Living in Sterling's house

New Crisis, The, May/Jun 2001 by Davis, Marcia

I first saw the house on a late summer's day in 1995. It was a time of transition, one season ending, another beginning. I suppose that is what you could have said about my life then, too. Though when think about things now, they all seem to fit on a continuum, a seamless series of events that brought me to this place that I now call home.

Home for me is a modest brick house that sits atop a hill on a small street in Washington, D.C. It is also the place where Sterling Allen Brown, the poet, critic and legendary Howard University professor, lived most of his adult life, from about 1935 until a few years before his death in 1989. Brown, a contemporary of his far more famous fellow traveler Langston Hughes, walked these same hardwood floors that I do now. His private space, the attic, which he filled from floor to ceiling with papers and books and forbade anyone else entry, is now the room where I sleep. For me, a Black journalist and writer, the granddaughter of Mississippi sharecroppers, it has been life-changing.

His father, Sterling Nelson Brown, who'd been born into slavery, had become a professor at Howard himself, and counted W.E.B. Du Bois among his good friends. His son, the young Brown, was born in 1901, at the dawn of the 20th century and grew up on Howard's campus among giants of the Talented Tenth. And though Brown himself - like Du Bois, with whom he worked in the NAACP - eventually would reject such elitism, he turned over his fierce intellect, his gift of gab and pen, and his great passion for the arts in service of his people. Read Brown's work though - filled with his commitment to celebrating the dignity and grace of the Negro masses - and you know that his service was not out of obligation, but from love.

How different times are today. What, if anything, brings with it an obligation of social responsibility - for Blacks, whites or anyone else, for that matter?

I had been looking for a home for months by the time I got to 1222 Kearney St. NE, in Washington's Brookland neighborhood. Neither I nor the real estate agent knew the house's history. The bookcases though were a signpost. They were everywhere, in the living room, the dining room, a small nearby study. Beautiful, builtin, floor-to-ceiling bookcases. "Somebody sure loved books," I said casually to the agent, all the time wondering what the story was behind all those empty shelves.

By the time I'd finished looking around, I had cautiously fallen for the house on the hill. But there were potential downsides. At the time, I was working as a night police reporter, so I also knew how one Washington block could be a haven, and the next one a killing field. I was mulling over these things as I headed down the walkway - my agent already in her car - when a taxi stopped out front and a nattily clad woman stepped out.

"Sterling Brown lived in that house," she said.

"Sterling Brown!" I said, stunned.

She couldn't believe I knew who he was. (Too many people still don't)

How could his house simply be sitting on the market? No marker, no monument from Howard or the city I was incredulous.

This house, I would soon learn, was where Brown and his wife, Daisy had played out most of their 50-plus years together. Where Brown had worked; maybe he contemplated issues from The Federal Writers Project on the side porch, did his share of editing on the classic anthology The Negro Caravan, in his attic workspace. I know he listened to Ma Rainey (he loved the blues) in that old basement.

But the house was home to more than the Browns. He would gather students and colleagues for discussions on literature, music, and the problems of the race. Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, so many people have stories to tell. Kwame Toure, he was Stokely Carmichael then, and others who would make up the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee would seek out Brown for his advice.

That day outside the house, I dropped any facade of detachment. The agent had never heard of Sterling Brown. I educated her that afternoon. History had embraced me and was daring me to embrace it back. Was I going to walk away if a corner bar was too rowdy, crime too high? Didn't Brown's home deserve someone who would work to make sure it would not be allowed to slip back into oblivion?

I'd become a journalist because I believed in the power of words, had fallen in love, really, with their transforming magic. And wasn't I struggling to balance my career as a newspaper journalist with my return to that first love, to literature. A writer's workshop even met regularly in my apartment. Had that house been waiting for someone like me?

I sat up all night. The next morning, I called the agent and told her that I wanted the house. We hung up. She called right back with bad news: The house had gone under contract while we were looking at it. I stayed in bed the rest of that day. Three months later, in November, she called again. The Poet's House, as she'd dubbed it, was back on the market. The earlier deal had fallen through.