Two writers sharing: Sterling A. Brown, Robert Frost, and "In Dives' Dive."

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by John Edgar Tidwell

Even though Frost never had to argue for his identity as an American, he nevertheless attempted to define the meaning of being one. But being an American was important to Brown, too, as many of his poems suggest. In "Old Lem," for example, Brown subtly suggests a protracted history of legal and social customs in contrasting, minute gestures: "Their fists stay closed / Their eyes look straight / Our hands stay open / Our eyes must fall" (Collected Poems 81). Or in the raucous "Slim in Atlanta," in which Brown skillfully uses the techniques of the tall tale, the peripatetic Slim satirizes racial proscription and laughs the reader into understanding the ridiculousness of such practices: "Down in Atlanta, / De whitefolks got laws / For to keep all de niggers / From laughin' outdoors" (Collected Poems 81). Frost never had to write a poem like "Sam Smiley," whose last two lines elevate the poem out of the more direct social protest against lynching and into a cultural moment resonating with impressive power of human emotion: "And big Sam Smiley, King Buckdancer, / Buckdanced on the midnight air" (Collected Poems 46).

"In Dives' Dive" served quite different aesthetic and political purposes for these two writers. The traditional claim for "influence," as Mark Jeffreys correctly observes (see, especially, 221), has no merit if one poem or poet is set forth in hegemonic relation with the other. However, the special form of sharing that takes place between both writers rescues Brown from his own dilemma of how to acknowledge his participation in modifying a given body of ideas without accepting the burden of being "influenced."

Notes

1. This difficulty with racial integration was only one of many dilemmas confronting Brown. See, for example, his steadfast disavowal of being included as a New Negro, only to contradict his own claims, as Robert Stepto has persuasively shown, by locating himself in the center of New Negro activity in New York during the 1920s.

2. See my essay "The Art of Tall Tale in the Slim Greer Poems."

3. It bears mentioning that either Brown misremembers or the editors mistranscribe these lines in "A Son's Return." The two published verses are interposed. More importantly, the published line "[Dives] had a home in that Rock" alters dramatically the meaning of the biblical parable, since he had no home in the kingdom.

Works Cited

Baker, Houston. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

Brooks, Van Wyck. America's Coming-of-Age. New York: Huebsch, 1915.

Brown, Sterling A. The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown. Ed. Michael S. Harper. 1980. Evanston: Tri-Quarterly Books, 1989.

-----. Letter to James Weldon Johnson. 17 Feb. 1932. Yale U Library.

-----. Personal Interview. 2 December 1982.

-----. "A Son's Return: 'Oh, Didn't He Ramble.'" 1974. Ed. Michael S. Harper and Robert Stepto. Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art and Scholarship. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1979.3-22.