Sterling A. Brown and the Afro-modern moment

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Mark A. Sanders

When Robert Penn Warren wrote his highly ironic line "Nigger, your breed ain't metaphysical" (321), he compressed into five deceptively economic feet nearly a half-millennium of white hegemonic philosophy, both its rhetorical strategies and underlying presuppositions. Buzzard, "the carrier of the ostracizing power of white discourse, the trope which declares the otherness of the black" (Nielsen 117), does not simply assert black inferiority but reconstructs and reaffirms the mutually exclusive mythic realms "white" and "black" must inhabit in order to sustain five hundred years of radical inequity. As ametaphysical, "the black" (or, better yet, blackness) must exist beyond the aesthetic, beyond the redemptive possibilities central to the humanistic tradition of arts and letters. As "fictive signifier of the nonwhite" (Nielsen 10), blackness serves as a repository of reifying antitheses: anti-intellectual, illiterate, subhuman, and ahistorical. All in all, Warren constructs a blackness thoroughly banished to the margins of the human community, a blackness of radical absence proclaiming the final and ultimate abstraction of damning eternal sameness. Indeed Warren (and by extension what I will call hegemonic or conventional modernism) achieves much of his coherence through the assertion of objectified blackness, through a tropic vocabulary of necessarily reductive poses impervious to change over time (see Nielsen, North).

Yet it is precisely the cultural force of these poses and the pervasive nature of the objectifying language which would drive James Weldon Johnson, William Pickens, Carter G. Woodson, and even W. E. B. Du Bois (in "A Conservation of Races") to advance a countering but often equally reductive discourse. Johnson's ragtime piano players, for example, are "guided by their natural musical instinct" and their "extraordinary sense of rhythm"; thus Johnson effectively reinscribes essentializing tropes in an attempt to assert a "negro exceptionalism" worthy of notice and, ultimately, of citizenship (20).

The profound condensation of Warren's single line was not lost on Sterling A. Brown, whose famous retort some years later undermined entirely the conception of ahistorical blackness. His reply in a 1974 interview with Steven Jones, "Cracker, your breed ain't exegetical," appropriates Warren's five-foot economy in order to parody both the sound and sense of his poetry. Through such "signifying" Brown points to a crucial blindness which makes possible an assertion of black ametaphysicality. Signaling much more than a lack of specific exposition, Brown alludes to a profound illiteracy, a lack of attention to a broad corpus of texts and cultural idioms which assert African American complexity and change. So, too, Brown remained skeptical of these countering tropes on the part of New Negroes, tropes which could not account for the burgeoning complexities he found in Southern black life. Positioning himself outside (or perhaps beyond) the two competing discourses, Brown questions the fundamental assumption (or acceptance) of ontological blackness, and so begins to formulate an Afromodernism (both a poetic vocabulary and a theory of folk culture) capable of exploring a more dynamic range in African American being. In short, Brown embarks upon an artistic and aesthetic project which fundamentally reconceives black modernity. Appropriating contemporary notions concerning subjectivity and process, and applying them to a range of black idiomatic expressions and rituals, Brown reworks the language and tropes he inherited in order to explore the inventive ways in which African Americans articulate their modernity; that is, express a presence, a historicity, an ongoing engagement with the contemporary moment.

A reading of "Odyssey of Big Boy," both within and beyond Southern Road, helps to illustrate Brown's larger concerns. Brown introduces Southern Road with an allusion to travel and experience, to independence, self-discovery, and the romantic possibilities of immortality. "Odyssey of Big Boy," in its gesture toward the mythic, initiates the road as witness, odyssey, and highly ambivalent duality, and thus presents the major motifs and metaphors which will develop through the course of the collection. "Odyssey," for Calvin Big Boy Davis, resonates with Homeric implications - extended travel resulting in catholic experiences and the possibility of heroic stature - but Davis's odyssey embarks upon an innovative variation on the standard theme and approach.

Significantly, Big Boy Davis's proclamation is not a third-person narrative rehearsing the past deeds and mythic status of cultural heroes; it is not the ballads of John Henry, Casey Jones, or Stagolee. Instead, as he confronts his imminent death, Davis embarks upon a personal odyssey toward self-realization, an incomplete journey into the future. This fundamental dynamic depends heavily upon the intricate play between past and future, a play which propels the poem out of the static sphere of traditional balladry into the dynamics of highly personalized subjectivity. Davis begins and ends not with a statement about the past, but with a vision of the future: