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

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

Sterling A. Brown was a pioneering cultural and intellectual leader. His pedagogical object was, as Michael R. Winston sees it, "to remake the world" and - on the way toward that - to lay "the foundations for the reconceptualization of what is American in American culture." Brown helped to set in motion much of what is positive in American culture today. "He searched," writes Winston, "for a way to confront the modern world's materialism and potent emptiness with an enduring human response that had integrity and space for real people" (27).

As a poet, Sterling Brown advanced a fertile direction, as did Langston Hughes, in American literary modernism. If, as Wallace Stevens saw it, modern poetry was to be understood as the mind of the poet finding from his past "what will suffice" ("Of Modern Poetry"), the mind of Sterling Brown found that sufficiency by recovering black vernacular traditions from maudlin uses and revealing in them the Southern way of a land of the folk. Our critical intelligence tells us that the idea of the Maker creating a world is freighted with multiple meanings. Immediately it signifies a quality of narrative, the verisimilitude and continuity informing successful storytelling. At the same time, though, milieu is conveyed through choices of craft reflecting the ways a writer believes reality can best be known. Self-awareness leaves its textual traces, sufficient to observe that the project of modernism may easily be called epistemological.

Everyone has a favorite Brown poem, but take "Ma Rainey" as the illustration. It aptly includes a blues sung by Ma Raihey that generates an experience of communion between the singer and her listeners, who recognize that the blues statements of personal loss are signifying their mutual condition. Ma Rainey's blues song, however, is framed among other voices - that of the poet persona and a raconteur testifying that Ma" 'jes catch hold of us, somekindaway.' "The assembly of voices renders a dramatic scene through which Brown communicates a presiding consciousness actively creating and controlling the reality of Ma Rainey's glorious performance so as to offer an exemplum: how to know the world. Brown's epistemological negotiation and poetic strategies are the consideration of essays by Joanne V. Gabbin, Lorenzo Thomas, and John Edgar Tidwell in this issue.

As a scholar and a critic, Professor Brown spotlighted the African American literary tradition in such pathfinding studies as those already mentioned and a field of germinal critical essays - among them, his 1931 essay "Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors." His contributions to the Federal Writers' Project and the Carnegie-Myrdal Study, to courses designed and taught at Howard University and the New School for Social Research in New York City - all establish, as Eleanor Traylor has pointed out, that "Sterling Brown was one of these singular thinkers who revealed to us that we are a classic people, with spiritual and intellectual aspects of our total cultural tradition that stand on their own, born of our historic determination that circumstances would not dictate the limits of our integrity or dignity" (qtd. in Winston 28).