Authenticity and elevation: Sterling Brown's theory of the blues

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Lorenzo Thomas

They dragged you from homeland, They chained you in coffles, They huddled you spoon-fashion in filthy hatches, They sold you to give a few gentlemen ease.

They broke you in like oxen, They scourged you, They branded you, They made your women breeders, They swelled your numbers with bastards. . . . They taught you the religion they disgraced.

You sang: Keep a-inchin along Lak a po' inch worm. . . .

You sang: Bye and bye I'm gorma lay down dis heaby load,

You sang: Walk togedder, chillen, Dontcha git weary. . . . The strong men keep a-comin' on The strong men git stronger. (Poems 56)

Much of the force of the poem may be attributed to syntax. Brown launches most of his lines with heavily stressed verbs that are preceded by the contrasting pronouns they or you, which also must be stressed strongly. The cadence of the poem suggests the rhythm of a martial approach, which quickens and becomes more pronounced as the poem reaches its conclusion:

What, from the slums Where they have hemmed you, What, from the tiny huts They could not keep from you

One thing they cannot prohibit - The strong men . . . coming on The strong men gittin' stronger. Strong men. . . . Stronger. . . . (57-58)

Brown also becomes the African American voice, the elegant trickster, the bodacious badman, the heroic strong man, as he juggles wit, understatement, irony, and humor with his inimitable style. Perhaps nowhere does Brown take humor more as his metier than in the Slim Greer tales. A favorite of many generations, the character is based on a virtuoso tall-tale teller whom Brown met waiting tables at the Hotel Jefferson in Jefferson City, Missouri. In the Slim Greer tales, we find the hero in humorous situations that obliquely comment on the absurdity of Southern racism. In "Slim in Hell," the joke exposes Southern racism and oppression with a kind of laughter out of hell. Brown's unsuspecting hero makes a discovery on his visit to hell:

St. Peter said, "Well, You got back quick. How's de devil? An' what's His latest trick?"

An' Slim say, "Peter, I really cain't tell, De place was Dixie Dat I took for hell."

Then Peter say, "You must Be crazy, I vow, Where'n hell dja think Hell was, Anyhow?" (Poems 92)

Informing this poem are not only the familiar images found in hell-and brimstone sermons of the folk tradition but also subtle allusions to the Orpheus and Eurydice story in classical Greek mythology. Slim, like the favored Orpheus, is allowed to go to and leave the underworld. Here also is Cerberus, the terrible dog that guards the entrance to the infernal regions, now transformed to a "Big bloodhound . . . bayin' / Some po' devil's track" (90). By a synthesis of two viable traditions, Brown created this ballad through "cross-pollination." He linked the early stirrings of expression with present literary development, affirming the breadth of the black creative experience in America. He made the necessary connections between folk culture and self-conscious literature, identifying in his own poetry his debt to the folk. Significantly, he also managed to eliminate the much-touted gulf between particular racial experiences and the so-called "universal" experience.