly

During a stark winter, an old farmer dreams of planting his spring garden in Sterling Brown's pastoral "After Winter":

The lean months are done with, The fat to come. His hopes, winter wanderers, Hasten home.

At home, eight years after the poet's death in 1989, a new harvest of critical acclaim and tribute illumining his plantings is growing green and fat. Four years ago, the Department of English at Howard University began a successful effort to establish an endowed chair in the name of the man who, at Howard, in the early forties, brought distinction to English 144: American Prose and Poetry of Negro Life, a founding course for the study of African American literature in the academy. On 14 February of this year, the Department hosted a conference in his name that produced the essays published in this issue of African American Review. On that same day, The Federation of Friends of The D.C. Public Library System and The Howard University Libraries held a tribute to Sterling A. Brown; and at a Symposium and Gala Celebration (to be held 24-26 October 1997), Williams College, the poet's alma mater, is inaugurating the Sterling A. Brown Visiting Professorship with a celebration at Howard's Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel. His hopes, winter wanderers,/Hasten home.

Home, for Sterling Brown is Howard, as he has said: ". . . I grew up on the Howard University campus, and my father knew that I was not going to do any studying there. I knew the Howard campus like the back of my hand. I was mascot [for the football team] at Howard when I was seven" (4-5). The young Sterling attended two public schools in Washington, D.C., made famous by graduates like him. One was Lucretia Mott Elementary School, the other, Dunbar High School: "Williams [College] would give a scholarship [annually] to Dunbar, and the top man got it" (Brown 5). As valedictorian of Dunbar's class of 1919, Sterling Brown won the scholarship, graduating from Williams College Phi Beta Kappa in 1922. The following year he earned a master's degree in English at Harvard University. Yet "at Howard University I have been returned," said the seventy-three-year-old poet in accepting an honorary degree at Williams in 1973:

I am the oldest person on the Howard campus now in active duty. I am older than any maintenance man, any gardener. I am the oldest so and so at Howard, and I am unique in that I was hired, fired - and I was, I'm not ashamed of it, I'm proud of it, I'm not going to tell you why but the cause was good - but I was hired, I was fired, I was rehired, I was retired, I was again rehired. If I tell many lies tonight and you get them taped, I may be retired. (3)

Fortunately for American literature, Sterling Allen Brown, at Howard, built a Southern Road (1932) in American poetry, drove with Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee The Negro Caravan (1941) - the most comprehensive anthology for the study of Negro literature published at the time - through the modern literary landscape, and seeded the garden in which has grown contemporary scholarship with his germinal studies The Negro in American Fiction (1937) and Negro Poetry and Drama (1937). One of the essays which follows sounds, in its title, an acknowledgment central to the 1997 Sterling Brown Conference at Howard. The title of that essay, "And I Owe It All to Sterling Brown: The Theory and Practice of Black Literary Studies" (by Fahamisha Patricia Brown), echoes the debt of Howard and an entire world of scholarship to his plantings.

He snuggles his fingers In the blacker loom The lean months are done with, The fat to come.

His eyes are set On a brushwood-fire But his heart is soaring Higher and higher. . . .

"Butter beans fo' Clara Sugar corn fo' Grace An' fo' de little feller Runnin' space." ("After Winter")

Sterling A. Brown is curiously absent (but in name only) from current discussions of the history of twentieth-century literary criticism; yet to those of us familiar with his life's work, the traces of Brown's remarkable influence on contemporary thought are everywhere identifiable in the past half-century's scholarly activities in this country and abroad. He was a pioneer cultural critic, anticipating the trends in recent literary theory that have interconnected anthropology, sociology, folklore, linguistics, race politics, and religion to the study of literature. He anticipated the deconstructionist critique of logocentrism by showing the primacy of the labeling word in American literature and culture. He anticipated the field of Gender Studies by pointing out the ways discourse can structure, prejudice, illuminate, and restructure the same human experiences. Indeed, Leon Damas, Aime Cesaire, and Leopold Sedar Senghor, who defined the Negritude movement, stated that it was Sterling Brown who kindled it. Michael S. Harper in his 1980 edition of the Collected Poems, Joanne v. Gabbin in her Sterling A. Brown: Building The Black Aesthetic Tradition (1985), and Mark A. Sanders and Richard Yarborough in their A Son's Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown (1996) have recognized Brown's genius. Nevertheless, the entry for Brown in the recently published Norton Anthology of African American Literature fails to convey the profound influence and the vitality of this man's thought. The essays in this issue go a long way toward redressing the academy's general neglect of Sterling A. Brown and correcting the cultural blindness perpetuated by that neglect.